Dosed to Death

by P. D. Workman

  Kenzie nodded. “Thanks.” She paused, hesitating. “Is Mrs. Hubbard still making meals? Even though...?”

  “Do you really think that we believe she was trying to poison us?” Jack asked. “Or that someone else here was? It’s pretty ridiculous, when you get right down to it. Doesn’t make any sense. So a couple of people had a bit too much to drink one night.” He shrugged. “That doesn’t mean that we were all being given some mythical hallucinogen.”

  Kenzie blinked in surprise. They had all been more or less onboard the night before. But she supposed that after a good night’s sleep, they had shaken off their anxiety and decided that skipping meals or making their own until the police got there was unsustainable. If it were impossible to avoid a danger, people eventually accepted it, even if it were something that would previously have seemed untenable. The other guests had to eat, so they had to accept it in spite of any warnings.

  “You don’t even like to take over-the-counter medications,” she pointed out to Jack.

  Maybe it was a mistake to use something she had learned about him during the search the night before as an argument against him. Her mother would certainly have frowned on it.

  Jack narrowed his eyes at her. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You already confiscated everyone’s medications,” Raven said. “So even if someone was trying to harm us, they can’t now. So it’s safe to eat here.”

  Kenzie closed her mouth and kept her lips pasted together. It would not help her to argue with either of them. Pointing out that Mrs. Hubbard’s possessions and the kitchen had not been searched would just make both of them antagonistic toward her.

  53

  Kenzie shook her head and went to the kitchen. She knocked on the door frame as she entered, trying to give Mrs. Hubbard notice that she was there and not to just walk into her domain as if she had the right to be there.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Hubbard.”

  Mrs. Hubbard turned. She raised her brows at Kenzie and didn’t look pleased to see her there. Kenzie figured she had probably already made enough of a disruption for the cook. Telling people that the food was poisoned was not exactly likely to endear her.

  “Sorry to bother you. I was just looking for Zachary. Is he around?”

  Mrs. Hubbard nodded, turning back to her stove. “He went downstairs to make sure that boy didn’t end up down there somehow.”

  Kenzie walked over to the stairs and looked down. She didn’t think that the farmhouse had a full basement. Probably just a dugout for some preserves or wine to be stored where they would be cool and out of the sun.

  “Zachary?”

  “Kenzie?” Zachary appeared at the bottom of the stairs, twisting his neck for a good look at her. “What are you doing here?”

  “We found Mason. I wanted to let you know.”

  “You found him!” Zachary began to climb the steep, creaking stairs. He kept one hand on the wooden stair rail, the other hovering an inch from the wall next to him, as if the whole thing might collapse and he needed to be ready to catch himself or to hold it up. “Where was he?”

  Kenzie waited for him to get to the top of the stairs. She touched his arm, but he didn’t move closer to embrace her or give her a kiss.

  “He was in the barn, up in the loft. Way up the top. Mr. Burknall found him and came to the cabin to let me know.”

  “I checked the barn.”

  “I know. So did Tyrrell. But he hid from you. He didn’t want to get caught or to be in trouble.”

  Zachary rolled his eyes. “Well, I’m sure that helped.”

  Kenzie smiled. “Not so much. I didn’t stick around for the fireworks, but Tyrrell was pretty steamed when he got back to the cabin.”

  “T won’t be happy.”

  “No. I hope he’s not too hard on Mason, but...”

  “He’ll be okay,” Zachary assured her. “Kids are tough.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t want him to have to be tough. I want Tyrrell to be...” Kenzie searched for the right word and shook her head. “To be easy on him.”

  “Well, I guess we found him,” Zachary told Mrs. Hubbard, though of course she’d heard the conversation and already knew that for herself. “So we can all stand down. Are you expecting everyone up for lunch and supper?”

  “I expect so,” Mrs. Hubbard agreed. “Other than you folks.”

  “Yeah. We still have plenty at the cabin to eat. I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.”

  Kenzie caught Zachary watching Mrs. Hubbard very carefully for her reaction. Did he suspect her? Think that she had been the one to put something into the food? She was the one with the best access, but Kenzie could not think of a reason the woman would have to hurt anyone. She was sure that Mrs. Hubbard was not the kind of person who would do something like that out of pure mischief.

  Though Kenzie’s searches of the night before had shown her that her assumptions and judgments of others were not always right. She had been very wrong in some of her conclusions.

  “If you get tired of it, you know you can always come here,” Mrs. Hubbard told him. “It’s our Thanksgiving night. Turkey, potatoes, a couple of salads...”

  Zachary’s expression did not change. “You’re a very good cook. I’m sure it will be delicious.”

  Mrs. Hubbard nodded her agreement.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Zachary said pleasantly. “Maybe the weather will have cleared by then and we’ll actually get some company.”

  Mrs. Hubbard’s eyes rolled up toward the ceiling. “I certainly hope so. Mr. Dewey and the young lady will not improve with age.”

  Kenzie grimaced. At least she didn’t have to work in the house, in the company of a couple of corpses. She wasn’t sure how she would feel living under those conditions.

  But then she realized that she did work under exactly those conditions, and it had never bothered her. But then, that was what she had signed up for. She didn’t suddenly just find herself in the middle of a situation where she was required to put up with bodies being stored in her workplace.

  Zachary nodded to the back door. “Let’s go out this way,” he invited.

  “I... my coat and things are at the front door.”

  “Oh.” He paused to consider her. “I guess they are. Why don’t you grab them and come out this way, then?”

  “I’ll just go out that door. I can walk around the house and meet you out back, if you like.”

  Zachary nodded. “Yeah. Do that.”

  Kenzie wasn’t sure why he wanted to go out the back instead of the front. Clearly that was where he had taken off his outerwear, but he could have grabbed it and gone out of the front with Kenzie, where it was a clear shot down the road to the cabin.

  “Okay, see you in a minute.”

  Zachary exited the kitchen through the other door, which Kenzie assumed led to some kind of mudroom or porch. She said a quick goodbye to Mrs. Hubbard, which wasn’t returned, and she returned to the front door to get her winter gear. Andy Collins and Vance Stiller had joined Raven and Jack in the living room. No one seemed particularly interested in or happy to see Kenzie. She supposed she had made enemies of all of them by going through their private belongings. It wasn’t nice to have someone pawing through your personal, private things, even if you didn’t have anything that was really secret to hide. People just didn’t like it. Raven’s search of Kenzie’s things the night before had seemed like the ultimate imposition. She hadn’t been worried about Raven learning her deepest, darkest secrets, but she hadn’t felt good about having someone go through all their things.

  “Couldn’t find him?” Raven asked.

  “Oh, I did. He just went out the back door.”

  “I saw that kid of yours messing around by the barn,” Vance Stiller commented, fixing his gaze on Kenzie. “You should keep him in the house if he isn’t being supervised.”

  “He’s not my kid. But thank you for keeping an eye on him. We found him and he’s back at the cabin now.
He wasn’t supposed to take off like that.”

  “Kids.” Stiller shook his head. He looked like the thought of having kids around, of starting a family himself, was repulsive. Why would anyone want to have children? “This isn’t really the kind of place to bring them.”

  “Actually, they provide a lot of family activities,” Kenzie pointed out, as she slid her hands into the sleeves of her coat. “Hayrides, bonfires, board games, hot chocolate. When it isn’t so cold and snowy, there are other activities for them too. It’s a family resort.”

  “Shouldn’t be,” Stiller said unapologetically. “A place like this should be adults only. So that we can enjoy it properly without worrying about children and what they might say or do.”

  “Hear, hear,” Jack chimed in. “I’m all for adults-only.”

  Kenzie just shook her head. She wasn’t sure why they were trying to get her goat about it, but they weren’t going to draw her into an argument.

  “Enjoy dinner. I’ll see you later,” she told them blandly. She pulled on her gloves and let herself out.

  There were no fences or guard dogs to get past outside; it was an easy walk around the house from the front door to the back where Zachary was waiting. He nodded as if confirming something to himself.

  “What’s up?” Kenzie asked.

  “Nothing. I just wanted to come this way.” Zachary motioned to the woods. “We can cut through this way.”

  “I thought you wanted to avoid me being killed by someone.”

  He raised his brows. “I do.”

  “Then shouldn’t I stay where people can see me, instead of tromping off through the lonely woods?”

  “No one comes through here. They all go up on the road.”

  Kenzie thought about the knife in the bushes. “Not everyone. Someone killed Brooke in the woods.”

  “Well... yes. But that’s not going to happen to you. You’re not alone, and you’re not high on some illegal or prescription drug.”

  Kenzie remembered Raven’s conversation with her the night before. A person could make all the right decisions, all the low-risk choices, and still end up killed. She and Zachary could only control their choices, not what happened as a consequence. Or just as a random happening. Sometimes a person’s decisions had nothing to do with how things unfolded.

  Kenzie let Zachary lead the way. Like Mason, he had better visual-spatial memory than Kenzie did, and his better sense of direction meant that he could get her back to the cabin way before she could sort it out herself.

  “Mason and Alisha are making lunch,” she informed Zachary.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Kenzie smiled. “I just hope it’s edible.”

  “At least with it being winter, you don’t need to worry about him putting poisonous berries into it.”

  “Yikes! You’re right. He’s only allowed to choose from the food that we have. So we should be safe.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I came up here.” Zachary explained. “In case he went looking for more ingredients.”

  Mason going to the house for more ingredients was something that hadn’t even occurred to Kenzie. And she had known that Mason and Alisha were putting their heads together to come up with something they could make for the adults for lunch.

  “Well, probably a good thing that they didn’t, since we still don’t know where the toxin came from.”

  Zachary nodded. “Down in the basement, there were a lot of preserved plants and herbs. I don’t know what they all were.”

  “Jars of fruits and vegetables?” Kenzie asked, since that was what she had pictured when she thought about the small basement room.

  “Some,” Zachary said. “But also lots of herbs tied into bunches.” He made a movement, trying to sketch it out with his hands. “Like flower bouquets without any flowers. Tied together and hung to dry. I don’t know what they all were. Some kinds of herbs and spices for her cooking, right?”

  “Herbs,” Kenzie repeated thoughtfully.

  Zachary’s brows went up as he considered her response.

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “No... But it does make me wonder what she might have down there.”

  54

  Do you want to go back and look?” Zachary asked, turning back toward the house and gesturing.

  “No... I want to get back to the cabin and get warmed up. Before the kids are finished whatever they are making. So that we don’t have to eat whatever it is cold.”

  Kenzie could just imagine some of the bizarre combinations the kids might come up with together. And they wouldn’t be better once they had cooled.

  Zachary chuckled under his breath.

  “But I do wonder what she has,” Kenzie said. “I would say we should go back after and see... but I’m not even sure how I would know what I was looking at. I might be able to identify poison ivy, but I’m afraid that my plant identification abilities don’t go much farther than that.”

  “Do you think there is anything we need to worry about?”

  “I don’t know. And without the internet, I can’t even look them up. I would just have to take her word for it that everything she said was true.”

  They walked in silence for a few minutes, their gloved hands shoved into the oversized pockets of their jackets.

  “Oh,” Kenzie remembered one of the reasons she had wanted to get Zachary right away instead of waiting for him to return to the cabin on his own once he’d run out of places to look for Mason. “Mason found a knife.”

  Zachary stopped walking. Kenzie halted to continue the conversation.

  “A knife?”

  “Well, the knife, I guess. A long kitchen knife. The murder weapon, I’m guessing.”

  “Did it have blood on it?”

  “Not that I could see. But hopefully some microscopic traces.”

  “Where?”

  “Under a bush. He was looking for sticks to use for his snowman.”

  “Well, that was lucky.”

  “I haven’t told anyone or retrieved it yet. But I grabbed my phone and a bag from the cabin to preserve any evidence.”

  “We should go get it before whoever hid it decides to retrieve it again. If he remembers where he put it.”

  “It is sort of back behind our cabin.” Kenzie looked around. “We’re pretty close, right?”

  Zachary nodded. He raised an eyebrow. “Do you remember where it is?”

  “Uh... I sort of do. But Mason and I were coming from the barn, not back this way, so it’s a little different. I don’t know whether I’ll recognize the exact place...”

  “And you didn’t happen to mark that particular bush in some way...?”

  “No.” Kenzie’s face warmed. “It isn’t like I had an evidence kit with me, you know.”

  “Clearly not. Do you remember what kind of a bush it was? What it looked like?”

  “I don’t know my bushes any better than my poisonous plants. It was about... this high...” Kenzie raised her hand above the ground, trying to convey the approximate size of the bush to him.

  Zachary looked around.

  “You walked close to it before,” Kenzie told him. “You were coming back from the barn, and you turned off to the left, instead of back toward the cabin, which was to the right.”

  Zachary thought about that. “How do you know that?”

  “Mason pointed out your footprints. He said they were yours.”

  Zachary looked down at his boots. He made a print and stepped to the side to study it. Kenzie saw the same zigzag pattern that Mason had pointed out. She looked around the ground for more footprints.

  “Okay...”

  “Let’s try this way.” Zachary pointed. “If I was coming back from the barn, then this should be the approximate path I took...”

  They walked slowly, watching for more zig-zag footprints. It took a while, but eventually, Zachary spotted his previous path. “Here. This is the way I went...”

  “When Mason and I came back from the barn to
the cabin, we turned away from your footprints, and he found the bush and showed it to me...” Kenzie looked around. Everything looked the same. She couldn’t figure out where the elusive bush was. She looked under all the nearby bushes for the knife. It had to be close by. She could feel Zachary’s tension. He was trying to follow her instructions and knew that they must be close to the spot where the knife was hidden.

  Kenzie’s stomach started to growl. She covered it with her hand and laughed. “I don’t know whether I should be hungry... who knows what they are cooking up...”

  “Well, you like all the food that we brought, don’t you? So it doesn’t matter what they make.”

  “Except kids mix weird things together. I don’t want ketchup on granola bars or anything bizarre like that.”

  Zachary made a face. “I don’t want ketchup on granola bars either,” he agreed. “That might put me off of breakfast foods forever.”

  They kept looking for the bush.

  “Here!” Zachary called finally. “Over here.”

  Kenzie hurried over to him. Zachary pointed. “Your footprints and Mason’s.”

  She sighed with relief. “Perfect. This will lead us right to the bush.”

  She let Zachary go first, leading the expedition. She had already seen the knife. He would be the better tracker. Kenzie didn’t pay much attention where they were going until she saw the cabin in front of her. “Uh... this is too close. We missed it. It’s back farther.”

  Zachary reversed and walked alongside the footprints. He stopped a couple of times. It felt like they had been following the trail for too long. Kenzie shook her head, puzzled. “Something isn’t right.”

  “These are your footprints.”

  “I know, but...” Kenzie looked around and saw the barn. “It wasn’t all the way back here. It was in the woods. You couldn’t see the barn or the cabin.” She was getting hungry and frustrated. It didn’t make sense that they had lost the knife. They were in the right place. They couldn’t both be that blind.

  Zachary looked at her for a minute, then followed the trail back again, toward the cabin. He moved slowly, carefully. “Here?” he asked finally, pointing to a bush.