Madness In Maggody (10 page)

Jim Bob was
not a happy camper by any means. He sputtered threats and cursed steadily as Plover and I rounded up all the shoppers, ordered them to abandon their carts in mid-aisle, and sent them away bereft of bargains. The four employees gathered near the office door, awed equally by Plover's commando tactics and Jim Bob's command of the viler side of the King's English.

Once the door was locked, I went over to Jim Bob and said, "Go right ahead and call the sheriff. I've told you I cleared this with him beforehand. He's busy having his men question everyone who called to report nausea and pins, but he'll be here shortly. You can't keep selling merchandise until we figure out what in blazes is going on."

"I cannot believe this shit," Jim Bob groaned. "We open Saturday at two o'clock and at three we're closed down tighter than a rabbit's ass. We reopen not even twenty-four hours ago, and now we're closed down again. Is this some kind of friggin' conspiracy to keep the SuperSaver closed until we go broke? You working for somebody, Chief? Somebody who doesn't like the competition, for instance?"

"Shut up," Plover said as he came around the corner of the office. He looked at the huddle of high-school boys. "You all came to work yesterday afternoon and again this morning at seven, right?" They nodded. "Anyone missing who worked yesterday?" They shook their heads. "Go wait at the picnic tables in the pavilion. Someone from the sheriff's department will be there before too long to take your statements."

They reluctantly went toward the back of the store, leaving Jim Bob to grouse without an appreciative audience. When he lost momentum, I told him we'd have to question the night staff, too, since Kevin had bought the cupcakes and sponge cakes on his way out the door shortly after seven o'clock that morning.

I followed him into the office enclosure and waited impatiently as he threw papers here and there and made several graphic comments about my lineage, among other things. He at last found a notebook, opened it to the page with the schedules, and tossed it to me. "Are you saying one of these people diddled items on the shelf to try to kill half the town?"

The list was distressingly short: Buzz Milvin and Kevin Buchanon. I frowned at it for a minute. "No one else came into the store last night after it closed at nine o'clock?"

Jim Bob sat down at the desk and took a bottle of whiskey out of a drawer. "Nobody had any cause to. You'll have to ask Milvin.

"I will, but he can wait for the time being. According to the schedule, he's supposed to total the receipts and count the cash. Is there a safe here?"

"It hasn't been installed yet. I came by at ten-thirty to verify the figures and take the cash to the night depository at the bank in Starley City," he said, his face turning pale. He took a drink from the bottle, but it didn't seem to help. "I ended up sending Milvin to the bank because I was in a hurry."

"In a hurry to get home?"

Pale turned to outright pasty. "I had an appointment somewhere else. In Farberville."

"At eleven o'clock at night?"

"Yeah," he muttered. "Business."

"With Lamont Petrel, perhaps?" I said, wondering why he looked as if he was about to pass out. "As you know, he disappeared three days ago and the state police are conducting an investigation. In your statement to Sergeant Plover, you said you had no idea where Petrel is. If you had some sort of secret meeting with him last night, you'd better say so now."

"It wasn't with Petrel. I was...interviewing a checker." Several inches of whiskey gurgled down his throat.

"Oh, were you? She must be some potential checker to warrant the drive to Farberville that late at night. I'll have to have her name and address so I can verify this."

"This doesn't have anything to do with sticking pins in cupcakes—and you damn well know it!" he roared, a little of his customary charm returning along with his circulation. "If you know what's good for you, Chief Hanks, you'll just worry about whoever it is trying to ruin my store and stop pestering me. I got every right to do interviews when and where I choose."

"And I have every right to question everybody involved and verify stories," I said, taking an inordinate pleasure in the sweat popping out on his forehead like crystal zits. "Her name and address?"

"I don't reckon I recall offhand."

"I reckon you'd better try harder."

A loud rapping on the glass door interrupted any reckoning about to take place. I stuck my head out the office door, saw Mrs. Jim Bob arguing with Plover, and turned back with a bright look. "It's your wife. I suppose we could wait until she comes into the office, but it's your choice."

The whiskey bottle went back into the drawer. "Cherri Lucinda Crate, and she lives in that apartment house across from the airport. Top floor at the far end." Jim Bob tried to give me a nice smile, but his heart wasn't in it and the curl of his lips reminded me of an animal that'd been dead in the woods for several weeks. "Ain't no cause to go bothering her, though," he continued in a low voice. "She doesn't know anything about this."

"I should say not!" Mizzoner snapped as she came into the office. "I explained at great length to Eula Lemoy and to Dahlia O'Neill's granny that I for one cannot be held responsible for whatever funny business is going on in this store. Although I must say I fail to see anything funny about it." She turned on me with the fury of a goose defending its nest. "I want you to arrest Lamont Petrel, and I want you to do it before he poisons the remaining members of the missionary society. This has got to stop." I agreed, pointed out the slight difficulty in arresting Petrel at the moment, and left the two alone for a cozy chat. Plover was unlocking the door for Harve, Les Vernon, and two other deputies. We went down to the far end of the checkout counters, where Mrs. Jim Bob's shrill voice was less deafening.

Harve gave me a disgruntled look. "We talked to this last bunch of victims. All the tampered products were purchased this morning from the display by the register next to the office."

He scratched his head as he consulted a tattered stenographer's notebook. "We've had six reports thus far, and I'll call the dispatcher shortly. There haven't been any complaints on cupcakes and sponge cakes or anything else purchased yesterday evening, but that may not prove anything. The puke-provoking packages could have been put on the shelf last night or this morning."

"Kevin left the store at seven-fifteen," I said. "That narrows the time frame just a bit."

"There were a lot of folks in the store last night. As soon as we've interrogated the checkers, I'll get the list to you and you can start working on it. Les, you check the cake packages on the shelf for prints."

I felt slightly better that the perp list was now expanded to include more names, especially since I'd eliminated Kevin from contention and couldn't come up with a motive for Hizzoner, despite my best efforts. I suggested we examine the remaining stock for suspicious seals, and we fanned out for what became a tedious two-hour marathon of studying the underside of candy bars and corn-chip bags for telltale smears of glue—all without putting our own prints on top of someone else's, and as it turned out, all for naught, since none of us found anything.

We regrouped at the last register to listen to Deputy Vernon. Three packages of cupcakes had been pierced through the cellophane with straight pins. Two packages of cream-filled sponge cakes had been resealed, and sloppily at that. To our collective disappointment but not our great surprise, there was nary a print on any of the items.

Harve pointed at the beads of glue on one of the packages.

"I'd bet my new weedless bucktail jig it didn't come this way from the factory."

No one took him up on it.

Plover offered to send the evidence to the lab, since he seemed to get better service than Harve and I did. Harve thanked him effusively (the primaries were coming up fast), and went to call the dispatcher for an update on the upchuckers.

I walked out to the parking lot with the amiable state trooper. "I won't fall over backward if the lab finds ipecac in the sponge cakes," I said, squinting as the sunlight pounded down on us. "I wish I knew what the hell was going on. First some unknown party dumps an unknown quantity of the damn stuff in the tamale sauce and takes down twenty-three innocent grazers. Petrel disappears, but it takes a stretch to see him as the perp. He and Jim Bob both have an interest in the store's success, not its failure—and a lot of folks won't be shopping within five miles of it. The picnic pavilion might as well stay closed; no one's going to patronize it anytime soon."

"Heard anything about Petrel?" Plover asked quickly, then winced as if he'd stepped on a live coal and said, "Just asking, Chief."

I told him about Jim Bob's trip into Farberville, but added that I had a feeling Cherri Lucinda Crate would eventually, if somewhat unwillingly, back his story. "Nobody even saw Petrel leave the office? What about the checkers and customers in the front of the store?"

"They all went to the back of the store to watch the show," he said morosely. "There was a ten-minute interval during which Petrel could have ridden out the door on a pink-polka-dotted mule."

He told me he'd be back shortly and drove away. As I started for the door, Deputy Vernon came out and said, "Harve says there's still no answer at Buzz Milvin's house. He wants you to run up there and see if the guy's scrunched in a closet counting up his victims on his fingers and toes."

"The stuff may have been tampered with before he came to work at nine," I said.

"Harve had a chat with the employees, and they finally produced a half-assed list of customers what came in last evening after six. Lots of folks, including"—he gave me an odd look—"Ruby Bee Hanks, Estelle Oppers, Buzz Milvin and his mother-in-law, and a dozen or so more."

"Mandozes, the Mexican guy?"

"I think so. Anyways, Harve says for you to go see if you can hunt up Milvin and bring him back for questioning."

I tried to assign Buzz a motive as I drove down the road to his house, but I was as bereft of inspiration as I was of cool air from the pisspoor air conditioner. I parked beside Buzz's truck and went to the front door. I rang the bell, and when there was no response, I went around the side of the house to see if they might be having a barbecue or something.

As I swung around the corner, I almost crashed into a small figure under an open umbrella. "Lissie," I said urgently, "where's your pa?"

"Napping."

"What about your grandmother and Martin?"

"They're napping, too. I wasn't sleepy, so I got Roxanne"—she held up a rag doll—"and we decided to go for a walk all the way up the road to the mailbox. I made her a raincoat and a rainbonnet. See?"

There was an icy rock growing in my stomach, and growing damn fast. I briefly glanced at the doll wrapped in clear plastic and said, "Good for you. I need to talk to your pa now."

"Please don't tell Pa where I went, Miss Arly. He likes me to stay close to the house, but sometimes Roxanne and I get bored with the same old yard. Pa says not to talk to outsiders, too. I suppose it's okay to talk to you."

Humming tunelessly, she went past me and vanished around the front of the house. I continued to the back door, knocked on the glass, and then ordered myself to try the knob. I had a real bad feeling about it.

"Anybody home?" I yelled as I stepped inside. The kitchen was clean, with dishes drying on the rack and the dish towels neatly hanging from plastic hoops. I repeated my question, listened for a reply, then went along a dark hallway to the living room.

Buzz Milvin was lying in a recliner. His eyes were closed, and had it not been for his wheezy breathing and gray skin, I might have thought he was, as Lissie had told me, sleeping. I hurried over to him and shook his shoulder. "Buzz? Buzz? Are you all right?"

He mumbled something and his head flopped to one side. A trickle of saliva ran down his chin, and his breathing seemed to worsen. I went back to the kitchen and called the sheriff's office. The dispatcher promised to send an ambulance immediately. I glanced in at Buzz, who hadn't moved, and went on down the hall to several closed doors.

I recoiled from the odor as I opened the first one. It had the sour pharmaceutical smell I'd noticed when I first met Lillith Smew, but something had been added that made it even less tolerable. The woman on the bed was motionless. Unlike Buzz, her chest did not jerk up and down as if responding to jolts of electricity. Her skin was grayer than his, and her tongue protruded between slack lips. Death had voided her bowels.

I gulped back an acid taste, shut the door, and went on to the next one. It was the children's bedroom. The bottom bunk bed was vacant, but a hand dangled over the rail from the top bunk. I approached the hand, and again heard labored breathing.

"Martin?" I croaked.

"Yeah?" he said so softly that I could barely hear it. "That you, Gran?"

"It's Arly. I've sent for the ambulance. Someone will be here to help you in a minute." I squeezed his hand, more to comfort myself than him, and said, "What happened, Martin?"

"Where's Gran? I wanna talk to Gran."

"I'll listen," I said, straining to hear him with one ear and the ambulance's siren with the other. "I'll listen to you, Martin. What do you want to tell Gran?"

"That I wasn't lying."

"Of course you weren't lying." I jiggled his hand. "Lying about what? You can tell me; I know you won't lie to Gran or to me, Martin."

"What's the matter with my brother?" Lissie asked from the doorway.

"He's sick," I managed to say calmly. "So are Gran and your pa. I sent for an ambulance."

"Why's everbody sick?"

Martin groaned from the top bunk. I wiped the sweat from his forehead, murmured to him that I was there, and looked back at Lissie. "I don't know why everybody's sick. Do you?"

She began to shake her head, and continued to do so as the ambulance arrived out front. For all I knew, she was still at it as I ran to the front door and barked at the medics to bring two gurneys. There was no need for hurry with a third.