Brewing Death

by P. D. Workman

  “Maybe she’d already had supper.”

  “She wouldn’t even swallow the soup. I thought maybe she’d overdosed on painkillers and that was why she was so out of it. But I couldn’t find any sign that she’d had anything but Tylenol.”

  “And tea,” Vic contributed.

  “Yes…” Erin agreed, unsure how to put her doubts about the tea into words.

  “You made her tea and she drank it?” Terry asked.

  “No. She had tea beside her bed. Cold. Room temperature. She said she wanted more of the tea, so I gave it to her. She didn’t want anything else. I said I’d get her water and that the tea was cold, but she drank it anyway.”

  “So she was able to swallow.”

  “Yes. She swallowed the tea.”

  Terry nodded.

  “She went back to sleep, and I came out to the kitchen to make some more tea. I was looking around to see if she had more leaves…”

  At his questioning look, she tried to explain further.

  “It wasn’t tea tea. It was an herbal remedy. She said it was boneknit. Comfrey.”

  The doctor was nodding. “A lot of natural remedies are used in these parts. Comfrey is generally regarded as safe, if it is used in small amounts and for a limited period of time.”

  “What happens if a person takes too much?” Piper asked.

  “Liver damage, if I remember right. Possibly carcinogenic. But those are long-term consequences. I’ve never heard of it causing a sudden death like this.” He gave a smile. “I think you can disregard it as a causative factor in this case.”

  “But it wasn’t just boneknit,” Erin said.

  Both men looked at her. “Oh…?” Terry prompted.

  “There was something else in it. I know what comfrey smells like. Very fresh and aromatic… like sliced cucumbers. The tea had comfrey in it, but there was another smell, a stronger one. I’m not sure what it was. I know most of the common tea ingredients, but not all of the medicinal herbs.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “Not very well. It was bitter. Sharp. It was… unpleasant. I couldn’t have drunk it.”

  The doctor gave a shrug. “There are many different plants used in folk remedies. Most of them are harmless. Some can be poisonous, or beneficial herbs have poisonous lookalikes, but reactions are usually mild, they don’t end up being treated in hospital… or dead. I doubt if it was the tea.”

  “How long after drinking the tea did Joelle die?” Terry asked.

  “A couple of minutes, maybe,” Erin said uncomfortably. “It couldn’t have been more than five minutes from the time she drank the tea until the paramedics got here and couldn’t get a response from her.”

  “I think I’d better take this tea into evidence,” Terry said. “Did you find any more leaves in the kitchen?”

  “No. Just what was already made in the bedroom. I couldn’t find any more loose leaves. They would probably be out on the counter if she had a supply of them. But there weren’t any.”

  “We’ll get it tested. Maybe there was something harmful it in. Between that and the autopsy… hopefully we’ll be able to get some answers about what she died of.” He made a face, and Erin wondered what was bothering him. “You guys really shouldn’t have been here. I understand that your intentions were good, but you just landed yourself in the middle of another unexplained death. You want to stop doing that…”

  “It isn’t like I was planning to!” Erin protested. “We were just trying to do something nice. We didn’t poison her.”

  “I imagine that’s the conclusion people are going to jump to. This is the third time you’re the suspect in a possible poisoning. People will stop coming to the bakery, afraid that you might poison them.”

  “They know I didn’t poison Angela or Trenton,” Erin shot back. “And there’s no other bakery for them to go to. Not in town.”

  Her eyes locked with Terry’s, and Erin knew in an instant that was exactly the wrong thing to say. There was no other bakery and there would be no other bakery, now that Joelle could not team up with Charley to open The Bake Shoppe. The potential opening of a competing bakery was, once again, on the back burner.

  “I didn’t poison Joelle to eliminate the competition,” Erin said tiredly.

  “No,” Terry said. His voice was just as weary as hers. It didn’t carry quite the conviction that she would have expected from him on her behalf.

  Erin knew that it would take time for Joelle’s death to be investigated. It took time to analyze unknown substances, and it took time for an autopsy to be performed and have anything useful for the police to investigate. In the meantime, Terry would be making inquiries with anyone who might have had motive or opportunity to kill Joelle. Unfortunately, if Joelle had agreed with Charley to sign on Davis’s behalf and open up The Bake Shoppe, it would put Auntie Clem’s Bakery’s business in jeopardy, and nothing Erin could say would remove that mark against her.

  She didn’t get much sleep, but she was at the bakery the next day early in the morning as usual, trying to focus on her job rather than on Joelle’s death. It wasn’t just the fact that she would be a suspect that bothered her. Maybe even the prime suspect, since she had been on the scene when Joelle died. She couldn’t erase Joelle’s face from her mind. The pallid, frail look she had exhibited before her death. Should Erin have known that she was near death? She and Vic had recognized that something was wrong. Joelle shouldn’t have been that ill just from a leg injury. The doctor had said that if it were a blood clot, there was probably no way Erin could have recognized it and nothing she could have done differently. Would Joelle had looked that way if she had a blood clot? If it were in her leg, would her face and her thought processes have been affected?

  “Erin.”

  Erin blinked and looked over at Vic. “Hm? Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

  “You don’t think it was the tea, do you?”

  Vic’s thoughts were apparently running parallel to Erin’s.

  “I really don’t know. I don’t think so. The doctor said most herbal teas are harmless. And she didn’t have very much. Just a few sips…”

  “But we don’t know how much she might have had before we got there. She might have had several cups already, hoping to heal her leg faster.”

  “With medicine, more isn’t always better.”

  “I know that. But would Joelle? People think that a natural herb can’t do any damage, because it’s natural, but… well, hemlock is natural too, right?”

  “Hemlock?” Erin repeated, her voice jumping higher, “You don’t think someone put hemlock in her tea, do you?”

  Vic shook her head emphatically. “No, no. I didn’t mean that at all. I’m just saying, it could have been something that was harmful to her. Even if it was a healing herb, it could still have affected her the wrong way.”

  Erin shook her head. “I don’t think it was the tea. The doctor thought maybe it was a blood clot.”

  Erin hadn’t told anyone that Joelle said it was Adele who had given her the tea. Adele wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Joelle. Adele was a good person. She was a friend. Despite all that had happened since Erin had moved to Bald Eagle Falls, she still believed in the basic goodness of people. Despite all of the people and problems that lurked in her past, she still thought that most people, people like Adele, were good.

  They continued to work in silence.

  Chapter 7

  True to her usual schedule, Charley didn’t show her face until the afternoon, probably having slept away the morning.

  “Can you take a break?” she asked Erin, motioning to the tables and chairs at the front of the shop.

  There were no other customers and Erin expected it to stay quiet until the after-school crowd arrived. She nodded.

  “You want a coffee? Danish?”

  “Coffee,” Charley agreed. “It’s too early for anything too sweet, though. How about… a muffin?”

  “Most of them are still pretty sweet. Maybe�
�� lemon cranberry?”

  “Sounds good!” Charley agreed.

  In her first weeks living in Bald Eagle Falls, she had approached Erin’s gluten-free goodies with some trepidation, sure they were going to be awful, or at least substandard. But she had gotten over her uncertainty of the food and was open to trying whatever was on offer.

  Erin got them each a coffee and a muffin for Charley, and she went to the front of the store.

  “Just let me know if you need a break for anything,” she told Vic.

  Vic nodded, unsmiling. Erin knew that Vic didn’t particularly like Charley. Partly because of who Charley was—a Dyson and a rather abrasive personality—and partly, Erin suspected, because she was jealous of the time Erin spent with Charley and the fact that they had a familial relationship Erin and Vic did not. It wasn’t like Erin was spending a lot of time with Charley and only a little with Vic, but that didn’t seem to matter.

  “So…?” Erin prompted, wondering what Charley wanted to talk about.

  “So…? Someone practically dies in your arms, and you have to ask what I want to talk about?”

  News traveled fast in Bald Eagle Falls, especially juicy gossip. Erin wasn’t sure who had talked to Charley. She didn’t have a lot of friends in town, but there were plenty of people who were happy to spread bad news.

  “She didn’t die in my arms,” Erin countered. “I wasn’t even in the room.”

  Charley broke off a bite of muffin. “Spill it,” she said, “I want to know all the details.”

  “I probably shouldn’t be talking to you about it. Officer Piper will want to talk to you…”

  “Why would he want to talk to me? I wasn’t there. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “But you’ll be a suspect. Because of the bakery…”

  “Why? I didn’t want her dead. Who knows who Davis will appoint as his attorney now. I wanted Joelle alive, so she could sign whatever directions were needed to get the bakery opened up again.”

  “But she wasn’t cooperating, so maybe….”

  “Still no reason for me to kill her. I can’t convince her if she’s dead.”

  Erin considered it, but she couldn’t think of any reason Charley would have killed Joelle. Not if she was telling the truth.

  “Well…”

  “Come on. Tell me what happened. All of it.”

  Erin surrendered and gave Charley a brief account of what had happened at Joelle’s house.

  “Bizarre,” Charley said, shaking her head. “I never would have thought… she seemed really healthy. I know sometimes athletes have heart attacks just out of the blue… do you think that’s what happened?”

  “It’s as good a guess as any. Until the autopsy has been done, we have no way of knowing what it actually was. Maybe she had a virus or an infection. I don’t know.”

  She didn’t suggest to Charley that it might have been a blood clot or that it might have had something to do with the mysterious ingredients of the tea. She wasn’t comfortable talking to Charley about it like she was with Vic. Charley was still an outsider.

  For a while, Charley was silent, sipping her coffee, her brow furrowed. Erin waited for her to spill what she was thinking.

  “You know how you hear stories?” Charley asked finally. “Somebody who had several near-death experiences in a short period of time, and then things caught up to them, and they actually did die?”

  Erin shook her head. “I don’t know… I guess I’ve heard of a couple stories like that, but it isn’t that common.”

  “No… but how would you explain it? Was that person fated to die? The person was supposed to die, and even if they escaped the first few incidents, it was bound to catch up to them…”

  “I don’t believe in fate.” Erin shifted uncomfortably. She took a sip of her black coffee, knowing that she probably shouldn’t have anything too late in the afternoon. She wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, and she needed to be able to sleep.

  “But you must see how some things are meant to happen,” Charley pressed. “Things that just fall into place? Coincidences? Unexpected events…”

  “No. Sorry. I just don’t see it that way. There is randomness and there are patterns… but God or fate? I’ve never seen anything to convince me of that.”

  “Okay… well, then maybe you can explain this. Joelle kept having accidents and now she’s dead. Do you think that’s just coincidence?”

  “Not exactly. She died because of one of those accidents. It’s not a coincidence, it’s related.”

  “But you don’t know why she died.”

  “Not yet. But I think it was related to her getting hurt.”

  “What about the other accidents?”

  “Maybe she hurt herself the first time, and that caused the others. She hit her head or pulled a muscle. Something that made her more clumsy.”

  “I talked to her, though. She said they weren’t related. And if she had a head injury or was limping, I would have noticed.”

  “It might have just been more subtle than that.” Erin shrugged.

  Charley’s face was tight, a mask. She shook her head.

  “What other accidents did she have?” Erin asked.

  Charley drew her chair in closer to Erin. Erin got the feeling that this was the question she had been waiting for. She was bursting at the seams to share what she knew, only she didn’t have anyone to share it with.

  “The first time, it was a black eye. She said that she had walked into a tree branch. We kind of laughed about it. She said she had never done anything like that before, and we laughed at what a crazy accident it was. She’s a city girl, so I teased her about how she’d never learned how to be safe around trees, you know?”

  Erin nodded.

  “Then there was the accident at the river.”

  “Someone said she was standing too close to the edge and the bank crumbled.”

  “That could happen to anyone, right? But… I mean, she was a city girl, she would still be figuring out how close to go and be safe. Not like someone who’s grown up climbing trees and jumping into rivers and all of the stupid things we did as kids.”

  Erin hadn’t grown up in Bald Eagle Falls either. Like Joelle, she was a product of the city, not really at ease in the bush. Her childhood had not consisted of climbing trees and jumping into rivers.

  Charley shrugged, as if acknowledging this.

  “And that was the only other accident? Until she fell and hurt her leg?” Erin asked.

  Three accidents. Only one of them had resulted in any serious injury. If they had happened months apart, no one would have thought anything of any of them. But because they had happened in a short time, they formed a pattern in Joelle’s and Charley’s minds. A false pattern, probably.

  “She couldn’t explain how she had hurt herself in the woods that day,” Charley said, her voice low as if she were telling a ghost story. “She said that something had grabbed her foot and made her fall.”

  “Grabbed her foot? What grabbed her foot?”

  “She couldn’t say. When she fell, she was knocked out initially. When she woke up, she was in shock. She was bleeding badly, so she was faint and queasy. She tried to figure out how she had fallen, but she wasn’t in any shape to sort it out. She told me about what had happened. Told me where it was, and I went back there to take a look around, and I couldn’t see anything that she might have tripped over.”

  “Where was this?”

  Charley chewed her lip. “In the bush, where she’d been out hiking. She had to flag down a passing vehicle to give her a ride because she was too hurt to walk back.”

  “How do you know you got the right place? And how do you know there wasn’t anything she might have tripped over? I mean… I can trip over a crack in the sidewalk. All it would take is a stick or a pebble that she stepped on the wrong way. You can’t tell that by going back and looking at the ground.”

  “I know it was the right place because her blood was still there.
And there wasn’t anything that could have tripped her up. Not like she said. Not something that could have grabbed her.”

  “That could mean anything. Her foot caught under an exposed root. It doesn’t mean that there was a person lying in wait who reached out and grabbed her.”

  “There were no exposed roots,” Charley said triumphantly. “There wasn’t anything sticking up from the ground that she could have caught her toe under.”

  “Not that you could see. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t something she had just caught the wrong way. A rock that caught her toe in a hollow, that she ended up kicking away when she tripped over it. With all of the experience you have in the backwoods, you’ve never tripped?”

  “Sure. A hundred times. But I’ve never hurt myself that bad, and I could usually figure out what had tripped me.”

  “Usually. So not always.”

  Charley considered. “Okay, not always. Sometimes, it could just have been uneven ground, something that looked perfectly smooth to the casual eye. But I never thought I’d been grabbed.” She considered and reworded. “Usually,” she admitted again.

  “When you catch your toe under something or run into weeds or branches that are ankle-high, sometimes it feels like you were grabbed,” Erin said.

  “I suppose.”

  Erin shrugged.

  “So your answer is that it was all just coincidence. It wasn’t just because it was her time to die.”

  “It wasn’t really coincidence. She was doing activities she wasn’t used to in a place she wasn’t accustomed to doing them. She wasn’t used to walking around in the woods or standing on riverbanks. So she made mistakes, and those got her hurt.”

  “She wasn’t supposed to die?”

  “Supposed to?” Erin shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t believe in fate or God. There isn’t any supposed to or not supposed to. She just did.”

  “I don’t know how that is supposed to make more sense than fate,” Charley said. “Death just being a random happening… that doesn’t make me feel any better. Our lives are more than just random.”

  Her speech just served to convince Erin further that religion was mostly just people attempting to make themselves feel better about what they perceived as the unfairness of the short human life.