So it must be hers. How’d it get here in the kitchen? She dusted it off on her apron, and went looking for Anton. He was in the lounge.
“This must belong to Miss Viola.”
She held out the book.
“What’s this?” He reached for it, and opened it to the first page.
Journal of Viola Featherstonehaugh.
He flipped a page and began to read, with a growing intensity that made him forget Fiona was in the room.
She cleared her throat. He waved her away. Closed the book.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll give it to her.”
When Fiona left the room, he opened up the book again and sat down to read it. He had to squint, but his eyes were sharp. He didn’t miss a thing, including one very important thing. The final piece of the puzzle.
Interesting. Very interesting. How had he never known this?
He felt luck coming his way.
The inaugural dinner at Anton’s Paradise that night began with cocktails and amuse-bouches in the lounge, following which the guests slipped into the dining area to find green turtle soup in glass bowls at their places.
Spoon poised to attack, the CBC reporter was compelled to ask, “How is this dangerous?”
“Salmonella. Tons of it.”
Viola had already taken a spoonful. She spat it out and lit up a cigarette to calm her nerves. Anton smiled, a broad smile.
“We have taken all the precautions in cooking. No more fear with salmonella here than with your Christmas turkey.”
A few of the diners took a taste.
“Mmmmm,” was the general opinion.
“Of course, there are the heavy metals and pesticides.”
The guests looked up, disconcerted. Viola’s reaction was hidden by a cloud of smoke.
Anton smiled again, that broad smile.
“These were raised in a pesticide-free zone.”
If there is such a place, thought the CBC reporter, making a mental note to research that point. She wasn’t here, after all, to endorse this project. She must treat it as a sample of the experience, not a bribe.
The rice came next. Saffron rice and red kidney beans, cooked and cooled.
“Such a beautiful colour.” The Mayor of Winterside was eyeing the beans, a personal favourite.
The pufferfish looked like any other piece of fish. It was disappointing. Anton gave a full description of the terrible way its poison could kill, and how the Japanese chef carefully cut out most of it, leaving them the tingling sensation of stepping close to death. He ended, with a smile:
“Bon appetit.”
Hesitation. Then Viola stubbed out her cigarette on the bread plate and tucked in.
The MP was first to go. He hadn’t had a good sleep in days – between here and Ottawa and Washington and Alberta, as he delighted in recounting to people. In fact, he did work hard, and it took its toll now as, first, his eyelids grew heavy. They were well-muscled from attending countless boring meetings, so for some time he was able to pull them open again, and again, until finally, defeated, he let go, and his head dropped down onto his chest. His breathing became heavy.
Next to go, as if falling asleep were catching like yawning, was the mayor of Winterside. Sleep for him was an escape, and he wanted to escape this meal before he had to eat the deadly pufferfish. Danger for dinner wasn’t his cup of tea. He’d stuck to the rice and beans. He and the MP harmonized little puffs of air with rattling snores.
That was the cue for the Minister of Tourism and the CBC reporter. Hardened by endless meetings and little to do the rest of the time, they had managed to ride out the wave of exhaustion that gripped them until finally they succumbed. The Minister’s head dropped forward, as did his comb-over, revealing his baldness and flirting with his food. The CBC reporter would be horrified to find out that she’d fallen asleep with her head tipped sideways, her mouth open, and drool running down one side of her chin. When he saw her, Anton crossed her off his list of potential bedmates. And he decided against Miss Harvest Festival, too, who was too young anyway. Unlike the others, she hadn’t fallen asleep because she had only picked at the food and was taking photos of everyone with her cell phone to post on Facebook.
The most fragile of all, Anton’s patroness, Viola, was not affected by sleepiness at all. Instead, she began to laugh. It started as a titter. She lifted her hand to staunch the flow, but it escaped in a big burst.
“Ha!”
And again.
“Ha!”
The laugh spread right across her face. There was also panic written there. She could not stop laughing. She wrapped her arms around her torso to try to contain the laughter, to ease the muscle pain in her abdomen. She stood up to relieve it, but it only caused the laughter to tumble out more freely.
“Oh…oh…oh…whoot!”
That last woke everyone up, and soon the whole table was laughing, tears streaming down faces, fists pounding the table. Viola had dropped to the floor, rolling around in an agony of mirth.
The MP didn’t like the look of things. He jumped up from the table and hurried off into the lounge, to phone his second-in-command and start some damage control. He excused himself to Anton and left.
Viola had begun to hiccup. Huge intakes of air were followed by loud expulsions, which became weaker and weaker as she lost strength. The CBC reporter was standing, recorder in hand, capturing what had become alternate hiccupping and belching. In an effort to stop herself, Viola grabbed at the table linen, and stuffed some of it into her mouth. The plates, glasses, and dishes came tumbling down. The reporter recorded that, too.
The beauty queen from Winterside, with the vapid face and brain, was on her cell phone “ohmigodding” to friends, holding it up to take photos and email them.
The mayor of Winterside was having a hard time. He knew exactly why – too much of the wrong food. If he’d felt better, he’d have gone to help Viola. He was, after all, a retired doctor.
On and on it went, until Viola was gasping for breath, still laughing, but gasping. Then she stopped. The others did, too.
She’d stopped breathing.
She had laughed herself to death.
What had been so funny?
A vase that had been shuddering on the tabletop was the next thing to go. It planted itself on Viola’s chest, and then fell over onto her. The first of the funeral flowers.
The mayor of Winterside did not survive the aftermath of the dinner. He’d kept asking for more rice, picking the kidney beans out and eating them.
The mayor’s wife said he’d loved them, but couldn’t stomach them.
This had been the reaction to end all reactions.
Chapter Fourteen
Anton looked puzzled.
“So it was the beans?”
“The mayor died of a heart attack, brought on by overstraining. Dr. Dunn says it’s quite common. Happened to an elderly fellow here recently.” Jamieson still wondered about what had happened to Elmer Whitehead. Hy had told her about red- kidney- bean poisoning. But any death seemed to put her instinctual antennae up these days. She had to stop seeing murder around every corner. Old people died. And this place had more than its fair share.
“Yes, you could say it was the beans. In his case.”
Paradis groaned. “The pufferfish, that I could bear, but beans?!”
“It wasn’t the pufferfish, that we know. Those symptoms are too severe to go unnoticed. None of your guests…showed any of those symptoms. They all had a good laugh, but that’s about it. As for Miss…” Jamieson chose not to attempt the last name, in spite of her usual formality.
“As for Viola…heart attack. Asphyxiation. It appears to be natural causes. That’s what the doctor said.”
Jamieson wondered if Doctor Dunn knew what he was talking about anymore. He was very old
and hadn’t been able to find the door out of the cottage when he was standing right in front of it.
Jamieson’s brow furrowed. Viola had been old. Frail.
And rich.
“Something tells me that it’s not that simple.” It was that gut feeling she tried to ignore, but couldn’t. It was like worms squirming around in her stomach that wouldn’t settle until things felt right, fell into place.
Why had they all been laughing? She had no answer for that.
“Do you have any idea what triggered the laughter?”
“I can’t imagine.”
Jamieson shook her head. “Neither can I.”
“No, neither can I,” she repeated, shaking her head. She had to stick to the facts.
Here she was again. Accident or murder? Where was the motive that might lead to murder?
What was Anton’s relationship with the deceased? What were his expectations? The will would be illuminating. The Japanese chef – long gone but an unlikely suspect. No, it looked like Anton was the only possibility, if Viola had been murdered.
The mayor of Winterside? Collateral damage.
A stream of village women, remembering the bouquets, turned up at Anton’s door with every kind of casserole imaginable – from the standard tuna to the more exotic turkey and pineapple bake.
No one brought beans.
There were muffins and rolls and cakes, cookies and jams and jellies. It had a peculiar effect on Anton. A month ago, he would have dismissed such offerings as being beneath his dignity, both as culinary possibilities and as charity.
It was the way the village responded to a death, providing the means to ease people through that terrible time.
The embarrassing truth was that Anton needed the food. That’s how desperate his financial situation was. He had very little cash and had used all his credit. There were a few thousand he could access in a week’s time, but that was the end of his gravy train.
He was pinning all his hopes on Viola’s will.
Fiona was either kindhearted, guilt-ridden, or wanted to cover up her animosity towards Viola, because she headed for Winterside as the sun rose the next day. She’d cooked up the idea the night before, and had a fitful sleep in her excitement to realize her inspiration.
She arrived just as The Loonie Bin opened its doors for the day, grabbed a cart and began to scour the flower section, tossing in a variety of fake fabric roses and tulips and poppies – they were for remembrance, weren’t they?
What she’d come for was the latest retail item, the memorial wreath. The wreaths came in ghoulish purple, vomit green, and black. She threw a dozen of them into her cart, and, since it caught her eye going by, tossed a pink teddy bear on top.
She didn’t waste any time window shopping or popping into the Big Girl’s store.
She did, however, stop “home,” her uncle Jim’s neat bungalow, that she now called her “townhouse.” She liked the sound of it.
She unearthed a dress, suitable for the occasion, and a hat. She changed into them and emerged in a lacy black dress that ballooned around her, differing not at all in shape from her daily wear, but with sequins dotting the yoke and the hemline. Her hat was also black, broad-brimmed, with a gauze veil covering her face. She had to push it aside to drive back to The Shores.
The wind had picked up by the time she rolled down the Shore Lane to Anton’s Paradise. She emerged, with difficulty, from the vehicle, squishing her belly past the steering wheel.
The hat went flying off her head. Rather than chase it, which she couldn’t have done anyway, she watched it tumble along one side of the building, hoping it would stop before she lost it.
It did. It got stuck on one of the posts that held up the sign that, in an elegant cursive, read: Anton’s Paradise.
Perfect. That is where she would build her memorial.
She hauled the plastic bags out of the car. Thin and cheap, they rustled in the breeze and threatened, like the hat, to get away from her. She dropped a red sandstone rock on each of them, to keep them in place.
Then, battling the wind, she began to arrange the flowers and wreaths around the signposts. She had to anchor each flower, each bouquet, and each wreath, with a rock. The effect wasn’t what she’d hoped.
She hadn’t had time to create a fudge heart, but at the bottom centre placed a large chocolate fudge “V.” She picked up the crowning touch, the pink teddy bear – that Viola would have hated – with its pop-open eyes, surrounded by long, lush, dark eyelashes. She had just planted it at the top of the pile and begun to take photos with her cell phone when Anton came blistering out of the building.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” It was a word he didn’t normally use; it was out of keeping with his image of himself. But there was no other way to say it. When she didn’t respond – he had no idea his words were tossed away on the wind – he said it again.
This time, she heard, and snapped upright from her bent-over position, dropping a rock on the pink teddy’s toe and dislodging it from its perch atop the hill of remembrance.
There was no history of heart trouble in Anton’s family – a good thing since he was ripe for it – his age, his rich diet, and the state he was in – apoplexy. Not the kind that delivers a stroke, but not healthy. His colour – bright red – didn’t look very healthy either. He came thundering over. Fiona stood even straighter.
“I have made a memorial for Miss Viola.”
“It looks like she died by the side of the road – or under my sign.”
“She almost did.”
“Christ!” Viola would have hated this monument to maudlin mourning as much as he did. He lunged at it and ripped flowers and wreaths, sending them scattering. Bits of ribbon and plastic and petals were caught on the wind and began to somersault over the cape, dancing around Anton’s Paradise. The building. The sign. Anton himself.
Fiona looked hurt – and puzzled.
“You’d think it would be good advertising for dangerous dining.”
“Not this kind. Not this tacky, tasteless…”
“It was good enough for Princess Diana.”
He snorted. “She was dead. She was spared the sight of it.”
Fiona was shocked.
“The Queen liked it.”
“I doubt it.”
“So it’s taste, then, not someone’s dying that bothers you.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I’ll have my wages, because I won’t be doing any more work for you.”
“That suits me. Clear this stuff away and then we’ll talk about wages.”
“What about the cost of it?” She’d keep the teddy bear, she knew, and charge him for it anyway.
A white Mercedes streaked with Red Island dust purred down the Shore Lane. Here he was in a shrieking match with a fat fishwife in front of a common roadside shrine, an inexcusable lack in taste, and a valued client was about to arrive.
He had to get rid of her.
“All right, but clear it up immediately. Mail me an invoice.”
“Mail it? I could send it by a paper airplane.” She snickered at her own joke, gesturing to her trailer home. “We’re that close.”
Anton did not need to be reminded. “Get it to me. An invoice.”
“A invoice? What’s that?”
He sighed.
“Move this stuff. Now. Bill me later. When my guest is gone. Or tomorrow.”
As he turned his back to her, his expression transformed from wrath to a smooth, welcoming smile for someone he hoped was going to spend a lot of money with him. He’d have to ask for a deposit, although it offended him. He wouldn’t have the money otherwise for the expensive ingredients to feed his clients. He felt like the Mother Hubbard of the culinary high end. Not a feeling he liked.
He took one backward glance to make
sure Fiona was clearing her shrine away. Not as fast as he’d like, but…
She was getting to be a real liability.
In the end, Moira hooked Frank the way some women – women Moira wouldn’t have spoken to in church – always have. She gave him more. It went from innocent petting to not so innocent. Fully clothed to dishevelled. Never naked. Never. Mostly standing up, but when no declaration came, she began to sit down. Lie down. She called it reclining. She’d unearthed her Cosmo articles again, and blushed deep crimson at some of the things they suggested a woman do to hook a man. She wouldn’t, couldn’t, do most of those things, but she did find one or two that would work.
Finally, Frank got the message. She wasn’t like his other female customers, who’d been happy with some harmless fooling around.
No, Moira – as he knew from the start – was a lady. That’s how he explained away her reluctance to go any farther than they had, her lack of response. She wasn’t frigid – he’d heard the moans held back – but it would take a ring to unlock her.
He was surprised she’d gone unclaimed for so long. Here she was sitting on a tidy bit of property. The house, inside and out, and the yard were well-maintained. The furnishings, modest, but nonetheless antique. He assumed there was money in the bank left by her thrifty garbage-collector father. She was a good cook and housekeeper. Passion? He was confident it would come to her, in his experienced hands.
It would please his mother. She was dead, but he felt her watching him. She’d begged him to settle down, begged him until the day she died. It was time.
If he didn’t move soon, it wouldn’t be long before someone else snapped her up.
An engagement ring would be the key. Frank knew it would impress her – most of the women at The Shores had only a simple gold band, their wedding ring. He knew Moira fancied herself a cut above.
The beauty of it was that he didn’t have to buy the ring. It belonged to his sister Maggie, now divorced. She’d yanked it off and thrown it across the kitchen when she’d found out her husband was having an affair with his dental hygienist, a woman half his age.
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