The Killer Wore Cranberry

by J. Alan Hartman

  “We are what we eat, Sheriff,” Marjory added meekly.

  “I like vegetables—and meat,” Helen Pilston stated. “But I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  Sheriff Centers slammed his big meathooks down on the kitchen table and bellowed, “Maybe I should’ve said: who here loves vegetables!? Who’s the turnip-hugger!?”

  When no one responded to that line of questioning, the Sheriff wheeled about and yanked open the refrigerator, rooted around inside, then pulled out a head of lettuce. He spun back around and slapped the lettuce down onto the table with a thud, making the crockery and the four suspects jump a second time. Then he grabbed a meat cleaver off the kitchen counter and brandished it over the ripe, green, leafy, round head of lettuce. “Answer me, or it’s off with this head!”

  Everyone gaped at the Sheriff and his threatening cleaver, including his own colleague. But nobody spoke. Centers brought the razor-sharp blade crashing down, chopping the lettuce in two.

  “Murderer!” Laura Evers screamed, jumping up out of her chair. She grabbed the two severed halves of lettuce and clutched them to her breast, glaring at the Sheriff.

  The two lawmen and the assembled Pilstons stared at the woman.

  “You executed this innocent vegetable!” she wailed at Centers.

  “It was DOA,” the Sheriff replied grimly. “You preached your gospel of living vegetable liberation to Morris Pilston, Ms. Evers, and when he wouldn’t listen, you drugged him. As a warning to end his Thanksgiving harvest.”

  “Thanksgiving slaughter, you mean!” Laura Evers shrilled, her wide eyes as glazed as holiday yams. “He reaped what he sowed—death by the bushelful! It’s an annual atrocity—the slaughter of our defenceless vegetated friends—that has to be stopped! Plus, if fewer people eat vegetables, it’s better for my meat business,” she added quite lucidly.

  Centers gestured at his deputy. “Okay, ‘cuff her. We’ll take her in to the—”

  “You aren’t taking her anywhere, Sheriff!”

  All eyes gawked at the giant cornstalk in the doorway. A shotgun was cradled in its green fronds, the twin deadly muzzles aimed directly at the Sheriff’s ample stomach.

  “Stay rooted right where you are,” it advised ironically, “and no one will get hurt!”

  Deputy Duggan went for his gun.

  The shotgun boomed.

  The kitchen exploded with the Sheriff’s stuffing…

  * * *

  “No!” Morris Pilston cried out, shooting upright in bed.

  He gasped for air, his chest heaving, his face lathered with sweat. Then he looked over to his right, at the sleeping form of his wife, Helen, lying next to him in the bed.

  “I-I guess I shouldn’t have eaten all that food,” he muttered jerkily.

  Then he sighed, slowly settled back down onto his pillow. He burped, and smiled, tucking the bedcovers back under his chin.

  He glanced to the left.

  A large, brown, dirt-flecked potato sat on the nightstand next to the bed, not two feet away from Morris’s suddenly bloodless face. The two protruding, postulacious, glowing white eyes on the potato appeared to be staring at the horror-stricken hobby farmer in the dark, accusingly.

  Blame It on the Chef

  By Rhett Shepard

  When Uncle Jeb slumped face-first into the oyster-chestnut-and-raisin stuffing, in a fit of shivering, I have to confess that we didn’t think much of it. At one time or another, most of us had fallen victim to the side effects of one of Dad’s “special” meals.

  “Yeah, Uncle J, I agree,” said my brother Danny. “That’s some pretty gnarly Turkey Day food, all right.”

  “Daniel!” Mother gasped. “Do you have any idea how hard your father worked to roast that turkey? And his creative efforts to make the stuffing…?”

  I snorted, so then Mother turned and looked disapprovingly at me—but I couldn’t help myself. Dad fancied himself an amateur gourmet chef. Throughout the year, he combed through recipes, collecting possible candidates for holiday dinners. As a result, in previous years we’d ended up with a pumpkin soufflé that went flat (and no pumpkin pie—which, as Danny pointed out at the time, was a “total bummer”) and a deep-fried turkey that was burned to a crisp on the outside (along with Mother’s garden gazebo, in which Dad had set up the deep fryer) but raw pink on the inside. This year, so far, we’d dined on a turkey stuffed at one end with oyster stuffing and at the other end with chestnut-and-raisin stuffing (newsflash: when you start taking out the stuffing, it all ends up mixing together in a single extremely dubious concoction—rather than staying separate in two slightly-less-dubious concoctions), a bird that was golden on the outside and light pink on the inside (“It’s cooked!” Dad insisted. “The little white button that means it’s done cooking popped up!”), and cranberry-ginger relish that contained so much fresh ginger it burned my mouth when I tasted it. Currently, he was in the kitchen finishing the vegetable dishes—but I think, without my saying any more, you can understand why I snorted in bemusement at what Mother called Dad’s “creative efforts” in the kitchen.

  “Dude,” said Danny, as he jiggled Uncle Jeb by the arm, “I get that the noshes are less than stellar, man, but come back up for air, will ya?”

  Uncle Jeb’s arm fell off the table and dangled limply.

  We all stared at Uncle Jeb and Danny’s side of the table then.

  “Whoa,” said my Southern California surfer-guy brother, as he drew out the single-syllable word for several seconds. “Whoa,” he said again. “I think Uncle J’s expired.”

  * * *

  “You think it’s the turkey that killed him—or maybe the oysters?” my brother questioned the EMTs as they entered the room upon their arrival.

  “Daniel!” gasped Mother.

  I turned to him. “You mean, was Dad’s turkey dinner so much worse than usual this year that it made Uncle Jeb die of food poisoning?”

  “Kathleen!” gasped Mother. (Clearly, we made her gasp a lot that day.)

  One of the EMTs glanced at Danny, then over at me. “Your Thanksgiving dinner was bad enough that you’re afraid it might’ve killed your uncle?”

  His partner tried to stifle a chuckle but didn’t quite succeed.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, our Thanksgiving dinners are never great, but this year—I don’t know…”

  Based on the scarlet-deepening-to-purple color of her face and the little breath-sucking noises she was making, I could tell Mother was angry that either—and, worse yet, both—of us had suggested that Dad’s cooking was atrocious enough it might have killed his brother.

  A police officer, from a pair that arrived shortly after the EMTs did, sauntered into the dining room while we were having this conversation. He turned and looked over one shoulder, and told his partner, “Maybe we’d better confiscate this dinner as possible evidence.” From his facial expression and tone of voice, it wasn’t clear whether he was jesting or not.

  “It wasn’t that bad!” Mother couldn’t help but defend Dad—I understood and had to admire her for her loyalty. “It was…interesting—the same way it is every year. My husband is an…adventurous…cook, and it’s always…fascinating…to see what he comes up with for Thanksgiving dinner from one year to the next.”

  I guess thinking up all those euphemisms took a lot out of her, because she sank back into her chair after she gave that little speech.

  “By all means, then,” replied the second police officer, whose nametag read Sommers. “Let’s seize the food and take it to the police lab for analysis.”

  Poor Dad, I thought. This year’s Thanksgiving dinner was only going from bad to worse.

  * * *

  They started by confiscating the food that was already in the dining room—first of all, the unevenly cooked turkey, the odd mishmash of stuffing, the spicy cranberry-ginger relish and whatever else Uncle Jeb had sneaked onto his plate.

  “Did the deceased eat anything else in the house today?”

&n
bsp; “What didn’t he sample?” Mother muttered.

  “Uncle J had a massive appetite,” Danny explained. “He had a stomach that needed, like, mucho grub to stay satisfied.”

  The police officers exchanged glances with each other, and then Sommers asked, “Could you show me the actual dishes from which he ate, please?”

  I led him into the kitchen, where Dad sat at the heart pine table, his “Kiss the Cook” chef hat askew, wringing the hem of his “Chefs Know How to Heat Things Up” apron in his hands, his face reflecting total dejection. “This is my dad, Zack Winters,” I introduced him to the officer. “He’s the brother of—of—”

  “The corpse in question?” Officer Sommers supplied.

  I nodded. Okay, the corpse in question is not the wording I would have chosen.

  He held out his hand to Dad. “My sympathies, sir, on the loss of your brother.”

  Dad nodded in acknowledgment, but all he said was, “I just realized that I forgot to add the giblets to the gravy—and now he’ll never taste this year’s gravy.” The gravy boat sat on the table in front of Dad. I wasn’t sure if the floating lumps I saw there were unmixed lumps of flour or chopped-up giblets; either way, I didn’t suppose any of us were missing a great treat by not being able to partake of Dad’s homemade turkey gravy that year.

  “What foods in here did your brother eat, Mr. Winters?”

  Dad vaguely waved a hand, encompassing the whole kitchen. “Pretty much all of them,” he replied, “except the gravy.” His face crumpled. In all my twenty-nine years, I’d never seen Dad as close to tears as he was at that moment.

  The officer turned to the kitchen counter and motioned to one serving bowl as he took a step toward it. “These are mashed potatoes—?”

  “—And parsnips,” supplied Dad. “Mashed potatoes and parsnips with horseradish—plenty of fresh horseradish.”

  Maybe that explained why my eyes and those of Officer Sommers had started to water as we’d approached the bowl.

  The lawman looked slightly ill as he motioned to the next bowl, piled high with some recipe that had turned the ingredients in it an unnatural shade of hot pink. “And this would be?”

  “Mashed sweet potatoes and beets. The recipe called for plain Greek yogurt, but I couldn’t find any at the store, so I substituted sour cream—hope it turned out okay.”

  An undertone of green inched up the officer’s face. He pointed at a tureen. “This?”

  “Homemade cream-of-asparagus soup,” replied Dad.

  I gazed into the huge tureen along with Officer Sommers. Stiff, nearly raw-looking finger-length pieces of asparagus floated atop a pale green liquid thin enough to resemble milk with food coloring added. “You put it into the tureen before you finished cooking it?” I asked.

  “Of course not!”

  I locked gazes with the officer and shrugged. If he’d thought it strange, before, that we’d eaten our meal courses out of order, he no longer seemed to think that was the strangest thing about our family’s Thanksgiving. He looked pained and amused.

  Next in the lineup was a big springform pan containing a bright orange…something. “Pumpkin pudding?” I guessed, confused. If it were pudding, though, why would it be in a springform pan—a pan that people normally used for baked goods?

  Because it wasn’t pudding, as Dad explained. “It was supposed to be no-fail/no-bake pumpkin cheesecake—not sure why, but the gelatin didn’t work and it hasn’t solidified like it should have.”

  Smirk met smirk over the disastrous dessert in the springform pan—only, when I considered all of Dad’s culinary failures and his brother’s unexpected death, my smirk quickly faded away. Instead, I felt a salty moisture begin filling my eyes again—and this time it wasn’t because of the noxious fumes arising from Dad’s cooking.

  “Your brother sampled from all these dishes?” asked Officer Sommers.

  “Those—plus his salad.” Dad pointed at a different counter, where individual dishes of salad were laid out.

  “Spinach salad?” asked the officer, who appeared relieved to see an appealing-looking food he recognized. “With edible violets?”

  “Comfrey leaf salad,” Dad corrected, “with edible violet, pansy and rose petals. That was my wife’s contribution to the meal. The comfrey leaves and flower petals came from her garden. The comfrey leaves do taste similar to spinach, though.”

  Motioning to one of the plates with a plastic-gloved finger, the lawman asked, “I suppose this is what’s left of your brother’s salad?”

  Dad nodded mournfully. “Go figure—Jeb always did prefer Lucy’s cooking over mine.”

  * * *

  “This is outrageous,” Mother shrieked, “utterly outrageous—to go from disparaging dear Zachary’s culinary skills to suggesting that his brother’s death might have occurred as a result of anything other than natural causes!”

  “Death as a result of natural causes—at the age of forty-five?” I countered. Uncle Jeb had been Dad’s younger brother by several years. Although, as Danny had remarked earlier, Uncle Jeb had had a “massive appetite,” he burned off all those calories with his active, athletic lifestyle. I couldn’t imagine my cool, hip, still-youthful-looking Uncle Jeb keeling over from a heart attack or stroke—at least, not until he got a lot older. No, while Mother might purse her lips in disapproval at my comment (and her lips did look like she’d been sampling some of Dad’s lemonade), we all had to suspect that extenuating circumstances—such as food poisoning—must have led to Uncle Jeb’s demise.

  “He was my partner on the Pacific waves,” Danny remarked, waxing poetic. He strode to our dining room picture window, hands shoved into the pockets of his board shorts, and gazed wistfully at the ocean, which we could see from our house’s perch atop the La Jolla cliffs. Indeed, Uncle Jeb was the one who’d taught Danny how to surf.

  Mother made a distraught noise, halfway between a screech and a moan, and she stomped a foot in protest.

  “It actually might not be outrageous,” said one of the EMTs as they helped the people who’d shown up from the medical examiner’s office to load Uncle Jeb, now encased in a black body bag, onto a gurney. “You didn’t realize there are signs he went into convulsions before he died?”

  “Convulsions?” I thought back to when he’d collapsed onto his plate. Was what I’d thought of as “shivers,” at the time, more extreme than any of us had noticed? “You mean it might not have been simple food poisoning giving him the shivers?” For all of Danny’s and my talk about how awful Dad’s food was—and don’t get me wrong: Dad’s cooking could be bad—I don’t believe either of us had seriously thought that Uncle Jeb’s death could have been anything more than a fatal ingestion of something that…well…could have accidentally killed any of us.

  “He vomited onto his plate,” observed the other EMT.

  “So that’s why Uncle J’s portion smelled extra-gnarly.”

  I stared at my brother. The entire dining table and its contents had smelled “extra-gnarly” to me. I hadn’t realized that Danny had smelled anything beyond that.

  “This may not be a case of simple food poisoning,” continued the EMT. “It may be a case of intentional poisoning with food or some other ingestible substance.”

  “Do you mean…murder?” Asking the question aloud felt out-of-body-experience weird. That idea had never occurred to me.

  This time, our whole little family gasped.

  * * *

  “With a relatively young gentleman and the symptoms he exhibited prior to death, they’d want to take at least a few toxicology tests, I’d think,” remarked the talkative EMT.

  Officer Sommers flashed a consternated glare at the EMT who’d spoken and then he turned back to us. “Just sit tight,” he instructed. “Don’t take any long trips without letting us know”—he handed out business cards to the four of us—”and don’t travel abroad for the time being. We’ll contact you when the body can be released for burial—or…whatever.”

  W
ithin minutes, everyone beyond the four of us was gone.

  Dad threw his hands in the air. “So, what’re we going to do now, without a Thanksgiving dinner?”

  “Is that all you Winters men can think about?” Mother snapped. “Nothing but food?”

  “Hey, Lucy,” said Dad, sadness tingeing his voice, “that’s not fair and you know it. Cooking for friends and family is my way of trying to bring happiness to the people I love.”

  Mother tottered over to Dad on her high heels, plopped herself in his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I know, Pookie—I know,” she replied in sweet apology.

  Danny and I exchanged glances. On the one hand, it was heartwarming to know our parents were still in love after thirty-plus years of marriage. On the other hand…

  “Yo, dudette,” he stage-whispered, “you want to see if Rubio’s is open today so we can chow down on fish tacos?”

  I was starving by then but—needless to say, I guess—traditional Thanksgiving fare held absolutely no appeal. I smiled up at my six-foot-something baby brother. “Sure,” I agreed. “That sounds totally rad.”

  My surfer-girl-style answer earned a grin in reply.

  We left Mother and Dad canoodling in the dining room, and I drove us toward the nearest Rubio’s.

  “You don’t think it’s true, do you, Kat?”

  “You mean that maybe it wasn’t simple food poisoning that killed Uncle Jeb?”

  “Yeah.” Danny paused. “‘Cause you know what that means?” He paused again. “It means maybe Uncle J offed himself—or maybe one of us offed him.”

  Well, I knew for sure that I hadn’t; and with Danny’s long-time hero worship of our uncle, I couldn’t imagine Danny doing anything to harm him; Dad was clearly grieving his brother, and the two of them had seemed to get along as well as any set of brothers could; and while Mother had always gotten easily rankled by Uncle Jeb, she got easily rankled by plenty of people, and so I simply thought of Mother as being…Mother, and as unlikely as any of the rest of us to resort to murder.