Gunpowder Green

Chapter 16

“I’ve been watching the weather channel, and it looks like there’s a storm moving in,” said Jory Davis.

“There is,” agreed Theodosia. After five days in New York, Jory had finally phoned her. “It’s been raining all day, and everything just seems to be building in intensity. Something’s definitely brewing out in the mid-Atlantic. I spoke with Drayton earlier, and he’s worried sick that all the flowers will get blown about and smashed. Which means next week’s Garden Fest will be an absolute bust.”

Theodosia was cozied up in her apartment above the tea shop. Even though it was Friday evening, it was far too rainy and miserable to contemplate going out anywhere.

“I’m worried about my boat,” said Jory. “Eldon Cook, one of my sailing buddies, went over to the Isle of Palms a couple days ago and brought it back, so it’s moored at the yacht club now. But if there’s an even worse storm blowing in...”

“What can I do to help?” offered Theodosia. “Could you stop by my office and pick up the second set of keys? I know Eldon locked up the boat, so if you could take the keys to the yacht club and give them to Billy Manolo—”

“Billy Manolo?”

“Yeah,” said Jory, “he works there. He’s a kind of handyman.”

“I know who he is,” replied Theodosia. “I met him yesterday morning. Well, I didn’t actually meet him, I saw him. At Oliver Dixon’s funeral.”

“Of course,” said Jory. “I’d completely forgotten that the funeral was yesterday. How was it?”

“Sad,” said Theodosia. “But nicely done. A lot of his friends stood up and said some wonderful things about him.”

“That’s good,” said Jory. “Oliver deserved it.”

“So take the keys to Billy and have him do what?” continued Theodosia.

“Secure the boat, turn on the bilge pump. Probably check to make sure the sails are stored properly. Your basic hurricane preparedness.”

“You trust this guy to do this?”

“Yeah. Sure I do. It’s his job to do this kind of stuff.” Jory paused. “Is there some problem, Theo? Something I don’t know about?”

“No, of course not. Don’t worry about a thing,” said Theodosia. “I’ll take care of everything. How are things on your end? How are the depositions going?”

Jory sighed. “Slow.”

Theodosia hung up the phone and peered out her kitchen window as rain thudded heavily on the roof and sloshed noisily down drain spouts. She could barely make out the little garden apartment across the cobblestone alley where Haley lived, so strong was the downpour.

Shuddering, she buttoned the top button of her chenille sweater. Charleston was usually engulfed in warm weather by now, and everyone was enjoying a lovely, languid spring before the buildup of summer’s oppressive heat and humidity. But this was a whole different story: nasty weather and a chill Atlantic breeze that seemed to whip right through you.

The teakettle on the stove began its high-pitched, wavering whistle, and Theodosia quickly snatched it from the back burner. Pouring boiling water over a teaspoon of Darjeeling, she let it steep for three minutes in the tiny one-cup teapot. It was funny, she thought, the biggest enemies of tea were air, light, heat, and dampness. And, so often, Charleston’s climate offered up abundant helpings of all of these!

Theodosia retreated to her living room and stretched out on the couch. Earl Grey, already well into his evening nap, lifted his head a few inches, eyed her sleepily, and settled back down.

As Theodosia sipped her tea, she thought about Lizbeth Cantrell, the woman who had implored her for help just a few days ago.

She still didn’t know why she’d promised Lizbeth that she’d try to clear Ford Cantrell’s name. After all, she was the one who’d been suspicious of Ford in the first place.

She supposed it was the connection between Lizbeth Cantrell and her mother that had triggered her answer. The bittersweet flood of memories had been a strange, slightly mind-altering experience.

And, deep down, she knew that she also felt beholden to Lizbeth. In the South, with its curious code of honor, when you were beholden to someone, you helped them out when they needed you. No questions asked.

But what would she do if she couldn’t keep her promise to Lizbeth?

What if more investigating proved that Ford Cantrell really had tampered with that old pistol? Ford was, after all, the one with an extensive gun collection. So he had expertise when it came to antique weapons. And the man had recently turned his plantation into a hunting preserve. She wasn’t exactly sure what that proved, but it was the kind of thing that could carry nasty implications in court.

But Lizbeth had seemed utterly convinced of her brother’s innocence. Then again, Lizbeth was a believer in signs and portents. Like the wreath of coltsfoot. What was it supposed to symbolize again? Oh, yes, justice.

And exactly what justice had Lizbeth been making reference to? Theodosia wondered. Justice for her brother, Ford Cantrell? Or the type of justice that might have already been meted out against Oliver Dixon?

Theodosia stared at the bone china cup that held her tea. She had begun collecting individual coffee, tea, and demitasse cups long before she’d opened the tea shop. She’d found that when she set her table for a dinner party, it was fun to arrange it with mismatched pieces, pairing, for example, a Limoges plate with a Lilique cup and saucer.

Now the information she’d managed to collect so far on the people surrounding Oliver Dixon also seemed like mismatched pieces. But unlike the eclectic table settings her guests often raved over, none of these pieces seemed to fit together.

Theodosia stood, stretched, and tried to shake off the chill. She’d been avoiding turning on the heat—it seemed kind of silly to still be using heat in April—but her apartment felt like it was growing colder by the minute.

Relenting, Theodosia walked across the room and flipped the lever on the thermostat. She was immediately rewarded by an electrical hum followed by a small puff of warm air.

Okay, she asked herself, what am I missing? She stood, staring at the droplets of water that streamed down the outside of the windows, reminding her of tears. Like Doe’s tears for her dead husband, Oliver Dixon?

She believed fervently that Oliver Dixon was more than just the victim; he was also the linchpin in all this. If she could figure out why someone wanted Oliver out of the way, she could establish motive.

And when you found motive, you usually found the murderer.

Theodosia went to her computer and sat down. She had looked at the financial and start-up information on Oliver Dixon’s new company, Grapevine, and nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary. They’d spent a lot of money on research and development, but that was fairly typical. And because Grapevine was a start-up high-tech company, their burn rate, or rate of spending for the first few months, had been high but certainly not unexpected.

She wondered what the media had written about Grapevine. Haley had quoted from an article in the business section of the Post and Courier. But, from the rah-rah sound of it, the article had probably been reedited from a press release that the company itself had prepared. That was usually how those things worked. Lord knows, over the years she herself had written enough press releases that got turned into newspaper articles or sidebars in trade publications.

But what had the hard-nosed business analysts said about Grapevine? The techie guys from Forrester or the business mavens at Arthur Andersen? Or even the reviewers at some of the vertical trade pubs?

Easy enough to check, she thought, as she clicked on Netscape and typed in the key word “Grapevine.”

Forty-seven thousand hits came up for Grapevine, everything from rock bands to a restaurant in Napa Valley. Oops. Definitely got to narrow the search, Theodosia decided.

Now she added the term PDA to the search parameter. That yielded sixty-three hits. Far more manageable.

Theodosia scanned down her new list of hits, searching for a company profile, analyst’s report, anything that might give her an outsider’s snapshot view of Grapevine.

She clicked open an article from Technology Voyage, a well-respected publication that reported on new products and trends in E-commerce and provided top-line analyses of various new high-tech companies. She had actually placed advertising in Technology Voyage and met with its editors when she worked on the Avanti account, a company that manufactured semiconductors.

The Technology Voyage article was titled “PDAs on the Fast Track.” It began with a good overview of the PDA market. Sales were erupting, topping three billion dollars with projections of more than six billion dollars by next year. And just as Haley had said, PDAs were touted as portable, pocket-sized devices that let you magically keep track of appointments, addresses, phone numbers, to-do lists, and personal notes. More full-featured PDAs could even be used to send and receive E-mail, surf the Internet, or support digital cameras.

The article went on to list the various PDA manufacturers, manufacturers of PDA applications, chips and inner workings, and PDA wireless service and content providers.

According to the article, Grapevine was a manufacturer of flash memory cards, thirty-two and sixty-four-megabyte SD cards for storing data in those PDAs that used the Palm operating system.

Wow, thought Theodosia. What with working on computers, setting up a Web site, and trading stocks on-line, I’m fairly well versed in technology, but this is getting slightly complicated!

The article went on to list the burgeoning number of PDA manufacturers that included such companies as Casio, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Royal, Compaq, and Handspring, and briefly detailed Microsoft’s competing operating system, Pocket PC.

Theodosia put two fingers to her forehead, kneaded gently at the beginnings of a techno headache. Better to quit while she was ahead? She scanned the rest of the article quickly, then became caught up again. As she read the “Editors Choice” thumbnail sketches of several different PDAs, she wondered how she’d ever gotten along without a Blackberry to deliver wireless E-mails. Then she changed her mind in favor of an Ericsson that boasted handwriting and voice recognition. And finally, Theodosia decided the daVinci, with its tiny folding keyboard, had to be the slickest thing yet.

Would one of these minicomputers work for her? Perhaps so. A whizbang PDA might help her keep better track of all manner of things. Tea party commitments, shopping lists and—she pulled her face into a wry grin—a list of murder suspects? She shook her head. Time to give it a rest. She was starting to obsess, and that wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.