Murder Gone A-Rye (A Baker's Treat Mystery) (21 page)

T
hanksgiving dinner was not a sit-down affair at my house. Instead it was a chaotic buffet. The fancy linen–covered table groaned with enough food to feed an army. The meal was officially served at five, but the feast continued into the night, with a second table laden with desserts.

Family came and went. Everyone had at least two affairs to go to, ours and their spouses’. Everyone, that is, except me, which is why all holidays were held at my house. Grandma came to my house because it was bigger than her apartment at the senior assisted-living building, and so aunts and uncles and as many of my fifty-two cousins as possible stopped by to eat, drink, and visit.

Then there was the yearly tradition of the “holiday reveal.” Homer Everett Day aside, Thanksgiving was the beginning of the Christmas holiday in the Nathers family. The reveal always began with the telling of the story, then the procession, and finally the reveal. What had started as a joke, Grandma had made a tradition.

The cuckoo clock in the den struck eight
P.M.
and the kids all jumped up to mob Grandma Ruth.

“Tell the story, Grandma.”

“It’s eight o’clock.”

“Okay, okay.” Grandma held out her good hand and hushed them with an up and down motion. The kids sat down as she cleared her throat. “Way back in 1972—”

“That was a long time ago,” Emma said, her blue eyes wide.

“Way before your mom was born,” Joan said with a smile.

“Stop interrupting,” Grandma Ruth commanded. The room grew still. “As I was saying, back in 1972, my daughter—your grandma—decorated the basement with the finest Christmas decorations money could buy. They were so fine, in fact, she saw no reason to take them down once the New Year came.”

“Imagine Christmas year-round,” Rosa told the kids. “All we had to do was go down to the basement and there it was.”

“Until the years passed and your grandma got tired of dusting them, so she cleverly covered the decorated silver aluminum tree with black plastic. It remained covered all year, and was then uncovered for the Christmas season. Each year when a new child was born, a new stocking went up on the wall to wait for Santa.”

“I have a stocking up there,” Emma said. She was four and wanted everyone to know how much she, too, was part of the family. “When Auntie Crystal has her baby, the baby will get a stocking, too.”

“That’s right,” Grandma Ruth said. She adjusted her hips in her wheelchair. “This went on for some time, until your uncle Rich got tired of the decorations always in view. He wanted to bring his friends over to play video games in the basement. So he took sheets and tacked them up on the walls, completely covering the walls and the lovely decorations.

At this point the entire family gave Rich the stink eye. He took it in good humor and crossed his arms and shrugged.

“This lasted for two years,” Grandma went on, “until your uncle Tim announced the big reveal would happen at precisely eight
P.M.
on Thanksgiving Thursday, and that first year we had no idea what the big reveal was. So we all gathered in the living room at precisely eight
P.M.
to find out what Tim was talking about.”

“And then he led you all in a procession into the basement,” Emma said, clapping her hands excitedly.

“Yes, he did.” Grandma Ruth waved her hand and Tim stood and good-naturedly led everyone to the basement. We followed him down the hall through the kitchen and down the stairs into the soft glow of the single-bulb overhead light.

We waited while Grandma was helped down the stairs. It had been decided that Rich and Calvin would take Grandma down in a fireman’s carry because the house elevator didn’t go into the basement—whoever had installed it hadn’t thought about having it go down there. Dad had considered extending the elevator to the basement, but there was a structural issue, so he had decided we would make do with stairs just like all the other people in the neighborhood. Thankfully the men were strong enough to manage more than two hundred pounds of grandma with her leg and arm casted. She refused to miss the big reveal.

“If this doesn’t make Calvin run, then he really is a good guy to date,” I whispered to Tasha as the two men, red-faced, sidestepped down the ten stairs.

“Oh, he deserves some extra TLC after this,” Tasha agreed with a grin.

Once Grandma was ensconced in the dusty, old Barcalounger near the stairs. The kids gathered around her again. “We all came down and Tim told everyone to sit.”

She nodded at Tim, who said, “Sit.”

All the kids hit the floor. The basement had been remodeled in the seventies, which meant a painted concrete floor with large rag rugs. The walls were paneled and currently covered in sheets that had motifs of everything from the Backstreet Boys to Star Wars to pale pink roses.

“Dim the lights,” Tim said with ceremony. The overhead disco ball light was dimmed with the dimmer switch my father had installed one year when my sister Rosa wanted to have a boy/girl party. “Man your stations.”

My brothers and sisters and I each had our duty stations. Tim, Rich, Eleanor, and I were to yank the sheets from the wall. Rosa was to pull the plastic off the tree, and Michaela, being the oldest grandchild, was to plug in the extension cord, which ran the entire light show.

Boyfriends, girlfriends, and, in my case, husbands, came and went, but blood always attended the family reveal.

“Begin the countdown,” Tim bellowed, and everyone started: “Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .”

When we hit zero, the sheets and plastic were yanked off and the lights were plugged in and the entire room was plunged back in time to a 1972 Christmas, complete with giant, groovy, multicolored lights, plus a train that never failed to chug around the track at the bottom of the tree. The air was filled with must, dust, and the
oohs
and
ahhs
that were the magic of Christmas in the Nathers family.

Yes, I know, Grandma was the only one with the last name of Nathers, and that was the only thing she’d kept of the man she’d married. But Nathers we were and would always be, no matter what our last name was.

“They do this every year?” Calvin asked Tasha loud enough so I heard it.

“Every year,” Tasha said. “Our entire life, right, Toni?”

“Remember the first time you were here for the reveal?” I asked her.

She giggled. “I was thirteen and my mom and dad had said I could come over as long as I did all the Thanksgiving dishes.”

“All of them?” Calvin raised an eyebrow. “All by yourself?”

“All of them,” she acknowledged. “I think they hoped it would deter me. But I was insistent because I wanted to get to see the reveal in person. Toni had talked about it her whole life.”

“Not my whole life,” I said. “Tim had only started it two years before.”

“It’s a sight to be seen,” Calvin agreed.

The noise level in the basement precluded being able to hear yourself think. Rich had started a fire in the potbelly stove. The basement wasn’t exactly heated, so when my father had envisioned a family room in the seventies, he’d thought it wise to put in the stove. For the most part, it worked wonders. Over the years furniture came and went, but the rugs remained the same, along with the decorations. My mother never spoke of another renovation. I wouldn’t be able to do one either, now that she was gone. The reveal was one of the few things we had left of her.

“You okay?” Tasha bumped me with her hip.

I wiped the tears out of my eyes. “Yeah. Thinking about Mom.”

“There is so much of her in this room,” Tasha agreed. “It’s kind of cool, because she was the foundation of the family, wasn’t she?”

I looked around the room at all my relatives. Tasha was right: Mom was the foundation.

“Now you are the foundation.” Tasha hugged me. “I’m glad you moved back.”

“Hey, where is everyone?” My assistant, Meghan, stuck her head through the open basement door. “Wow!” Her eyes were nearly as wide as little Emma’s. She came clomping down the steps in her skinny jeans and thick boots, silver chains, and full-on piercings. “Awesome!”

“Welcome to a 1972 Christmas,” I said and waved my hand.

“You missed the big reveal,” Tasha said.

“It was big,” Calvin agreed with a glint in his eye. Someone had put a Christmas DVD in and the big screen television was now playing
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
.

“Oh. My. God. I haven’t seen that since I was a kid.” Meghan moved in to sit beside my nieces.

“Speaking of dishes”—I headed up the stairs—“a foundation’s work is never done.”

I said I liked the noise and chaos in the house, but like Michaela, I was rarely part of it. Maybe that was my creative nature. While Michaela always had a book in her hand, I was always in the kitchen trying something new.

While in the kitchen I heard the doorbell, which was odd. No one in my family ever rang the bell. Even Brad and Sam knew to just walk in. With the number of people in the house, all you had to do was holler as you came inside. There was always someone there to greet you.

I wiped my hands on a dish towel and went down the hall. There was a young man at the door. I recognized him as Hutch Everett’s son, Harold. “Hi, Harold,” I said as I opened the door.

He seemed taken aback by my familiarity. I saw a moment of uncertainty in his eyes and then a strange light. It lasted only a second, and then the heavyset, pouty young man was back.

“I brought over your prize,” he said and shoved a holiday tin in my hands. “See ya.” He turned and headed down the stairs.

“Thank you,” I called after him. He waved his hand and got on his bike and peeled off.

I studied the tin. It had a turkey motif. Opening it, I found homemade chocolate chip cookies. Nice try, I thought, then put them down on the dessert table. I’m pretty certain they weren’t gluten-free. I’d let the kids eat them.

“A
unt Toni, come quick! Something’s wrong with Aubrey!” Kip’s cry struck fear in my heart. I rushed into the dining room as Tasha raced down the stairs.

When I got there Kip was making a mournful sound as the puppy lay on his side panting hard, his little eyes glazed over. Beside him was the tin of chocolate chip cookies. The dog had somehow gotten them off the table.

“Oh no,” I heard Tasha say.

I picked up the dog, who only let out a small pitiful whimper that made Kip start screaming.

“I’ll get him to the vet, you calm Kip down.” I had to shout for Tasha to hear me.

“Take a cookie with you,” Michaela said and handed me a cookie. “The doctor might need to know what’s in it.” Her blue eyes were too wise for her age.

“It’s probably the chocolate,” I said. “Aren’t dogs allergic to chocolate?”

“Smells like almonds.” Michaela opened the back door for me. “It could be cyanide.”

I placed the puppy in the passenger seat of my van and hated the fact that a twelve-year-old would know what cyanide would smell like.

It was only another three minutes to the emergency veterinary clinic. Thank goodness Oiltop was surrounded by ranchers. It wasn’t every town that had access to emergency animal care.

I burst through the door with the puppy in my arms. “He ate something bad,” I said as I rushed him into an open examine room. Aubrey was panting hard, his tongue hanging out.

“Do you know what it was?” The vet tech pulled out her stethoscope.

“He got into a tin of homemade chocolate chip cookies. My niece put one in a bag.” I lifted the bag.

The tech frowned. “How many did he eat?”

“I don’t know, not that many if even a whole one,” I said thinking back on how big the pile was in the tin.

“A couple of chips in a cookie won’t make a dog this sick. Has he thrown up?”

“Yes.”

“Did you bring in a sample?”

“Um, no, but I can get one.”

“Do,” the vet tech said. Dr. Peter Bekany walked into the room. He was in my brother Tim’s class in high school and was the resident veterinarian.

“What’s going on?” he asked and quickly assessed the situation. “Get a blood draw.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Thank goodness you’re here, Dr. Bekany,” I said. “There’s a young man with Asperger’s who is very attached to this puppy. You have to fix him.”

“Do you know what he ate?”

“Some cookies.” I lifted the bag. “My niece said it smells like almond, but they are chocolate chip cookies. She thought maybe they had cyanide in them.”

Peter helped the vet tech administer IV fluids. “Let me see that bag.” He took the bag and sniffed it. “She’s right. It could be cyanide. Okay, little guy. We’re going to do our best to make you well.” He petted the pup and looked at me. “Why don’t you step out for a few minutes while we figure this out.”

“Should I leave him?”

“He’ll be fine.” The vet nodded toward the door. “Go get that vomit sample and comfort the boy.”

“Okay.” I hated that my adrenaline was working overtime. It was so hard to feel calm and in control when your brain was screaming as loud as Kip had been when I left the house. Thank goodness for Michaela. I would have never thought to bring the cookie.

I hit my sister Rosa’s cell number. They were all still at the house watching holiday movies. “Pick up, pick up!”

“Toni, what’s going on?” my sister asked as she answered the phone.

“Rosa, did anyone eat any of those cookies? The chocolate chip ones in the turkey tin?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ll ask.”

“It’s important.” My stomach was in my throat. I paced the linoleum floor of the vet’s waiting room. I would have driven back home to get the sample, but I was shaking too hard.

“No, no one ate them.”

“Not even a crumb?”

“What’s going on? Are you worried because the dog got into them?”

“They may be poisoned.”

“What?”

I pulled the phone off my ear as my sister’s tone rose three octaves. “Michaela, get away from those cookies.”

“Michaela knows,” I said. “She suspected the minute she saw the dog. She might have saved his life.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll get them cleaned up.”

“Vacuum as well. I don’t want any of the kids getting crumbs on their hands.”

“Not a worry,” Rosa said. “Where did they come from? I mean, you wouldn’t bake poisoned cookies.”

“No, gluten is poison enough for me. Harold Everett stopped by after the reveal. He brought them. He said they were part of my finalist prize.”

“Holy Moses, Toni, why would Harold Everett bring you poisoned cookies?”

“I don’t know.” I pulled the hair off my forehead. It was a hot mess of wild curls. “Listen, call the cops on this and don’t let anyone get near the cookies.”

“Not a problem. Once the cops get here, I’m pitching the entire dessert table.”

“I don’t think you have to go that far,” I said as I paced.

“Would you want to eat anything off that table?”

“Um, no, okay, toss it all—once the police say you can. Too bad Calvin left already.”

“Right? I’d have him go over to the Everett place and kick that kid’s butt. I swear, if he thought this was some kind of joke, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”

“I don’t know what he thought.” I sat down hard. “Did Tasha get Kip calmed down?”

“She managed to get him calm enough to get in the car. They’re on their way.”

“Okay. Listen, I need a sample of the vomit if you can get one. Wear gloves.”

“Oh, I’ll be wearing gloves and a face mask.” Rosa loved to exaggerate. But this time I couldn’t tell if she meant it or not.

“Thanks Rosa—and thank Michaela.”

“Thank goodness for that puppy,” Rosa said. “Can you imagine what would have happened if it had been Emma?”

That was something I didn’t want to think about.