She Tried to Poison Me novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Sunday at the Point

By four o'clock on Sunday there were ninety people on my grandmother's lawn.

The cook had taken over the cottage kitchen at dawn and run it.

Seth carried tables.

He carried eleven of them from the lodge's storage shed in the back of his truck.

Bishop rode on top of the pile.

I carried plates.

Somebody had brought folding chairs, and somebody else had brought a radio.

A man I had never met was setting up a badminton net in the pines.

My coworkers came in a convoy of three cars.

The night doctor who had said the word thallium came, in a Hawaiian shirt that stopped me in the middle of the grass.

"You own a shirt with a color," I said.

"I own four." He hugged me, awkwardly, with one arm.

"I told you to stay alive, and you took it as a personal challenge."

The detective came in jeans and a sweater and ate three pieces of chicken without once saying anything official.

The tech from the lab brought a cake with my name on it in blue icing.

It said Emme, Clean.

I laughed so hard I had to sit down in the grass.

"It's too soon," said the night doctor.

"It's perfect," I said.

At five, the cook rang a spoon against a pot.

"Everybody eat while it's hot," she said. "Nobody's allowed to talk about the Kesslings until the pie."

"That's a rule?" Seth asked, carrying a bowl of potatoes the size of a washtub.

"It's my kitchen. Everything's a rule."

We ate at tables pushed end to end.

I sat at the middle one with Seth on my left and the girl in braids on my right.

She had decided I was her friend, and she informed me that her dog was better than Bishop.

"Bishop's a very good dog," I said.

"Mine knows tricks."

"Does he know how to steal an entire chicken leg off a plate?"

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