Valentine's Blizzard Murder

by Linnea West

  At this point, I could feel like it was almost too late. I could feel Jake's life slipping through my fingers, almost literally. What a way to start a weekend that was supposed to be about love.

  Chapter Five

  Time seemed to slow down as I sat on the dining room floor with Jake. It felt like no one was doing anything to help. Dawn and I sat holding Jake while everyone else was staring helplessly at us. Thoughts were racing through my head, mainly about where in the world Clark and Anna were with the medicine.

  I kept feeling for the pulse on Jake's neck, but it was barely there now. It was shallow and slow and I knew it wouldn't be long before it was completely gone.

  "We are losing him," I said, trying to maintain my composure.

  "But there wasn't any fish in the dinner," my dad said again as he paused from cleaning the table. He looked befuddled, staring into space as he repeated it again. "There wasn't any fish."

  I was getting a bad feeling about this situation. It seemed like a terrible accident, but my dad didn't make mistakes like this, not when it came to the health and safety of B&B guests.

  "Can't anyone do anything to help?" I asked.

  I was greeted only by silence and quiet sobs as I glanced around the room at everyone's faces. My parents were still clearing the table while Tank and Mandy were trying any phone they could get their hands on. The storm must have knocked out everything.

  Linda and Cheryl were still quietly crying together while Joe patted both of their backs. Candy was frozen in place, her eyes wide and mouth agape. Lyle and Claudia were walking slowly back and forth between the kitchen door and the door to the rest of the house as if they were trying to find some way to help, but there was nothing for them to do. They almost seemed to be like trapped animals.

  Dave was kneeling on the other side of Jake, keeping his fingers on the pulse on Jake's neck. After a few more moments, his heart had slowed down so much it had almost stopped. I locked eyes with Dave and he solemnly nodded before standing up.

  "He's gone," Dave said to the room. "Jake is dead."

  "What do you mean dead?"

  The door to the entryway swung open violently and I turned to see Anna coming back into the room, medicine in hand. She dashed in, shoving Dave aside. Anna ripped the cap off of the needle and jammed it into Jake's outer thigh. Her hair was flowing around her in a wave as she rocked back and forth, counting to ten before she took the medicine pen out of his leg.

  "Did that do it?" she asked as she jumped to her feet.

  "I'm sorry Anna," I said, feeling no change in his pulse. "I think he is gone."

  Anna staggered backward a step and Clark caught her just before she crumpled to the floor. Her long blond hair covered her face as her body started to heave with sobs. Dave rushed to her side and helped Clark carry her out of the dining room.

  "Mom, Dad, I think you should see the rest of the guests out to the living room or their rooms, please," I said.

  My parents both nodded and set down the dishes they had in their hands. Linda and Cheryl linked arms and scooted out of the dining room with Joe behind them. Lyle and Claudia followed close behind. Candy was still standing still and looking puzzled, as if she were sure that Jake was playing some sort of joke.

  "Candy, leave," I said, a little too gruffly. "You need to leave now."

  She shut her mouth and grabbed her camera, either forgetting to try to take a picture or possibly having some common decency for once. Dawn was still cradling Jake's head. She was stroking his hair tenderly. It was so intimate that I almost felt like I shouldn't be watching.

  "Dawn, I think you should go out to the living room also," I said quietly.

  Dawn's brown eyes were filled with tears that were about to spill, but she carefully lowered Jake's head to the ground and stood up with the help of one of the dining room chairs. She walked to the door and turned back for one more look before making her way towards the living room.

  I stood up and motioned for Mandy and Tank to come closer. I didn't want anyone to overhear me and get the wrong idea and I needed people that I not only could trust, but also were not panicking to help me. I also was glad to have Tank stay here because true to his name, he was built like a tank. No one was going to mess with him even though he was only a teenager still.

  "I need the two of you to stay here with Jake's body," I said. "Keep an eye on it and don't let anyone touch that bowl of food."

  "Do you think someone did this on purpose?" Mandy asked. She always could read me like a book.

  "I don't know, but until we are sure we need to make sure to preserve anything that might possibly be a clue," I said. "I'm going into the living room to check on everyone. I will be right back."

  The living room was quiet chaos. Clark was sitting with Anna on the couch. She was sobbing and I could hear her muttering into her hands. Dawn was at the other end of the couch, quietly crying and wringing her hands. My father was in the armchair with my mother sitting on the arm. He looked to be in shock over the entire situation.

  Linda, Cheryl and their husbands were at the table in the corner, pretending to play a board game. The pieces were out and it appeared they were all taking turns, but the in between was full of whispers and furtive glances.

  Lyle, Claudia, and Candy were the only ones that appeared to be missing and I assumed they had all gone up to their rooms. I didn't blame them. It had been a weird night and we were still all trapped together with a dead body rapidly cooling in the other room. I decided the first thing I had to do was confirm with my father about the pad thai he had been cooking.

  I walked over and settled myself down onto the large, oversize ottoman in front of the armchair. I could hear Anna a little better now and before I started questioning my father, I caught what she was muttering over and over again.

  "But I had the medicine," she was telling Clark. "It took a while to find, but I had it. Why didn't it work? I did it exactly the way he showed me."

  My heart broke for her. I knew what it was like to lose a spouse unexpectedly and I could feel my own grief for Peter starting to well up but I needed to push it back down, at least for a little bit. I turned my body so that my back was to Anna.

  "Dad, I need to ask you a question, but I'd like you to answer quietly, understand?" I said. My dad nodded at me and leaned forward. "Was there anything made with fish in the dinner tonight?"

  "No," he answered. It was firm and definitive. "Jake told me both before he got here and when he arrived that he had a severe allergy to fish and that there could be nothing served that contained any sort of fish. I cleared out the kitchen and wiped everything down to make sure that he couldn't react to anything."

  "So there is no way that you could have accidentally cross contaminated it?" I asked.

  "No, I made sure to use up any and all fish we had late last week so that I could clean the kitchen and disinfect it of any possible allergens before he stayed here," my father said.

  His dark eyes were sad and he sat back in the chair with a big sigh as my mother patted his shoulder. I believed him. My father was a bit rough around the edges sometimes, but he would never do anything to endanger someone's life.

  I leaned forward and grabbed his hand, giving it a squeeze. He squeezed back once, but let his hand go slack in mine. I could tell he felt guilty and I didn't blame him. He was the cook after all. But now the question was what had happened to Jake's food? I needed to get back to the dining room and figure out what had happened.

  Chapter Six

  Mandy and Tank were both still milling around in the dining room. Jake was still on the dining room floor, although they had grabbed a clean tablecloth out of the kitchen to cover him up. They had also cleared the rest of the table, leaving only the things that had been in Jake's spot.

  "My dad says that he knew about Jake's fish allergy and that he went to great lengths to make sure there was no risk of cross-contamination," I said.

  "So what happened to make Jake have a reaction lik
e that then?" Tank asked. "Maybe there was something that Dad didn't realize contained fish?"

  "Maybe," I said with a shrug. It would make the most sense if this horrible situation was an accident. "Why don't you go in and check everything you can find to see if there is any fish anywhere. Check the fridge, freezer, pantry, everywhere."

  Tank nodded and shoved his way through the swinging door. I walked over to Jake's spot at the dinner table and took a look. Nothing looked out of the ordinary and as far as I could remember, it looked exactly like the pad thai I had eaten for dinner. I leaned down and gave his bowl of dinner a good sniff. There was a very faint odor of fish. Was I imagining it? Was all of the talk of fish just making me smell it?

  "Mandy, come over here and smell this," I said.

  Mandy rolled her eyes at me, but came and inhaled the aroma coming off of the plate of pad thai. She froze for a moment and then took another, deeper inhale. As Mandy straightened back up, her eyes were wide.

  "So you smell the fish too?" I asked.

  "Yes, but I'm sure that my dinner didn't smell like that," she said. "I definitely would have noticed that smell."

  "I'm going to taste it," I said, picking up the fork.

  "Are you crazy?" Mandy shrieked, slapping the fork out of my hand. It clattered to the table and Tank stuck his head in the swinging door from the kitchen. We were all a bit jumpy now.

  "Everything all right?" he asked, one eyebrow cocked.

  "Your crazy sister wants to taste the poisoned pad thai," Mandy said.

  "Except it isn't poisoned unless you have a fish allergy," I said. "Which I don't. At least this time we know where the medicine is just in case I discover I've developed a fish allergy since I ate that tuna melt for lunch yesterday at the Loony Bin."

  Mandy rolled her eyes at me and crossed her arms over her chest. I know she was just looking out for me, but gosh it was just like having another annoying sister. I already had two of those, what was one more?

  I grabbed the fork off of the table and stabbed a few noodles and vegetables. I smelled them one more time, getting the same aroma of fish that I had before. Gingerly, I brought it to my mouth. I had to admit that Mandy had scared me a little. What if it was poisoned?

  Before I could scare myself more, I shoved the entire bite into my mouth and shut my eyes as I chewed. I wanted to focus on the taste, so I chewed slowly.

  At first it just tasted like pad thai, but there was something just a bit off about it. The more I chewed, the more it tasted like fish. Jake's reaction to the dinner made more sense as I ate more. The first taste had been normal, but the fishy taste got more and more pronounced as I ate.

  "Well, what do you taste?" Mandy asked.

  "Fish," I said as I swallowed. "A lot of fish. At first, it tasted fine, but the more I chewed, the more fish I could taste. I'm not sure what is in here, but it is pretty strong."

  I used my fork to stir the bowl of food around. As far as I could tell, there weren't any pieces of fish in there. That meant something else had been used to set off Jake's allergic reaction, something a bit more undetectable.

  "Come look at this," I said. "I don't actually see any fish in here."

  "Let me grab a plate and we can sort through it and look," Mandy said.

  She popped into the kitchen for a large plate and another fork and sat down beside me. I tried to forget that there was a dead body behind me on the floor and I made a mental note to try and get through to Officer Max Marcus once the phones were working.

  I tried not to smile at the thought of Max as Mandy and I started digging through and sorting the pieces of the pad thai. As we sorted the vegetables from the noodles, I thought about how I had got here. When I moved back to Shady Lake, I had unexpectedly started dating my high school boyfriend again. Max had lost his wife to cancer just around the same time I had lost Peter, so it was nice to have someone who understood the wild roller coaster of grief.

  It was also nice to have someone who I didn't have to get to know. As exciting and new as everything was with Clark, Max knew pretty much everything about me. It was so comfortable to not have to explain everything to the person I'm dating because he has already been there for most of it.

  Lately, I had been wondering if I'd need to pick one of them soon. I had told both Clark and Max that I wasn't looking for a serious relationship because after Peter, it was going to take me a while to get back into wanting something serious. Max was in the same place as I was, so he understood and agreed totally.

  Clark was a bit of a flirt who enjoyed not being pinned down. He was the new guy in town and I often wondered why he chose me to date. I'm pretty self-critical, so all I usually see is my lack of proper adult makeup, inability to dress up, and my dumpy figure thanks to the self control I do not have around pizza, donuts, or most other junk foods. Of course, Clark also chooses to go out with Candy, so he must not be the best judge of character. Or Mandy could be right and he could be drawn to my fun personality and pretty face. It pays to have a best friend like Mandy. She may also say that because we are often told that we look like we could be twins.

  We finally got to the bottom of the bowl and looked at the plate piled high with food. There was a noodle pile and a vegetable pile, but neither of us found anything that resembled fish.

  "I think the only option here is that someone used something like fish sauce to add to this specific bowl of pad thai," Mandy said, sitting back in her chair. "No one else's bowl tasted like fish."

  "You're right," I said. "Which means that someone did this on purpose. Now we need to figure out who and why."

  I hated to admit that someone had done this to Jake on purpose. He had been a bit of a jerk, but using someone's allergy against them is just plain evil. Food allergies are very serious and should never be used as a weapon.

  "Stay here with Jake's body while I check in on Tank," I said.

  I pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen and almost ran right into Tank. He had the door to the pantry cupboard open and was vigilantly turning each item around so that he could read the ingredients label. By the looks of it, he had gotten through about half of the food.

  "How is it going in here?" I asked.

  "Depending on your view, good or bad," Tank said. "I have found nothing containing fish so far. That's good because it means that Dad didn't do it accidentally. But that's also bad because it means that someone planned to do it and brought something with them."

  He was right; it was both good and bad. On one hand, an accidental cross-contamination would have been tragic but it also would have been an accident. On the other hand, having it not be an accident meant that someone had done it on purpose which meant there was a murderer among us.

  "Well good, keep looking and let me know if you find anything," I said. "I'm going to try all of the phones again and see if I can get through to Max."

  If this really wasn't an accident, I couldn't let anyone in on the fact that I knew. There was something fishy about this entire situation and it wasn't just the pad thai.

  Chapter Seven

  I tried the house phone first, just for good measure. But of course there wasn't even a dial tone when I picked it up. I had a feeling that it was going to take a while to get the landline back in working order since the storm had managed to knock it out right away and the storm wasn't supposed to be done for at least another twenty-four hours.

  Next up was my flip phone. I figured if anything could do it, my trusty, dumb phone could. I tapped through and found Max's number and hit the call button. Amazingly, the phone rang a few times before Max's voice came through the other side.

  "Hey Sweet Thing," he said, which was a nickname he had called me starting all the way back in high school and could still make me get all ooey gooey inside. "What can I do for you?"

  "Are you on duty Max?" I asked, knowing full well that he wasn't. He never would have called me Sweet Thing while he was on duty. Max kept a very strict boundary between his work life and his
personal life. "We've had a bit of an incident at the B&B."

  "What's wrong," he said. His voice immediately shifted into Officer Marcus mode. "Do you need help Tessa?"

  "Well, there's been a, um," I faltered. I had been about to say that we had had an accident, but I wasn't so sure of that. "Let's just say there's been an incident and someone has died."

  "What?" Max exclaimed. If it had been possible for him to jump through the phone, I think he would have at that moment. "What do you mean someone has died?"

  I tried to briefly describe what had happened, ending with the fact that I didn't think it was actually an accident and that I was trying to figure out what had actually happened.

  "I also want to keep it on the down-low because Jake is a celebrity in town," I said. "And I don't want it getting out before we know what actually happened. So don't send any of the town gossips over here, please."

  "Okay, here is what I'm going to do," Max said. His voice was starting to cut in and out, just a little. I could tell that I wouldn't be able to keep him on the line forever. "I'm stuck at home, but I will send someone over to you and I will also send an ambulance. Everyone will be given very firm warnings to zip their lips. But Tessa? It might take a while. This storm is one of the worst I've ever seen and from what I hear, the switchboard is lighting up like a Christmas tree. Obviously it isn't fun to have a dead body there, but that puts you pretty low on the priority list compared to the people stuck in their cars who are trying not to freeze to death."

  I sighed because of course he was right. But that was alright because I wanted the time to investigate for myself. The Shady Lake police department did a pretty alright job most of the time but anytime something big happened, they managed to bungle the investigation. They usually would get themselves so set in one line of thinking that they would ignore obvious signs they were wrong, preferring to dig in their heels instead.