by Harper Lin
In the easy chair off to the side of the couch, Detective Mike Stanton sat hunched over with a cup of coffee cradled in his hands. He seemed to be holding it and staring at it more than drinking it, an indication, I suspected, that he didn’t actually feel much better than either of us did, even though he was up and dressed and out of his house.
He stared at the coffee cup for a few more seconds then put it down on the end table next to him and slowly drew a notebook and pen out of the pocket of his navy cargo pants. The detective flipped his notebook open and turned his bleary eyes toward me. “Any idea what happened, Fran?”
I started to shake my head but stopped as pain shot through my skull and the nausea kicked up again. I could hardly move without feeling like I was going to be sick again, although my stomach had long since rid itself of all its contents. “No,” I forced out.
“Not even a guess?” Even sick, Mike was a dogged investigator.
“Not really.” I tried to move my lips and nothing else. “I figure it must be food poisoning. I’ve been trying to think of whether I accidentally left something out too long or didn’t cool it fast enough, but I don’t think I did. I can’t imagine what happened unless maybe something came in contaminated.”
Mike nodded and scribbled something down on his notepad. “Where do you get your supplies?”
“Coffee I get from a distributor, mostly, but there are a couple of farms I order from direct—”
“The stuff you made last night.”
“Milk, butter, and eggs come from local farms. The Italian sausage came from a local farm. Flour and that kind of thing comes from a distributor. I got some stuff at the grocery store.” I was exhausted from just that little bit of talking.
Mike bobbed his head in what I took for a nod. “I’ll need a list of everyone you bought things from for last night.”
Did that mean he thought something had been contaminated before it got to me? And was that a matter for the police? As much of a relief as it would be to find out that it wasn’t my fault, it didn’t make up for all those people getting so sick by a long shot.
The detective leaned back in his chair, cringing as he did. He took a couple of breaths with his eyes squeezed closed. He opened them again, blinked a few times and tried to focus on my face. “They ran tests at the hospital on the people who were brought in.”
“Was it salmonella?” That was the first type of food poisoning that came to mind. And with the number of eggs I’d used, it would make sense if they were contaminated before I got them.
Mike inclined his head slightly.
“E. coli?”
His eye twitched like he would have raised his eyebrow if his head didn’t hurt so much.
“Trichinosis?”
“Did you clean everything up before you left last night?”
“No.” If I’d been feeling better, I would have been ashamed of myself for leaving the café a mess and all that food out to spoil. Of course, if the food had made everyone sick, there was no use saving it anyway, but it was still embarrassing to have left the café such a mess when anyone could walk by, look in the windows, and see what a disaster everything was. I was almost too sick to care about that, though. Almost.
“Sammy clean it up this morning?”
“No,” I croaked. “She’s sick too. And Rhonda. The girls are too young. And Ephy—” I stopped. I’d called Sammy and Rhonda earlier that morning to see how they were feeling, but they both felt like death warmed over. With all three of us sick, there was no point in opening the café, so I’d called the girls and then Ephy to let them know we would be closed. The girls had been feeling fine, but they were both picky eaters and left early besides, so it didn’t strike me as particularly strange. But Ephy felt fine, too, and even sounded almost perky. Perky for Ephy anyway. When I’d expressed my surprise, she’d volunteered that she must not have eaten whatever made everyone sick. But that wasn’t really any different than the girls not being sick, was it? “Ephy’s too new to be there by herself. We’re closed until we all get back on our feet.”
Mike grunted and wrote something down on his notepad. He stared down at it for a moment before turning back to me. He spent a long time looking at me, so long that I started to feel uncomfortable and shifted a little on the couch. “It wasn’t food poisoning.”
I stared back at him, trying to process what could have made all of us so sick if it wasn’t food poisoning.
“They were poisoned.”
If my abdomen hadn’t already ached from spending all night huddled over a toilet, I would have felt like someone punched me in the gut. “Poisoned? With real, actual poison? What? Why? Who would do something like that?”
This time, he did raise an eyebrow while looking me dead in the eye.
I waited for him to explain until my nausea seemed to fade away as realization slowly dawned for me. “You—you can’t—you don’t—Mike, you know me—” I searched his face for some sign that he wasn’t serious. It was cruel to joke about something like that, and I’d never known Mike to be cruel, but maybe the sickness was messing with his sense of decency.
He looked at me with expressionless eyes. “Fran, I’m going to need your permission to search your house and the café.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. I still had some fragile hope that he was joking.
A flicker of regret passed across his eyes. His voice was softer. “Otherwise, I’m going to get a search warrant.”
Chapter 9
As soon as I agreed to let them search my house and the café, he sent me to get dressed. Then he loaded me into his squad car and drove me over to the café. He must have had the crime scene team on standby because they were already parked outside when we pulled up.
One of the crime scene techs had to unlock the door for me because my hands were shaking too much to get my key into the lock. He pulled the door open and held it for me to walk in first.
The café was exactly like we’d left it before. The tables loaded down with food, big bowls of punch at either end still half full, discarded paper plates and plastic cups scattered on every available surface, some with food still on them. Some of the food even had bites taken out of it. It was the kind of thing you would see at a disaster site where everyone had fled unexpectedly and in a hurry, leaving the remnants of the last normal moments behind. If you dropped a group of people into the room, they could pick back up exactly where they left off, and no one would know the difference.
I would, though.
The night before, the tantalizing smell of fresh-baked pastries, both sweet and savory, had filled the café. The rich, buttery aroma of freshly made cookies and puff pastry, the hint of citrus from the lemon tarts, the warm spices of the sausage—they’d all blended together in an enticing mix that beckoned our guests inside and welcomed them to our party.
Now, it smelled stale—stale food, stale air, and stale—well, a lot of people had been very nauseated, and the bathrooms hadn’t been cleaned. The scene was far more repellant than inviting. And the scattered detritus of the party just drove it home. The night didn’t end because people were ready to go—it ended because they were too sick to stay.
“All right, guys.” Mike’s voice boomed behind me as he and the crime scene techs started filling the café. “We believe the poison was ingested, so we want samples of all the food on the table and—” He stopped and looked around. “You may as well get the stuff people left on the tables too.”
The techs swarmed the room, fanning out with plastic evidence bags in hand, ready to be filled with the food I’d made—food the police thought had been poisoned. Even though I knew the food was inedible, my gut reaction was still that it was such a waste of food.
“Do you want us to take all of it, Detective?” one of the techs asked, his hand poised over a platter, ready to slide every last slice of the mille-feuille into his bag.
Mike studied the table for a few seconds then shook his head. “Just grab a few of each. If the tests come ba
ck inconclusive, we’ll come back for more.”
I realized then that the café wasn’t getting cleaned up anytime soon.
The tech dropped a couple slices of the mille-feuille into the bag and moved over to the fudgey chocolate chip cookies next to them. Mike stopped him as he reached out for them. “One thing per bag.” He rolled his eyes and looked at me for sympathy. As much as I wanted to offer it, I couldn’t quite muster it under the circumstances.
He seemed to understand, shoving his hands in his pockets and turning back to survey the techs. After a moment, he glanced back my way. “You can sit down if you want. Probably be a while.”
I sank down into the closest chair. The techs were everywhere, like a colony of ants moving in on a picnic. I watched them warily. I’d seen enough TV shows where the aftermath of a search looked about the same as a thorough burglary—drawers emptied, shelves cleared, everything everywhere. I hoped the local guys would be more considerate than that. Of course, they were from the county, so they didn’t actually know me like the Cape Bay officers did.
“Let’s be careful, guys. We don’t need to toss the place,” Mike said, giving a hard look at a tech behind the counter who was being a little haphazard with the glass jars I used to display different varieties and roasts of beans. I liked having them to show customers when they had questions. Being able to hand someone a few beans to sniff and roll around in their hand went a long way towards helping them understand what differentiated one from another. Plus, they looked pretty and made good décor.
“Sorry about that,” Mike muttered in my direction. “I’m trying to keep them in line.” He looked over at me with something like regret.
I nodded slightly—as much as I could without sending another wave of pain through my skull—and put my elbow on the table next to me. The sign-in sheet and donation box from the night before were still sitting on it. One of us should have locked that up before we left the night before. Someone could have stolen it easily. I’d been too sick to think even of that the night before.
I pulled the box toward me and checked under the lid. I didn’t know how much money had been in it the night before, but there was still a pile of bills and checks inside, so I didn’t think anyone had tampered with it. I’d have to ask Mike about locking it up or going ahead and taking it over to the animal shelter. I didn’t know what I’d do if the crime scene techs wanted to take it for some test or other. Find out how much it was and go ahead and write a check, I guessed. I hated the thought of the animal shelter missing out because of what happened last night.
I pushed the box away and pulled over the sign-in sheet. Well, it wasn’t so much a sign-in sheet as a sort of guest book. A guest sheet, really, since it was only one piece of paper. Names filled one side completely and went two-thirds of the way down the other side. We’d had a good turnout. It was a shame how the night ended up.
I scanned down the list, idly looking for any names that stood out. Names I didn’t recognize were scattered in amongst the many I did. It didn’t mean I didn’t know them—there were lots of people I ran into around town who I recognized and would chat with but whose names I didn’t actually know. And there were plenty more who I only knew by first name. Still, I recognized many of the names. Todd Caruthers, Mary Ellen Chapman, Karli, who worked the front desk at the gym, Sammy, Melissa, Rhonda and her husband, Sammy’s friend Dawn, Dean Howard from Howard Jewelers. So many people I knew and loved. I’d just wanted to celebrate with them, and I’d ended up sending some of them to the hospital.
Well, not me. I hadn’t actually done anything to put them in the hospital. But someone had. Someone had come into my café and poisoned the food I had prepared for our big birthday celebration. I felt violated. I felt angry. I felt offended. And I felt helpless. I didn’t know who could have done such a thing.
The girls who worked with me in the café had the most access, but I couldn’t imagine any of them doing something like that. I’d known them all a long time, and I trusted them. Well, all except for Ephy. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her—I just didn’t know her yet. Still, I didn’t think she could have possibly... no, she couldn’t have.
That meant it had to be someone who came to the party. Someone had come to the party under the pretense of celebrating with us but had poisoned us instead. I couldn’t imagine who could have done such a thing. Who among my friends and neighbors would do that?
I held out a fragile hope that something had come in from a vendor already contaminated, but it seemed unlikely. I’d tasted everything as I made it and hadn’t gotten sick until the party itself. Maybe there was still a chance it hadn’t been someone at the party.
A tech stuck his head out of the back room. “What do you want us to get from back here, Detective? She’s got a lot of stuff.”
I bristled at his choice of words. As if I’d somehow intentionally made sure I was well-stocked with supplies, just to annoy them or make their jobs more difficult.
Mike rubbed his forehead and looked at me. “What do you have back there?”
The rebellious side of me wanted to blurt out that I had poison, of course, but I didn’t think Mike would see the humor in it. I chose the wiser option. “Supplies. Some extra food I had for the party.”
He nodded. “Get samples of all the party food in the—” He looked at me again.
“Fridge.”
“In the fridge.”
The tech nodded and walked back into the kitchen. As he went, I realized I actually did have poison on site, if you considered cleaning products a potential poison, which I supposed they were if they were put into someone’s food. And then I thought of something else. I’d been so focused on the “who” that I hadn’t even thought about the “what.”
“What kind of poison was it?”
Mike looked down at me with his eyebrow raised like he wasn’t sure I was talking to him.
“You said the food was poisoned, but you didn’t say what the poison was.”
He grunted and turned back to watch the techs still going through every last inch of the café.
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea at this stage in the investigation,” he said without looking at me.
“Why? Are you afraid I’ll accidentally tip someone off?” And then a worse possibility crossed my mind. “You don’t actually think I had something to do with it, do you?”
Mike crossed his arms over his chest and glanced down at me out of the corner of his eye before looking back at the techs.
I sank back in my chair as a fresh wave of nausea washed over me. Since Mike announced that someone had poisoned my guests, I’d reassured myself with the thought that Mike knew me and understood that I would never do anything like that. But now I wasn’t so sure. And that terrified me.
Chapter 10
We were back at my house when Mike walked into the living room. The crime scene techs had finished at the café and done a quick search of Matt’s house before coming to mine and settling in for what looked like the long haul. They’d already been through my kitchen cabinets and drawers, and now techs were digging through my refrigerator, pantry, dresser drawers, and bathroom. Two of them were even sitting on the floor in the bedroom that used to be my grandparents’, going through the boxes I’d packed up with their belongings. To keep myself from freaking out about it all, I kept telling myself that they would put everything neatly away when they were finished, even if I wasn’t sure that it was true.
“How you holding up?” he asked, leaning on the doorframe.
I took a deep breath and turned to look at him from my place on the couch. My first instinct had been to snap back with some smart-alecky comment about how he was suddenly acting like he wanted to be my friend again, but before I could say anything, I noticed how utterly miserable he looked. He was my friend, even if we were on opposing sides of an investigation at the moment.
“You look terrible. Do you want to sit down?” I g
estured at the chair nearby.
He looked at the chair with something like longing, paused for a moment, then lowered himself down into it. He rested his head on the back of the chair and closed his eyes. My own eyelids started to feel heavy—well, heavier, since I’d been one pillow away from falling asleep all day. Now, seeing Mike looking like he was drifting off, I was starting to think I didn’t need a pillow at all. Wouldn’t it be just as easy to fall asleep sitting up? Or maybe to rest my head on the arm of the couch. That seemed like a good idea.
Just as I started to lean over, Mike’s eyes opened. “Almost fell asleep there,” he said, blinking rapidly.
I righted myself and pulled my blanket tighter around my shoulders. I couldn’t wait for all this to be over, if only so that I could go to sleep for a while. “I was hoping you would so that I could take a nap.”
He chuckled then winced and rubbed his head. “Head’s killing me,” he muttered.
“Your eyes are all red.”
“Are they?” He rubbed both eyes with the heels of his hands. “You have any of those anti-redness eye drops?”
I resisted shaking my head, knowing how much it would hurt. “Nope.”
His eyebrows rose ever so slightly. “You sure?”
What a strange question. Why would I lie about something like that? Why would he even think that I would lie about something like that? “Yes, I’m sure. Why do you ask?”
Mike sighed and looked down at his lap. He rubbed at his fingernails with his thumb. “You hear what happens if someone puts some of those into your drink?” he asked, watching me out of the corner of his eye.
“I think I saw it in a movie once. It gives you an upset stomach or something, right?”
He bit his lip and rubbed the back of his hand across his stubbled chin—another sign that he wasn’t feeling well. I’d never seen him with so much as a five o’clock shadow before. “It’s a lot more than an upset stomach. Headache, tremors, blurred vision, trouble breathing, messes with your blood pressure...” He trailed off, his eyes still fixed on my face as my eyes went wide.
