The Killer Wore Cranberry

by J. Alan Hartman

  Then again, how ridiculous was the idea that Uncle Jeb—Danny’s happy-go-lucky surf dude mentor—might have felt depressed enough to kill himself? That struck me as highly unlikely too.

  There was one more possibility I could think of: Might he have come into contact with an ill-meaning person in recent days—at a restaurant, say, where they’d slipped a poisonous Mickey to him in a drink or perhaps in his food? Didn’t some poisons take awhile to work? (And all to the killer’s benefit, they could escape before death occurred and foul play was suspected.) Again, Uncle Jeb’s angering someone enough for them to want to kill him was inconceivable to me, as I adored him. Then again, murder under any circumstances was inconceivable to me—and what did I know?

  * * *

  I was the only one home a couple days later when the phone rang. (Yes, at age twenty-nine, I lived with Mother and Dad; I’d moved out after graduating from college and scoring a job as a journalist—and I’d moved back home after the newspaper had gone to a digital three-days-a-week format, letting go half its staff in the process and leaving me unemployed and in need of rent-free housing.) “Hello,” I answered, “Winters residence.”

  “Yes,” said a female voice at the other end of the phone, “I’m calling from the county medical examiner’s office. With whom am I speaking, please?”

  “I’m Kathleen Winters.”

  I heard what sounded like paper shuffling. “Ah, yes, here’s your name,” she said. “You’re one of the individuals with whom I’m authorized to talk.…I’m calling to let you know that Mr. Zachary Winters can now contact whatever mortuary he’d like to have handle final arrangements and have them give him an Order for Release of Remains form to sign, and then we can arrange transportation from our office to the mortuary and the release of the client’s personal property.”

  She spoke so quickly and matter-of-factly that I struggled to keep up with everything she was saying. “Client”? What client? Uncle Jeb hadn’t gone to the salon for a haircut—he’d been taken to the morgue. Hair salons had clients; morgues had…dead bodies. Correction: This particular morgue had dead bodies—and a Merry Sunny–type who chattered like a magpie when she called the families of the bereaved. I had to ask her to slow down and repeat herself so I could take notes.

  “Wait a minute,” I said before she sounded like she was about to hang up, “what about cause of death? Can you tell me that?”

  After more sounds of paper shuffling, I heard her say, “Hmm, well, this is interesting. We can’t issue a death certificate yet because our preliminary findings were inconclusive. The body’s ready now, but our office will be holding on to internal organs and fluid samples for further testing. My notes here say that Mr. Jeb Winters died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, ‘triggering event unknown.’ But our doctors could put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so don’t you worry—Mr. Winters will still look handsome if you want to dress him up for an open-casket service. Well—have a nice day!” she chirruped and hung up before I could ask anything else.

  It couldn’t be easy making calls to survivors’ families like this, I thought. I supposed that I should give her credit for staying positive while dealing with grieving family members. After all, what was the alternative? Sinking into the depths of moroseness?

  I went straight to my laptop and Googled “hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.” I quickly learned that it’s an often-undetected defect in which the heart muscle—the myocardium—grows too thick, which makes it harder for the heart to pump blood, and that it’s perhaps the most common cause of sudden death in athletes.

  Did this mean Mother was right and Uncle Jeb had, indeed, died of natural causes at a young age? And did this mean that the surfing and other sports he’d been so into might not have turned out to be a healthy habit to prolong his life, but instead might have been the trigger that caused his death?

  Also, what of the convulsions and vomiting the EMTs had mentioned? Were those typical symptoms of this kind of cardiac death?

  It was too much for me to take in. My grief, two days after Uncle Jeb’s passing, was fresh, and I found it difficult to believe that, due to a rather common congenital defect, his time had come at age forty-five while he’d still been in his prime. Go for a run on the beach and a surf in the morning and then, poof!, die at noon with your face in a plate of undercooked turkey, oyster-chestnut-and-raisin stuffing and super-spicy cranberry-ginger relish. It didn’t seem right.

  I needed a break.

  Spending time in Mother’s gardens sounded like the kind of soothing activity I needed, so I grabbed a sweater and headed out.

  I couldn’t think what it would be like to live in a place where you couldn’t find respite in a garden or on a beach at any time of year. I needed this kind of peace.

  Our backyard, which ran to a set of cliffs overlooking the Pacific, was devoted to flowers and grasses native to coastal Southern California. In contrast, Mother had turned our large front yard into a traditional English garden, complete with winding gravel walkways and a swimming pool constructed to look like a pond, with a high arching bridge that connected a rose-lined path on one side to a small grotto (the replacement for the burned-down gazebo from four Thanksgivings before) on the other. A Jane Austen heroine would have been perfectly comfortable there; I was no Regency novel heroine, for sure (for one thing, I had no idea how one went about simpering—what was that?), but I did revel in the greenery and the beauty. I walked down one lane lined with purple foxglove, lavender, purple pansies and violets, to another where a bench was tucked into the curve of a semicircle formed by boxwood hedges—and there I sat.

  How could Uncle Jeb have left us so abruptly? I wondered for the umpteenth time.

  I recalled how Officer Sommers had taken Danny and me seriously when we’d raised the possibility of food poisoning. The ME’s office had mentioned nothing about that; maybe they hadn’t yet looked into it. Of course I wouldn’t want Dad’s bad cooking to have been what triggered Uncle Jeb’s death—wouldn’t want him to have to bear that guilt—but I couldn’t help wanting there to be a reason for our losing Uncle Jeb beyond plain dumb luck in the genetic lottery.

  * * *

  I invited Danny to supper in Old Town San Diego that night—I needed to talk to someone I trusted implicitly, and I trusted him. Once you got past the beach lingo he used, he could be a smart, sensitive…dude.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I told him. “I need your advice.”

  “Whoa—sounds mondo serioso, babe.” He stabbed at his oversized, overstuffed chicken taco with a fork until he got a piece small enough to fit in his mouth.

  “It could be muy serioso,” I replied, “that is, if what I noticed in Mother’s garden today has anything to do with Uncle Jeb’s…passing.”

  “‘Food for thought,’ eh?” He took another bite.

  I groaned. I had no appetite. “Not funny, Danny—not funny…Did you know foxglove leaves look similar enough to comfrey leaves that you could easily confuse them? I noticed when I was walking around the front yard this afternoon.”

  He halted his current forkful halfway to his mouth, then placed the utensil back on his plate. “Are you suggesting that Dad’s goofiness in the kitchen has finally rubbed off on our parental dudette, or…?”

  “Or maybe she purposefully substituted foxglove leaves for comfrey leaves on one or more of our salad plates because she’s had a—a mental breakdown? Or else I’m wrong and a terrible, unfaithful daughter…” I started to tremble so hard I couldn’t hold my fork or pick up my drink when I tried. I let my hands drop.

  “Aw, Kat…” Danny reached and took both my hands in his. “Yo, babe,” he said, “if you can’t deal with calling Officer Sommers with your questions, I’ll do the gnarly deed—’cause it’s got to be done.”

  * * *

  “How you know everything you do about all the plants in your garden—well,” I said, “I find it amazing.”

  Mother and I were strolling in her English garden two days aft
er my supper with Danny.

  “Take these, for instance.” I stopped in front of a patch with comfrey and touched a leaf. “If I saw these side-by-side with these”—I moved a few feet away and touched the leaves on a foxglove—”I wouldn’t be able to distinguish them from each other. I might assume—”

  “Stop.”

  “—That they came from the same genus, or family, or whatever you call it, but—”

  “Stop, please, Kathleen. I know what you’re doing.”

  I couldn’t bear to look her in the eye. “Then you know what I have to ask.”

  “You loved your Uncle Jeb almost as much as your brother and father did, didn’t you?” The tenderness in her voice startled me into glancing up at her—into those aquamarine-hued eyes I’d inherited.

  “I love our whole family,” I replied. If my heart was about to break because of a confession she was going to make, it was only because I loved her enough that I was vulnerable to her hurting me.

  “It wasn’t my intention to kill him.”

  “What was your intention, then?” I demanded.

  She covered her face with her hands and began to cry. “He just kept taking and taking and taking, with no regard for what others wanted or needed. He was a charming free spirit, fascinated and finding joy with everything in the world around him, like a child, except with a grown man’s interests and strengths and temptations and abilities and impossible dreams.

  “Like many children, though, Jeb didn’t have a strong sense of responsibility. You and Daniel saw that your uncle held down a series of jobs and stayed gainfully employed most of the time. What you didn’t see, though, was the amount of extra help your father and I gave to him.”

  “You poisoned him over money?”

  “Not entirely.” She shook her head. “For years, we supplemented whatever Jeb earned, filling in the financial gaps even more during those brief periods he was out of work—and I didn’t complain, not once. He was family and I loved him. Then he started urging your dad not only to back him, but to join him, in risky business ventures—to put our portion of their inheritance from your grandparents on the line, since he’d already gone through his share. He wanted us to put our house on the line too, as collateral.” I followed her gaze as she turned to look at our home; I realized it was an extravagant place by many people’s standards, but it was still home by ours. “I couldn’t let his greed steal away our home and the inheritance your dad and I intended to belong to you and Daniel someday.”

  “So, that’s why you poisoned him?”

  “I only wanted to teach him a lesson. I figured the bitter flavor of the foxglove leaves would be a dead giveaway.”

  I flinched at the unfunny pun.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Anyway, I figured he’d start eating the salad before I served it, because he was greedy when it came to food too, but I thought he’d stop once he tasted it, and say something like, ‘What is this?,’ and then I’d say, ‘It’s what you get for being so greedy all the time that you take what you want, whenever you want it,’ and that would be that, and hopefully he would have learned a lesson. I never thought he’d eat the entire salad before I could stop him.”

  Officer Sommers and his partner, trailed by Dad and Danny, rounded a bend in the garden path then. “And,” added Officer Sommers as they came into view, “you didn’t count on Jeb’s having a congenital heart condition that the toxins in the foxglove leaves would trigger.”

  Mother gasped and her face registered horror as she realized what was happening. “You only have my confession to my daughter to prove anything, and she won’t testify against me!”

  I pulled aside my shirt collar to reveal the wire I’d volunteered to wear. “Sorry, Mother—but I couldn’t let you get away with murder.”

  “Don’t worry, Ms. Winters,” Officer Sommers said, addressing me. “The case won’t rest completely on your shoulders. There’s also the physical evidence. Once the ME had a better idea what to look for, they were able to find evidence of your uncle’s foxglove ingestion—and the symptoms fit, as well. His death certificate will now read”—he consulted a notepad—”‘cardiac arrest as a consequence of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy triggered by sinus rhythm with premature ventricular contractions, contributory cause: ingestion of toxic levels of cardiac glucosides in Digitalis purpurea.’

  “Believe me, ma’am,” he said as he turned to Mother, “I don’t like this either, but”—he handcuffed her as gently as I could imagine anyone getting handcuffed—”you’re under arrest for the murder of Jeb Winters.” He started to recite her Miranda rights as he and his partner led her to a squad car.

  Dad plodded slowly behind. I assumed he’d follow the squad car to the jail and see about hiring a lawyer and posting bail.

  Danny wrapped a supportive arm around my shoulders. “This totally sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “totally.”

  “Dad may not want to celebrate Thanksgiving ever again.”

  I mourned for Dad—and for the rest of us—although, embarrassing as this is, I must admit that my spirits brightened a bit at the notion of never again having to endure one of his Thanksgiving dinners. “We’ll be here for him, anyway,” I remarked, “on Thanksgiving—and every day.”

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “And, Kat?”

  I looked up at him. “What, Danny?”

  “I want you to know that you can always think of me as your longboard leash when the sea’s full of ground swells and crunchers.”

  He was a tenderhearted surf dude, this brother of mine. I understood his meaning: He’d be there for me to hang on to whenever life got too rough for me to handle on my own. And for that I was truly thankful.

  Lisa’s Apple Cranberry Pie

  Lisa Wagner

  Combine in a large bowl:

  8 medium apples, peeled and chopped, plus fresh/frozen rinsed cranberries to equal a total of 2 pounds

  1/3 cup sugar

  1 Tbsp. arrowroot powder or cornstarch

  3 Tbsp. unbleached flour

  Dash of salt

  1 1/2 tsp. apple pie spice

  Stir well, and allow ingredients to mingle while you heat the oven to 400F and prepare the whole-grain oil crust.

  Combine in a bowl:

  3/4 cup whole wheat flour

  3/4 cup unbleached flour

  1 cup oat flour (use a coffee grinder, 1/2 cup at a time, to grind rolled or quick oats)

  1/2 tsp. salt

  Combine dry ingredients with a fork. Add 1/2 cup ice water and 1/2 cup light olive oil. Combine with fork and form a ball.

  Divide ball in half, then place one half between two sheets of wax paper. Roll dough into a circle that is large enough to completely cover the bottom and sides of your ungreased pie plate. Arrange rolled dough in pie plate, then spoon in seasoned fruit. Repeat rolling procedure for second ball of dough, then place over the fruit. Pinch the sides of the dough so the top crust meets the bottom. Cut 5 slits spaced apart in the top crust. Place pie on a foil-lined baking pan, and bake in preheated oven for 1 hour, until crust begins to brown and fruit is bubbling through the slits. Allow pie to cool on a rack before serving.

  Serves 8

  It’s All in the Timing

  By Warren Bull

  Had the pen by the telephone worked, the message from the answering machine would have been transcribed successfully. The ensuing unpleasantness would have never taken place. Unfortunately, Tom had brought home one of those cheap pens from his work. His boss insisted on buying them in bulk to discourage the theft of office supplies by employees. The result of the policy was that employees now stole boxes of twenty pens instead of stealing one pen at a time.

  Even so, had Tom not immediately erased the message he would have been able to listen to it again. But Tom had the message in his head. He saw a pen and a pad of paper right where they should be—next to the phone. He thought he would just jot the message down and that would be the end of it. Finding the pen useless, he
rooted through the junk drawer, uncovering five cough drops of dubious age, the ruler he had been looking for the day before, three intact paper clips, five paper clips that looked like they had been through the Spanish Inquisition, four index cards that had phone numbers on them but not names (he didn’t recognize any of the numbers), and assorted junk.

  Finally he looked under the middle seat cushion of the couch. Next to a quarter, three dimes, four pennies and a hutch full of dust bunnies he found a pen that worked as often as it failed. Unfortunately, Tom’s anger had erased the message by then. He did the very best he could considering that he no longer remembered which of the family members called or the exact time he or she mentioned for dinner. He slapped the message on the refrigerator and thumped a magnet down to hold it there.

  Tom spouted his fury to his wife, Susan, when she got home. She might have called someone in Tom’s family right then and there except that his eruption seemed to be subsiding. She did not want to wind him up again, knowing in the second round Tom might spew his venom toward her. She counted herself lucky that Tom’s target had been limited to his conniving skinflint of a boss who treated everyone at work like they were a gang of thieves. Susan knew Tom could go fifteen rounds without even breaking a sweat.

  Susan intended to call her sister-in-law, Joyce, the next day from work, but when she showed up at the office she discovered that a co-worker refused to talk to the secretary and the secretary acted as if the co-worker did not even exist. By the time the office staff achieved what passed for normal behavior in that environment, she forgot about the message.

  With the holiday season approaching, Tom and Susan were busier than usual at work. Occasionally one or the other would notice the message held on the refrigerator door by an auto club insurance company magnet. Each time Susan would decide the risk was too great of setting off Tom by calling when he was around. Tom could never quite bring himself to call anyone in his family. He worried that if he called to confirm the information he might be accused of having made a mistake.