The Killer Wore Cranberry

by J. Alan Hartman

  Would Moon have alerted me so promptly if she had been the killer? Maybe yes, maybe no. They told us in cop training that psychopaths are emotionally cold and don’t have a conscience, which can make them poor at visualizing the reactions of normal people. Was Moon a psychopath? She loved her sled dogs and talked baby talk to them in a high voice that made her sound like a stoned Smurf. Did that show she had the ability to love others, or did it indicate she had bodies buried under her woodpile?

  “Okay,” I said in my warmest I-suspect-you-of-nothing voice. “That makes sense. So let’s get on with this. If anyone in town is alive besides you and me, one of them has to be the killer.”

  For the next hour or so we mushed from house to house waking up people and telling them that Nowhere had just experienced a sudden decrease in population. I talked to every living person in town and by the end of it, I had decided all of them could have committed the homicides but probably none of them had.

  Item One: They all had the same alibi: “At the time of the murders, I was eating Thanksgiving dinner in the presence of witnesses.”

  Item Two: They all had knives large enough to behead whales, not an unusual thing in Alaska. They also all had enough guns to resupply the U.S. Army, including an M240 machine gun that Ben Carter said he sometimes used to hunt caribou.

  Item Three: They all looked visibly surprised and upset when Moon and I told them twenty-four of their neighbors had had their throats slit. The most upset of all was Travis Warfield, who fainted dead away. As Moon and I lugged him over to the sofa, I found myself wondering why the news had hit him so hard.

  I never would have pegged Travis for the fainting type. He was a short, stocky guy who ordinarily had the courage of a pit bull on meth. Last September, he’d blown the head off a grizzly sow who was charging straight at him at thirty miles an hour. Unfortunately, he’d killed her too late to save the life of his son Richie, whom the sow had already beheaded with one swipe of her gigantic paw.

  Anybody might faint after seeing his own son beheaded, but Travis had just skinned the bear, picked up what was left of Richie, and built a big fire to keep the wolves off. I suppose there hadn’t been enough left of the bear’s head to be worth the taxidermy fees, but that bear rug in front of Travis’s fireplace was definitely grizzly

  I’d never much liked Richie. He was an arrogant, whiz kid geneticist with a Ph.D. from MIT who had come up here two years ago after he was fired from U.C. San Francisco for doing experiments on live animals without the proper permits. I imagine sooner or later he would have gone back to the Lower Forty-Eight, but unfortunately no one bothered to tell him that you never come between a grizzly bear mama and her cubs.

  Travis also had a deaf daughter named Kimberly who lived in Florida. When Kimberly came up for a visit, she and Moon and Travis were always waving their hands at each other. Moon had a deaf brother and could sign with the best of them.

  As soon as Travis opened his eyes and sat up, I gave him a shot of whiskey, which he downed in one gulp. Then I poured myself a shot. Moon, who claims alcohol drills holes in her aura, went out to the kitchen to see if she could locate a teabag.

  “So,” I said to Travis. “You okay?”

  Travis nodded. “Yep,” he said.

  “Why’d you faint?”

  “The deceased was my customers.”

  For a moment I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then I remembered he was raising turkeys in his basement. It had been Richie’s idea. In winter there’s a shortage of fresh meat around here unless you want to hunt it down, kill it and skin it. Last Thanksgiving the Jensens and the Patucks had been the only people willing to pay Travis to put his turkeys on their tables. This year he must have sold birds to them and to the Vandenbergs, Bonnevilles, Murrays, Da Silvas, and Hiram Hawk.

  “So are you saying somebody just wiped out all your customers?”

  Travis nodded sadly. “Yep, that’s about the size of it. You reckon any of the survivors will be interested in buying turkeys from me next year?”

  “Sure. They’ll be flocking to you.” That was a lie. Everyone left alive in Nowhere was either too poor to buy Travis’s birds, or they were vegans like Moon who lived on tofu and seaweed. Or they were like me and preferred drinking a couple of shots of whiskey and eating a Hungry Man Turkey Dinner on Thanksgiving Day instead of wasting their time in the kitchen chopping and basting. Not that I’d turn down one of Travis’s turkeys next year if it came already stuffed and cooked. Personally, I’ve never liked to mess with anything you can’t pull out of the freezer and microwave, but I’m still hoping to find myself a woman in high heels who owns a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

  While Travis was in the bathroom splashing cold water on his face, I went into the kitchen to see how Moon was doing with the tea and caught her nibbling on a ham that was sitting out on the counter. When she saw me, she tried to pretend she had nothing in her mouth, but the grease on her fingers was a giveaway.

  “I thought you were a vegan,” I said.

  Moon turned bright red. “I am mostly. But sometimes my body tells me it needs meat.” She tore off another piece of ham and ate it defiantly. “Why do you suppose Travis didn’t have turkey for Thanksgiving like everyone else?”

  “He’s probably sick of turkey. Besides, it looks like Marcie isn’t here this year and Marcie always cooks their Thanksgiving turkey.”

  Marcie was Travis’s wife, or maybe trophy wife, or possibly they’d never married. She came up to Nowhere in the late spring and left for Seattle as soon as the days started getting short, always returning for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This Thanksgiving it seemed she hadn’t shown up. Maybe she and Travis were having marital problems, but if so Travis would never tell you. He was the kind of guy who wouldn’t let on he was in pain if a wolverine was chewing off his right foot.

  “Marcie might not have been here lately, but somebody has,” Moon said. “There’s a pair of plus-size pantyhose hanging over the shower rod in Travis’s bathroom.”

  “Maybe Travis likes to play dress-up when Marcie’s not around. Let’s get out of here. I want to go back and talk to the survivors again. All of them had the opportunity to commit the murders; all of them had the means; now we need to figure out who had the strongest motive. I think we can eliminate Travis because he had nothing to gain by offing all his customers.”

  Back we went into the blizzard, where we found Moon’s sled dogs stamping the ground and barking like the hounds of hell. “I bet they smell the turkeys,” Moon said as we climbed into the sleigh. “Travis’s house stinks like a chicken yard.”

  We did the rounds again and found everyone nailing boards over their windows. In Alaska where anyone over the age of five who has not committed a felony can own a gun, it was not surprising to find that my neighbors were now armed like Rambo, which is not to say they were uncooperative. All of them were more than willing to tell Moon and me the motive for the murders—not their own motive, which they claimed didn’t exist, but the motive of anyone they had a grudge against.

  When we finished doing the second round of interrogations, Moon and I went back to my place to drink hot coffee and thaw out.

  “All the survivors had a good motive to kill at least one of the deceased,” Moon observed glumly as she piled sugar into her cup.

  “Right,” I agreed. “But none of them had a motive to kill all twenty-four.”

  Moon leaned back and closed her eyes. “You taking a nap?” I asked.

  “Shut up, Yvette. I’m channeling Isis.”

  “Well, when Ms. Isis is ready to talk, let me know. Meanwhile I’ll concentrate on finding some lunch.” I started to get up, but she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back down.

  “I’ve got it!” she said. “It’s terrorists!”

  “What?”

  “Terrorists. You know, like Al-Qaeda.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Think about it, Yvette: a bunch of innocent Americans sits
down for a sacred national feast—”

  “Hold on. First, since everyone moves south as soon as they have kids, there’s no one in this town who can accurately be called ‘innocent.’ We’ve just heard that our fellow citizens sleep with their mothers and hunt endangered animals by helicopter, not to mention other things I don’t even want to think about. Second, Thanksgiving is a secular holiday based on what might well be a myth.”

  “My point is, Thanksgiving is the perfect time for terrorists to attack.”

  “Are you saying there was an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell in Nowhere? Don’t you think we might have noticed them? There isn’t a person in Nowhere we don’t know on sight.”

  “Well, then, if it’s not Al-Qaeda, there’s only one explanation.” Moon pulled a creepy-looking charm made of bone and moose hair out of her pocket and pressed it into my hand. “Demons, Yvette! It has to be demons!”

  “Baloney,” I said, tossing Moon’s charm into the trash. Then I went to the fridge to see if the real baloney had gone off.

  We returned to the Murrays’ to see if we’d overlooked something. As soon as we walked in the door, Moon went into the dining room, picked up the carving knife, and began to cut slices of white meat off the turkey.

  “Your body talking to you again?” I asked.

  Moon glared at me. “Can’t a person make herself a sandwich without being interrogated?” Grabbing a couple of slices of bread from the breadbasket, she slapped the turkey on one and topped it off with cranberry sauce and gravy. She was just starting to cram the whole mess into her mouth when I had a revelation.

  “Stop!” I yelled, knocking it out of her hand. “It’s poisoned!”

  Moon looked at me as if she’d gladly turn me into a toad. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The turkey! Don’t eat it! Turkey was the only thing the Thanksgiving dinners of the victims had in common. Someone must have poisoned their turkeys and then slit their throats after they were dead. I just remembered dead people don’t bleed much when you cut them.”

  “Impressive,” Moon said. “Did you learn that in cop school?”

  “No, I saw it on an episode of PBS Masterpiece Mystery.”

  “That accounts for Attila. The Vandenbergs must have fed him turkey scraps. Any doubt in your mind who did the poisoning?”

  “None,” I said.

  We mushed back to Travis’s place and I read him his Miranda rights and told him he was under arrest for the murder of twenty-four of his neighbors, but before I could slap a pair of cuffs on him, he started signing to Moon.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked.

  “Hang on,” Moon said. “You’re not going to believe this.” She grabbed a copy of Huntin’ Fool magazine and began to scrawl on it.

  He says the turkeys made him do it, she wrote. He says he can’t talk out loud because the turkeys are spying on us right now. He says Richie modified their genes so they could think like people, and when they realized what happened to turkeys on Thanksgiving, the whole flock vowed revenge. He claims seven of them volunteered to be “suicide turkeys” so the others could murder all the turkey-eaters in town. He claims the turkeys made him slit the victims’ throats after they were dead so no one would suspect turkeys were behind the killings. He also claims the turkeys are holding Marcie hostage in the basement.

  I took the pen from her hand and wrote: He’s crazy. Then I cuffed Travis to the pipes in the bathroom, and Moon and I went down in the basement, where we found a dozen turkeys and Marcie.

  Marcie was trussed up with twenty-four-ply Butcher Twine like—well, to be honest, exactly like a turkey. When Moon and I went over to untie her, the turkeys charged at us and tried to peck out our eyes. Drawing my gun, I blew away all twelve of those murdering, psychotic fowls.

  Maybe Travis wasn’t crazy after all.

  Next Year, the Lotus Garden

  By Mary Patterson Thornburg

  Another Thanksgiving fiasco, Kate McGraw thought as she stood over the kitchen trash can with a virtually untouched bowl of cornbread-and-chestnut dressing in one hand and a large spoon in the other. And I’d be thankful it was over, if it were only over.

  But it wasn’t over; with this thought she drew back the bowl. Outside, the wind howled across the sagebrush flat and snowdrifts swelled. They’d been little things at first, but by now they’d be tall, swirling shapes across the county road, daring any driver to attempt a passage through them.

  So she’d better save the dressing. It was too salty to eat, but she still had an onion, one stick of celery, and another bag of bread cubes. Maybe she could make a batch without salt and the combination would be edible. Or maybe no one would care. If this storm kept up, they’d be like the Donner party out here, glad for any form of sustenance, eyeing each other surreptitiously when the leftovers gave out. Were there eggs for breakfast? Yes, eleven—one apiece if the twins split one and she passed. Then she remembered Ruth Ann, who’d announced as the turkey was being carved that she’d become a vegan. The twins could each have an egg. Ruth Ann could starve, or whatever. There’d been no vegans among the Donner party.

  Carefully scraping food into bags—the regrettable dressing, the green-bean casserole, the broccoli salad (with, thankfully, bacon and sour cream), the creamed onions, the rich sweet-potato custard, even what was left of the succotash and the cranberry-orange relish on which Ruth Ann had largely made her meal—and dumping Damon and Nessa’s delicious mixed greens into a Tupperware container, Kate recalled Thanksgivings past.

  The turkey she’d roasted for the first one, a month after their marriage, a cozy celebration for two, took longer than anticipated. Cocktails went into overtime. When they’d finally filled their plates, Mack fell face first into his and she’d barely been able to drag him, mumbling about Pilgrims, onto the couch.

  The next year, Jake and Jodi were two weeks old and Mack baked a frozen pizza, over which both he and Kate fell asleep.

  The Thanksgiving after that, Kate indulged in three large glasses of wine in the kitchen before bringing out the meal to their guests—both sets of parents and Mack’s grandmother. She tripped on the dining-room rug and crashed to the floor, preceded by the turkey, which bounced first off her father’s lap.

  And so it went, a series of disasters. This year she’d tried to persuade Mack to skip the whole thing. “The Chinese restaurant’s open on Thanksgiving,” she said. “The Lotus Garden. It’d be a nice break for us all.”

  He shook his head. “We can’t. Unfortunately. George and Marilu had that party last year, and it’s obvious he expects us to reciprocate. Dropping broad hints about the historical significance of big old ranch houses, etc. He wants an invitation so he can snoop around. Yesterday he even started whistling ‘Over the River and Through the Woods’ when I took in my midterm grades.”

  “Hell,” Kate muttered. George Shirley, English department head at the community college where they both taught, was a pompous ass known for punishing faculty with remedial classes and crack-of-dawn schedules. His wife, Marilu, a well-preserved fiftyish blonde, had published a couple of silly mysteries and fancied herself the Sue Grafton of Glencove, doing readings at local bookstores and giving what she called “whodunit” parties. “If I have to spend a whole evening in that woman’s company I’ll go mad. I might even lose it and tell her what I think of her books.”

  “You wouldn’t have to devote yourself entirely to her,” Mack said. “I don’t think they need an exclusive invitation, so we can spread her around. Invite some other people.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “How many other people?”

  “Oh, I thought four or five couples, maybe. I’ll help,” he added quickly.

  And he had helped—it was Mack, for instance, who’d oversalted the dressing. But he’d also been the one to suggest that they clear out the three unused rooms for anyone who wasn’t up to driving home, and to his credit he’d done the clearing out, even to making up the beds. “Terry and what’s-her-name are likely t
o stay, at least,” he said. “They’re not going to want to drive all the way back until morning.”

  “Her name’s Heather. And you’re not going to let Terry and that girl stay in the same room, are you? The twins—”

  “The twins’ll be asleep long before Terry’s ready to give it up, and anyway it’s time they learned not everyone’s as morally upright as the McGraws. It’ll be a teachable moment.”

  Anyway, she reflected now, pummeling the turkey carcass into the fridge, the problem hadn’t arisen: Heather was a no-show. Everyone else had appeared on schedule, however, and they were all still at the table, polishing off several bottles of expensive liquor as the storm raged.

  She and Mack had made sure to invite not only people on the faculty—this would not be a glorified college meeting—but a leavening of others too. Stanley and Ruth Ann, for instance, were students, only slightly nontraditional and chosen because their presence would discourage academic infighting. Terry Carver was an English teacher, yes, but at the regional reform school, known euphemistically as the Boys’ Home, eighty miles west in Spring City. He was something of a character, appealingly elfin in looks, and none of the rest would know him, they’d thought. So it was a surprise to find that he and young Stanley were nodding acquaintances. Something had told her not to inquire about their connection until she could ask Terry privately. When she did, he winked. “Student from four or five years back,” he said. “Little matter of a joy ride in a stolen beer truck, as I recall. Took him three tries to pass the course, which made him resent me. It’s always the teacher’s fault.”