Madness In Maggody

"Maybe he intended to close the store on Thursday on the QT," Plover suggested. "Of course, with the ipecac in the tamale sauce and the pins and poison in the cupcakes, it might be challenging to keep things quiet for a week."

"What did the lab report?" I said, losing interest in Petrel's hieroglyphics. "Did it confirm our theory about the sponge cakes?"

"They didn't have anything on the contents of the boy's stomach, but they had done some preliminary analysis of Milvin's, since he was first to have his stomach pumped. We were on the right track but in the wrong lane. There was a small quantity of sponge cake and cream filling, along with tinted coconut flakes."

I went over to a display shelf and pointed at the cellophane-wrapped mounds. "I went through these earlier, and I didn't spot any evidence that the seals had been opened.

"So your prints are all over them?"

"I was careful, but I can't swear I didn't touch one," I said levelly.

Before he could come up with a smart-assed comment, various official cars promptly pulled into the parking lot.

I gestured at the latest arrivees. "The cavalry has arrived. I'm going to take another look at the deli."

"I'll let you know if we turn up any prints on the coconut-cake packages."

"I'm sure you will." I went through the picnic pavilion, around the corner of the deli counter, and into the kitchen area. Most of it would be visible from the front, I realized, so it would be impossible for a nonemployee to sneak to the stove and sabotage a pot of tamale sauce.

Everything had been put away. The counters were as spotless as Ruby Bee's, and the spice bottles above the stove were neatly aligned. I examined each one, just in case, but they were all i

However, I thought as I roamed around the kitchen, picking up utensils and replacing them, opening and closing cabinet doors, we'd only been offered samples. Each tamale had been sliced into half a dozen pieces and then speared with a toothpick. Dahlia'd brought out platters and put them on a picnic table. A cheerleader had picked one up to circulate, and I was fairly certain I'd seen another go by with a platter of ugly orange tidbits. We weren't necessarily dealing with a vast quantity of sauce requiring a gallon of ipecac, especially not with the power of suggestion murmuring to slightly queasy stomachs. If one of the cooks had stirred the sauce three or four times, she very well could have dumped enough ipecac into it to set off a chain reaction in the pavilion.

But why? Two of the cooks were temporaries from another of Petrel's stores. Dahlia had looked angry, but she'd also chomped into a tamale herself and ended up in an ambulance. Dahlia was stupid, but not that stupid. Or that wily.

It would be risky to approach the untended platter and sprinkle the contents of a small bottle on the tamale slices, but not impossible. I'd noticed Ruby Bee and Estelle in the vicinity; Mandozes had headed that way, as had Ivy Sattering and several dozen other people.

I stopped cold and forced myself to evaluate the possibility that Ruby Bee-my mother-would do something that drastic to put the picnic pavilion out of business. You may be shaking your head, but I wasn't. Ruby Bee'd once gotten so ticked off at Eula Lemoy that Eula had been besieged by a nonstop parade of cemetery-plot salesmen and vacuum-cleaner demonstrators. After several weeks, Eula actually came over and offered an apology. She retracted it when she started receiving somewhere in the range of a dozen magazines a week-invoices attached-and the solicitous attention of bicycling missionaries, not to mention Cheese of the Month Club selections, records, books, and telephone calls from asthmatics who'd read her personal ad in a porn magazine. It took most of a year for the dust to settle outside Eula's mobile home. Ruby Bee never admitted anything, but she had an aura of complacency most of that very same year.

So it wasn't incomprehensible that she might have wanted to make a public statement about the deli, I thought with a shrug. But she wouldn't have put pins in the cupcakes, much less used the substance that I was assuming had resulted in Lillith Smew's death.

I didn't know much about Mandozes, but he had been angry at the opening. Ivy had joked about becoming a migrant worker. Her smile had lacked depth, though, and her voice had been too tight. It wasn't impossible to imagine her or Mandozes adding a few packages to the display. But would either of them see the SuperSaver as such a threat that he or she would be willing to kill?

I gave up and went to the front of the store. Plover was talking to a fellow trooper who was putting away bottles of black powder and wispy brushes.

"Corporal Anderson, Chief Hanks," Plover said as I joined them.

Anderson nodded at me, then said, "Prints all over the display shelf, naturally, but I suspect they'll match with those we'll have to get from the installation crew and the stock boys. I pulled up two partials from this package; from their position, I'd guess some customer picked it up and changed his or her mind."

I made a face at Plover. "Unless a law-enforcement agent of some species picked it up earlier when we searched for tampered packages."

"Yours are on file," Plover said. "We'll keep them in mind."

Anderson finished packing his equipment and picked up the case. "The rest of the packages are all clean as a whistle, thanks to automation in the factory, and the seals look okay. I doubt any of them have been tampered with."

"Well, shit," I said, eliciting a frown from Anderson. Once he'd moved away, I perched on the checkout counter and said, "Then how did Buzz happen to buy the only one laced with the mysterious poison? Do we have anything on the ducktailed kid?"

Plover beckoned to a sheriff's deputy (we were still an oddly homogenized group) and asked him to find the deputy who'd interviewed the employees. We twiddled our thumbs and gazed blankly at tidy rows of candy bars until Les Vernon arrived.

"Yeah, I took their statements," he said. "That kid smelled okay. We ran background checks on all of them, and he was one of three that doesn't have a track record. The others have a smattering of minor-in-possession, driving without a license, busting heads after football games, that sort of thing. It's hard for our youth to find ways to amuse themselves out here. But that kid in particular seemed clean. Lives in Emmet, a cousin of Jim Bob's, pla

I threw up my hands, literally and figuratively, and went to the office to call the hospital. Buzz Milvin was critical but stable. Martin Milvin had been moved to a semiprivate room and was upgraded to resting comfortably. I called Joyce and learned that although Saralee had come home with a bloody nose, she and Lissie had eaten supper and were out doin' something. A baby screamed incessantly in the background.

My stomach rumbled, but I wasn't about to snitch a candy bar from the rack. I told Plover I'd start questioning people the next morning, and also inquire whether anyone had seen Petrel after three o'clock Saturday afternoon. As I walked across the parking lot, I realized I was two meals short and very confused. If the checker was clean, which I supposed he was, then he didn't set out the poisoned package for the first customer to pick up. Buzz wouldn't have done so and then eaten one later in the afternoon. It occurred to me that Kevin might have noticed something. Yes, a long shot, and apt to be as successful as teaching a turkey to sing.