A Flock and a Fluke (Clucks and Clues Cozy Mysteries)

by Hillary Avis

  Eli threw up his hands. “There’s no peril here, Jaz.”

  “Oh yeah? Tell that to Aaron. He’s still in the hospital. I’m not putting my mouth on no poison after seeing him go through that, thank you very much.”

  “This isn’t the same—she probably just had a heart attack,” Eli said, resuming chest compressions that jolted Marge’s whole body. I felt every one of them deep in my core.

  Jasmine pointed to the soggy doughnut a few inches from Margie’s right hand. It had a big bite out of it. “Last I heard, cream filling doesn’t cause heart attacks. She must have eaten whatever Amelia did.”

  “I don’t think the poison works that fast—” I began, but Eli cut me off.

  “Come on—Marge needs you!” he snarled at Jasmine, but she just shook her head even more firmly.

  “Seems like you’re doing fine. I’ll get the van. I’ll drive, you can bag her.” She tossed the kit toward Eli and backed all the way to the door, fumbled the handle behind her, and left City Hall the way she came. Eli swore, took a deep breath, and began mouth-to-mouth.

  Visions of Amelia’s body rose in my mind, causing my stomach to roil. I couldn’t watch this. Not again. I trained my eyes on the floor and edged carefully around Eli and Marge. Eli finished administering the breaths and rummaged through Jasmine’s kit, looking for something. He paused to glance up at me. “It’s OK if you need to wait outside. Really.”

  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. As I stumbled to the door and the sweet relief of the sidewalk, I tripped over one of the coffee cups on the way out. It rolled toward the door and I caught a glimpse of the logo printed on the side.

  Rx Café — Good for what ails you.

  Any other time, this wouldn’t be notable. The Rx was the only place in town with takeout coffee, after all. But today—today it was notable. Because the Rx Café wasn’t even open. That meant only one thing: Sara herself had brought the coffee to City Hall. And when Margie collapsed, Sara had run away.

  I looked back, panicked, at Eli. He’d somehow managed to find a breathing bag and had affixed the mask to Margie’s face. Even though I knew Margie couldn’t have ingested the same poison as Amelia—she was fine when I was in City Hall only a few minutes earlier—I was relieved that Eli wasn’t giving her mouth-to-mouth anymore. If Margie had been poisoned, and Eli had been exposed...

  Well, I didn’t even want to think about it.

  I heard and then saw the ambulance pull up to the curb and Jasmine hopped out, her face tense and alert. “Clear the walkway, please,” she said tersely as she passed me.

  Her words jolted me into action. I had to find Sara. I jogged down the sidewalk toward the Rx. She had to be there—where else would she run? And if she wasn’t at the café, I could ask Doc if he’d seen her...and tell him that his wife might be dead. Ugh.

  I slumped against the café’s doorframe, trying to catch my breath as I rapped on the door. A “CLOSED” sign hung in the window with a paper explanation taped above it: “Restaurant will re-open May 1. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  I waited a few beats, and when Sara didn’t come to the door, I cupped my hands to the glass to see inside the dim interior. There were no signs of life inside. Though the tables were set as though Sara expected a service, the kitchen lights were off. Only the red light on the coffee pot glowed ominously from behind the counter.

  She had made coffee today. My heart hammered in my chest, and it wasn’t from my jog down the sidewalk.

  I strode briskly into the pharmacy and braced myself to deliver the news to Doc that Margie was dead—and possibly had been poisoned. A crash met my ears, and then Doc sprinted out of the pharmacy booth and past me with something in his hands. I wouldn’t have believed that old Eeyore could move so fast if I hadn’t seen it myself. I barely had time to say, “Margie...” as he flew past me. He held up whatever he had in his hands, as though I knew what that meant, and then ran down the street.

  I stood there a minute, staring out the door and imagining the scene Doc was going to come upon when he pushed through the door to City Hall. But how did he know something was going on there, when Eli and I had only just found Margie’s body? Someone must have told him. Jasmine? Or...

  I turned back toward the pharmacist’s booth and sure enough, there was Sara standing behind the counter, twisting her tattooed hands together. She winced when I caught sight of her, her eyebrows drawing together worriedly.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking it was my fault.”

  I gave a noncommittal shrug. “You have to admit, it doesn’t look good. You bring Margie coffee, and then she immediately keels over.”

  Sara looked like she was going to burst into tears. “She didn’t even drink the coffee! She had one bite of doughnut and—” She squeezed her eyes shut as a tear slipped down her cheek. “She choked out ‘get Doc’ and I so ran down here. I ran as fast as I could, I swear. When I told Doc what happened, he tore apart the place looking for her Epi-Pen. I only hope he got it to her in time. She’s allergic to nuts,” Sara added, motioning to the sign posted in the window, though it wasn’t visible to us from the inside. I remembered what it said, though.

  No peanuts. No tree nuts. No wingnuts.

  Now the sign made more sense. And now I understood what Doc had held up to show me: Margie’s Epi-Pen. Margie must have recognized the signs of anaphylaxis before she passed out. Before her heart stopped. Even though I didn’t know whether Margie would live or not, I felt a strange sense of relief knowing that she hadn’t been poisoned. That meant Eli hadn’t been exposed to a toxin like Aaron Alpin had been—and Eli wasn’t allergic to nuts, as far as I knew.

  “I have to throw the rest of these out,” Sara declared. She marched over to the little table near the sink and scooped up a pink box. “They shouldn’t even be in here. I just assumed, because Doc had them in the shop, that they were safe!”

  I realized she meant the doughnuts that must be inside the box. “Wait, you brought Margie the doughnut, too? Not just coffee?”

  Sara nodded, her chin wobbling as she held the pink box. “I did. But it didn’t have nuts! The whole box is Boston cream, look!” Sara flipped open the lid. It was full of rows of round, fluffy pastries with shiny chocolate glaze. No nuts in sight. “I brought Doc a coffee, and then he said I should bring some to Margie, too. To butter her biscuit, he said. He gave me the doughnut to take with me. I thought it would help...but it didn’t, obviously. There’s no way, now...” Her voice cracked and trailed off, and I couldn’t help feeling a pang of sympathy. Sara was trying to be helpful, and instead ended up in the middle of another catastrophe, poor thing. As if she didn’t have enough problems.

  “No way, what?” I asked. “Why did Margie’s biscuit need buttering?”

  Sara ducked her head, her voice thick with emotion. “I can’t make the rent this month because of everything with Amelia. I came to ask Doc for an extension, but he said he couldn’t make the decision without Margie’s approval. He said her word was final, so I went to City Hall. But I didn’t have a chance to ask.”

  I frowned. “Closing for a few days is enough to bust your budget for the whole month?”

  Sara nodded. “Things were tight already. Why do you think I’ve been taking on side gigs? No sane person gets up at four a.m. to run a breakfast service and then stays up until midnight to cater a cocktail party.” She frowned at the doughnut box in her hands, flipped the lid closed, and headed for the connecting door between the pharmacy and the café.

  I’d almost forgotten that Sara had been at the cocktail party when all the blackmail business with Amelia and Cal had been going down. Maybe she’d overheard some of the conversations that night and could sort out what had really happened, since I couldn’t exactly ask Margie now.

  I glanced out the door at the empty street, torn between minding the empty pharmacy until Doc returned or following Sara. I opted for the latter. I turned the deadbolt on the front door so n
o passersby could drop in and nab medications from the pharmacy shelves, flipped the sign to “closed,” then traced Sara’s footsteps to the Rx.

  In the darkened restaurant, I heard the back door creak open, the crash of the dumpster lid outside, and then the door open and close again. Bye-bye, secret-peanut doughnuts. Sara returned and, seeming unsurprised to see me standing there like a burglar caught red-handed, scrubbed the dumpster grime off her hands at the sink.

  “I guess I have to kiss the café goodbye,” she said over her shoulder. “Amelia always said I should go somewhere with a better food scene, anyway. She said this town would never appreciate what I had to offer.”

  I swallowed hard. For some reason, her words stung me, like I was the one who would be kissing my dream goodbye. “Building a business is hard. You shouldn’t give up, though.” I said it as much for me as for her.

  She turned to face me and leaned against the sink. “Do you think Amelia was right?”

  I tilted my head, considering the idea. Sara’s food was comfortable—recognizable, easy to pronounce and understand—but she took it to another level, using the freshest and most delicious local produce available. She made every element, even down to the white bread under her egg salad, the most delicious it could be. I couldn’t speak for everyone, but I certainly appreciated what the Rx Café had to offer. “No, I don’t. People in Honeytree have taste buds the same as the folks in Portland. We like good food, too.”

  “There are more people in Portland, though. More people means more customers, and more customers means more income.”

  “More people means more competition, too,” I pointed out. “Here you only have the Greasy Spoon to worry about, and Ed has a whole different thing going on over there. Amelia isn’t from around here, so she doesn’t necessarily understand the community dynamic.” I borrowed Jam and Jelly’s phrase with no small measure of satisfaction.

  “Didn’t,” Sara said, her eyes downcast.

  “Pardon?”

  “Amelia didn’t understand. Past tense.”

  “Oh, right.” I sighed. “I didn’t know you two were friends. You seem so...different.” I couldn’t help glancing at Sara’s tattoos and punky hairdo, so different than Amelia’s starched and pressed pastor’s-wife image.

  “Well, we were,” Sara said defensively, crossing her arms. “We got really close in the last few weeks, since...” She trailed off, then shook her head. “I’ll miss her, that’s all.”

  “Since she and Cal separated?” I guessed.

  Her eyes widened. “You knew?”

  “Margie told me.”

  Sara’s eyes narrowed. “Of course she did,” she spat. “If one good thing comes out of her death, it’ll be that she can’t spread her lies around town.”

  I hoped Sara was wrong. As much as I disliked Margie, I didn’t think anything good would come of her death. Whatever sympathy I’d felt for Sara’s predicament evaporated like steam off manure. “What was Margie lying about? It was true they were having problems, wasn’t it?”

  “Problems she created!” Sara blurted out, color rising in her cheeks. “She was blackmailing them—that’s why they split up! Amelia swore me to secrecy, but now that she’s gone, I guess I don’t have to keep that promise.”

  I racked my brain, trying to put the timeline together. How could Margie have caused their breakup, if their breakup was what she was using to blackmail Cal into quitting his campaign? It didn’t make sense. “She told me that they were blackmailing her.”

  “That’s rich,” Sara said bitterly. “They were fine until Margie stuck her nose in their business. They had nothing against her.”

  “Why didn’t they just get divorced and be done with it?” I’d be the first one to say that divorce was no picnic, but it was certainly better than sticking it out in an unhappy marriage. Trust me, I’d tried both, and divorce was so much better.

  Sara stared at me, her expression confused. “What did Margie tell you, exactly?”

  “The truth. She said Cal and Amelia weren’t happily married. That they were living separately, not as man and wife, and were hiding it from everyone. Honestly, it seems like no big deal to me, but I guess for a pastor who’s running for mayor, it’s not a great image.” I shrugged.

  Sara shook her head disbelievingly. “She’s more of a snake than I thought. I should have slipped peanuts into her pastries months ago.”

  My heart leaped and I took a step backward. Had Sara just admitted to poisoning Margie on purpose? As if to underline my fears, the ambulance siren began to wail down the street, the sound fading as it headed down the highway toward Pear Grove. It was a comforting sound, actually. It meant they hadn’t given up on Margie yet. Maybe Doc had made it in time.

  Sara noticed my change in posture and shook her head. “No, no—I didn’t mean it. I’m just angry. Angry because my friend’s gone, because my café is headed down the drain. It’s easy to blame Margie for those things, but she didn’t cause either one of them, not really. All she did was break up a good relationship.”

  My head was starting to hurt. I rubbed the bridge of my nose with the hope of getting rid of the headache before it really sunk its teeth in. “But they were already split up. I feel like I’m missing something.”

  Sara glanced out the front window as though checking whether someone might overhear her, and then lowered her voice. “Margie didn’t tell you everything because she knew she’d get in trouble for it. I wouldn’t tell you, either, except that Amelia’s gone and Margie’s gone, so it doesn’t even matter anymore. When Margie said Cal and Amelia weren’t happily married, she wasn’t lying—not exactly. They were happy. Just not married.”

  I blinked. “Yes, they were. They had the same last name!”

  “Nope. They lied about that. Margie found out through the pharmacy records. That’s why she didn’t tell you the whole story. She’s an employee of the pharmacy, and if she was caught revealing private health information, the fines would put Doc out of business.”

  My jaw literally dropped. That explained why Cal couldn’t get a copy of the ME’s report—he wasn’t legally Amelia’s family. “But why did Cal and Amelia split up instead of just tying the knot? The waiting period is only a few days in Oregon. Heck, they could fly to Vegas and make their vows in an Elvis chapel in just a few hours.”

  “They couldn’t. Amelia was already married to some English guy. He wouldn’t agree to the divorce, and the separation period there is something like five years. She and Cal just couldn’t wait. They wanted to be together—but pastors can’t be shacking up with their girlfriends, you know?” Sara chuckled sadly.

  I guessed at the end of the story. “So they moved from Idaho to Honeytree and lied to everyone here that they were already husband and wife until Amelia’s divorce was granted and they could actually get married?”

  Sara nodded.

  “How do you know so much about Cal and Amelia’s relationship?”

  Sara stuck out her chin defensively. “If you must know, Amelia was staying on my couch. She didn’t have anyone else to talk to, so I heard about everything. You know, Amelia told Cal not to run. She told him it would all come out.”

  “She was right about that. He finally realized it at the cocktail party, I think. That’s why they got back together, because he agreed to drop out of the race.”

  Sara’s eyes bugged.

  “You didn’t know? They spent Friday night after the cocktail party together. Cal planned to withdraw his candidacy on Easter Sunday.”

  “So that’s why she didn’t come home,” Sara murmured, her gaze distant. “I thought it was something I—well, never mind.”

  “What could you possibly have done?”

  Sarah’s cheeks flushed again, and she stubbed her toe on the floor sheepishly. “Well, Margie and Doc are my landlords. I couldn’t really take down the signs, could I?” She gestured to the Morrow for Tomorrow campaign sign taped in the front window. “But Amelia didn’t understand that. She
said I had to stand up for my principles instead of hiding behind my business. I called her a hypocrite. And as you can imagine, that didn’t go over well. That was the last time I spoke to her. She avoided me at the cocktail party and then I never saw her again.” She blinked away the tears that welled in her large, dark-fringed eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Sara,” I said quietly. I couldn’t imagine how it felt to lose such a close friend. What if the last conversation I had with Ruth or Eli was our last conversation ever? With a jolt, I remembered where I’d left Eli—alone, desperately trying to revive Margie. Had he succeeded, or was he now feeling the sting of Margie’s life slipping through his fingers? “I’d better go.”

  “I understand.” Sara’s face twisted. “I’m sorry you got wrapped up in everything—it’s my fault.”

  “No, it’s not,” I assured her. “Not any more than it’s Cal’s or Doc’s. We’re all just victims of circumstance.”

  She offered me a grateful smile as she unlocked the front door to let me out. But as I walked toward City Hall, my feet felt heavier with every step. Had two women in Honeytree really been accidentally poisoned within a week of each other? Two women who just happened to be connected to a contentious mayoral election? Who happened to have eaten food served to them by Sara? Who happened to smooth the path for Cal’s election? That didn’t seem like a single fluke. That was a lot of flukes. A whole flock of flukes.

  Chapter 17

  I found Eli in his office, his head bent over a sheaf of paperwork. He glanced up only briefly when I walked in, and then went back to filling in the stack of forms. I stood there awkwardly, waiting for him to finish before I asked the question burning on my tongue, but my impatience got the better of me.

  “Is she OK? I heard the ambulance siren. They don’t turn it on unless the person is alive, right?”

  “Right.”

  Relief washed over me. Margie was alive. Eli re-started her heart, and then Doc got there with the Epi-Pen in time. I sank into the chair across from Eli. “How are you doing?”