Dosed to Death

by P. D. Workman

  “Yes! That’s it!” Kenzie agreed. She got closer, pointing to the base of the bush. “Right... there...” The words faded away. Kenzie looked at Zachary, then down again. “This can’t be right.”

  “Are you sure this is the bush?”

  “No... I think it is. They all look the same to me. But it looks like the right one.”

  Zachary looked around at some of the other shrubbery. He pointed down at the footprints. “You can see that this is where you and Mason stopped. Did you stop to look at more than one thing? Maybe there was a bird or an animal...?”

  “No. The only time we stopped was to look at the knife. I didn’t want to pick it up, because I didn’t have my phone or a bag to put the knife in. I didn’t want to destroy any evidence.”

  “Did you bring your phone with you this time?”

  “Yes, but...” Kenzie shook her head. “We need to find the knife.”

  “It isn’t here.”

  “I know, so we need to find it...”

  “No,” Zachary said firmly. “Someone has picked it up. It isn’t here anymore.”

  Understanding dawned on Kenzie. “Oh, no.”

  Zachary nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry, but... we took too long.”

  Kenzie looked down at the bottom of the bush. “There isn’t any point in taking pictures of nothing.”

  “There still may be something here that helps.” Zachary pointed at the footprints in the snow. “The police may be able to sort out who has been by here. Not just you and Mason. Whoever left the knife there and whoever picked it up. Not necessarily the same person, but more than likely.”

  Kenzie nodded. She patted her pockets to find her phone, then removed her glove in order to unlock it and launch the camera. “I can’t believe someone came here while I was up to the house to get you. What are the chances that they would come right at that time and take the knife?”

  “They might have been watching.”

  Kenzie tried to suppress a shudder. If they had been close enough to see her and Mason leave the knife and go on, or to see Kenzie go up the hill to the farmhouse, then she should have seen them. She should have known that someone was watching the house and she should have done a better job at protecting herself and the little boy. She had put him in danger and hadn’t even known it. They had walked right by a murderer. Or at least, they had walked by the person who had retrieved the knife. If that hadn’t been the killer, then who else could it have been? Would anyone else have picked up the knife if they had seen it? They would all want to preserve the evidence, wouldn’t they? To prove that it was someone else who had killed Brooke. Nobody would want to hide the identity of the killer.

  At least, she hoped not.

  Kenzie took several pictures of the leaves under the bush, of the footprints. She took close-ups and shots from farther out, hoping to capture all the evidence the police would need.

  “Who do you think it was?” Kenzie asked Zachary. She put her phone in her pocket and slid her fingers back into the nice warm fleecy interior of her gloves. “You think that the person who retrieved the knife is the person who killed Brooke?”

  “Probably. I don’t know. We’ll have to see whether anyone says anything about it. They might have just been trying to do the right thing, like you. To gather evidence for when the police get here.”

  Kenzie nodded. She really hoped that was all it was. She felt very exposed, standing out there with Zachary, taking pictures of the bush. She hated to think of the unknown shadow watching her and Mason when they had walked through the first time. She was lucky that whoever it was had waited to see if she would pick up the knife or not. And she was probably lucky that she hadn’t picked up the knife. If she had, and whoever had killed Brooke had wanted to keep it a secret, then she might not have made it back to her cabin at all.

  She shuddered.

  “You’re cold,” Zachary observed. “We’ve been out here long enough. Let’s get back to the cabin and have a hot meal.”

  Kenzie just hoped it was edible.

  55

  It wasn’t far to the cabin, but Kenzie was feeling tired and wrung out, as if she had a run a marathon instead of just walking around in the snow. She had walked more than she had expected to, to the barn, back to the cabin, up to the farmhouse, back to the barn again, and back to the cabin. But still, that couldn’t add up to very much if one were just counting miles.

  The back door was locked, so Zachary knocked and called out a few times before Tyrrell came to the door and opened it.

  “You’re back! I was afraid you had gotten lost.”

  “Goldmans don’t get lost,” Zachary said lightly.

  “Yeah!” Mason agreed, jumping down from a chair and running over to give Zachary’s legs a hug. “Goldmans don’t get lost!” He grinned up at his uncle. “That’s because we have excellent visio...”

  “Visual-spatial memory,” Kenzie contributed.

  “Yeah!” Mason agreed. “We have that, right?”

  “We do,” Zachary agreed. “So... how are we in cooking skills?”

  Mason considered this seriously. “We made pasta.”

  “Pasta is good,” Zachary said agreeably.

  “It has pieces of turkey in it. And a tomato sauce. Daddy says it tastes really good.”

  “Well, we should all have some, then. You know, Kenzie’s stomach was growling so loud, I kept thinking that we were being stalked by a wild animal!”

  Alisha giggled loudly. “You did not!”

  “You should have heard it,” Zachary said dramatically. He looked around, acting out how frightened he had been. “Every time we went around a corner, I was sure that it was coming...”

  Kenzie put her hand over her stomach. “It growled once! And that’s just because I didn’t have any breakfast.”

  “You should always have breakfast,” Mason told her, his voice taking on a lecturing tone. “It’s the most important meal of the day.”

  “Yeah, Kenzie,” Zachary teased.

  Kenzie glared at him.

  Alisha put bowls and spoons on the table for them, and Tyrrell supervised Mason handling the hot pot and bringing it over. Kenzie and Zachary sat down. Mason placed the pot on the table with a large serving spoon. “Do you want me to dish it up?”

  “I’ll get my own.” Zachary reached for the spoon.

  He dished up more than he would normally eat. Kenzie wondered whether he had worked up an appetite from walking outside, or whether he was taking more so that Mason wouldn’t think that Zachary didn’t trust his cooking. When he had dished up, Kenzie took the pot. She leaned over it and sniffed the savory steam.

  “Mmm, it smells really good, Mason. What made you think of this?”

  “We just looked in the cupboards to see what we had,” Mason said with a shrug. He had a wide grin at her compliment. “I make pasta with Mommy sometimes. It’s not hard. And we had turkey. Usually, we put ground beef in it, but I thought turkey would be okay. Sometimes we make other kinds of pasta with chicken or turkey.”

  “Sure,” Kenzie agreed with a nod.

  “We have dessert too,” Alisha piped up, hovering over them. “So don’t eat too much!”

  “Ooh, dessert,” Zachary murmured. “I’ll have to leave some room. I might have taken a bit too much.”

  This gave him an excuse for not being able to eat all the pasta that he had taken. Not a bad plan.

  Kenzie watched Tyrrell and Mason. Whatever discussion had taken place after Kenzie had left didn’t seem to have resulted in any tension between them. Maybe Tyrrell had only given Mason a lecture on leaving when he wasn’t supposed to, hugged him and said how worried he had been, and then moved on to lunch preparations. Kenzie hadn’t been gone for long enough for much more to have taken place.

  If Mason were under house arrest or facing some other punishment, he didn’t seem to be upset about it. Alisha had washed her tear-streaked face and seemed to be back to her usual cheerful self.

  Kenzie took her first
bite of the pasta. The children had managed to cook it properly without letting it get too mushy. It wasn’t underdone or overdone. The pasta sauce was a bottled sauce that Kenzie had brought with her, but she thought they might have added something to it. The turkey lent it a nice heartiness. She might actually try adding turkey to pasta at home.

  “This is really good. You did a great job!”

  Both children beamed, happy with her reaction. Kenzie dug in, her body ready for a larger meal after skipping breakfast. Zachary took only a few bites. He praised Mason and Alisha, but they could see how little he was eating and obviously doubted his assurances that he enjoyed it.

  Zachary got up, muttering something that Kenzie couldn’t make out, and started to wander around the kitchen. She didn’t realize at first that he was pacing; she thought he was looking for something. She ate a little more and tried to get him to return to the table. At least for their dessert.

  “What’s up?” she asked. “You’re thinking about something.”

  “Trying to figure it out... who took that knife and what they did with it. And all of the pills that you searched out and collected... where are they? I was hoping that when I looked around this morning, I would find them. Disposed of in a ditch or shoved into a pile of snow. Because... no one is going to want to deal with them, are they? They won’t try to poison anyone.” Zachary shook his head. “Did anyone actually put any of them into the food to start with? Or were we wrong?”

  Kenzie looked at the kids, wishing that Zachary wouldn’t say so much around them. But he didn’t follow her glance and didn’t stop talking about it.

  “A lot of drugs can have the kinds of effects that we saw or heard about.”

  “But did they?” Zachary demanded. “How much would be needed to make everyone suffer the effects? And they wouldn’t be able to taste them? For them all to be affected, Kenzie. Does that make sense?”

  “What are you suggesting, then? That we were just being paranoid? That everyone was just... feeling their oats that day? It was a full moon? What about the amnesia? Both Vance Stiller and Andy Collins had pretty significant memory blocks.”

  “Maybe they drank too much? They’re both drinkers, right? But we don’t know how much they usually drink. If they went overboard or if they started out dehydrated?”

  Kenzie tried to follow Zachary’s reasoning. “So... you don’t want to think that it was an intentional poisoning. It was just... a series of coincidences, and we made it out to be something that it wasn’t?”

  “We misjudged.”

  “I did, you mean. It was all my idea from the start, not yours.”

  “We both thought it,” Zachary said firmly. “Everyone except us had... weird experiences that night. But what if it was just... mass hysteria? One person setting another off? Like kids telling ghost stories. Like the Salem witch trials. A couple of people had too much to drink, maybe Redd was into his mushrooms, and between them... they managed to influence everyone, to make them see and hear things that weren’t there. But in reality... it was just...”

  “A couple having a fight that ended in disaster.”

  “It happens.” He grimaced at her. “It happens a lot.”

  Kenzie knew that was true. She was the one who worked in the medical examiner’s office. She knew very well how easy it was for a domestic dispute to turn bloody. And fatal.

  “It could be,” she admitted.

  Zachary continued to wander around. Kenzie rubbed her forehead and thought about what he had said. Had they gone way overboard in their theory that someone had poisoned the food? Had she been that far off base? If so, then why had someone broken into the safe and stolen the drugs? Just like the knife under the bush? Someone was cleaning up, trying to sanitize the area and get rid of any evidence. They would say that Dewey’s death had been by natural causes, and Brooke’s was just a tragic accident. A newlywed’s argument gone bad. Would there be any evidence to the contrary?

  Had Kenzie just let her imagination get the better of her? Was she prone to flights of fancy without Dr. Wiltshire there to bring her down to earth?

  It was true that they didn’t have much in the way of evidence. There would be more once the authorities had a chance to examine Mr. Dewey’s and Brooke Collins’s bodies. The medical examiner for the county would be able to find a hallucinogen, if he knew what to look for.

  “Are you done?” Alisha asked. “Are you ready for dessert?”

  Kenzie brought herself back to the present. The children were watching, hovering nearby, eager to serve them the next course.

  “Yes,” Kenzie agreed, pushing her dish away. “I had a lot, but I left a little bit of room...”

  “It was really good, right?” Mason asked.

  “Yes, it was. I’m going to make some at home sometime. It’s a really good use of the turkey and other ingredients that you have on hand. I was afraid you guys were going to come up with something really weird. I used to do experiments in the kitchen when I was little, mixing potions and coming up with some really bizarre—and totally inedible—stuff.”

  Alisha giggled. “Really?”

  “Really. Like... mixing chocolate milk and orange soda and... brown sugar and cinnamon.” Kenzie made a face. “It was not something you would have wanted to drink.”

  “Eww!” Both children broke into giggles, making little shrieks to express how disgusting it was and then laughing until they were out of breath.

  Kenzie shook her head. “Okay, you’d better tell me what you’ve made for dessert, before you bust a gut.”

  Mason wiped at his eyes, wet from tears of laughter. “Can you really do that?” he asked seriously. “Bust a gut?”

  “No. It’s just an expression.”

  “You can break a rib laughing,” Zachary contributed, walking back to the table. “Or get a nosebleed. Or... if you’re drinking milk, it could come out your nose.”

  “Or if you’re mixing together chocolate milk and orange soda,” Alisha gasped. “And cinnamon!”

  “Don’t spray that through your nose,” Kenzie said. “Trust me.”

  That sent them into more gales of laughter. Tyrrell moved into the kitchen, interceding. “You guys are a terrible influence!” he scolded Zachary and Kenzie. “These two are going to be in hysterics before long. Dessert!” he told Mason and Alisha sternly. “No more nonsense!”

  The children’s faces fell, and they went to the counter to get the dessert ready. They tried to pout and stay serious, but Kenzie could see them still exchanging looks with each other, trying to keep their expressions serious.

  “We have peaches and yogurt,” Alisha said, bringing over bowls of each and a couple of small dessert bowls for Kenzie and Zachary to dish up their individual desserts.

  “Are we supposed to choose one or the other?” Zachary asked mischievously. “Or mix them both together?”

  Alisha giggled. But she glanced at Tyrrell and quickly stifled it. “You’re supposed to mix them. And you can sprinkle granola on top. If you like granola.” She supplied a small dish of clumps of granola that had once been formed into bars.

  Kenzie and Zachary dished up their desserts with solemn expressions. Once they had tasted a couple of bites, Tyrrell shooed the children away, telling them that they could play for a while and work out their silliness.

  He shot a glance toward his brother that told Kenzie without a doubt that he had picked up enough of their conversation to not be happy about the way they were talking around his children. Kenzie imagined him trying to explain to his ex-wife why the children were suddenly obsessed with the idea of their food being poisoned or were talking about dead bodies at their vacation resort. She grimaced and took another bite of her peaches and yogurt.

  56

  The children were in the living room, playing, already arguing over what they were going to play and what the rules would be. If they had been disturbed by overhearing any of Zachary’s and Kenzie’s discussion over lunch, it didn’t seem as if it were botheri
ng them anymore. Kids were like that. Flexible. Able to switch from something worrisome to something safer in a few minutes.

  Most kids, that is.

  Kids who hadn’t been traumatized as Zachary had been as a child. Children who didn’t have OCD or other obsessive conditions that forced them to relive the conversations over and over again.

  “The Salem witch trials,” Kenzie said in a low voice.

  Zachary raised his brows. He took a bite of the peach and yogurt concoction.

  “You said that it was all mass hysteria,” Kenzie said.

  He looked at her. “Wasn’t it? You’re not contending that it was actual magic, are you?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.” Kenzie smiled and shook her head. “I’m not arguing for actual magic and witchcraft. There might have been some traditional herbal healing that was identified as witchcraft, I’ll admit to that. It’s easy to attribute malice to things that you don’t understand. But I don’t think it was just mass hysteria, either. That might be part of it. And the same kind of pressure to inform on your neighbors as you might have dealt with in the anti-communist era or in Nazi Germany. But it was more than that.”

  “What, then?”

  “They think that part of it might have been ergot.”

  Zachary shook his head. He blinked at her, trying to make sense of it. Clearly not a theory he had heard before. “What is ergot?”

  “It’s a disease that rye and other grains can get. And if people eat the infected grain, then they can experience hallucinations and other odd behaviors. So some of the ‘hysteria’ surrounding the trials might have had to do with people having hallucinations about things that other people were doing, or hallucinations about performing magic themselves.”

  “Ergot. I’ve never heard of it before. So... is it one of those diseases that doesn’t exist anymore? Like the plague?”

  “It still exists, but with the commercialization of grains and regulations on care and handling, it rarely affects anyone anymore. Maybe a farmer who grows rye for himself and doesn’t know what to watch for. But it doesn’t generally enter the market.”