Dosed to Death

by P. D. Workman

  “Could they have it here? Could something that Mrs. Hubbard cooked with have been contaminated with this disease? She makes bread, buns, all of that kind of thing. Whatever they need, she makes from scratch.”

  Kenzie thought about it while slurping down a few more bites of peaches and yogurt. It was a nice, sweet treat. Not chocolate ice cream, but something nice to have when they were separated from most of her usual comfort foods. The kids had really risen to the challenge and had produced a very nice lunch.

  “I don’t think they could have it here, but of course anything is possible. I would think that if Mrs. Hubbard had any diseased rye, she would recognize it and not cook with it. But if a neighbor had it and ground it up...” Kenzie shrugged. “It could be something shared between households in these parts. A farmer’s market or a barter group.”

  “How would we find out?”

  “We’re just going to have to wait until the authorities can get here. They can check Brooke’s body for ergot and any other toxins that we think she might have been exposed to. We can’t test everyone else, but her metabolism stopped while she still had it in her system. Unless it’s got a really short half-life, it will still be present in the body.”

  “But there’s nothing we can do until then?”

  “Just talk to Mrs. Hubbard. Ask her where she gets her flour. If she’s ever heard of anyone having this in the area. But I don’t know how forthcoming she will be. Not if she thinks that we suspect her of wrongdoing. It’s one thing to say that someone came into her kitchen and put something into the food without her realizing it. It’s another thing to say that she did it herself, either through negligence or intentionally.”

  Zachary nodded slowly. He stirred his peaches and yogurt around, then licked off the spoon. Sometimes he ate at a maddeningly slow speed. Like a kid who took three hours to eat Brussels sprouts, hoping that Mom and Dad would give up and not make him eat them all.

  “Mushrooms, ergot, what else?”

  “What else what?”

  “What other plants can cause hallucinations? We were looking for drugs. Something that would have to have been intentionally added to the food to have this effect. What if it were something that was in the food by accident? Something that... Mrs. Hubbard thought was something different. There are mix-ups sometimes. Berries, wild parsnips, herbs that someone thought were one thing, but they were actually another. You hear about people being poisoned by accident because something was misidentified. So what might have caused these other symptoms? Psychedelic mushrooms and moldy rye. Anything else?”

  “It’s not really my area.”

  “But it is. How would you find out if someone ate something poisonous by accident if they came to your morgue? It happens, so there must be some kind of protocol to figure it out.”

  “Okay, yes,” Kenzie agreed. “Of course there is. We talk to the people who were around the deceased last, find out what they were doing and if they showed any signs or symptoms. Actually, the police usually do that, but sometimes the ME’s office has follow up questions. We take stomach contents and try to identify what their last meal consisted of. If it seems suspicious or poisoning is suspected, then we will take a longer time doing that. Not just observing what is in the stomach contents, but testing the various ingredients. And we do tox screens. The most basic ones just check for drugs someone is likely to overdose on, but if there is something specific we are looking for, a particular plant or drug, then we can test for those.”

  “But you can’t do any of that here.”

  “The only thing I can do here is to talk to people and look for signs and symptoms of what they might have eaten. And people are not being really cooperative right now. I think everyone is tired of the questions and just wants to pretend that nothing happened. It was just... a nightmare or a drunk. Nothing more than that.”

  “And you don’t know what other plants could cause these symptoms?”

  “Which symptoms? I know a few, but I’d have to look most of them up in a database. I at least need internet access so I can look them up.”

  “And we can’t.” Zachary sighed. “Oh, well. Hopefully, it won’t be very long until the weather clears up and the authorities can get here. I know we won’t be first priority, but they know we already have a body here. Even if it were just natural causes, the ME is still going to want a look while it is still as fresh as possible. In three days, a body is already starting to decompose.”

  “Luckily, ours is in cold storage. I’m glad we ended up here in the winter rather than the summer. But yeah. They don’t know that and... hopefully they’re eager to get here before it decomposes too much.”

  Zachary went back to stirring his fruit around. Kenzie worked through the symptoms in her head. She kept starting a list and then getting distracted, so she tried to work it through out loud. “Hallucinations or delusions. Amnesia. Anger, irritability, oppositional behavior. Maybe heart attack.”

  Zachary’s eyes sparked. He was eager to work it out with Kenzie. They both enjoyed it when they could work on a case together, bouncing ideas off each other and seeing what they could come up with. Kenzie providing the medical knowledge and Zachary making suggestions based on his observations of human behavior.

  “What about fever?” he suggested. “You thought that Redd might have a fever.”

  “Yes... a fever can cause hallucinations, but what caused the fever? It could be a virus.”

  “And we know that viruses can cause a lot of other neurological symptoms as well.”

  “Yes,” Kenzie acknowledged, and rolled her eyes. “They certainly can. And you and I would be less likely to catch a virus, staying down here away from the rest of the crowd and having just gone through an antiviral protocol.”

  “What else could fever be caused by? Is a virus the only possibility?”

  “Bacterial infection. There are definitely drugs that can raise your core temperature as well. Ecstasy is one of them.”

  “Did you find any of that when we searched the cabins?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean that no one had any before I did the search. Or had it on their person, since we didn’t search everyone to see what they were carrying.”

  Zachary nodded. “What else?”

  “Redd had dilated pupils as well. Very wide.”

  “Not pinpoint like with opioids.”

  “No. Opioids are out. If everyone were exposed to the same thing as Redd. His pupils were definitely dilated.”

  “Anything else?”

  “They seemed drunk. More than they should have been for having a drink or two with dinner.”

  “They might have started drinking earlier, or have had more than you thought.”

  “Or it made them act drunk.”

  Zachary nodded, conceding. “So what does that tell you? Anything?”

  “Death. Drunken. Delirium. Dilated pupils.” Kenzie blinked, trying to put it all together.

  “You sound like... you know.”

  “The ten D’s,” Kenzie said. There was something tickling the back of her brain, but she couldn’t bring it to the fore. Why did they have to have no internet access? With a few searches, she could have looked up the ten D’s. She could have reminded herself what the others were, so she could see whether they fit. And they would tell her, if they all fit, what the toxin was. “This is maddening! I can’t think of it.”

  “This is something you learned in medical school?” Zachary suggested. “What class?”

  Kenzie tried to picture it. Which professor or doctor had listed them? Was it a class? A case she had attended to on rounds? The emergency room? Something that had come up in the medical examiner’s office? She pressed her fingertips to her forehead, trying to remember.

  “Yes, but I can’t remember. It’s just on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t remember it.”

  “There were ten D’s? What else could there have been? What other symptoms start with D?”

  “There are too many of them to cou
nt. I have to remember what those ten were. Or what they indicated. It was... it was a toxin, I’m sure of that. Not a genetic disorder. Nothing congenital.”

  Zachary was quiet, watching her. But despite the fact that he was respecting her process and giving her the time to think it through, Kenzie was irritated by his focused interest. It was too much pressure.

  “Are you done with that?” She indicated his dessert bowl. “If you are, then get rid of it. Don’t keep playing with it.”

  Zachary stood up. He picked up the bowl and took it with him to the sink. Of course he was hurt. He was trying to help, and she had snapped at him for something that wasn’t even the issue. Kenzie would make it up to him later. She would thank him for being quiet and leaving her to just think about it. She would thank him for getting up and washing his dish without making a big deal of it. Once she had sorted the symptoms out and knew what it was they were looking for.

  Tyrrell had heated a pot of water for washing dishes. Kenzie tried to ignore Zachary as he scraped his dessert bowl and his main course into the garbage, then splashed around in the sink, cleaning them up. He returned to the table and didn’t say anything to Kenzie about whether she had solved the puzzle yet. He indicated her dinner bowl. “You’re done with that one?”

  Kenzie nudged it toward him. She looked down at her dessert bowl, but wasn’t really interested in the fruit and yogurt anymore. The kids were both in the other room, so they wouldn’t see whether she finished it off or not. She took one more bite, and then pushed that bowl to Zachary as well.

  “Thanks.”

  He nodded and took them both away without a word.

  Kenzie leaned her head back until she was staring up at the ceiling.

  She was a trained medical professional. She had seen the group of symptoms that had been described to her. It might have been rare, but that wasn’t any excuse for not remembering the details. Doctors had to be able to consume and retain vast quantities of information. She had been too lazy, relying on her ability to perform searches to find out what she needed to instead of on retaining the new information that she learned. She couldn’t stop learning. Just because she was in the Medical Examiner’s Office now, that didn’t mean that she could just coast. There was far more that she could be learning from each and every case that went through their autopsy.

  Zachary finished the dish-washing and didn’t return to the table to check up on her and see whether she had figured out the information she was trying to remember yet. He knew, of course, that she would tell him when she remembered. It wouldn’t be a secret. She wouldn’t hold back to surprise him later when he least expected it. It wasn’t some kind of game or power play.

  They both knew that however safe they felt there in the cabin, their lives could depend on it.

  57

  It sounded melodramatic, but it really wasn’t, was it?

  She needed to know what it was that the guests were being poisoned with, if anything. It could be the difference between someone living or dying. Not only that, but if someone had intentionally poisoned the food or drinks, then they were not going to want Kenzie to figure it out. They would already be looking for a way to take her out. To remove Kenzie and her knowledge from the equation.

  And she had seen the knife. Maybe that wasn’t a key piece of evidence. She hadn’t been able to see what fingerprints were on it, of course. Seeing the knife itself hadn’t told her anything about who it was that had stabbed Brooke. It was just a knife. She hadn’t even been able to prove that it was the knife that had killed Brooke, though she was sure it was. Why else would someone have thrown it away behind the cabins? People didn’t just randomly throw knives away in the bush.

  It was a matter of life and death. Kenzie’s, and maybe others’ as well. She couldn’t afford to treat it like a case she was only remotely interested in. People could die if she didn’t figure it out. Like on a medical mystery TV show—the doctors always kept looking until they found out exactly what the patient’s problem was. It didn’t matter how rare the disease or syndrome was or how expensive the testing or treatment were. It didn’t matter how long it would have taken doctors in real life to figure out what the problem was. A TV show doctor would figure it out.

  And that was what Kenzie had to do too.

  She got up from the table. Sitting there wasn’t bringing her any inspiration. She needed to move around, to think through what they knew again. Maybe make a written list this time. Like she had written down the drugs that she had found in each of the cabins. She should probably look at that again to see whether she could add anything to it. She might remember one or two more medications.

  Not that it mattered. Not if, like Zachary suggested, it wasn’t even someone’s medication that had been used to poison the guests. Something that occurred naturally or had been added in. A berry? Belladonna? Wild parsnips? Something that Mrs. Hubbard had foraged and saved, thinking it was a harmless substance. It wasn’t her fault. People made mistakes.

  Tyrrell looked at Kenzie as she wandered through the living room. He too gave her the space she needed. Maybe he didn’t know what they had been talking about and he was just tired or enjoying watching the children. But he didn’t interrogate her and ask her if she had figured out what the ten D’s were yet, or what they signified.

  She would write down all of the D symptoms she could think of. Then she would pick out the ones that fit together. And once she had the list of ten, she would remember what it was that they were looking for. And they would be one step closer to figuring out the answer.

  It wasn’t just mass hysteria. She was convinced of it. The constellation of symptoms was too familiar.

  Kenzie finished going over her written lists and pushed them to the side, sighing loudly. Zachary was playing with the kids on the floor and looked up at her.

  “Maybe you need to distract your mind. Sometimes, when you’re trying to remember something, the best thing to do is to not think about it. Distract yourself with something else, and then it suddenly pops into your head.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen here.”

  Zachary shrugged. “Well, you’ve written everything down, so it isn’t like you’re going to lose something if you put it out of your mind. Why don’t you play a game with us. Distract yourself and see what happens.” He looked toward the window, which was starting to get dark. “It doesn’t make any difference whether you remember tonight or tomorrow. I don’t think anything is going to happen tonight.”

  But the fact was, something had happened every night since they had arrived there. Deaths, the theft of the drugs from the safe, something had happened ever time the sun had gone down. But she’d better keep it to herself. She didn’t want to upset the kids and give them nightmares.

  Maybe the weather would break, and they would be able to get help the next day.

  The doors were locked and, unlike in many of the houses in the city, they were not hollow core doors, but heavy, thick, hardwood doors with bolts that sank into thick log walls. Practically impenetrable. Or so she hoped.

  They were safe for the night. Help would not arrive until at least the next day. She might as well put her worries aside and do something that the kids would enjoy.

  “Okay, what? What do you guys want to do?”

  “Play Clue?” Alisha suggested.

  Kenzie laughed. Clue. When they were trying to figure out a real murder. That would be distracting, all right.

  But at least there were no poisons or toxic plants in Clue. It was all manual murder weapons. Knife, gun, rope, candlestick. No one could leave a poison in one room and then leave, so that their crime was not discovered until much later.

  Kenzie shook her head, but she agreed. “Okay, Clue. You guys get it out. I want to be Mrs. Peacock.”

  “I like Professor Plum,” Alisha said. “I like purple.”

  “You can’t be Professor Plum,” Mason objected. “You have to be one of the girls.”

  “Girls can be
professors.”

  Mason looked skeptical. He pulled the box out of the pile and started going through the cards. He showed Alisha the one for Professor Plum. “He’s not a girl. He’s a man. You have to be one of the girls.”

  “No I don’t. And that doesn’t mean that Professor Plum has to be a man. They just had to make him a man or a woman when they drew the card. He can be anyone you want. If I want him to be a woman professor, he can be.” Alisha looked at Kenzie, appealing to her. “A lady can be a professor, right?”

  “Of course,” Kenzie agreed. “I’m a female doctor. I had lots of professors at school who were women.”

  “In this game, he’s a man,” Mason grumbled.

  “He can be a woman,” Alisha asserted. “And that’s who I’m going to be. What color do you want, Mason?”

  Mason made a face. “Mr. Green.”

  “Okay. Mr. Green. Who do you want to be, Uncle Zachary?”

  “Colonel Mustard.”

  “He’s the yellow one,” Mason declared, setting the figure on his square. He sounded the word out. “Col-o-nel. Why do you say it kernel?”

  Zachary shook his head. “That’s how it is pronounced. I don’t know why.”

  Mason accepted this. “Daddy, you have to be White or Scarlet, because Alisha took Professor Plum.” He lowered his eyebrows at Alisha. “See? You should let Daddy take Professor Plum. You can be one of the girls.”

  “It’s okay, Mason,” Tyrrell told him. “I’ll be... Miss Scarlet.”

  Mason giggled.

  Tyrrell tried out a falsetto voice. “Is this how Miss Scarlet talks?”

  Mason guffawed loudly. He pushed Alisha over.

  “Hey!” Alisha objected.

  “You still sound like a girl. You have to make a voice like a man.”

  “No. I’m a lady professor, not a man professor, so I don’t have to use a deep voice.”