I saw Gillian glance in our direction, and tried to modify his opinion. “Well, some folks have a real allergy to it, called celiac disease. As for whether it’s more common these days, I’ve heard different explanations. Maybe some people always have gotten sick, but didn’t know it was because of bread. Farmers also have ‘enriched’ today’s wheat, so it has more gluten than the kind our ancestors baked with.”
He didn’t argue any further, but made a point of using his bread to mop up all of the pudding. “This porridge stuff looks kind of weird, but y’know, it’s pretty tasty.”
The reception, I noticed, seemed to be going well. The society officers reminisced about events they’d held for Christmas, harvest season and Chadwick Founder’s Day at various sites around town.
“Maybe we could host something here,” Nora Stafford suggested.
“Halloween,” her husband joked. “In the cellar.”
Donald laughed. “I’ll have to make it safe for human habitation first.”
“Well, you should at least be on the Christmas tour this year,” Nora told Gillian. “I’m sure with his electrical skills, Donald could do some nice outdoor lighting.”
“I’ll try to rise to the occasion,” he said with a smile.
During this exchange, Gillian’s face took on an almost giddy glow. I had to give her credit, she’d made the impression that she’d hoped to. Good, now maybe she could chill out a bit and stop nagging and criticizing.
“Excuse me,” said a hushed female voice behind me.
I turned to see Adele Dugan looking rather pale. “Do you know where the nearest powder room is?” she asked.
I’d seen one . . . where? “Down the hall, I think, next to the guest bedroom.”
She thanked me and walked in that direction at a brisk clip.
The group migrated then to the nearby living room, and Bill Stafford stepped into a central spot in front of the fireplace. I had a sense that the boring speeches, about which Gillian had warned us, would soon begin. Maybe I’d ask Nick if he wanted to slip away. We both had jobs to get back to, and the hostess herself had given us permission to leave.
Jack Dugan looked around. “Adele? Now where did she go . . . ?”
I discreetly explained that I’d directed his wife to the guest bathroom. “That was a while ago, though.”
“I hope she’s okay.” He ducked into the hall to check.
Stafford, meanwhile, noticed that he had lost some of his audience, and held off on whatever pronouncement he intended to make. Concerned, I stepped into the hallway myself. I heard muffled voices from the bathroom and edged closer.
Jack emerged minus his wife. I saw panic in his eyes as they met mine. “She’s sick,” he said. “I need to drive her to the medical center.”
Linda, Kay and the Fosters all had drifted out of the living room to ask what was going on. Jack returned to his wife’s side, and a few seconds later helped Adele, her linen clothes showing wrinkles now, out of the restroom. She leaned on his shoulder, but looked ready to pass out at any minute.
“You can’t drive her like that, Jack.” Grim-faced, Donald pulled out his phone. “I’ll call nine-one-one.”
Dugan didn’t argue, and only asked, “Can someone get her a glass of water?”
Whitney, who had made herself scarce for most of the afternoon, appeared in the kitchen doorway with a shocked expression. She heard this request and ran to fill it. Adele drank the tumbler of water slowly, with some effort.
A few minutes later, Officers Mel Jacoby and Steve Baylock of the Chadwick PD arrived. They checked on Adele and questioned us about what had happened.
“She has pretty serious celiac disease,” Jack told them. “This happens sometimes, when she accidentally eats the wrong thing.”
“Any idea what could have made her sick?” Baylock asked.
“She was being careful, she ate hardly anything,” Gillian said. “I know she didn’t take any of the pastries.”
“There was barley in the soup,” Linda said.
“Did you eat any of that, sweetheart?” Jack asked.
Eyelids drooping, Adele shook her head. “Just . . . the dish with the peas.”
After some more discussion, Jacoby said they’d need to take samples of some of the food. Gillian sent Herta into the kitchen to fetch a few small containers they could use. Whitney mainly kept out of the way. She pulled her long blond hair forward over one shoulder and twisted it into a rope, as she watched the activity in the front hall.
Meanwhile, an ambulance rolled up outside. Two EMTs tramped in, gave Adele a quick look-over and put her on a gurney. Her husband went along with her.
She was whisked away, with sirens in full cry. The two cops finished taking short statements and contact information from the rest of us; then they also left.
“You had some of the pudding, too, didn’t you?” Donald Foster asked his wife.
“Yes, but only a little.”
Gillian’s shell-shocked face made me actually feel sorry for her. Despite her efforts to control all of the variables at her reception, something had gone very wrong. A key member of the Chadwick Historical Society had eaten something that, in effect, had poisoned her.
Gillian had been so meticulous, though, that I couldn’t imagine how such an accident could have happened.
Unless it hadn’t been an accident . . .
Chapter 9
By the time Nick and I were free to go, it was early evening. I didn’t want to imagine the conversations that would take place among the Fosters, and even their maid, after the rest of us left. Gillian might take out her embarrassment and disappointment on everyone within earshot.
As we walked down the driveway, Nick half joked, “Just hope you and I don’t end up on the suspects list. We’ll have to alibi each other.”
“We can,” I pointed out. “We were together during the whole reception, and neither one of us went back into the kitchen. I think we’re safe.”
He sprang behind the wheel of his blue panel truck with an energy that belied his sixty years, wished me a quiet rest of the evening, and pulled away. I have rarely been so glad to slip into my own older-model CR-V and escape to the relative sanity of my shop.
At least, because it was almost midsummer, the sky remained light when I reached home. Downstairs, Sarah had left things in good order, and I found no urgent messages on the shop answering machine. I checked and fed my four remaining boarders, then climbed the stairs to my apartment. Naturally my own three felines mobbed me as if I’d been gone for a week, and as if I hadn’t left them with plenty of dry food for the duration. I gave them a dinner of high-quality canned fare, then collapsed on my slipcovered living room sofa.
On the one hand, I felt emotionally drained from all the tensions of the afternoon. On the other, questions about Adele’s mishap kept skittering through my mind. Everyone was assuming she’d suffered a celiac attack, but what if it had been something else? Some illness totally unrelated to what she’d eaten? At least that would let everyone at the reception off the hook. Good thing, anyway, that she’d gone to the hospital. Whatever the problem, I hoped she recovered soon, and completely.
Mark had gone to Philadelphia for the weekend, planning to get together with some old college buddies from UPenn. They had tickets to a Phillies game tomorrow. He’d invited me as a courtesy, but I’m not into many team sports and figured he needed some time to just hang with the guys. I glanced at the clock; they’d probably have gone out to eat by now, so I wasn’t going to bother Mark with my story of the ill-fated reception.
I wouldn’t disturb Sarah, either, because she might be helping Chester and his family prepare for tomorrow’s funeral. Still, I felt like discussing the mysterious incident with someone. Guess I’d just have to suppress that urge for a while.
It was time for a real dinner, but the odd mixture of foods at the reception, plus all the talk about digestive upsets, had blunted my appetite. For the time being, I sat at my kitchen’s yell
ow Formica table—a find from an antiques mall—and made do with a carton of organic yogurt from Nature’s Way. This involved fending off sneak attacks from my calico, Matisse, the only one of my trio who adores milk in any form.
The yogurt reminded me of Dawn. She would probably just be closing up her shop and might have time to talk. Bouncing ideas off her was usually productive, especially when I was trying to make sense of a weird and suspicious situation.
Before I could even punch in her number, though, the phone in my hand played my ringtone, “Stray Cat Strut.” I recognized the caller as Detective Angela Bonelli of the Chadwick PD. Not surprising, really, after the cops had shown up at the reception fiasco.
Her dry contralto voice didn’t bother with a hello. “I guess you had a pretty exciting afternoon over at the Fosters’ house.”
“Not the dignified event everyone was expecting, for sure,” I told her. “I’m starting to think I’m some kind of jinx—mayhem finds me wherever I go.”
“Well, you haven’t been involved in any local crises for a couple of months now, so I guess you were due.” Her tone turned serious. “So, what’s your take on this, Cassie? Anything about it smell fishy?”
“No fish was served.” Bad joke on my part. “The chief suspect seems to have been the pease pudding.”
“The hospitalized woman”—Bonelli sounded as if she were checking a written report—“Adele Dugan, told them she couldn’t tolerate wheat and ate something that supposedly was gluten-free. Then she had a negative reaction similar to what she usually experiences from wheat.”
“Did the doctors confirm that?”
“She had her stomach pumped and was given IV fluids. The latest word is that she’s recovering. But they’re running tests on her and the food samples to rule out anything else.”
I presumed the hospital would find out if Adele had, say, appendicitis, or consumed anything that actually was spoiled or poisoned. “Gillian Foster, the hostess, swore she gave the caterers a gluten-free recipe. When I arrived, I heard her personally making sure they followed her directions to the letter.”
“Mmm. My guys said she acted pretty upset.”
“She’s a bit high-strung, anyway. But she was hoping to impress the historical society folks with her ‘authentic’ buffet, as well as her house. Instead, one of them gets rushed to the emergency room, and the rest of us spend an hour being questioned by the cops. By the time it was all over, she looked like she wished the floor would open up and swallow her.”
“So if anybody played a mean trick on Adele Dugan, I’m guessing it wouldn’t have been Gillian.”
Yikes, it sounded as if Bonelli really did suspect foul play! “From what I could see, she had absolutely nothing to gain by that. Also, I got the impression most of the people there liked Adele pretty well. I’d never suspect her husband—he seemed horrified, and wanted to drive her to the hospital on his own, before Donald Foster insisted on calling nine-one-one.”
Bonelli asked me to describe the pease pudding, and I did my best.
“Did anybody else eat the stuff?”
“I passed because it looked kind of yucky, but Nick had some, and when he headed for home later he was fine. Gillian herself had a bit with no ill effects, even though she also claimed to have a gluten problem.”
Angela fell silent for a second. “The people at this reception—they’re Gillian’s friends? Would they all know about her allergy?”
“She was acquainted with them, but how closely, I don’t know. She talked very openly with Adele about how she got sick when she ate wheat, so maybe she’s told other people in the past.”
“In that case . . . maybe Adele wasn’t the intended target of the prank.”
I hadn’t considered that; but after all, there was a reason why Angela had climbed to the rank of detective. “You think someone was out to get Gillian.”
“From what little you observed, could anyone have had a grudge against her?”
I laughed, then gave her a quick summary of what I’d seen and heard on my two visits to the Foster home. “I don’t know about the historical society, but between people working on her house and even her family members, that definitely opens up a wide field of suspects.”
Bonelli sounded satisfied with my inside info. “Thanks, Cassie. Get some rest—you sound like you need it. By tomorrow we should have some more information from her doctors that could help clarify things.”
“I hope so,” I said.
Maybe Bonelli suspected that I couldn’t wait to share this juicy information with Dawn or Mark, because she added, “Meanwhile, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about the details of this case with anyone else. Even if it was just a nasty prank, it might be a crime. And at worst, if the target was Adele, it could be attempted murder.”
* * *
It was no hardship to keep my shop open Saturday morning, on my own, while Sarah went to Bernice’s funeral. Still, it reminded me of the first couple of months that I’d been in operation, handling everything solo. It had taken me more than a month just to hire an assistant. I ran ads mostly in the local papers and even posted notices with businesses around town, because I wanted someone who lived fairly nearby. Young kids just out of school, and a couple of women who’d never held another paying job, tried out with me simply because they liked cats. Unfortunately, that didn’t qualify most of them for the challenges of handling a customer that could hiss, bite and twist around in your hands like a cobra, with claws front and back that could slash like razors.
Of course, most of our feline clients were reasonably well behaved, and by now I’d learned several tricks and acquired a few devices to keep the testy ones under control. But still, I’d been hampered in my job until Sarah had come along. I hadn’t expected that a woman around sixty, with a background in teaching high school math, would work out so much better than any of the other candidates. But she had nerves of steel, a strong work ethic, and most important, our temperaments just clicked.
That Saturday on my own, I did have a few walk-in custumers, mostly asking questions and picking up pamphlets for future reference. I was down to only five boarders, so I turned out each of them in the playroom for a spell, and dragged feather toys or threw catnip mice to exercise them.
Tough job, but someone’s got to do it, right? Determined not to intrude on Mark’s weekend with the boys, I phoned my mother but got her voice mail. Not too long ago, Mom had a lot of time on her hands, but since she’d taken up with Harry she was on the go more often. I remembered that he had a lake house—maybe they’d decided to spend this gorgeous June day up there.
Now Cassie, don’t pout!
I closed to the public at twelve and devoted the rest of my workday to housecleaning chores around the shop. To keep from feeling like Cinderella, slaving away while her stepsisters went to the ball, I booted up my laptop and played a mix of summer-themed music—everything from Jersey boys Springsteen and Bon Jovi to newer, upbeat numbers by Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Timberlake. Turning it up just loud enough not to disturb the boarder cats, I danced and sometimes sang my way through the sweeping and vacuuming.
Occasionally a passerby would glance through the front window in curiosity, then smile or shake their head: Guess dealing with cats all day finally drove the poor girl around the bend! For a while, the music took my mind off the more somber issues I’d been dealing with, such as Bernice’s death.
That evening, when I expected even the post-funeral activities were over and Sarah would be home, I gave her a call to ask her how things went.
“It was . . . interesting,” she said. “I met Chester’s kids. Hard to believe two such sweet people raised such self-centered children.”
Her criticism almost shocked me, because Sarah usually tried to see the best in people. “Wow, what did they say? Or do?”
“It’s more what they didn’t say or do. They sat in the same pew with Chester, of course, and near him at the gravesite. But they each stayed with th
eir own families and didn’t make much effort to console their father. He had a nurse with him, and I guess they felt that was enough, a paid helper to make sure he didn’t fall apart. Chester needed the help, too—he was so wobbly on his feet, Robin said she thought he was sedated.”
“That’s awful.” Stretched out on my sofa, I uncrossed my legs so Matisse, my calico, could settle on my lap. “Do you think he had some kind of argument or falling-out with his children?”
“No, but they’re big shots now, I guess. Especially the son, Jimmy—calls himself James these days and has his own construction company. Sylvia is some kind of attorney. They both dressed well, drove up to the funeral home in nice cars, and came with spouses and kids. So I get the feeling old Mom and Dad had just slipped off their radar.”
“I guess that explains why neither of them lent a hand when the Tillmans’ house starting getting so run-down and cluttered.”
“Robin said they finally saw it the day before the funeral and acted totally disgusted. Not sad or upset that their parents were living that way, just repulsed and embarrassed. At the repast, at least Sylvia thanked Robin and me for stepping in and trying to tidy up.”
“Do they have any plans to help Chester, now that he’s alone?”
“James wants to move him to assisted living as soon as possible. He wants to get the house cleaned out, fix anything that really needs it and then sell it off to the first buyer who’ll offer a decent price.”
Even though the place was in such bad condition, that still sounded callous to me. When we’d talked to the Tillmans, it was clear both had become very attached to their house because of the memories it held—particularly from the years of raising their family. It was ironic that their children had so little sentimental feeling for the place.
Stroking Matisse’s multicolored fur, I remembered Chester telling Robin not to throw out some old video games because “Jimmy” might still want them. “They aren’t interested in going through the contents first, in case there are things they might want to keep?”
Claw & Disorder Page 9