by Mary Logue
They came to the park and saw the throngs of people lined up by the lake. Rich had a sleeping bag tucked under his arm for them to sit on. Meg was dancing and jumping at the end of his other arm. Claire cupped the back of his neck with her hand and said, “I’ll try to get into the spirit of things. It looks like a party down here.”
Meg wanted to run off and play on the swings, so they let her go, telling her to find them at the beach in a few minutes. Rich slung his now free arm over Claire’s shoulders.
“I take work with me too much,” she confessed.
“That’s a good thing about you. You make our county a safer place to live.”
“You sound like an ad,” she said, but she was laughing.
“Let’s go get a good spot to watch from,” he suggested.
“Oh, Rich, I ate too many potato chips. I need a glass of something.”
“Beer?”
“No alcohol. I might need to do a little more work tonight.”
“They’ve got some kind of food stand. We’ll swing by and get you something on our way to the beach.”
They walked slowly, exchanging greetings with their neighbors and watching the night settle over the bay. Rich stood in line with Claire to get the drink and when she got to the front, she ordered lemonade.
As they turned to head toward the beach, Rich saw Harold Peabody over Claire’s shoulder.
Who was that with Harold? he wondered. When the man turned and faced Rich, he could make out that it was Andy Lowman. He wondered what those two could be talking about. They didn’t have much in common. Suddenly Andy clutched his throat.
Rich stopped walking and gave his full attention to what was going on with Andy.
Claire lifted the glass of lemonade toward Rich and said, “Do you want a drink?”
Rich shook his head, not saying anything. He was watching the glass of lemonade Andy had in his hand as it went flying. Then Andy collapsed.
“I’m so thirsty,” Claire said as she lifted the drink to her mouth.
Rich’s hand rose up and just as the plastic cup touched her lips, he knocked it away, lemonade spraying them both.
CHAPTER 11
Claire felt herself splitting into pieces as she tried to determine what to do. She had to help the man who had fallen. She had to stop what was happening. She had to find out who had done it. It was too much. Her greatest fear was that whoever had stolen the pesticides was at work again.
The first thing was to ask for help. Rich had told her that he thought it was the lemonade that had made the man sick.
“Rich, you gotta stop them from selling any more of that lemonade. Go up and talk to the owner. Don’t let anyone drink it.”
As Rich ran to the stand to shut it down, Claire turned to help Harold Peabody, who was about to collapse under the big man’s weight. They held him together and then gently lowered him to the ground.
“Who is he?” Claire asked.
“Andy Lowman,” Harold said as they settled him on the dirt. He was trying to hold Andy steady, as the afflicted man held his stomach, twisting and moaning in pain.
“What happened?” Claire asked Harold as she pulled out her cell phone. Harold shrugged. She knelt by Andy and, as she punched in the numbers of the station, she tried to reassure him. “Andy, you’re going to be all right. We’re right here. I’m calling for help right now.”
Harold leaned him forward and encouraged him to hang in there, but Andy was fading. His face was pallid and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.
Claire needed to get help for him immediately. Her call was picked up by Judy. Thank God, she was one cool cucumber.
“I think we’ve got a poisoning in Fort St. Antoine. The park. At the fireworks. Send the ambulance and tell them we may have a case of Parazone or Caridon poisoning. Tell them to refer to my memo. And make sure they do it.”
“Got it,” Judy said back to her.
When Claire clicked off the cell phone and turned her attention back to Andy, she remembered what Bridget had told her about what the pesticide could do. As she knelt by the man, she started to check him over. He was sweating and salivating profusely, gagging reflexes shaking his whole body. All these responses were what she would expect to see in someone who had ingested one of the pesticides. Andy barely seemed conscious, and she shook him gently. His eyelids lifted slightly.
“Let’s try to keep him awake and keep him partially sitting up so he doesn’t choke,” she said to Harold.
At her words, a spasm of nausea hit the man. He leaned forward and vomited on the grass.
A woman came running up and tried to fling herself at him, but Claire moved to block her. “I’m his wife,” she told Claire. Then the small, dark-haired woman turned to her husband. “Andy, what’s the matter with you?” she screamed as she reached out a hand to touch him.
“God, help me,” Andy managed to get out, and then he passed out, sprawling limp on the ground.
Andy’s wife tried to pull him into her arms and Claire had to be a little rough with her to let him go. “Ma’am, you need to let me take care of him.” The woman looked at her with horror in her eyes as Claire pushed her away. “I’m sorry. I need to help him.”
Harold Peabody put an arm on the woman and pulled her back, saying, “Marie, let the deputy do her job.”
Claire knelt down by the big man and started to arrange him in the recovery position. He was already prone, so she turned his head to the side, making sure he was breathing; then she put an arm up on that side to give him some support and pulled up the leg on that side too. She had learned in her latest Red Cross class that this was the safest position for victims who were unconscious but breathing—as long as they hadn’t been seriously injured.
Rich came to get her. “Another person, a little girl, is throwing up.”
Claire turned to him, horrified.
He guessed her thoughts. “Meg is fine. She’s still at the swings.”
“Watch her,” Claire begged him, then turned back to Harold and Andy’s wife. “Can you take care of him? I need to check on someone else. Watch him. Make sure he’s breathing. Try to keep him from vomiting until we know what it is. The ambulance should be here in moments.”
Claire went to minister to the girl, an eight-year-old blonde named Shawna whose mother told Claire that she had taken only a sip of the lemonade. The young girl was lying with her head in her mother’s lap.
“Shawna,” Claire said, bending over the child. “What happened when you drank the lemonade?”
“It made my throat feel dusty.” The young girl clawed at her tongue, trying to get the drink out of her mouth. “It tasted like grass.”
Claire worried that such a small child would suffer much worse effects. But she was relieved that Shawna seemed more alert than Andy.
By the time the ambulance arrived, four people were sick with whatever had been in the lemonade. The emergency technicians took over and examined the casualties before loading Andy into the first ambulance.
Claire stepped back from them all for a moment and looked around for her daughter. She saw that Rich was standing at the swings, pushing Meg into the sky. She wanted them to go home and lock the door. She wanted her daughter out of here, away from this danger.
She took a deep breath and headed toward the lemonade stand to find out what had happened there. As she approached it, a large bang went off and she jumped. Then glowing lights filled the sky. The fireworks blazed from the far shore of the lake, seemingly arising from another, more peaceful country—a country where it was still a holiday.
When the man came charging up, yelling at them to stop selling the lemonade, Dot decided to shut down completely. It could kill her business if someone got sick from something she served. She was racking her brain, trying to imagine anything she’d done wrong, but she knew she had meticulously followed the state’s thorough guidelines. She hoped that it wasn’t botulism or E. coli.
She thought of taking a sip of the lemonade her
self to test it, but then she saw a man stretched out on the grass, throwing up. She didn’t need that.
Remembering something, she checked the lid on the big silver cylinder that contained the latest batch of lemonade. She had seen something there when she had moved the new lemonade dispenser into the trailer to start selling it, but had been too busy to stop and see what it was. Sales had been brisk. It was a nice hot evening and everyone had eaten too much and needed something to drink to wash it all down.
She had been hoping to make enough money from this event to make the last payment on her trailer. When Guy had left her last year, telling her he couldn’t sleep with a woman (actually he had said cow) when she weighed more than he did, he had left her with all their bills to pay. Since he had left, she had tried to lose weight, hoping he might show up again, but the harder she tried, the more weight she gained. It didn’t help to be working with food.
Just as she had remembered, there was a small white plastic joint under the handle on the lid. She didn’t touch the lid or the cylinder. She had watched enough TV to know that you don’t touch anything. But she bent her head down and stared at the little plastic piece.
Maybe it wasn’t plastic. It was off-white and looked like a small tube or joint or something. She looked closer.
It was a bone. A small bone like from the leg of a bird or a frog. A delicate ivory bone.
She felt the urge to pick it up and feel it, but she resisted.
It might mean nothing. It might have been dropped from the tree that was above the cart in the park. Those cottonwoods were notoriously messy. Maybe a bird cleaning out a nest. The remains of a fledgling that didn’t make it.
When the woman deputy came running up to ask them about the lemonade, she asked who was the owner of the stand. Dot looked her over. Pretty woman, nice dark hair, great teeth. Probably smart, too, weighing well within the normal range. Dot hated her on principle.
Dot stepped forward. “I am.”
“Did you make the lemonade?”
“Yes, I made it last night.”
“Could it be contaminated in any way? Did you leave it sitting out overnight?”
“I didn’t. And I don’t think lemonade contaminates. I follow the rules that the state told me to follow. I do everything just the way it should be done. You can ask anyone. I’ve been doing this all summer and never had a problem.”
“Where did you keep the lemonade right before you were serving it?”
“Out behind the trailer.” Dot pointed to the refrigerated area that attached to the back of her trailer.
“You don’t keep it in the trailer?”
“There’s not enough room.”
“So anyone could have had access to it?”
Dot realized what the woman was saying. “I guess.”
“Shit,” the woman said.
Dot was surprised to hear a deputy sheriff swear, especially this pretty woman. Dot decided that she should tell her what she found. “I don’t know if this means anything, but I found something on the lid of this particular canister.”
“What?” The deputy lifted her head.
“A small bone.”
Stewy had been pretending to watch TV with his eyes closed. It was too early to go to bed, only nine o’clock, still light outside. But probably he was tired because he had gotten up early to mow the lawn. Really, he should blame it on the three beers with dinner. He didn’t drink much anymore. Just couldn’t keep functioning when he did. A couple of beers made him fall asleep. Sad state of affairs.
But a sharp, insistent ring kept nudging him awake. As he opened his eyes and saw someone shoot someone on TV, he realized that he was hearing his cell phone. Where was the blasted thing? What could be so important on this summer night that work would call?
Then he remembered the pesticides, the letter. He bolted up in his chair and the thing folded up on him, the footrest sliding under him and the back pushing him down. Couldn’t move fast in that chair. It could kill you. He managed to extricate himself from it and he looked down at a pile of newspapers and realized the phone was in there someplace. Scrambling through them, he could still hear the ringing.
Hold on; I’m coming, he thought.
As he stirred around in the newspapers, the phone popped out of the comics section. He grabbed it and pushed the right button the first time around. He hated having a cell phone, but the sheriff insisted.
“Hello,” he said.
“Stewy, it’s Claire. We’ve got several poisonings down in the park at Fort St. Antoine.”
“Bad food?”
“I’m not sure. I think there’s a chance it might be the pesticide guy using some of the stolen goods.”
He hated to ask the next question. “Any fatalities?”
“Negative. Not so far. But the ambulance from Maiden Rock just took two people out of here, and the ambulance from Pepin is loading up. Five people in all were affected. A little girl is one of them.”
“What happened?”
“I think something was put into a vat of lemonade that was being served from a refreshment stand here.”
“Why do you think that?”
“All the victims had just consumed the lemonade.”
She paused. He didn’t like the way this incident sounded. Then she added what turned out to be the clincher for him. “A small bone was found on the lemonade container.”
Stewy caught himself on the verge of swearing. The words came out too easily. Now that he had grandchildren, he was trying to curb that impulse.
“Have you called Sheriff Talbert?” Stewy asked.
“No. Could you do that? I need to organize people here. We’ve got a couple of patrol cars.”
“I’ll call the sheriff and the lab.”
“Thanks.”
“Claire, what’ve we got going on here?”
“Possibly some kind of vendetta.”
Stewy heard her hang up. He had to call Dan Talbert. But he needed to breathe for a second. He would drive down to the park as soon as he got off the phone with the sheriff. He’d brush his teeth and gargle with Listerine so the evidence of his beer would be washed away. But first he turned to the dictionary that perched on top of the bookshelf in the living room. It was always left opened to the last word he looked up.
He looked up vendetta. The first definition read, “a feud in which the relatives of a murdered or wronged person seek vengeance on the wrongdoer or members of his family.” The Schuler family were the murdered people.
Stewy called the sheriff, trying to sound alert. “You know what a vendetta is?” he asked.
“Yes,” Talbert answered. “Why?”
Stewy pressed on. “And do you know if there’s anyone left in the county who is related to the Schuler family?”
“Stewy, where you going with this? Why?”
Then Stewy told him why.
CHAPTER 12
Earl was hammering the last nail into a stool he was fixing for Stella, his next-door neighbor, when he thought he heard something. It took him a few moments to figure out that the phone was ringing. He dropped the hammer. A call this late scared him to his bones.
When he picked up the phone and heard Marie’s voice, his hand flew up to his heart. In Tucson it was eleven at night, so he knew it was one a.m. in Wisconsin. He knew the only reason she would contact him at this hour would be about something bad.
“Why are you calling me?” he asked, his voice shaking.
“Earl, I’m at the hospital.”
“What happened?” he yelled. “Tell me.”
“They think Andy was poisoned. Maybe pesticides.”
“What did he do? Was he mishandling them? What was he doing using pesticides this time of year?”
Marie raised her voice, saying firmly, “Earl, calm down and listen to me. It wasn’t like that. Someone put it in some lemonade he drank.”
He didn’t comprehend what she was saying, but that wasn’t important right now. “Is he going to be all righ
t?”
Her voice deepened. “The doctors aren’t sure. They’re using charcoal to get it out of his system. One doctor talked to me a few minutes ago. He said that they should know in a few more hours if he’s going to make it.” Suddenly her voice broke and she wailed, “Earl, I can’t lose him. I won’t be able to stand it.”
He wasn’t going to argue with her. She was one strong woman, but no one could stand to lose a loved one. He still missed his wife every day.
“Marie,” he said soothingly, “start at the beginning.”
So she explained that she and Andy had gone to see the fireworks and that Andy had bought some lemonade. “They think there was something in it.”
Then she explained what the sheriff had told her, that a crazy person had stolen some pesticides and was going around the county using them for destructive purposes.
“Seems to be tied in with the Schuler murders,” she said in conclusion. “That’s what they think.”
The irony. It didn’t matter how far away he went, that damn murder case was going to haunt him all his life.
“Was anyone else hurt?” he thought to ask.
“Yes, four other victims. One of them was a little girl. But she’s all right. She spit it right out. The mother doesn’t think she swallowed much. They sent her home an hour ago. The other three are in worse shape, but all of them seem to be recovering. They figure Andy drank half his glass in one gulp. Man, I’ve always told him he has a big mouth.” She started laughing and then she was crying again.
Earl knew what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to tell Marie, because he didn’t want her to dissuade him. “He’s a strong man, Marie. He’s not going to let this stop him. You can count on him to come back to you.”
Marie had gone silent on the other end of the line. She sniffed and blew her nose. “Thank you for saying that, Earl. I needed to hear it. You’re right. If anyone can make it through this, he can.”
“Are you going to stay there all night?”
“Where else could I be? I can’t leave him. What if he wakes up? I need to be with him.”
“Of course. Listen, give me the number there and let me call you in the morning. It can be on my nickel.”