Dosed to Death

by P. D. Workman

  Kenzie could be kind and understanding of Zachary’s limitations and challenges no matter how frustrating they were. She had not entered into the relationship with the intent to change or cure him. She had known how difficult his behavior could be and had vowed not to turn into Bridget.

  “Come on,” Kenzie told Zachary, her voice neutral. “We need you to come to the living room.” She swiveled his legs around to the edge of the bed and pushed his feet to the floor, bringing him up into a sitting position. Zachary was still fully dressed. He held his fingers against his temples, moaning. “I know you just want to go back to sleep, and you can soon. Just come out and let Tyrrell know that you’re okay. It won’t take long for Raven to search the room.”

  She put her hand under his arm and behind his back to encourage him to get up. He rose unsteadily to his feet and she stabilized him. He didn’t lean his full weight on her, but shuffled and was wobbly as she walked him out of the bedroom, past Raven, and down the hall to where Tyrrell waited. A blanket had been left on the couch, so Kenzie encouraged Zachary to sit down, then pulled the blanket over him. He hunched over, holding it against his face but not pulling it over his head.

  “Hey, bro. How are you doing?” Tyrrell asked.

  “Fine.” Of course he wasn’t fine, and if he had told Kenzie that, she would have reminded him that “fine” was not an acceptable answer when she really wanted feedback on how he was doing.

  “You need anything? I could get you a drink—of water—or if you need one of your pills...?” Tyrrell suggested.

  Kenzie didn’t like to ask Zachary. It was better if he decided what he needed and asked her for it.

  “No.” Zachary rubbed his eyes. “Sorry... just... tired.” He directed it at Kenzie rather than Tyrrell. An apology for resisting getting out of bed or for calling her Bridget?

  How many times had Bridget berated him and forced him to get out of his protective shell to go to a party or event with her? How many times had she told him that his feelings didn’t matter, only his attendance at her side?

  “I wouldn’t normally force you to get up,” she explained, “These are special circumstances.”

  “I know.”

  Kenzie thought that rubbing Zachary’s back might be a good idea and help him relax, but he was sitting just a little bit apart from her and might not want to be touched. “I don’t think she’ll take too long.”

  Zachary leaned with his elbows on his knees and his hands covering his eyes, as Kenzie might if she had a migraine. Kenzie listened for Raven’s movements. She didn’t know how thorough Raven would be, since this was the only cabin she was searching. She would want to be thorough enough that she could tell the others she was sure Kenzie and Zachary weren’t hiding anything. The time ticked past slowly. Kenzie was glad for the gentle heat of the propane heater. Grateful to Burknall for making sure they had a way to stay warm without having to light a fire. Despite Dr. B’s statement that exposure was the best way for Zachary to desensitize himself from his anxieties, Kenzie wouldn’t have wanted to try several days with him in a cabin with a fire blazing in the fireplace. That might be a bit much, if his reaction to Raven’s fire was any indication.

  Eventually, Raven came out of the bedroom. She had her hands full with both prescription pill bottles and over-the-counter and herbal remedies. She shook her head. “He’s got as many as I do.”

  “Yeah.” Kenzie shrugged. “But there aren’t very many pills there. Not enough to poison a group of people.”

  “Not now. I don’t know how many he started out with. And maybe if a few of them were mixed together...?”

  Kenzie raised her hands in a surrender. “Probably not, honestly. But you would have to take my word for it.”

  “Yeah,” Raven agreed. “And I’m not inclined to do that.”

  Zachary pulled his face up from his hands and studied her. “You suspect me?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I do or not. If one of the others does, and I didn’t check carefully and take all of the precautions, then they’re going to blame me.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “Seeing how sick you are?” Raven looked down at the pile of bottles in her hands. “You got trouble, dude.”

  Zachary didn’t argue the point.

  “Are you finished?” Kenzie asked. She knew Raven wasn’t and wanted to move the proceedings along. There was no point in their chatting about what she had found. They all knew what Raven had found and what all of the medications meant. As Raven had said, Zachary had his troubles. If someone were looking for a man with mental health issues for a scapegoat, Zachary was an easy target. There was no evidence that he had done anything to poison the other guests up at the farmhouse. In fact, they had all agreed that no one had even seen him at the house. But that wasn’t proof.

  “No. This is just the bedroom.” Raven shook her head. “Do you have a bag I can put these in?”

  Kenzie tracked down a zip-top bag, similar to the one they had put all Raven’s medications into. If the quantity of pills were any indication of guilt, then Raven was just as much a suspect as Zachary. And she had been up at the house.

  Raven sealed the top of the bag and kept it with her while she went back to check the room that Lorne and Pat had vacated, and then the one that the children were sleeping in. No one told her that she shouldn’t be checking the children’s room. Kenzie knew from her time talking to law enforcement officers that criminals were not above hiding contraband in their babies’ diapers or carriers. There wasn’t anything hidden in the children’s room, but Raven had to check anyway, before she could confirm to the others that she had been thorough. Then, finally, Raven moved on to the bathroom and took her time going through their toiletries and the additional pill bottles she found there.

  Eventually, she came out. “Okay. I’m done in there, if you want to go back to bed.”

  Zachary stayed where he was. Kenzie was a little relieved that he didn’t go straight back to bed. Maybe since he’d been forced to wake up, he was more himself.

  Raven looked around the living room, but mostly just moved around the kids’ messes and didn’t find any contraband. Then she checked the kitchen and took a long time going through the food. She opened the fridge and frowned. “Nothing in here?”

  “No electricity. It’s not cooling anymore,” Kenzie pointed out. “We put the food outside. I’ll show you.”

  She took Raven to the back door, opened it, and showed her where she would find the leftovers from Pat’s Thanksgiving dinner feast.

  “It’s no wonder you guys didn’t come up for the dinner,” Raven commented.

  “No. We had plenty here.”

  “Why did you have so much? Was that planned?”

  “Well... in a way, yes. You can see Zachary needs to put on some weight, so we’re always looking for ways to tempt him to eat more. I didn’t know how much of the food provided by the Lodge he would eat, so I needed to make sure we had enough to eat without it. And our friends who visited—not Tyrrell, but Lorne and Pat, who were here the first night—they made the big dinner. Pat loves to cook, and it was a surprise for Zachary.” Kenzie closed her eyes briefly. She was tired. She felt as though she had been awake for a week. All of her plans for the vacation had been turned upside-down. She had planned everything so carefully, but that was the way things went in life. She could never plan everything and have it all work out. Life was too messy. “It was nice, but they had to leave early the next morning to beat the storm. I’m glad they did, but... it would have been nice to have had them for longer like we were expecting.”

  Raven shrugged as if it didn’t matter. But Kenzie knew that these points would all be brought up with the rest of the guests. Zachary had a lot of medications on hand, many of which, Raven would know from experience, were psychoactive drugs. They had brought lots of their own food and had not planned to eat all their meals at the farmhouse as the others had. It wasn’t proof of anything, but in the face of the lack of evidence poin
ting to anyone else, it looked at least mildly suspicious.

  “How are we going to secure everything we found?” Raven asked. “All of the stuff that you took from the other cabins, and this stuff?” She indicated the bag of Zachary’s medications.

  “I’ll need you to leave a single dose of Zachary’s night and morning pills here. Then tomorrow, we can get a second dose.”

  “Same with me,” Raven agreed.

  “Right. I guess you’ll need yours too. And the rest... we need to secure them in a way that no one else can get into them.”

  “And that you can’t by yourself,” Raven pointed out.

  “Right...”

  They were all quiet, considering possibilities. They could take them up to the farmhouse and lock them in one of the rooms, but a single key would open the door. Who were they to trust it to? Kenzie? Raven? One of the house staff? None of them could be beyond suspicion.

  45

  It was Zachary who worked out the method of securing all of the pills. Kenzie had counted him out, assuming he was too tired to be coming up with a solution.

  They imposed on Stiller to borrow his safe. It was just large enough to hold everything they had confiscated from the cabins and a few of Stiller’s possessions which he insisted be locked up. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be much more to take from the staff or the outbuildings the next day, or they were going to have to come up with an alternate solution. They placed the safe in the trunk of Zachary’s car. The keys to the car were given to Raven, as was Dewey’s key to Raven’s cabin.

  Kenzie ticked off the safeguards in her head. Raven was the only one who could get into her cabin, so the only one who could get into Zachary’s car. Vance Stiller had the only key to the safe. The other guests would not know where the pills were stowed, but even if they did, they would have to break into either Raven’s cabin or Zachary’s car to be able to get at the safe, and into Stiller’s cabin to get the key to the safe. With three levels of security, the pills were out of play. Everyone would be safe from any further tampering with the food, which had been Kenzie’s initial goal.

  Of course, there were still the staff quarters and outbuildings to be searched the next day. But they could be reasonably sure that the food would be safe. The vacationers could either eat food from the cans of food in the pantry, or they could watch Mrs. Hubbard cook. Maybe she wouldn’t like being watched, but they were talking about something that might be life and death, not just someone having privacy and her own space.

  Kenzie’s head hurt. She and Zachary needed to go to bed. In the daytime, when they were all fresh and feeling better, they could decide if there were a better way to secure the medications. And maybe the snow would stop and there was a chance that the police might make their way out to the Lodge to take care of Mr. Dewey.

  But that was wishful thinking.

  Raven left. Kenzie shut the door behind her and was relieved to finally be alone with Zachary. And Tyrrell.

  Kenzie gave a long sigh. “Got your night meds here,” she offered Zachary.

  He didn’t always take everything. In fact, he rarely did, but she had grabbed a dose of everything he might need, because once they were locked up, it would be impossible to access them until morning. Zachary put his hand out, and Kenzie transferred the pills to him. He stared down at the capsules in his hand.

  “You remember that first day they prescribed me meds?” he asked Tyrrell. “I was so embarrassed that I had to take all of those pills. And I wasn’t used to taking pills, I couldn’t swallow them.”

  Tyrrell shook his head, frowning. “No. Was that while we were at home? I don’t remember any of us having meds then.”

  But he had only been four years old at the time of the fire, so maybe he had forgotten about it.

  “Oh.” Zachary continued to stare at the pills in his hand. “Maybe not. I guess it was at Petersons’. I forgot you weren’t there.”

  Tyrrell glanced over at Kenzie. It wasn’t like Zachary to forget any details about where he had been or the fact that he hadn’t seen any of his siblings after the fire. He had not gone into foster care with any of them, but had been kept separate the entire time he as in foster care. He hadn’t been reunited with any of them until Tyrrell had sought him out a year earlier.

  Kenzie shook her head and shrugged. It wasn’t usual for Zachary, but after his big flashback due to Raven’s fire, she couldn’t be surprised by any lapses. He was probably still struggling to keep his head in the present. He needed rest. A good night’s sleep would help him to reset. Tyrrell seemed to sense this. It would not be a night where he and Zachary sat up together talking and reminiscing.

  “You going to be okay, bro?” he asked in a cheery tone, slapping Zachary on the shoulder.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Zachary assured him.

  “Okay. You take care of Kenzie. I’ll see you in the morning.” Tyrrell made a face. “I’ll try to keep the kids quiet so you guys can sleep in if you need to, but I’m warning you ahead of time, that’s kind of like trying to stop a stampede of wild horses...”

  Zachary gave a small smile. “If I’m still asleep by then, I don’t want to be.”

  “You need to get what you can. It’s been a brutal day.”

  Zachary shrugged. Tyrrell gave him a brotherly hug goodnight, clapping him briskly on the back. He went to the second bedroom to join the children in dreamland.

  Zachary picked through the pills in his hand and gave several of them back to Kenzie. She bit her lip when she saw that he wasn’t taking a sleep aid or anti-anxiety pill. It would probably have been better for him to take both. But it was up to him to decide what was best. Maybe he was tired enough from his flashback and the day’s events that he would just fall back asleep once they lay down.

  “Okay? You want some water?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kenzie went to the kitchen and cracked a water bottle open for him. He tended to get a dry mouth from some of the meds. He swallowed the pills he had chosen with a few gulps of water, then rose unsteadily to his feet, keeping the blanket wrapped around him like a robe and taking it and the water bottle with him to the bedroom. He didn’t follow his usual bedtime routine and brush his teeth, but headed directly to bed. Kenzie left him to get settled in and performed her own evening ablutions, running a cold washcloth over her face and brushing her teeth. It had been a very long, difficult day, and she thought she was doing well to not skip brushing her teeth as Zachary had.

  She went quietly into the bedroom. Not tip-toeing, exactly, but being quiet to avoid waking Zachary if he were already asleep. He didn’t move. Kenzie slid in under the blankets and lay down behind him, wrapping her arms around him to cuddle. He didn’t make any movement or snuggle into her. Already fast asleep. That was good, he certainly needed all the sleep he could get.

  Kenzie started to drift herself, her brain winding down and the sleepiness welling up like a tide until she was nearly asleep.

  “Who do you think it was?” Zachary asked quietly. Maybe not addressing her, but just the quiet, dark room, or maybe his own subconscious. “Who would do a thing like that?”

  Kenzie didn’t answer.

  46

  The herd of elephants that were Zachary’s niece and nephew awakened them in the morning as it began to get light outside. Kenzie shifted and groaned. Her muscles were cramped, as if she had been holding herself tense all night, even in her sleep. She felt Zachary move beside her. It was so rare he was still in bed when she awoke, she was startled. She put her arm around him and moved in close to kiss his cheek.

  “Hey, handsome. Good morning.”

  Zachary grunted. He didn’t kiss her back, but one arm wound around her and he squeezed her against him, then released her, and he just lay with her, their bodies lined up with each other.

  “Feeling better this morning?” Kenzie asked. She rubbed his back, making him purr in appreciation.

  “Bit better.”

  “A bit?” Kenzie propped herself up slightly
on her elbow. “You’re still feeling the aftereffects?”

  He nodded and rubbed his eyes, not looking at her, lids still lightly closed.

  “Maybe you should take a Xanax today.”

  “No. Be fine.”

  It was harder than usual not to give him her advice. She might be a medical professional, but she wasn’t his doctor, and he was far more qualified to know what his body and brain needed at any time than she was. But Kenzie wanted to be in control of something. To gradually gather the lost threads in her life and to bring them back into order. She took a few deep breaths, letting them out slowly.

  “You sound anxious too,” Zachary observed.

  “Yeah. I guess I am. I don’t like the uncertainty. Feeling like I’m supposed to stop this runaway train, but not being able to do it. I want my own lab and computer and law enforcement officers investigating and telling me what’s going on. All the things I normally have. This... chaos is really unsettling.”

  There was a shriek, and the bedroom door burst open, and two little cannon balls landed on the bed, nearly sending Kenzie straight up to the ceiling.

  “Whoa! Take it easy,” she protested, reaching for the two troublemakers and trying to corral them.

  “Alisha! Mason! You’re supposed to be leaving Zachary and Kenzie alone!” Tyrrell shouted from across the cabin. Probably in the kitchen, preparing their breakfasts.

  Kenzie tried to get control of them so she could send them back to their father with a stern word. But beside her, she heard a strange, unexpected noise. Zachary chuckling. He managed to catch the smaller whirlwind and pinned him to the bed, tickling Mason and making him shriek with laughter for his father to come rescue him. Tyrrell didn’t. Alisha dove in to try to stop Zachary and pull Mason away, but Zachary managed to get her too, somehow holding on to both children and causing fits of giggles as they tried to escape. Kenzie blinked and shook her head at the sight.