Gluten-Free Murder

by P. D. Workman

  At last, their bag full of gluten-free goods of varying types, they toddled off again. When she looked around the front of the store, she saw that only Mary Lou remained, savoring a blueberry muffin with a takeout cup of tea, looking though her agenda.

  “Blueberry is my favorite,” Erin told her.

  Mary Lou looked up from her agenda, giving Erin a reserved smile. “Mine too. And I would never guess that it was gluten-free. Most of the gluten-free baking that I’ve tasted is either gritty or like cardboard. Or it’s full of kale or some other weird superfood that nobody in their right mind would put in a dessert.”

  “Blueberries are a superfood. I’d much rather have blueberries in a muffin than kale!”

  “Me too!”

  Mary Lou looked down at her agenda for another minute, writing something down. She looked up.

  “Do you think you should check on Angela? She’s been an awfully long time.”

  Erin’s stomach clenched. She looked toward the stairs. “Didn’t she come back up? I just assumed I missed her leaving while that lovely couple was here…”

  “No. Not unless she went the back way.”

  “I have the other door locked. Can’t have customers marching through the kitchen.”

  Mary Lou looked at the closed stairway door. Erin went around the counter and opened it. She peeked down the stairs, afraid she was going to find Angela sprawled there with a head injury or a broken leg. How would a major insurance claim on her first day of business go over? And what would that do to her sales?

  “Uh… Angela? Are you okay?” she called down.

  There was no response. But if Angela was in the bathroom with the door shut, or had just flushed the commode or was running water, she wouldn’t be able to hear a thing. Erin felt like she was being intrusive going down the stairs to check on Angela, but if Mary Lou was right and Angela had not slipped past without either of them seeing her, something could be really wrong.

  “Angela?” Erin started down the stairs.

  Behind her, Mary Lou got up from her table and walked to the doorway, looking down.

  “Is she there?”

  “I don’t know yet…”

  Erin turned the corner and stopped.

  It was worse than she had imagined. Worse than her worst nightmares of all the things that might go wrong on opening day. What if nobody came? What if someone complained about the baking? What if she didn’t sell a thing?

  It was worse than all of that.

  Chapter Four

  “ARE YOU OKAY, MISS Price?”

  Erin took another sip of her water and nodded.

  “Do you think you can answer some questions now?”

  “I—I don’t know. I—it was so awful!”

  “I need you to tell me step-by-step what you saw. Everything. Every impression.”

  Erin took a deep breath. Her head was still whirling. She wasn’t sure how she had ended up sitting in the chair Mary Lou had previously occupied, by the front window of the shop. She wasn’t sure at all that she’d climbed the stairs of her own accord. Officer Terry Piper, hovering over her now, might have carried her, or helped her get up the stairs again. She wasn’t really sure.

  “Where’s Mary Lou? Is she okay?” Erin asked.

  “Mary Lou is just fine. You will be able to talk to her later. For now, we need to keep the two of you apart.”

  “Why?”

  Piper just looked at her and didn’t answer her question. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I just went downstairs. It had been too long. I thought she might have fallen and hit her head. I was worried about insurance.”

  “Start at the beginning. What made you go downstairs?”

  “Mary Lou. She said that Angela hadn’t come back up. Angela went down to use the commode… and she never came back up again.”

  “What did Mary Lou have to do with it?”

  “Nothing. She was just there. She just noticed that Angela hadn’t come back out. We decided I should go down and see. Make sure she wasn’t sick or hurt.”

  “Why did you think she might be sick or hurt? Why were you worried about your insurance?”

  “I didn’t have any reason. Just that she hadn’t come back up. The most logical reason was that she was sick. Or hurt. She’d had an accident, hit her head, maybe. And so I just needed to go check, make sure.”

  “It was Mary Lou’s suggestion?”

  “Yes.”

  “You never heard Mrs. Plaint call out? There was no noise from downstairs?”

  “No. Nothing. I was serving customers up here. There wasn’t any noise from downstairs.”

  “Did you call down to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you just go down?”

  “It just seemed… intrusive. I didn’t want her to think that I was checking up on her, if she was just stuck in the commode for longer than usual. I didn’t want to embarrass her.”

  “Okay. Go on. So, you called her and then you went down the stairs.”

  “I called her again, partway down, in case she just didn’t hear me the first time. Flushing the toilet or something.”

  “And still, no answer.”

  Erin gave him a look. He knew very well that Angela couldn’t have answered. “No. No answer. Not a sound.”

  “And what did you see when you got to the bottom of the stairs?”

  “I went around the corner and there she was…”

  “Describe what you found.” His pen hovered over his notebook, waiting.

  “You know what I found, because it’s exactly the same thing as you found when you went down there.”

  “Please tell me what you saw.”

  “I saw Angela Plaint. On the floor. Dead.”

  Chapter Five

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK Mrs. Plaint died of?” Piper asked.

  Erin took another sip of her water. It all seemed so strange. She felt removed from the situation. Like Piper was questioning someone else. Time was elastic, stretching out forever, and then snapping back into place, propelling her forward much too fast. She rubbed her temples.

  “I guess… she choked or had an allergic reaction?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Her face was all… purple. And swollen. And her skin… she had welts. Wheals. Hives. She must have eaten something she was allergic to. She wouldn’t get hives from choking.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “But the only thing she ate was one of the chocolate muffins. And they don’t have any wheat in them. She told me she was deathly allergic to wheat, but there is no wheat in the place. None at all.”

  “She didn’t tell you if she had any other allergies?”

  “No, nothing. Wheat was all that she mentioned.”

  “And the muffin couldn’t have been contaminated from something else? Or she ran across something downstairs that was contaminated?”

  “No. Not unless it was contaminated at the factory before I bought it. That’s the only possibility I can think of… accidental cross-contamination at the factory. I haven’t brought anything with wheat in it into the building.”

  Piper wrote a few words down. “What was it that made you decide to open a gluten-free bakery? Are you allergic to gluten yourself?”

  “No… one of my foster sisters was gluten intolerant… I was really good at cooking up things she could eat. Back then, there wasn’t much available commercially. You had to improvise. Experiment with different ingredients. Pick up alternate flours at import stores. It wasn’t like it is now, with so much available in grocery stores and health food stores.”

  “What happened to your foster sister?”

  There was an iron knot in Erin’s stomach. “What…?”

  “You said your foster sister was gluten intolerant. That could mean a lot of different things. It could mean that you were only foster sisters for a short period of time and then you were separated and didn’t keep in touch. Or…”

  Erin seriously co
nsidered lying. What were the odds that Piper would actually check her answer? Erin had been through lots of foster sisters in her lifetime. There were plenty of them she no longer kept in touch with. It was such an easy answer. She was my sister, she isn’t anymore.

  “No. She died.”

  “She died. Was it related to her gluten allergy?”

  “Intolerance. Yes, it was.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “She didn’t stay compliant. She didn’t like having to eat gluten-free all the time and she cheated. She couldn’t stick to the diet.”

  “And that could kill someone who was just gluten-intolerant? She didn’t actually have an allergy, so how could it kill her?”

  Erin took a deep breath. It was easier to answer an academic question than it was to talk about finding Angela’s body, or explaining what had happened to Carolyn.

  “A lot of people think that allergy means you have a bad reaction and intolerant means you have a mild reaction. But that’s not the difference. An allergy means you have a histamine reaction. An intolerance means that you have another kind of reaction. You can have a mild allergy, maybe a bit of itching or a stomachache, or you can have a severe allergy that causes anaphylaxis and is life-threatening. You can have a minor intolerance, where you can eat a certain amount of a substance without reacting, or where you don’t even realize you are having a reaction because there is no pain or discomfort, or you can have an intolerance that is life-threatening.”

  She stopped and took a sip of water.

  “My foster sister kept cheating on her diet and that caused damage to her intestinal tract. They tried to repair it, tried to keep her on a strict gluten-free diet, but she wouldn’t comply and nothing they did helped. She lost weight, couldn’t absorb nutrients from anything she ate… until she just wasted away.”

  Erin blinked her eyes rapidly and wiped away tears. “But that was Carolyn. That’s not the same as what happened to Angela.”

  “So, you decided to do something for others who had gluten intolerance. You went into specialty baking.”

  “Not right away. It was just a hobby. Something I did on the side, for friends who were intolerant or on special diets. Just because it was something I enjoyed doing, and they appreciated it so much, and… it did help me to feel better about Carolyn. Like maybe I could help someone else stay on a gluten-free diet and save their life like no one had been able to do for Carolyn.”

  “When did it become a business?”

  Erin sighed. “Today. Today was the first day that I was a professional gluten-free baker. The first day that it wasn’t just a hobby, but my job.”

  “I see. So you don’t have any professional experience.”

  “No. Plenty of experience, but not professional until today.”

  “And you haven’t run a bakery or eatery before.”

  “I’ve worked at restaurants before. I even helped Clementine with the tea room when I was just a little child. I’ve always been interested in the food industry.”

  “You’ve run a restaurant before? Or a bakery?”

  “No. Just worked at one.”

  “And what was your profession in Maine? You were a food service worker?”

  “No,” Erin admitted reluctantly, “I was a bookkeeper.”

  “I see.” Piper made a few additional notes in his notepad.

  Erin shifted uncomfortably in her chair and held her glass against her forehead. “I know what I’m doing,” she told him. “Just because I haven’t run a bakery before, that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the rules and laws involved. And I know more about cross-contamination and how sick gluten or allergies can make someone than anyone. I didn’t make a mistake and… kill Angela.”

  “As far as you know.”

  Erin looked for a way to argue with the statement. “Well… no,” she agreed finally. She obviously couldn’t say that she knew more than she knew. “As far as I know.”

  He turned the page on his notepad. “What was the beef between you and Mrs. Plaint?”

  “I… beg your pardon?”

  “Easy enough question. The two of you didn’t get along. Why not?”

  “I didn’t even know her.”

  He stared at her for a few seconds, impassive. That smile that had peeked out when he was discussing ghosts with Melissa Lee was nowhere in evidence. He was on the job. Dead serious.

  “I witnessed an altercation between you and Mrs. Plaint myself.”

  A wave of nausea washed over Erin as the images of her collision with Angela on the sidewalk in front of the store flashed through her mind.

  “That wasn’t an altercation. I just bumped into her as I left the store. I’d never even met her before that and I didn’t know who she was at the time. She didn’t tell me her name until today.”

  “The two of you had a very… intense conversation, for two people who didn’t know each other.”

  “I…” Erin stared out the window at the place where she and Angela had stood on the sidewalk, replaying what she could remember of the conversation. “I didn’t know who she was, but she knew who I was. Started up on the same old nonsense about how Bald Eagle Falls already had a bakery and didn’t need another one. I didn’t even know that she was the owner. She just started in on me, saying that I shouldn’t compete with The Bake Shoppe.”

  He scratched down a few notes. Erin’s face was warm.

  “The ‘same old nonsense,’” Piper repeated slowly, as he wrote the phrase down. “So, you had discussed this with Mrs. Plaint before.”

  “No! Not with her. Just with the other ladies. Everyone thought I should reopen as Clementine’s Tea Room, not as a business in competition with the bakery. When Clementine was running the tea room, she did very little of her own baking. Most of what she sold here, she bought. I don’t know if it was from Angela Plaint’s bakery, or if that even existed when I was a little girl. Everybody kept saying that I shouldn’t compete with Angela.”

  “And now you won’t have to. Now we’ll be down to one bakery again.”

  Erin’s stomach twisted and gurgled. “Are you implying that I deliberately killed Angela Plaint with contaminated muffins?” she demanded. “Maybe I should be calling a lawyer.”

  “No one is making any accusations right now. This is a routine investigation. Of course, you have the right to have your lawyer present during any questioning.”

  “I don’t know what happened to Angela Plaint. But I didn’t have anything to do with it. I think we’re done here.”

  “Okay. Thank you for your cooperation.” Piper snapped his notepad shut. But he gave no indication he intended to leave.

  “I’ll call you if I think of anything else,” Erin told him, looking significantly toward the door.

  “I’ll just supervise while you lock up. The business will be off-limits during our investigation. I’ll let you know when we release the scene.”

  “This is my shop!”

  “Yes, ma’am. And this is an investigation into a sudden, unexpected death. I will be sealing the doors and you will not be allowed back in until the police department releases it to you. You won’t be able to take anything from the scene.”

  “She died from an allergic reaction! You can’t possibly be implying there was foul play involved.”

  “We will need to make that determination. We don’t have Cause of Death yet.”

  “I have a business to run! How long will this take?”

  “I’ll let you know when we’re finished processing all the evidence.”

  #

  It took Erin a long time to get to sleep. She felt sick and run down by the end of the day and thought that after getting home, she would just fall into bed and sleep for twelve hours. After all, she had been up since three o’clock, had run her grand opening, and had found a body and dealt with a police investigation. It was enough to wipe anyone out. But when she got home, she didn’t climb into bed. She was so angry and worked up, she couldn’t even look at her
bed.

  She rummaged through the fridge for something nourishing to eat. She had planned to bring home a loaf of bread and some muffins from the bakery for her supper and breakfast, but Officer Terry Piper had advised her that she wasn’t allowed to take anything home, not even a crumb of bread. It would all have to be tested, he said, to see if any of it was contaminated with wheat or any other substance that might account for Angela’s sudden demise. She was left with the fruits and vegetables in the fridge, some cold cereal, and coffee. Whatever was left of the bagels. Not the best dinner.

  Of course, she could have gone out to eat. There was a family restaurant in town that boasted ‘meat plus three’ on the big sign with removable letters outside the building. There was a BBQ place with a special on hot chicken. There was even a little Chinese restaurant that always seemed to have a full parking lot. But Erin wasn’t up to appearing in public or dealing with anyone over the phone for takeout. She couldn’t stand to think of the management of those places whispering behind her back about her. Do you know who just ordered the baby back ribs? That woman who murdered Angela Plaint!

  After her unsatisfying meal—what she really wanted was a pint of Ben and Jerry’s—she went up to the attic with a cup of coffee. She had a few notes on her plan for the grand opening on her writing desk, though most of her papers were at the office, inaccessible during the police investigation into Angela’s death. Even though she had been writing down her lists and plans less than twenty-four hours before, Erin felt like years had passed. Had she really been that excited about opening up? I enough to believe everything would go off without a hitch? She had been worried about what she should bake and how she should display it. Worried that no one would show up at the opening. It had never occurred to her that one of her customers would be so inconsiderate as to die on the premises, immediately after eating Erin’s baked goods. Erin had beInaive little girl, acting no older than the five-year-old who had helped Auntie Clementine serve the church ladies their tea and cookies.

  She tried reading in her little nook, but couldn’t focus on the page. Couldn’t find anything that interested her. She found herself staring at the wall, going over and over the events of that day and the discussion with Piper. She hadn’t made herself look good. Piper thought she was an irresponsible, inexperienced girl pretending she knew what she was doing, a hazard to all her customers.