A riverside lunch ends with one friend in hospital and another insisting he shared the very same drink. Puz listens to the witness who stayed at the table. Her account leaves Puz with a puzzling question: what changed between the first drink and the last?
A picnic interrupted
By the time Puz reached the riverside park, Evan was receiving treatment. His friend Rosa had called for help when he became seriously ill. Later, the hospital reported that he was recovering, and investigators found that his drink had contained a harmful substance.
Three adult friends had come for a picnic: Evan, Rosa, and Noel. They had shared their food at a wooden table beside the footbridge. Only Evan had become ill. Rosa stayed to explain the afternoon to Puz; Noel waited at the other end of the table.
Noel owed Evan a large sum of money, and Evan had recently asked for it back. That gave Puz a possible motive to investigate, but a debt was not proof of a crime.
The drink that was shared
“Noel brought a small insulated cooler from home,” Rosa said. “At lunch, he poured lemonade into his clear plastic tumbler and added one large, cloudy ice cube from it. He drank about half straight away. The cube was still large when he put the tumbler down.”
Noel offered Rosa a taste. She declined: cold drinks upset her stomach, so she was drinking room-temperature water from her own bottle. Evan said he would try the lemonade instead.
“But Evan had just started eating,” Rosa continued. “He put the tumbler beside his plate and said he would finish his lunch first. We sat talking for quite a while. I stayed at the table the whole time.”
Rosa could see the tumbler throughout that wait. Nobody added anything, swapped it, or moved it out of her sight. There was no straw, fruit slice, or spoon in it. Evan had not yet taken a sip.
“When he finally picked it up, I could see there was no ice left,” Rosa said. “He drank the rest of the lemonade. Later that afternoon, he became ill.”
One account, two moments
Noel leaned forward. “Rosa saw me drink from that same tumbler. I was examined too, and I’m perfectly well. If I had poisoned the drink, why wasn’t I poisoned?”
“I did see him drink,” Rosa confirmed. “But he drank first, just after he prepared it. Evan drank much later.”
Puz considered those two moments separately. Sharing one tumbler, they realised, did not necessarily mean sharing exactly the same contents.
The later investigation established that Noel had deliberately poisoned Evan to escape his debt. His first drink had been part of his attempt to appear innocent. Puz had already worked out a possible explanation from Rosa’s account. How could Noel drink first without being harmed, while Evan was poisoned by the rest?