Free Death by Inferior Design by Leslie Caine Page B

first option was probably something of a given, but I’d never let a mild case of insanity stop me before. Options b and c were in a dead heat.
    “Gives me a chance to take my cigarette break anyway,” Taylor mumbled. He then plunked himself down on the tarp that covered a stack of lumber tidily marked “Sullivan.”
    “Could you sit someplace else, please? I need to go through that stack to look for my missing one-by-six.”
    “This is Sullivan’s stuff.” He kept his perch and lit his cigarette.
    “And what’s the obvious place to hide a board? With other boards. Give me a hand.”
    We started restacking Sullivan’s materials from top to bottom so that I could handle each piece of wood and ensure that there didn’t appear to be one odd man out that resembled my wandering board. A third of the way through a half dozen Italian black walnut boards we found a lone one-by-six of oak. Eureka! Kevin or Sullivan had tried to throw me off by hiding one of my boards! How low could you get? “This is it.”
    “How do you know, Gilbert? Did you mark each one with your lipstick?”
    “No,” I shot back, the tone of my voice more than implying the word jerk-face , “but when you’re at a lumberyard, you load the boards as you select them from the racks. You wouldn’t suddenly stick one board into the middle of a group of . . .” A brown bottle on the ground, partially hidden by the tarp, suddenly caught my eye— especially the skull and crossbones prominently displayed on its label. My pulse quickened. “Oh, my God,” I said. The bottle looked exactly like a container I’d stowed in my van a couple of months ago, just before moving in with Audrey. My ex-boyfriend had bought the cyanide for a metal-plating project that we never actually got around to starting before he became my ex. I hadn’t known where to dispose of the stuff, hadn’t wanted to bring a bottle of poison into Audrey’s home and risk Hildi’s getting into it, and the bottle was so safely packaged and nicely tucked away in my spacious van that I hadn’t given the matter a moment’s thought in weeks.
    “What’s wrong now ?”
    “What’s this doing out here?” I demanded, showing him the bottle.
    “That?” he asked as if seeing it for the first time.
    “Yes, that! It’s cyanide! Do you know if this is my cyanide?”
    He shrugged. “Guess it must be. It was in your van.”
    “What were you doing with it?”
    He puffed on his cigarette before replying, staring impassively at the little bottle of poison I clutched in my hand. “I didn’t want the glass to break when I was unloading wood.”
    “I had it carefully packed inside a heavy-duty plastic bag, inside a sealed metal container filled with kitty litter in case of spillage! And I put the can inside a box packed with foam. Just to make sure that it couldn’t break open!”
    He took another drag on his cigarette, squinted at the smoke. “So I guess I got curious.”
    “Jeez! This was an unopened bottle! Someone’s broken the seal!”
    “Like I said, I got curious. I’ve never seen real cyanide before. I wanted to know what it looked like.”
    “You had no right to go through the stuff in my van like that!”
    “You told me to unload your materials.”
    “I told you and Kevin to unload the wood. What kind of nutcase would have put wood inside a cardboard box inside a can that was filled to the brim with kitty litter?”
    “Beats me. Maybe the same kinda nutcase who carries around bottles of poison.”
    “Someone gave it to me when we . . .” I gave up. I didn’t need to explain myself to the likes of Taylor; after all, he was the one who’d swiped the bottle out of my van. “I don’t like anyone to touch it, for obvious reasons. That’s why I keep it locked away, inside my van.” Which, come to think of it, Taylor had left unlocked all of yesterday afternoon.
    “And yet you go tossing your key to Kevin,” he retorted. “After you’d talked to the guy for all of