Food Fair Frenzy

by Abby L. Vandiver

  “I know,” Miss Vivee said and waved her hand. “I just wanted Viola Rose to hurry and get us to our seats. She would have stood there for an hour and talked.”

  “Well I don’t want you to have her thinking I’d let you starve just so I could drive around.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” Miss Vivee said to Mac. “Logan took me to the doctor’s office this morning.”

  “Doctor’s? Why? Is something wrong?” Mac asked concern on his face. “Why didn’t you just come to see me?”

  “We went to that elderly doctor that Renmar wants me to go to.”

  “A geriatrician?” Mac asked. “Why does she want you to do that?”

  “Because she thinks I’m bonkers.”

  Viola Rose came just then and put down our drinks – sweet tea for Miss Vivee, a coke for me and coffee for Mac. She pulled three straws from her apron pocket. “I’ll be right back to get your orders,” she said.

  “She does not think you’re bonkers,” I said after Viola Rose left. I turned to Mac. “She was just worried about Miss Vivee because she seemed out of sorts this morning.”

  “You’d be outta sorts, too, if you thought someone might accuse you of murder,” Miss Vivee said and nodded her head. “At least I don’t go around crying for no reason like that Martha Simmons.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, what was wrong with her?”

  “I don’t have an inkling.”

  “What, Vivee?” Mac asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh! I forgot to tell you that we saw Martha Simmons at the fairgrounds.”

  “Aunt Martha?” he asked. “What was she still doing out there?”

  “Who knows?” Miss Vivee said.

  “She told us she had to collect her things,” I said and frowned at Miss Vivee. “And she met one of her customers out there. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh Lord,” Miss Vivee said. “Don’t go acting like I’m crazy again. “Of course I remember.” She turned to Mac. “But what got me was her granddaughter.”

  “Marigold?” Mac asked.

  “How did you know her name?” Miss Vivee asked.

  “I saw her there with Martha when they tried to accost Logan.”

  Miss Vivee hit the table with her palm and said, “Well, she did it again.”

  “Martha tried to accost Logan?”

  “Not Martha, she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Please try to keep up, Mac. It was her granddaughter. Iris.”

  “Marigold,” Mac and I said.

  “Well they should have named her Iris with those eyes. Anyway, she tried to best our Logan.”

  “Really? What happened?” Mac asked.

  I listened in too. I didn’t remember that happening.

  “Talking about she went to Stanford and that she’s a nutritionist and genie . . . genie . . . Genie what, Logan?”

  “Genealogist,” I said.

  “Right,” she said and nodded. “Couldn’t spit that word out.” She took another sip of tea. “But Logan straightened her out.”

  “I did?”

  “Oh I could see in your face that you knew she was lying.”

  I chuckled. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you were thinking it.”

  “Only the part when she said she studied nutrition at Stanford. But I must have been confused thinking she said she’d gone to school there.”

  “You weren’t confused. She said it. And what does a nutritionist do?” Miss Vivee asked.

  “A nutritionist is an expert in food, Vivee,” Mac said. “They know all about it, what’s healthy, what’s not.”

  “Oh, I know what a nutritionist is,” Miss Vivee waved her hand. “I’m saying compared to Logan being an archaeologist, what’s a nutritionist? Logan is the re-creator of our history. She digs it up, and she tells everyone what happened thousands of years ago, and what to think. She has influence on the story of our whole world, all the way from day one.”

  Sounded like she had been talking to my mother. Those were almost her exact words when describing our profession. But it did make me smile to think Miss Vivee thought highly of me, or at least what I did. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if she liked me. I chuckled.

  “What’s funny, Missy,” Miss Vivee said.

  “Nothing,” I said and turned my attention to studying the menu.

  Viola Rose reappeared and fished a pen out of her nest of hair piled on top of her head, and an order pad out of her apron pocket. She stood poised to take our order, but said instead, “So y’all here to solve Jack Wagner’s murder?”

  “I say,” Miss Vivee said. “Whatever gave you such an idea?”

  “That’s what y’all do, ain’t it?” She looked around the table at us. “So, you think you can solve it?”

  “His wife said he had a heart attack,” Miss Vivee offered.

  “Ain’t that a hoot? I wouldn’t be surprised if that cheating woman wasn’t the murderer herself.”

  Miss Vivee gave me a nod, as if to say, I told you so.

  “I’m not so sure if I can solve this one,” Miss Vivee spoke to Viola Rose.

  “I heard there was a note,” Viola Rose said. “They gave you a copy?”

  “You heard right,” Miss Vivee said. “There is a note, and they gave me a copy.”

  “What you make of it?” Viola Rose asked.

  “Nothing yet,” Miss Vivee said.

  “Well, I know you’ll figure it out, Miss Vivee.” Viola Rose placed her hand on Miss Vivee’s shoulder. “You got a keen eye, and a mind like a steel trap. Nobody better to get the answers.”

  Miss Vivee blushed. “You think I’ll solve it, huh?” she asked Viola Rose. “Catch the murderer?”

  “I know ya will,” Viola Rose said. “They’d have to put on an extra coat of grease to slide by you, Miss Vivee.” She smiled then looked and Mac and me. “And your little posse.” She nodded her head as if she said all she needed to say. “So what y’all having?”

  “Me and Logan’ll have the egg salad,” Miss Vivee said. “And I’ll have a cup of your split pea soup.”

  “Gotcha,” Viola Rose said.

  I don’t know why she always orders for me.

  “I’ll have the open-face turkey sandwich, Viola Rose,” I said and handed her my menu. “No egg salad.”

  “You want smashed taters with that?” she asked.

  “Yep,” I said. “With lots of gravy.”

  “What about Mac, Miss Vivee? You ordering for him, too?”

  “No,” Miss Vivee said sounding surprised that Viola Rose would ask her that. “He can order for himself.”

  “I think I’ll have a cup of chili,” Mac said.

  “Chili?” Miss Vivee said. “It’s hotter than the dickens outside.

  “You ordered soup,” I said.

  She narrowed her eye at me. “Plus, it’ll give you heartburn,” she said turning to Mac.

  “What do you suggest, Vivee?” Mac asked.

  “Well, the chicken fried chicken looks good.”

  Viola Rose chuckled and collected the menus from Mac and Miss Vivee. “Chicken fried chicken it is.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I just don’t know about those flowers, Mac.” Miss Vivee said. We had been eating quietly for a few minutes, and now Miss Vivee spoke in between bites.

  He touched her hand. “Well, you found them all, right? Camren Wagner had them all, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. I told you that.” Miss Vivee shook her head and took a sip of iced tea through her straw. “I mean which one? Which one of those flowers did it?”

  “My question is why no one else died,” I said. “They were all sick enough. And how did something get in all that food?”

  “You double-checked each one of the flowers on the note?” Mac asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Miss Vivee. “Not that I had to, I already knew about each of them. I know all about how they poison. And from what I know, I can’t say that it was any of them.”

  “What about smell?” Mac said
. “Does anyone of them leave a smell?”

  “A smell?” Miss Vivee asked.

  “You mean like a fragrance,” I asked swiping my turkey and bread through the last of the gravy. “A flower smell?”

  “No,” Mac said. “When I examined him, I smelled almonds. Now mind you it was just a prelim-”

  “Almonds?” Miss Vivee’s interrupted him, her face lit up. “You know what that is?” She seemed to scold him.

  “Yes, I do. But I didn’t know if one of those flowers would cause that smell.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “We didn’t talk about that,” he said. “We just talked about the plants, all the flowers on the note and in your garden.”

  “That makes a difference, you know?” Miss Vivee said. She looked at Mac.

  “I know,” he said and looked back at her. “Well, at least I know now.”

  “And you’re sure? He smelled like almonds?”

  Mac closed his eyes momentarily and nodded. “I’m sure.” He looked at Miss Vivee. “Positive.”

  “Well,” Miss Vivee said and seemed to sit up a little straighter. It appeared like an anxiousness that was bottled up in her had left. “There were those fruit trees at the arboretum.” Nodding, a grin on her face, she locked eyes with Mac.

  Then he smiled.

  “Fruit trees?” I said. “Okay.” I saw how they were looking at each other. “That evidently means something to the two of you.”

  “What kind of fruit trees, Vivee?” Mac asked.

  “I can’t remember them all, but there was plum, apple, and peach.” Miss Vivee tapped him on his arm.

  The had an amused look on their faces. I knew they had figured it out.

  “You know what that says about that note then, don’t you, Vivee,” Mac said and grinned.

  She nodded her head. “I sure do.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked. I felt so out of the loop.

  “That it’s a red herring,” Miss Vivee said.

  “A red herring?” I said. “Someone went to all the trouble to make that rhyming clue and it means nothing?” I frowned up my face. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Murder doesn’t make sense,” Mac said.

  I waved my hand at them. “Okay. Get back to the fruit trees,” I said. “Tell me, because I know you two have figured out how Jack Wagner died.”

  “Cyanide poisoning,” they said in unison.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Because cyanide grows on trees. Fruit trees to be exact.”

  “Right,” Mac said, seemingly not even recognizing the tenor of sarcastic doubt laced in my voice.

  “Yes, it does,” Miss Vivee echoed his affirmation.

  I fell back in my seat and took in a breath. No need to argue with them, these two knew things that others, people learned enough to be Nobel scholars, could only hope to know. I just needed them to explain it to me.

  “So, you wanna explain it to me?”

  “Amygdalin,” Miss Vivee said.

  “And what is that?” I said knowing I needed to look it up.

  But before I could whip out my phone, Mac told me to “Gaggle it, you’ll see.”

  “Google, Mac. And I am, see?” I held up my cell phone. “How is it spelled?” I said more to myself than to Mac or Miss Vivee. “Ah-mig,” I said sounding it out. “A-M-I-G” I typed in.

  “A-M-Y,” Mac corrected.

  “G-D-A-L-I-N . . .” Miss Vivee’s voice trailed away as she finished spelling the word.

  “I got it,” I said and looked up at Miss Vivee. Her face had gone white. “What’s wrong?”

  “A-M-Y-G-D-A-L-I-N,” she said the letters slowly. And then her eyes darted from me, to Mac, and then down to her purse. She reached inside of it and pulled out the copy of the note from the food fair. It was still covered in plastic and it rattled as she held it - her hands were shaking.

  “What is it, Vivee?” Mac asked.

  “Those are the names of the flowers,” she said.

  “What?” I said and frowned. “How is that the name of the flowers?”

  “Nightshade, Iris, Moleplant, Yellow Jessamine, Goldenseal, Angel’s Trumpet, Delphinium, Aconitum, and Lily of the Valley.” Miss Vivee read the names of the flowers from the poem.

  She pulled out her notepad and a pencil, licking the tip before she began writing. She copied the flower names from the paper. Then she wrote “AMYGDALIN” across the top. “Aconitum,” she said and crossed off the “A.” She continued, “Moleplant, that’s the ‘M.’ ‘Y’ is Yellow Jessamine, ‘G’ is Goldenseal . . .”

  “Oh my goodness,” I said. I could already see, even before she finished, that the first letter of each flower name spelled amygdalin.

  “An acronym,” Mac said and nodded his head. He bent in closer and watched her work.

  “An acronym that’s already a word,” Miss Vivee said as she wrote.

  “So maybe the note isn’t a red herring,” I said.

  “No. Maybe not,” Miss Vivee said. “But none of those flowers on there could have killed that man. I knew that when Mac said he smelled almonds.”

  “You knew it already,” I said, remembering her frustration earlier. “That’s why you seemed troubled, and didn’t know immediately what Jack Wagner died from.”

  She stopped writing, looked at me and smiled. “Yes, that’s right. None of the flowers would have made him look like he looked when they showed me his body. Finding out about the almond smell just confirmes it.”

  “So you get to cross your name off the suspect list,” I said.

  “I never put it on there,” Miss Vivee said with a smirk.

  Well don’t that just beat all, I thought and chuckled to myself. She had put me and Renmar’s name on her little list, #1 suspects to be exact on Oliver and Aaron’s murders as if she believed we were capable of it.

  Even at her age, I knew for a fact that Miss Vivee was more capable of murder than anyone else I knew.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I decided to go ahead and look up the amygdalin while she finished matching them up. She was moving way too slow for me.

  “Amygdalin,” I read the Wikipedia entry off my cell phone, “is a poisonous cyanogenic glycoside found in many plants, but most notably in the seeds (kernels) of apricot (known as bitter almonds), peach, and plum.’” I looked up at Miss Vivee, she was still matching the flowers to the word. Mac was watching her every move.

  I went back to reading and found that cyanogenic glycosides are broken down by an enzyme in the body when ingested into cyanide, glucose and benzaldehyde.

  Then I found a medical reference.

  “Mac,” I said getting his attention. “Listen to this,” I read the next paragraph. “It says here that ‘Since the early 1950s, both amygdalin and a modified form named laetrile have been promoted as an alternative cancer treatment.’”

  Miss Vivee interrupted me. “That’s hogwash,” she said without lifting her eyes up from the page she was writing on.

  “Well, this guy on here,” I looked back at my phone. “National arm wrestling champion, Jason Vale said eating apricot kernels cured him of kidney and pancreatic cancer.”

  “Pfft,” Miss Vivee blew out.

  I laughed and clicked off my search to look for apricot kernels. “Oh my gosh!” I said. “Amazon sells apricot seeds. Bitter Almonds. Look.” I held up my phone and Miss Vivee glanced up at it before going back to her writing. “It must not be too bad,” I continued. “Otherwise they couldn’t sell it. How does it work?” I swiped my phone to Google it.

  “B17.” Miss Vivee clicked her tongue. “But there’s no such thing.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “Let’s see what this says.” I clicked back through my searches and returned to the Wikipedia article. “Where was I . . . Oh.” I found the paragraph about cancer treatment. “Okay. ‘. . . it is promoted as an alternative cancer treatment, often using the misnomer,’” I emphasized, “‘Vitamin B17.’” Miss Vivee was right. I look
ed up at her. She had taken out her suspect notebook and was scrawling away, paying no attention to me.

  “‘But studies have found them,’” I went back to reading, “‘to be clinically ineffective in the treatment of cancer, as well as potentially toxic or lethal when taken by mouth, due to-’” I chuckled and read the last words, “‘cyanide poisoning.’”

  I lifted my head as I finished reading and found Miss Vivee staring at me.

  “Told you, Missy,” she said.

  “Soooo,” I said putting the puzzle pieces that we had together. “You think Jack Wagner ate some kernels from . . .” I looked back at the Wikipedia page, “an apricot, peach or plum, ingested amygdalin, and then died from cyanide poisoning?”

  “I don’t think that’s what happened,” Miss Vivee said tucking her notebook and pencils down in her purse. “I know it is. That’s why I added all three of them from the arboretum to my suspect list. ”

  “Three of them?” I said scrunching my nose. “Who?”

  “Camren Wagner. Her boyfriend, Robert Bernard-”

  “Wait,” I said. “You don’t know that guy was her boyfriend.”

  “You heard Viola Rose. And that man didn’t fool me one little bit,” Miss Vivee said. “He was slicker than snot on a glass door knob. Every time he opened his mouth, he told a lie.” She shook her head. “Windy as a sack full of farts.”

  I tried to picture that.

  Then I shook my head wanting to dismiss the thought. “That doesn’t mean they were dating,” I said.

  “I’d bet a fat man on it.”

  Miss Vivee had a penchant for placing bets on fat men. I wonder did she ever win any of those bets.

  “Who’s the third person?” I asked getting back on track. “You said ‘all three,’ who else?”

  “That Gavin Tanner.”

  I raised my eyebrows and chuckled. “He was so nice to you. Why would you think he’d kill anybody?”

  “Don’t know the why, just yet, but I know he works at a place where the murder weapon is in abundance, and he was at the fair. That’s means and opportunity.” She glanced at me. “Plus, he seemed kind of nervous.”

  “He did not,” I said, although he did fidget, but I took that to be because of Miss Vivee.