Pineapple and Poison

by Allyssa Mirry

  “And in this scenario, the lifeguard took a piece of taffy and added poison to it. He waited until he saw that Randall Holmes was alone and then offered him the deadly treat.”

  “Right,” Lydia agreed. “He might even have been on the beach, waiting for an opportunity to see Randall one on one. The free samples of taffy just helped him reach his objective. He would have poisoned something else if he hadn’t gotten a piece of my pineapple taffy.”

  They continued walking along the sand. The water was still too chilly for most people to go swimming, but there were a few people walking near the waves or reading in beach chairs. Lydia recognized some people from town, but no one seemed to be making eye contact with her. She wondered if this was the effect of the newspaper’s story about the death near her shop or if she was being paranoid.

  “Maybe he’s not out today,” Trina said, pointing to a sign posted on the beach that read “No Swimming. Lifeguard Not On Duty.”

  Lydia frowned. “He was here yesterday in uniform, and the weather was much worse then.”

  “Very suspicious,” Trina said, rubbing her chin as if she were deep in thought.

  “He is definitely a lifeguard, right? That’s not a disguise?”

  “The guy you described who took the taffy dressed as a lifeguard sounds like the new lifeguard that all the women at the salon have been talking about. Mrs. Miresome’s brother’s priest’s cousin got him the job. And he’s taught some swimming classes at the community center. It was just for kids though. I know some of the ladies wanted to strut out in their bathing suits to talk to him.”

  “He’s a real lifeguard then,” said Lydia. “But maybe he wasn’t on duty yesterday and was waiting to find Randall Holmes. What else can you tell me about him?”

  Trina shrugged helplessly. “Everyone wants to know about him, but he’s pretty private. I didn’t hear any mention of him and Randall Holmes together, but if he moved here somewhat recently, maybe Randall sold him the house. Most of the discussion at the salon is whether he is single or not. No one has seen him with a woman. He’s not wearing a wedding ring on his hand, but some of the ladies think they saw a ring on the chain he wears around his neck. So, maybe there’s a story there.”

  “And maybe Randall Holmes found out what it was,” Lydia suggested.

  “And he killed him to silence him?” asked Trina. “Creepy.”

  They walked a little further and were better able to see one of the lifeguard stands that had been erected in the sand. The lifeguard who had taken the free samples was sitting up in it and staring out at the water.

  “I guess we’ll get to ask him now,” Lydia said.

  She took a deep breath and walked up to the stand. She was feeling more nervous that she had been when she spoke to Amber Allen. Were these residual feelings from her first encounter with him? Or was she worried that this suspect had a better chance of physically overpowering her than tiny Amber?

  “Hello,” Lydia called up to the man. He was only a few feet in the air, but it felt high when trying to start a conversation.

  The lifeguard just nodded in response. He kept his eyes out at sea and said nothing.

  “So, what’s with those signs?” Trina asked, trying another approach. “It said there wasn’t a lifeguard on duty. Is that just so you won’t get sued if something goes wrong?”

  The lifeguard clenched his jaw, and Lydia knew they hit a nerve. However, he didn’t respond and continued scanning the water.

  Lydia watched him for a moment and then said, “No. The sign is not up so he won’t get in trouble. The summer season hasn’t officially opened yet. I bet he’s not really on duty. He just wants to make sure he’s ready when everyone arrives. He wants to get the lay of the land first. Or of the sea.”

  “Get his feet wet,” Trina joked.

  “I was trying to do the same thing with my taffy shop. I wanted to make sure everything was perfect with a small test crowd, and then have a great grand opening. Of course, I’m not sure that’s going to happen.”

  The lifeguard looked down at them and made eye contact. Lydia thought she saw a faint smile on his face.

  “It’s the taffy lady who thought I was old.”

  “No. Not old. Older, but…” Lydia trailed off. “This isn’t helping. My real name is Lydia Doherty.”

  “Daniel Brine,” he responded.

  “The girls at the salon will be so jealous. I mean, as long as he’s not a killer. Maybe even if he is,” Trina whispered to her friend before introducing herself. “I’m Trina Nichols.”

  “So, you might have heard what happened outside of my shop last night?” asked Lydia.

  Daniel nodded. “I read about it in the paper.”

  “Were you still on the beach then? Did you see anything suspicious that night?” Lydia asked, deciding to treat him like a witness instead of a suspect. It seemed like it might be tricky to keep him talking.

  “No. I left for the day when it began raining,” said Daniel. “You’re right that I’m not officially on duty. I decided not to sit in the rain when it was unlikely there would be any swimmers.”

  “Oh? And so you went home?” asked Lydia.

  “That’s right,” he said. “It’s a shame I didn’t stay. Maybe I could have helped the man.”

  “That’s admirable,” Lydia said. “Were you alone?”

  “Yes,” Daniel said.

  Lydia noticed that when he answered that, one hand went to touch the chain he was wearing around his neck. However, most of it was hidden beneath his lifeguard shirt.

  “Did you know him at all? Randall Holmes?” Trina asked.

  “He sold me my house.”

  “Oh, did he?” Trina asked. Her eyes widened as she glanced at Lydia. “Was there anything strange about this sale?”

  “I don’t think so,” Daniel replied. “It went pretty smoothly. I wasn’t very picky about the place though. I knew I downgraded when I moved to New Jersey of all places.”

  “What was that?” asked Lydia. She knew that New Jersey could often be the brunt of jokes, but she was a Jersey girl through and through. She didn’t like hearing it insulted. She also couldn’t understand how someone could insult it after spending time at the beautiful shores of Ocean Point.

  “Forget it,” Daniel said.

  “No. I’d like to know. Did you downgrade because you moved out of some lavish mansion in another state? Or are you hating on your new home state?”

  “Well, I didn’t have a mansion,” Daniel said with just a touch of insolence. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  He climbed down from the lifeguard stand and headed toward some kids down the beach that were beginning to climb on some large slippery rocks that jutted out into the sea.

  Lydia’s blood was boiling. She had finally gotten the man to talk, and she didn’t like what he had to say about her home. She decided that she wouldn’t mind seeing that man behind bars after all. She still needed to determine if he was the killer.

  11

  Pulling at Answers

  “Be careful,” Trina said.

  “I know,” Lydia responded. “I’m taking catching this killer very seriously.”

  The two women were in Lydia’s kitchen. After talking to Daniel and a failed attempt to find more clues on the boardwalk, Lydia’s stomach began growling, and she regretted not finishing her lunch at Crabby Craig’s. She decided to make the dinner that she had planned the night before, even if she didn’t feel much like celebrating. When Trina heard the plans for surf and turf, she invited herself over for a second girl’s night in a row.

  The dinner had tasted good, but Lydia had been distracted throughout it all. The distraction hadn’t left as she prepared their dessert.

  “I meant that you should be careful pulling that taffy,” said Trina. “You’re working it so hard I’m afraid you’re going to pull a muscle with it.”

  Lydia frowned. She had been operating on autopilot and didn’t realize how roughly she had been treating the
sweet.

  “The taffy does need to aerate,” Lydia said as a weak excuse.

  “Yeah, but I don’t think you’re following the recipe right now. And you’re scaring your dog.”

  Lydia looked towards her dining room table. Sunny was hiding under a chair. However, Lydia suspected this was due to the chance of finding crumbs from dinner and not because of the way she was manhandling the taffy.

  “You were quiet all through dinner,” Trina said. “What’s bothering you right now? Is it our investigation? Daniel Brine? Leo? Or have you and I really run out of things to say to each other?”

  “It’s not the last one,” Lydia assured her friend. She began working the taffy with more measured movements. “But I think I was working out some pent-up frustration with this candy making. I thought that after I narrowed down my list of suspects to three that this might be easy, but it’s not. It seems like Amber wouldn’t mind causing trouble for me, but she has an alibi for that night. I don’t know how to find the man in the suit that took a sample. And I don’t know what to think about Daniel Brine.”

  “You got him talking. The ladies at the salon will be impressed by that.”

  “I got him talking, but all he did was bad mouth Jersey. I didn’t get any real information about whether he could be the killer.”

  Lydia almost took her frustration out on the taffy again but contained herself. She pulled the off-white taffy like it was a rope with one end in each hand. Then she folded it back in upon itself and pulled again. It wasn’t quite at the proper consistency, but it was getting close.

  “He really pushed your buttons, didn’t he?”

  “I guess murder suspects have that effect on me,” Lydia said wryly.

  “I wonder why he was willing to talk to you,” Trina said. She thought about it as she leaned on the island counter that Lydia was working on. “Maybe the ladies at my salon are just inept at flirting.”

  “Or maybe he had a reason for wanting to talk to me. It probably is related to the murder. If he isn’t guilty, he might have felt sorry for me because it happened right outside my shop.”

  “And he did say that he wished he had been there to help the man.”

  “But he might have enjoyed talking about his crime if he were the killer,” said Lydia. “He might have wanted to point us down the wrong track.”

  “He didn’t come up with a good alibi for his whereabouts,” Trina pointed out. “If I were going to kill someone, I’d try to come up with something better than home alone. Not that I would ever kill someone.”

  “Maybe he didn’t think that he would ever get linked to the crime and he wouldn’t need a good alibi. Maybe he hoped I would take the blame.”

  “But why you?” asked Trina. “Were you just the easiest person to frame? Does he have some sort of vendetta against taffy? Or was it just convenient?”

  Lydia considered the matter as she decided her taffy had reached the proper stiffness. She knew the proper texture by heart now. It was the right time to add her extra ingredients for this special flavor.

  “I’m not sure,” Lydia admitted as she continued kneading. “The means of murder seems strange to me.”

  “What do you mean about the means?” Trina asked before muttering, “That sounded funny.”

  “Daniel Brine is very strong.”

  “I know. The rumors about his muscles were not over-exaggerated.”

  “What I mean is that it could have been easy for Daniel to commit a murder with his strength. He could have strangled Randall Holmes or bludgeoned him. He could have overpowered him in many different ways. Why would he decide to use cyanide?”

  “Maybe killing him with his bare hands would have led the police right to him?”

  “So, using the poisoned taffy lets the crime lead back to me. That does make sense,” Lydia said. “Still, something about this does seem off. I would have thought that a poisoner didn’t have another option for committing the crime, or they really wanted to target me. But what did I ever do to Daniel Brine?”

  Trina shrugged. “You’re sure you’ve never met him before? Maybe when you lived up north?”

  Lydia shook her head. “No. I never met him before. And I don’t know what to make of him now.”

  “Well, I hope he’s not the killer. I hope the mystery around him is something entirely different.”

  “And I bet all the ladies at the salon will wish that too.”

  “It will break a lot of hearts if a handsome guy like that is locked away,” said Trina. “But don’t tell Carl I’m talking like this.”

  Lydia nodded. It sounded as if the off and on again relationship that Trina had with the owner of the seafood market was on again.

  She began cutting the taffy into bite-sized pieces as she considered the possibility of Daniel’s guilt. There were a few reasons to still consider him a suspect. Randall Holmes had sold him his house, and there could be a motive for murder because of that. He didn’t have a strong alibi, and he had taken two pieces of taffy samples that day. However, the way Daniel left to make sure that the kids didn’t hurt themselves on the rocks didn’t seem like the act of a cold-blooded killer.

  She sighed. She wasn’t an expert at this. Leo was the member of the family that was involved in criminal investigations. Before Randall Holmes had been murdered with her taffy, the closest she had gotten to a murder was when she read mystery books under her beach umbrella. However, Leo wasn’t going to help her with this case. She needed to figure it out on her own.

  “I need to find the man in the suit with the anchor tattoo,” said Lydia. “Maybe talking to him will clear things up. He might be the killer.”

  “I wish I could help,” Trina said. “But based on that description, I don’t know him. I can see if any of my clients know who he is. It’s going to be a busy work day for me tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll be able to leave the salon, but I can help with the investigation that way.”

  “I’d appreciate it, but you can’t let anyone know why I want to find him.”

  “I can be very tactful. I can.”

  Lydia grinned and handed her friend one of her taffies. The white candy had small bursts of color inside it.

  “What do you call this?” asked Trina, accepting the treat.

  “This is sugar cookie taffy,” Lydia explained. “It’s a flavor I experimented with. It has a buttery vanilla taste, and those colorful bits are sprinkles.”

  Trina didn’t need to hear anymore. She popped the taffy into her mouth. She had barely finished chewing when she reached for another.

  “Liddy, this is incredible. It’s a bite-sized cookie and salt water taffy at the same time.”

  “I was pretty pleased with it.”

  “Are you going to sell this in your shop?”

  “I don’t know. I was planning on just selling the original six flavors that the shop had been selling. It was successful for the last owner until she retired.”

  Trina grabbed another taffy as Sunny came out from under the chair to investigate a new source of food. Lydia chewed on one of her candies as she looked for a less sugary treat to give to her canine companion.

  “Well, it’s up to you,” Trina said. “But now I feel bad for anyone who doesn’t get to try one of your sugar cookie taffies.”

  “Maybe I will reconsider my menu,” Lydia said as she handed Sunny a treat. “But first I need to make sure that I still will have a taffy shop – that it won’t go out of business because of the murder, and that I won’t be trying to run the shop from jail!”

  12

  Suspicions at the Shop

  Lydia had thought that the sound of the taffy puller machine in her own shop would be a happy one, but today there was no cheering her up. She kept rereading the latest article that Brie Rankin had written.

  Dianna was following the instructions that Lydia had taught her the other day to make pineapple taffy, but Lydia thought there was no chance that anyone would want to buy it now. However, she was grateful that Dia
nna had come into work and was trying to do her job. Kelsey and Jeff had not come in. They were probably afraid to be working for a suspected murderer.

  Lydia couldn’t help it and read the awful headline again: Pineapple Taffy Terror!

  Brie’s article went on to talk about how the police had learned that the cause of Randall Holmes’s death was cyanide poisoning and that the only thing the victim had eaten had been pineapple salt water taffy. The reporter took care to note that it was not confirmed that the taffy came from Doherty’s Taffy and Trinkets. However, the location of the dead man did make one wonder if there was a connection. The reporter was still not sure why Randall Holmes had been there that day but allowed the readers to speculate.