The Canning Factory, eight days before Thanksgiving, 1969
When I pulled up in front of the house, Nozzie flew out the front door with Grandma Papa close behind. She threw her arms around me and planted numerous kisses on my cheeks, leaving her signature Revlon’s Fire and Ice red lipstick behind. At six feet tall, she dwarfed my own five foot five. Grandma Papa barely reached five feet. We assumed Nozzie got her tall genes from her father, although Grandma Papa told me one Christmas that the milkman was well over six feet, a piece of information I did not need to know.
Both of them smelled like cinnamon and other spices usually associated with holiday meals. And maybe a hint of garlic.
“You came, you came, you came.” Aunt Nozzie hopped and danced around the front yard like a woman possessed. I wouldn’t say that couldn’t be possible. Her bright purple caftan swirled around her size eleven feet, and the breeze caught her red hair and tossed it back from her forehead. She wore a bib apron dotted with small blobs of red something. With Aunt Nozzie’s record for murderous holidays, I hoped she hadn’t killed someone and called me to help her dispose of the body. I knew she’d have a good reason for homicide, but still. It was an imposition to bring me as an accessory.
Grandma Papa did her own little jig, but only after she reached down and took off her shoes. I checked to make certain, and sure enough, they were a pair of Aunt Nozzie’s big clodhoppers, tied onto Grandma’s feet with fetching red grosgrain ribbons.
“Still reusing Nozzie’s castoffs, I see.”
Grandma was one of the original recyclers of the twentieth century, repurposing Aunt Nozzie’s shoes and dresses although they were much too large for my tiny grandmother. That didn’t deter Grandma, only challenged her fashion creativity. Today she wore one of my aunt’s purple and red dresses made to fit through the use of paper clips. She drew it into her slender waist with a silver belt. Whoops. My mistake. That was a length of duct tape that wound around her middle. Very festive.
“I had hoped you’d come sooner. We’ve been up for two days cooking cranberry sauce. I suppose you had a chat with your mother about me?” Aunt Nozzie gave a sniff of disdain. “That woman has way too much money. And way too many husbands.”
“She says you’re envious because you didn’t save for the future when you had money.”
“But look what I have.” Aunt Nozzie’s arms swept around her living room as we entered the house.
Purple. She had purple and lots of it. Couch, chair, knickknacks, lampshades, tablecloths, wallpaper, rugs, even the toilet seat was purple.
“Your mother’s house was decorated by someone she hired. There’s no color in it.”
Aunt Nozzie was right about that. I’d seen Mom’s house on Hilton Head Island. It contained the most costly furnishings, but even the brocade couch was beige on beige in beige.
But somehow I felt compelled to defend Mom now that I knew she was in a boat somewhere and wouldn’t spend the money on ship to shore phone calls to aggravate me.
“She’s serial monogamist, only one hubby at a time. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. But she keeps doing the same thing over and over again. Marrying a man with money only to watch him die in a year or so.”
“You’re making it sound as if she’s purposely going through men.” I threw my coat on the purple couch and sunk into the purple chair.
“Nope, nope. No time for that.” Nozzie pulled me out of the chair and shoved me toward the kitchen door.
“I tried the repetitive men thing, but you can see where it got me. Two dead ones and no money.” Nozzie pushed open the door. I stopped and gasped. Every surface in the kitchen was covered with jars, bags of sugar, and containers of cranberries. More cranberries sat in baskets near the door to the back porch. On the stove sauce bubbled over in a large pot, coating the stove with red while another larger pot held jars clacking away in boiling water.
The phone rang. I crossed my fingers it wasn’t Mom.
Nozzie rushed out of the kitchen and grabbed the phone in the dining room. “It’s Grandma Mama calling from Sweden.” They exchanged a few words, then Nozzie yelled for me to come to the phone.
Sure enough it was my grandma, and all the way from Stockholm or some suburb of the city, a Swedish-sounding name, unpronounceable by Americans and, to tell the truth, unpronounceable by my Swedish grandmother although she claimed she could sing in Swedish. We believed her. Who could prove her wrong? She usually burst into song after wetting her throat with several of Aunt’s Nozzie’s famous cranberry and Southern Comfort cocktails.
“So how’s your visit going?” I asked.
“I think fine, but who knows. I can’t understand a word they’re saying.”
“Why don’t you sing one of your songs to them? That they could understand,” I suggested.
“I’ve tried, but they say I’m not singing it in Swedish. What language do you suppose it is? I’ve been singing these tunes for years.”
“Maybe you forgot the words.”
“Maybe. But I don’t recognize the people here either. They don’t look like the relatives I remember. Maybe I’ve got the wrong house. Or the wrong country. Maybe I’m really Finnish or Danish.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’ll make the best of it. The food’s good, and they seem friendly. Why make waves now?”
I hung up the phone.
“So what did she say?” asked Nozzie.
“She likes the food.”
“She likes any food.”
Grandma Papa came up behind me, tied an apron around my waist and steered me back into the kitchen.
“But I don’t know a thing about making cranberry sauce.”
“Well, neither did I until Grandma Papa found the recipe in the family cookbook. It’s so old, we think it might have been from the first Thanksgiving.”
I doubted that, but the total look of joy on Grandma Papa’s face told me she did and I should keep quiet. Besides, I didn’t know if our family might trace itself back to the Pilgrims, but I suspected my ancestors entered the New World on a boat that got lost on its way to the penal colony in Australia.
Grandma gestured toward the counter next to the sink. The cookbook lay open to a recipe for cranberry sauce. I glanced at it. It didn’t say famous or Grandma People’s. And it was typed. So much for the Pilgrims.
“You wash cranberries in the sink, and we’ll cook. We can talk while I get the cooked berries into the jars. I’ve got an order for five hundred jars tomorrow at Marshall Field’s store in Chicago.” Nozzie smiled and did a little dance around the stove.
“Five hundred? Out of this kitchen?” I couldn’t see how they could turn out a hundred before tomorrow. “How are you going to get them there?”
“That’s where you come in, Darcie.” Nozzie winked at me and stirred the pot of cooking berries while Grandma kept an eye on the filled jars doing their final cooking in the boiling water.
I wondered if Mom’s ship had sailed yet. Maybe there was yet time to join her.
“Don’t you just love it? Next to purple, red is my favorite color. And why wouldn’t it be?” Nozzie chuckled and fluffed up her flame-colored hair.
“Yup, it couldn’t be better. We’re making money. Enough money to put in a new furnace. We won’t have to borrow from the bank. Or beg money off your mother. And next year early in the fall we’ll add my famous applesauce,” Grandma said.
“You have a famous applesauce recipe?”
“I will by next year.” She continued to check the clacking jars. She stood on a stepstool so she could peer over the top of the pot.
“Where’d you come up with the name ‘Grandma People’? And what other jams and jellies are you making? I only see cranberry sauce.”
“Don’t you think the name’s friendly, cozy, like home?” Nozzie asked.
“Sure, but where did you get it?” I sloshed cranberries around in the sink water and then scooped them into a large basin.<
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“Oh, somewhere. I think it’s an old family name.” Nozzie flipped the spoon through the air in a dismissive gesture.
It might be a family name, but not from our family, of that I was almost certain.
“We’re starting small this year.” Nozzie’s glance traveled around the kitchen. “But I guess we could expand into cranberry jam and jelly for the Christmas season.”
No reason why they shouldn’t sabotage Christmas as well as Thanksgiving.
“How many jars have you made so far?”
Nozzie pointed to a TV tray sitting beside the kitchen door. On it sat about twenty-four filled jars.
I groaned. “Tell me the others are outside on the porch.”
“Yep. Go look for yourself.” Nozzie held out her wooden spoon and pointed with it toward the back porch. Sauce dripped onto the floor where it joined the other splotches of cooked cranberry.
I walked out the back door and, sure enough, there sat hundreds of jars. All empty. All waiting to be filled.
I shook my head. There was no sense pointing out the obvious. We’d be lucky to have a hundred or so filled jars by tomorrow assuming we got no sleep tonight. Marshall Field’s would be out of luck. Maybe the shortage would make Grandma People’s sauce more valuable and the store would be satisfied to make more money by raising the price on it.
I shrugged and returned to washing berries.
“We even got a contract.” Again Nozzie gestured, this time toward the counter between the sink and stove. Another large splat of sauce hit the floor.
I pushed aside five-pound bags of sugar and located a paper underneath. It was sticky with red goo. I quickly read through it. There was nothing unusual in it until I came to the last paragraph.
“Do you realize if you don’t deliver those five hundred jars by tomorrow noon that you’ll be charged a penalty of a thousand dollars?”
“Oh, sure. That’s why we need to get this done.” Another dismissive gesture from Aunt Nozzie’s spoon. Plop. Splat.
Both Grandma and Nozzie laughed and said in unison, “Cuz we don’t have a thousand dollars.”
“It’s called incentive, Darcie. Don’t they teach you anything at that school?” Nozzie turned the burner down.
“I’m studying psychology, not finance.”
“That is psychology. It’s motivation to succeed.” Nozzie turned the burner down some more.
“Turn that back up.” Grandma stopped her surveillance of the jars and looked into the sauce pot.
“It’ll burn.”
“No it won’t.”
“Yes, it will. I know what I’m doing.”
“Whose recipe is this anyway?”
They squared off, Grandma’s nose level with Nozzie’s bust.
“Do you want to do the cooking?” asked Nozzie.
“I’m too short to get above the pan.”
“Well. Then.”
Grandma sighed. “I’ll recheck the recipe.”
“Fine.”
Grandma went over to the counter and peered at the recipe.
“Ma! The pot’s almost boiled dry. Get over here and remove the jars or they’ll explode. We’ll have sauce all over the place.”
Not that we didn’t have sauce all over the place already.
Grandma removed the jars from the water and set them on the counter upside down.
I looked at her with curiosity.
“That’s so they seal properly. I need to get at the sink. I need more water in this pot.”
I moved aside to let her in.
For the next hour I washed berries, Nozzie cooked sauce, all three of us filled jars, then Grandma did the final cooking in the jars. Now we had filled twenty-four more jars. And it was only eleven in the evening. We were really speeding right along. At this pace we might finish the order in time for Christmas. By then Grandma and Nozzie would be living on the street. With all those jars of sauce.
I hated to be negative especially with the holiday coming up, which in the past had spelled the loss of two men in Nozzie’s life. She had enough grief with those deaths and now her money situation. She certainly deserved something good to happen, but I was probably not going to be the one to give it to her. I was about to break into the celebration that twenty-four more jars occasioned, but Grandma left off her part of the dance to dump sugar into the cooking pot along with more cranberries and some water. Wasn’t anybody measuring anything, I wondered. Nozzie tossed in some spices. I looked at the labels: cinnamon, allspice, cloves, garlic.
“Garlic?” I asked.
“Oh, that. It’s not really garlic. The jar was empty so we filled it with dried orange peel.” Nozzie stirred in the spices.
I took a sniff. It was orange peel with just a soupçon of garlic.
“I think you should have washed out the jar.”
“Told you, Ma.”
Grandma stuck out her tongue at her daughter and set out sterilized jars on the counter.
“Should we tell Darcie about the death threats?” Grandma asked.
Oh, fine. Here we go. It was what I expected. No Thanksgiving is complete without a death or two.
I tried to look calm and asked, my voice breaking only a little, “Uh, what death threats?”
“Over there next to the recipe.” Again Nozzie’s spoon swung in the direction of the counter and another glop of sauce hit the floor.
I left off my job and looked at the papers lying under the recipe.
“Did these come in the mail?” I read through the notes. Each one was short, but clear.
“Shoved under the door.” Nozzie took a taste of the new batch of sauce. “Too much garlic, I mean, orange peel.”
There were four notes in all. The tone of the notes increased in threat level from “You’d better stop making that sauce” to “Stop or you’ll die.”
“The last one came just this morning,” said Grandma.
“I don’t suppose you told the police about these,” I asked and got head shakes from both of them.
“Too busy,” said Nozzie. “Nothing’s happened so far.”
That was a little like saying that my Uncle Harold was kind of dead when his killer cut off his head along with that of the Thanksgiving turkey several years ago. Nozzie always did try to stay upbeat.
We took a short break for peanut butter sandwiches and coffee. That was around three in the morning. We’d completed almost a hundred and fifty jars. If we stayed up all night we might just make it. A batch of jars was doing its final cooking, and Nozzie had begun another round of sauce. I heard the front door open.
“Are you expecting someone?” I asked.
“At this hour? No.” Nozzie turned in the direction of the door. Splat.
The door to the kitchen swung open and a woman clad in a mustard yellow barn coat sizes too big for her stood there. She was also carrying a shotgun too big for her, but she seemed to manage it just fine as she used it to sweep the room. It came to rest on Grandma.
“Bertie Hanford. What’re you doing up this late? Couldn’t sleep? Tired of watching late-night TV? I don’t think we’re much more entertaining, but come on in. We’ve got coffee.” Grandma gestured toward the pot on the counter.
“I don’t think she’s after coffee,” I said.
“Who’re you?” Mrs. Hanford asked.
“The granddaughter and niece. Don’t you want to put down that gun? It looks real heavy.”
“I’ll put it down once I finish with these two. And I suppose you’ll tell the cops who did it, so you’ll have to go too.” For such a little woman, only a few inches taller than Grandma, she sure was imposing when angry. And armed.
“How about we give you a few jars of this here sauce?” asked Nozzie. “Old family recipe.”
“It is not. It’s mine. I gave you that recipe years ago, and I want it back. And I want you to stop making my sauce. And, oh yeah, I want you dead.”
The filled jars in the pot of boiling water began to chatter and clank with increased
ferocity. I glanced over at the pot and noticed the water had almost boiled off again.
“Uh, Grandma. I think there’s a problem.”
“Sure is. Mrs. Hanford wants to kill all of us. Tell her, Nozzie, how not meeting our deadline will jeopardize getting a furnace for this place.” Grandma ignored the insistent clattering of the jars.
“You won’t need a furnace where you’re going. I’m sending you straight to hell.” Mrs. Hanford raised the shotgun to fire. The sound erupted with a roar. Lids blew off jars of sauce in the now dry pot. Sauce hit the ceiling and walls. Grandma toppled off her stool and lay on the floor, red covering the bib of her apron.
“I think she got me.” Grandma grabbed her chest. Nozzie and I ran to her.
“One down. Two to go,” said Mrs. Hanford. As she stepped forward to take aim, she stepped into one of the many puddles of cranberry sauce on the floor and slipped. The gun flew from her hand and landed in the pot of bubbling sauce.
“That’s not an ingredient that should be in there,” said Nozzie.
She turned her attention away from the cooking gun to her mother.
“Ma, are you okay?”
“I think I’m gonna die. Remember to bury me in that black lace number of yours. You can just have the funeral director pin the excess material behind me. No one will know.”
I leaned down to hear her next words and caught the smell of…cranberry sauce.
“You’re not going to die unless you drown in this stuff. That’s not blood. It’s sauce.”
Mrs. Hanford turned toward the back door.
“No you don’t, lady.” I tackled her on her way out.
Nozzie helped Grandma off the floor and into a chair. “I’ll call the cops.”
I dragged Mrs. Hanford back into the kitchen, lifted the hot shotgun out of the sauce and pointed the sticky weapon at her.
“I don’t care what you do to me. Your grandma and aunt stole my property.” She continued to wail about that the recipe was hers until the police arrived.
When the uniformed officer stepped through the door, he stopped in his tracks, a look of horror on his face. “The carnage. Those wounds look serious. I’ll call an ambulance.”
The Killer Wore Cranberry Page 3