Page 55 of A Poisonous Plot

“I know, but hearing you say it sounds completely ridiculous. What a pathetic way to poison people.” She stared down at the ice cream in front of her. “This is going to make me ill, isn’t it?”

“It won’t if you don’t eat it.” He felt his eyebrows pull together. “But there’s no way anyone slipped dried herbs or tea into the ice cream is there?”

“No, but if they’re taking advice from Arthur’s blog they probably also know you can poison people with fresh leaves from the plants. What if the mint leaves weren’t all mint leaves? What if there was another plant in there too?”

“Can you throw out everything that has ingredients from the garden centre and make it again?”

“I can, but that won’t leave me with much ice cream. It’s only a few days until the opening. I won’t be able to get my hands on enough fresh supplies to make new batches before Saturday.” She frowned as she put a spoonful of ice cream in her mouth.

“What the heck are you doing?” Flynn snapped, pulling the bowl away from her. “Are you seriously trying to poison yourself?”

“I’m hoping it’s not poisoned,” she said sadly. “But this seems to be the only way to figure out if there’s a problem with the ice cream. If I get ill, I’ll know I can’t serve it, and I’ll have to postpone the opening. OrmaybeI can make enough ice cream without the supplies from the garden centre, but I’m not sure I’dhave enough. It would also leave me with fewer flavours, which would be disappointing.”

He stared at her, trying to figure out if she was serious. “You can’t eat it if there’s a chance it’s going to make you ill. If you think the food has been tampered with, that’s a perfectly good reason to postpone the opening.”

“No, it’s not.” She reached for the bowl, which he moved further out of her way. “It’s one thing not to open because of my own stupid insecurities, but I refuse to let someone else scare me out of opening.”

She held her hand out for the bowl of ice cream and he shook his head. “Postpone the opening,” he said firmly.

“The most likely scenario here is that I get a nasty stomach ache. But maybe the food is fine. I don’t want to throw everything out for nothing.”

“This seems really stupid,” he said, finally releasing the bowl.

Lily plunged her spoon into the ice cream. “What’s stupid is that I didn’t consider that there might be a problem with the ice cream earlier. I wouldn’t accept a drink when I was up at the garden centre, but somehow it didn’t occur to me to wonder if the food I took from them might be problematic.” Gingerly, she put the spoon in her mouth. “If I’d thought about it, I’d have looked more carefully at the ingredients before I made the ice cream.”

“I don’t like this plan.” He rubbed at the back of his neck and remembered the message he’d received from her. “Why were you asking if we’d been talking to the press?”

“Because it’s all over the news. Haven’t you seen it?”

He shook his head and pulled out his phone to check his apps. “Not headline news,” he told her when he struggled to find anything.

“Dig around a bit and you’ll find it.” She sighed. “If it didn’t come from the police, I wonder who’s been spreading the word. Did you hear Gordon’s radio interview?”

“No,” he replied, feeling entirely out of the loop.

“You can listen to it on replay.” With a few taps on her phone, she set it playing for him, then took another spoonful of ice cream.

Watching her eat it pained Flynn.

“That’s enough,” he said, unable to concentrate on the interview while she ate the potentially poisoned ice cream.

“I should probably have a bit more.”

He shook his head. “How much of the smoothie did you drink before you got ill?”

“Not a lot.”

“That should be enough ice cream then,” he said, moving it away from her.

With a sigh, she dropped the spoon into the bowl and they fell silent to listen to the radio interview.

“So that’s what got you worried about the ice cream,” he said when it came to an end.

Lily nodded.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said after a moment. “Because he kind of sounds like a concerned citizen warning people to be vigilant. But…”

“He also sounds as though he’s scaremongering,” Flynn finished for her.

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