The Killer Wore Cranberry

by J. Alan Hartman

  Detective O’Donnell interrupted my babbling for a reasonable question. “Why would asking for the yams be such a controversial request?”

  I had to concede it was all sounding a little crazy. “To a normal family, it wouldn’t be, but my family has quirks, especially my mom and Uncle Bob.” O’Donnell simply nodded and let me continue.

  Mom and Uncle Bob never got along well. It started in childhood. People often say how you don’t need to like your siblings, but you still love them. Not so. Mom thought Uncle Bob was smug. Uncle Bob thought my mom was a prima donna. Not only could they not stand each other, neither would have cared if the other dropped off the face of the earth. And for a while, Bob did just that by moving to California from Illinois.

  Bob moved out west for an important promotion with his company. The higher he rose up the ladder, the more condescending he became, at least in my mother’s eyes. Plus, my mom has always been one of those people who didn’t like anyone she thought of as authoritarian. If a person brought up a topic that Mom felt passionate about, and if said person’s view did not align with my mother’s own, all hell would break loose. We all knew there were certain subjects not to broach—seatbelt laws, smoking bans and antique furniture to name a few. But the one known best was yams. This was the first year he was back in town for Thanksgiving, and what had been a day of tenuous peace between the two was about to break. And it was gonna break bad.

  O’Donnell raised his eyebrows and quipped, “Just tell me about the yams. I’m not even gonna ask about the antique furniture.”

  I had to giggle a little at that comment. Then I got to the part about the yams.

  It had all come to light during that Thanksgiving five years ago—Uncle Bob’s last before leaving town. We were all at Gram’s for dinner when someone asked for the yams. At that time it was considered a rather innocuous question, except to my mother.

  “They are not yams,” she said, putting her fork down. “They are sweet potatoes. Yams are a different vegetable entirely. Don’t you people know anything?”

  Her question was met with silence. Finally, my Aunt Connie, who has always been the peacekeeper in the family, spoke up. “I didn’t know they were different things. I thought a yam was a sweet potato.” There were murmurs of agreement from the rest of us.

  Mom shook her head emphatically. “Yams are not sweet potatoes, Connie. In fact, yams are not commonly sold in the United States. They are from Africa. Sweet potatoes aren’t even the same species of plant.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that,” Aunt Connie observed. “That’s very interesting. I always thought they were one and the same.”

  “Well, they’re not. I saw a TV show about it, and then studied about them online. The confusion started because in colonial days, sweet potatoes reminded slaves of something they used to eat in Africa. That something was called the yam. The name stuck, but they aren’t the same thing. Not the same at all.”

  The conversation should have ended there, but Uncle Bob had to get a dig at my mom. “So,” he asserted, leaning back in his chair, “does it bother you that we call sweet potatoes by a name that originated in Africa? That kind of sounds racist.”

  Someone dropped a knife on their plate. Others froze in mid-chew. I tried to deflect the situation the usual way by asking, “Hey, anyone seen a good movie lately?” with exaggerated enthusiasm.

  My mother stood up, her face reddened with anger. Bob just stared at her with what could only be described as a “shit-eating” grin on his face.

  “Bob!” she yelled. “YOU KNOW I don’t have a racist bone in my body. How dare you!?” Her voice shook with rage.

  Bob remained calm. Too calm. A goading calm. “Peggy”—he always called her Peggy instead of Margaret like everyone else, just because she hated it—”you’re the one who advocates the segregation of potatoes. We’re Irish. Potatoes are all the same to us. I don’t care if they’re purple or red or yellow. Yams. Sweet potatoes. A potato is a potato and all should be welcomed at this dinner table.”

  “Bob, you’re an ass. You’ve always been an ass. And you know your comment wasn’t about potatoes.” She stormed out of the dining room and into the garage for a cigarette. I followed.

  “Mom, Uncle Bob is just trying to bait you. Don’t let him get to you,” I pled. “It’s Thanksgiving. Let’s just have a nice dinner.”

  Mom stared at me, her eyes wild. “What? Are you on his side? Do you think I’m prejudiced?”

  Fuck, I thought to myself, I can’t believe this all started with potatoes. “Of course not, Mom. I just want to enjoy the day.”

  “Well, what about my day? My feelings? Don’t they count?”

  I knew there was no arguing with her. “I’m sorry, Mom. Of course they count. You’re not a bigot. Everyone knows that.”

  “Well, now I’m not so sure. Now I think everyone at that table believes I’m some kind of racist. I can’t go back in there now. I’m getting out of here.”

  My mom stormed out of the house, got into her car and sat a moment before driving off. The yams incident was never spoken of again. Even Uncle Bob’s name was rarely mentioned in her presence. Until today, that is, when he had to go there. He had to bring up the yams.

  Detective O’Donnell cleared his throat to signal me to stop talking. “Miss Hartigan. I still don’t understand. How did your Uncle Jim end up dead?”

  “Oh,” I said, “you see, after Uncle Bob asked for the yams, my mom totally lost it. She got up from the table, went around to Uncle Bob and started choking him from behind with a rolled-up napkin.”

  “And your Uncle Jim interceded somehow?”

  “No, Uncle Jim was a quiet man. He never got into the middle of things. Everyone else did, though. I got up and ran over to my mom and tried to pull her away from Uncle Bob. But the harder I pulled, the tighter she grasped the napkin, which just made things worse. Matthew and Tim were trying to pry my mom’s hands off the napkin. Uncle Bob was trying to stab my mom with his fork but there were too many people in the way. My aunt and my sister ran around the table the other way, but they got stuck because they couldn’t fit around the back of my grandma’s chair. Matthew’s wife scooted into the other room where the kids were sitting. And my grandma was throwing dinner rolls at all of us yelling, ‘Knock it off! Knock it off!’”

  “Okay, so this is when Jim got involved?”

  “No, Uncle Jim never got up. He just sat quietly watching us and continued eating.”

  O’Donnell sighed.

  “Finally, my mom let go and the momentum sent me, Matthew and Tim flying backwards. I slammed into the wall and slid down onto my ass. Then my mom yelled, ‘You can all go to hell’ and ran into the bedroom.”

  “What happened next?” O’Donnell impatiently tapped his pen on his notepad.

  “Well, I was sitting on the floor wondering whether everyone had asked for forgiveness since we’d all been sent to hell. I thought the whole thing was over. Then my little nephew John came in because of the commotion. He tugged on Uncle Jim’s shirt and Jim slumped over on the table. That’s when we realized he wasn’t breathing, so we called the ambulance.”

  “You seem rather calm about this, Miss Hartigan,” the detective observed.

  “I think I’m in shock. One minute we’re all running around after my mother, then everything went quiet. Then we noticed Uncle Jim had died. The whole thing is just too freaky. Oh, and the EMT gave me a Valium. But when Jim fell over, everyone leapt to his end of the table. My Uncle Bob started doing chest compressions and Mom did mouth-to-mouth.”

  O’Donnell scratched his head with his pen. “I thought your mom and uncle hated each other.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said, “but nobody hated Uncle Jim.”

  The detective gave me an odd look and was just about to say something when a policewoman interrupted us by poking her head around the living room door. “We’d like to see the whole family in the dining room, please.”

  I got up and walked into the other
room with O’Donnell in tow. Everyone was seated around the dinner table in the same spots they had sat in earlier. Except for Uncle Jim, of course. He had already been moved into the ambulance. My gram and Aunt Connie were crying. My mom was sitting stone-faced with her arms crossed on her chest. Matthew and Tim both shot me wide-eyed looks. Tim mouthed, “What the fuck.” Everyone was too stunned to speak.

  An EMT stood at the head of the table. “We want to express our condolences to your family. We will be conducting an autopsy on the deceased, but feel we may already have identified the cause of death. It appears that James died of asphyxiation. He choked on what looks to be a cube of toasted bread that we found lodged in his throat. A crouton, perhaps.”

  Uncle Bob cleared his throat. “It wasn’t a crouton. I brought the salad so I know. There were no croutons. It must have been from the stuffing.”

  Anxious eyes glanced at each other, waiting for what we knew would come next.

  “Bob,” my mother admonished, “it was not stuffing. It was dressing. They are completely different things. My God…don’t you know the difference?”

  Vegetables Aren’t Good For You!

  By Laird Long

  Morris knew something was wrong when the fat, brown potato he was about to pull out of the ground said to him, “You don’t really want to mash me, do you, Morris?”

  Morris dropped the potato like it was hot and jumped backwards. Then he watched with widened eyes and gaping mouth as the potato burrowed itself back into the black earth.

  Morris staggered over to the pumpkin patch section of his large garden. Thanksgiving was only a week and a half away, and he needed to start preparing the “all-inclusive” dinners for which he was rightfully famous throughout Morin County. His meals boasted turkey and all the trimmings, fresh raised and killed and cooked on his hobby farm.

  So he was shocked a second time, when the big, orange pumpkin he laid trembling hands on said to him, “You don’t really want to gut me, do you, Morris?”

  Morris backed off, almost tripping over one of the chickens that had free range of his small barnyard. He wiped his forehead, his mouth, staring from the pumpkin patch to the potato patch. Maybe if he approached a smaller vegetable, things would go better.

  Morris cautiously walked over to the pea patch. He reached down for a plumped, green pod on the vine. And the peas inside said to him, “You don’t really want to shuck us, do you, Morris?”

  He backpedaled.

  Morris didn’t know what the heck was going on, but he did know that he sure as heck wasn’t going to approach the squash patch. He could well imagine what those large, yellow gourds would say to him.

  Morris planted a damp, twitching hand on the side of his small red barn for support, thinking maybe the cream he’d put in his coffee that morning had been curdled. He often forgot to sniff in his rush to get to work.

  It was a beautiful morning—bright and warm, a huge yellow sun beaming down out of a clear blue sky. Chickens clucked and birds chirped and…vegetables mouthed off? Morris didn’t grow any “magic” mushrooms on his farm, like some of his neighbours.

  As he was leaning against the barn, desperately trying to regain his composure and figure out a plan of extraction to take on his vegetables, he suddenly heard the tramping of tiny feet behind him, coming from the open barn. He gulped, afraid to turn around. Were the animals against him, too? No, that chicken hadn’t beaked back.

  He turned around.

  Morris’s turkeys were marching out of the barn where he kept them, in a four-abreast formation, swinging their wings and waggling their wattles, webbed feet crunching rhythmically on the hard-packed ground. And as they tramped forward in feathered formation, they chanted in cadence, “Eat me-at, Morris! Eat me-at, Morris!” Bird after bird, marching out of the barn toward the stunned hobby farmer.

  Morris reeled away. He stumbled over the chicken, tumbled backwards and banged his head on the blood-stained chopping block in the middle of the yard. He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, out cold.

  * * *

  “Dead,” Doc Hychuk pronounced, crouching down next to Morris Pilston’s laid-out body.

  Sheriff Centers grunted and thumbed back his porkpie Stetson. He eyed the chicken pecking nearby, listening to the chorus of turkey gobbles warbling out from the barn. “Foul…play, Doc?”

  Hychuk examined Morris’s eyes, stuck his fingers into the dead man’s ears, felt the corpse’s throat and peered into the mouth. “Looks like rootric poisoning, Sheriff. It’s a toxin that causes hallucinations if ingested, overheating of the brain and bodily organs. Usually not fatal, except in this case. The concussion Pilston suffered when his head bounced off the chopping block caused his already overstressed brain to shut down, killing his other organs. Rootric is a fine powder, fast-acting and tasteless. Could easily be dissolved in a cup of coffee, for example, without the drinker noticing. This man hasn’t been dead more than half an hour.”

  Centers repeated his grunt. “That’s mighty good info—coming from a veterinarian.”

  Doc Hychuk straightened up. “Yes, you’re lucky I happened to be passing by. The coroner might have more to add. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to lance a sebaceous cyst on the Jones’s sow down the road.”

  Centers didn’t touch that punch line. Portly Ma Jones had enough problems.

  The Sheriff turned to the three people standing behind him—two women and a man. The man was Morris Pilston’s brother, Milton. The woman next to him was his wife, Marjory. The woman next to her was Morris’ estranged wife, Helen.

  As Hychuk trudged away to his Woodie, Centers asked Milton, “How soon after your brother left the breakfast table did you find him out here on the ground?”

  “Not more than five minutes, Sheriff. We’d all eaten breakfast together. Morris left the table to get to work, while the three of us continued talking over coffee.”

  “He was unconscious—dead?”

  “No, Sheriff. His eyes popped open for a second while I yelled at my wife to call nine-one-one, and he…”

  “Yeah?”

  Milton swallowed. “He looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘I’ve reaped what I’ve sowed. The har-vest! The har-vest!’ And then he was…gone.”

  “Hey, Sheriff, come and take a look at this!” Deputy Duggan shouted at his boss from over by the garden.

  “You three stay here,” Centers told the trio, then ambled over to the vegetable patch. He looked at the small wooden sign nailed to a thin wooden post that his deputy was pointing at.

  The sign read “Green Zone.” But crudely spray-painted over those green letters, in blood-red, was “VLA—Growing Together.”

  “What do you make of it?” Duggan asked. “Some sort of agricultural association or booster club?”

  Centers thumbed his porkpie Stetson even further back on his head, giving more of his tall, bald forehead room to breathe. “Strange way to advertise, if it is. Report it in to the station. See if ‘VLA’ shows up in our known agitators file.”

  The two lawmen trekked back to the one dead body and the three live ones. And one of the living spoke up.

  “Sheriff, Laura Evers, who lives next door, was here earlier in the morning. I heard her voice in the kitchen, talking to Morris, before we all came down for breakfast.” The discloser of that tattle-bit was Helen Pilston.

  “Okay,” Centers said, turning to his deputy. “Once you call in the signpost jottings, drive over and pick up Laura Evers and bring her back over here.”

  Deputy Duggan jogged away to the Sheriff’s Department vehicle parked in the long gravel driveway. Sheriff Centers ushered the three citizens back into the house, leaving Morris Pilston to bake in the warm November sun like a Thanksgiving ham.

  Centers had the trio sit back down at the kitchen table, without touching any of the dirty dishes, cutlery and mugs. And by the time Duggan returned with the next-field neighbour, the Sheriff had a little more information on each of his suspects.

  Hel
en Pilston was still living in the same house with her estranged (now deceased) husband because she had nowhere else to go. The couple had been separated emotionally, if not physically, because she’d caught Morris playing post office with the roving rural letter carrier.

  Milton Pilston and his wife, Marjory, were staying at the house while they were on vacation for two weeks. They lived in Nebraska. There’d been an ongoing squabble between the pair and Morris as to who really owned the family farm, after the two brothers’ parents had bought it—literally and figuratively.

  “A real friendly Thanksgiving gathering,” Sheriff Centers summed up dryly to his deputy in the living room of the home. “What did you learn about this neighbour, Laura Evers?”

  Evers was now seated in the kitchen with the other three.

  “She’s a cattle, sheep and pig rancher,” Duggan replied. “She admits there’d been squabbles between her and Pilston in the past over effluent issues.”

  “Something stinks, all right,” Centers agreed.

  Just then a message crackled over the deputy’s shoulder-mounted two-way. He clarified the garble for his boss. “‘VLA’ stands for, get this: Vegetable Liberation Army. Apparently, a small group of ‘earthers’ dedicated to stopping the ‘harvesting’ of vegetables for their living bodily matter. They’re on the FBI’s watchlist—the Farmers Bureau, Incorporated, that is.”

  Centers’ thumb rode his porkpie Stetson almost right off the back of his bald head. But then his eyes suddenly lit up and he smacked his lips like he’d sighted a turducken fresh from the deep-fryer. He gripped Duggan’s arm and pushed the puzzled officer back into the kitchen.

  The four seated suspects looked up at the Sheriff. “Okay,” he said, “who here really likes their vegetables?”

  “I don’t,” Laura Evers responded first to the strange question. The cattle, sheep and pig farmer laughed. “I’m a meat-lover. It pays better.”

  “We’re, uh, both vegetarians, actually,” Milton Pilston offered up next, glancing nervously at his wife. “We’ve tried to talk Morris out of putting his turkeys on the chopping block in the past. But we wouldn’t resort to violence over the issue.”