“It doesn’t seem likely,” Arthur said, and Manfred breathed again. “If someone wanted to poison her, surely they’d put the medicine in an identical water bottle and substitute that one for the one in her purse. And that would take a lot of foreknowledge. The appearance of the bottle, with all the butterfly decals on it. The type of medicine she’d been prescribed, the dosage that would kill her.”

“What kind did she take?”

“The medical examiner says she overdosed on Cardizem.”

“What exactly does that do?”

“That was her blood pressure medication.”

“But she wouldn’t have taken it like that. Crushed up and put in her water. Who would take their pills like that?”

“Some people—especially sick people, and especially elderly sick people—can forget they’ve taken a dose of their medicine and take another one. And maybe after that, they forget again. But not only was she comparatively too young and clearheaded to make such a mistake, the pills were actually ground up. Her daughters told the Bonnet Park police that she had no trouble swallowing pills the normal way. So the conclusion is, she was murdered. What was in her and what was left in the bottle was probably ten doses altogether. Enough to kill her.”

“She took that big a dose that morning?”

“Yes. Some time that morning, before she walked through your door, Rachel Goldthorpe had taken at least six times the dose of Cardizem she should have had for the day. In consequence, she went into shock and died.”

“Could her regular dosage of pills have had an unexpected effect on her because she was sick?”

“It was a deliberate overdose.” Arthur said this with finality.

“I don’t want to believe anyone would kill Rachel. Especially since it sounds like whoever did it, it had to be someone who knew her really, really well.” Manfred shook his head vehemently. “She would never have killed herself.”

“You sound pretty sure.”

“She was so coherent,” Manfred said. It was a relief to tell Arthur this; he hadn’t realized until this moment how much he’d wanted to talk about Rachel. “She felt pretty bad, as I told you. Sick as a dog. And she looked it. But she was on top of things mentally, for sure. She was just worried about her son.”

“Who still insists that you stole her jewelry.”

“Which I did not. For God’s sake, what would I do with it? You may not admire what I do for a living, but I’m not a thief.”

“That’s debatable,” Arthur said. “Most people would say that you take money under false pretenses: that you can actually predict the future or advise the people who call you on how to make their lives better.”