TheCart Before the Corpse (15 page)

Hiram’s property started on the right side of the road and climbed up the hill. Somebody must own the land on the other side of the road that continued down the hill. Whoever owned it was simply checking it out, although I didn’t see a soul. I also didn’t see a ‘for sale’ sign anywhere along the road on that side, and at first glance couldn’t see any viable use for the parcel. It looked to be made up of old growth woods, scrub pines and thick vines and underbrush that grew straight down the mountain. There was probably a streambed at the bottom, but it was much too far away to see or hear.

No good for farming. Any
house
would have to be built on stilts sunk deep enough into concrete so that the house wouldn’t slide down the hill during the first big rainstorm. Construction would cost a fortune. Logging would be next to impossible, since any logs would have to be hauled straight up the hill to the road. Hunting would be brutal. I’d seen several deer trails disappearing down into the woods on that side, but any hunter who shot a deer down there would have to haul the carcass up the hill though poison oak and sumac. And snakes. I do not do snakes.

If the original farmers who owned Hiram’s land had owned that land as well, I suspected their heirs would be stuck with it forever unless they turned it into a nature conservancy. Good thing they hadn’t tried to force Hiram to buy that parcel when he bought his farm.

*

Peggy had asked me to stop for a drink when I made it home. As I drove up I saw a number of packages on her front porch. I parked my truck, went in the kitchen door, and told her about them.

“Oh, Lord. Food. I put the car in the garage when I came home from Marilee’s and didn’t look out when I turned the front porch light on. I didn’t even see them. We’d better bring them in.”

We found several covered aluminum dishes and throwaway plastic containers on Peggy’s front porch, as well as a couple of cakes and loafs of zucchini bread. Just as Geoff Wheeler said.

I guess the people that dropped them off didn’t want to take the chance of leaving them in the driveway outside my door, so they left them on Peggy’s front porch. They might well have assumed she was feeding me anyway. In any case they knew
her
and didn’t know
me
. It took the two of us a couple of trips to bring them in off the porch and set them out on her kitchen counters and table.

Peggy brought a yellow legal pad and a pen from her desk in the library and handed it to me. “I’ll read you the name of the person who sent the dish and what they sent. That way you’ll have a list to use when we write thank-you notes after the funeral.”

The names meant nothing to me, of course, but I dutifully listed them as she read them to me.

“You can have the Lady Baltimore cake,” she said. “I’ve never liked white cake. I’ll fight you for the Sock-it-to-me cake. I don’t believe in any dessert that’s not chocolate. The apple pie we can split.”

Someone sent a pan of green beans with canned fried onions on top, already starting to sog up. My grandmother fixed them every Thanksgiving and Christmas along with her sweet potato casserole covered with marshmallows. Peggy could have them with my compliments.

I ate one of the pecan brownies and drank a Diet Coke while I wrote the names she read me from the cards attached to the dishes.

One container held slices of spiral cut ham and sliced turkey. Perfect for sandwiches. “I’d be happy with a sandwich for dinner,” I said.

Peggy nodded. “Me, too, but we should probably eat the tuna casserole while it’s fresh and still warm.” She shoved Sherlock off the chair at the head of the table before he could get to the throwaway aluminum pan that held cream tuna with breadcrumbs on top. I’m sure to a cat it smelled like ambrosia. “Bad cat. Go away.”

He meowed at her, swearing that nobody cared that he was starving too.

Peggy picked up the aluminum pan of tuna casserole and looked under the bottom. “Drat. No card. Maybe it fell off on the porch.” I’ll put the rest of this stuff away while you look.” I checked our path from the front door, the porch, the front steps, and walked down the driveway to the street. No card or masking tape that might have come off the bottom of the pan.

As I closed the front door behind me, I heard Peggy yell, “No!” followed by a crash and a thud. Something yellow streaked across the floor and disappeared into the library followed by three other streaks. Peggy ran after the four cats brandishing a metal serving spoon. “Sherlock Caldwell, I will throttle you!” She stopped when she saw me. “He’s greedier than Jabba the Hutt.”

“What?”

“Come see.”

The aluminum bottom of the upended tuna casserole pan glinted from the floor. Tuna, cheese and noodles lay in globs around it.

“I turned my back for one second to put the green beans in the refrigerator,” she said, “and the next thing I know Sherlock’s up on the table with a faceful of tuna casserole. He freaked when he saw me and knocked the whole thing on the floor. What a God awful mess!”

The next second we heard an ear splitting yowl from the library. Dashiell lumbered back toward the kitchen as fast as his arthritic legs could carry him. Behind him the yowls continued.

Cats have a special howl when they’re in pain that is impossible to mistake. “That’s Sherlock,” Peggy said.

Dashiell jumped onto the chair, then the table, and put his paws on Peggy’s shoulders, obviously trying to tell her something was wrong.

He didn’t need to convince either of us.

She tore off her apron and tossed it to me. “Clean that mess up,” she said and ran to the library with Dashiell in her arms.

I got down on the kitchen floor, picked up the casserole pan and shoveled tuna, noodles and breadcrumbs back into it with both hands. We couldn’t eat it now, and from those yowls, neither should any other mammal. I shoved the pan into the cold oven and slammed the oven door on it, pulled the entire roll of paper towels off the rack and scrubbed the floor to get the last bits of casserole, then tossed the used towels into the covered metal trash can with the cat proof lid.

Peggy rushed back in. “Sherlock’s under my chair vomiting and shaking. Call Hank Blackshear. He’s our vet. His number’s on the wall by the telephone. Tell him we’ll meet him at the clinic in ten minutes.” She disappeared while I made the call. It was after hours. Of course, I got his answering service.

“If you’ll tell me the nature of your problem,” the telephone lady said, “I’ll call Dr. Blackshear and have him call you back.”

“No time for that. Tell him to meet Peggy Caldwell and Sherlock at his clinic. It’s an emergency. I think he’s been poisoned.”

I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to catch Sherlock, but he huddled miserably under Peggy’s chair until I got down on my hands and knees and pulled him out. He didn’t even try to claw me.

I handed him to Peggy, who wrapped him in towels and cradled him like a baby.

“I’ll drive, you navigate,” I said and reached for my purse. “I’ll be there in a second.” I went back into the kitchen, unceremoniously dumped the brownies out of their throwaway plastic container and onto one of Peggy’s plates, scooped some of the tuna casserole into the empty container, popped the lid on and raced for my truck.

Jacob had told me that Hiram used Dr. Blackshear for his vet work, but I’d never met the man and had no idea where his clinic was located. If Mutt caught me speeding around the square, he’d have a fit and give me a ticket. I prayed he wasn’t around, because I didn’t intend to stop for anything less than a roadblock manned by Mutt and a fifty-caliber assault rifle.

Sherlock had stopped squirming and yowling. That was bad. I’d rather he tried to claw his way out of Peggy’s arms. Peggy sobbed and cooed, but neither of us said what we were thinking. I couldn’t talk and drive, and I don’t think she had breath left over for speech other than to mumble the occasional direction.

We rolled into the clinic as the vet arrived in his truck.

Peggy leapt out before I’d stopped, and raced inside as he switched on the lights. I picked up the bowl of casserole and ran after them.

She handed the cat in his nest of towels to the doctor. “Merry Abbott, Hank Blackshear,” Peggy said.

“Hey,” he said.

“Merry. Maybe I can help.”

The next half hour Hank intubated, intravenoused, shot, drew blood, and shoved nasty black charcoal stuff down Sherlock’s throat while I held him and Peggy alternately cried and crooned.

“What did he get into?” Hank asked me.

“Tuna casserole. Someone left it on Peggy’s front porch for us because of my dad’s death. Either we lost the card or it never had one, so we don’t have a clue who sent it.”

“Tuna casserole is normally pretty harmless to cats, even when they stuff themselves,” he said.

“He didn’t take but one bite,” Peggy sobbed. “I chased him away before he could gorge himself. He got sick almost within a couple of minutes. Could it have gone bad sitting on the front porch?”

“Not in this weather,” Hank said. “Unless it’s been sitting there for a couple of days, and even Botulism wouldn’t act this quickly.”

“It wasn’t out there more than a couple of hours,” I said.

“It’s not simple food poisoning or salmonella. this one might just have some unusual ingredients,” Hank said.

“Something actually poisonous?” I asked.

“Surely not on purpose,” Peggy said. “Somebody made a mistake and put in something they didn’t plan to.”

“Peggy,” Hank said, “Whatever it was made Sherlock real sick real fast.”

“He only had one bite,” Peggy wailed. “But he takes big bites.”

“It’s not corrosive,” Hank said. “His throat’s not burned. His gums were white when you brought him in, now they’re a tad pinker than when we started.”

He hadn’t dared give Sherlock a sedative, although his heart had been racing when he first listened to it. Peggy smoothed the broad, flat space between Sherlock’s big yellow ears. “Poor little boy, I yelled at him and chased him away.” She broke down again.

“Good thing you did,” Hank said. “Any of the other cats eat it?”

“Sherlock knocked it off the table and scared them off,” I said. “I cleaned it up before we left, but I brought some with us so you could test it.”

“I’ll give it a try. It acted so fast, I’d guess some sort of emetic. Ipecac, maybe, or
nux vomica
. Make a human being vomit and get very sick, but can kill a cat.”

“There were mushrooms in the casserole,” I said. “Could somebody have put a toadstool in by mistake?”

“Unlikely. This doesn’t seem like mushroom poisoning. It doesn’t act this fast either. We’ve got plenty of death angel Amanitas around here, but it’ too early for them. They usually come up late in the summer and early fall.”

He ran his hand over Sherlock’s golden flank and picked up the skin on his shoulder. It snapped back into place when he took his hand away. “His gums are nearly normal and he’s rehydrated. Unless there’s something latent going on, I’d say he’s over the worst of it.”

“Thank God,” Peggy said, bent over and butted heads with Sherlock. He managed to lift his head to respond weakly.

“We’ll need to keep him a couple of days to monitor his liver function,” Hank said. “I want to culture that casserole, see if we can find out what he ingested.”

“Surely it was a mistake,” Peggy said. “What else could it be?”

“Heck of a mistake, if you ask me. More likely some busy cook just grabbed the wrong jar. Hope your mystery cook didn’t make two casseroles. One to feed her own family and one to give you,” Hank said. “If anybody shows up tonight or tomorrow at the emergency room with the same symptoms, we may be able to trace the cook who made the casserole. Otherwise, we may never know.”

“But you can figure out what was in it that caused Sherlock’s symptoms, can’t you?” Peggy asked.

Hank shook his head. “Not necessarily. If I can’t pin it down, I can send off a sample to the state lab, but it won’t rate high on their priority list.”

“What about a private lab?” I asked. “Don’t you use private labs to test for parasite infestations and to process your Coggins tests on horses?”

“Faster, but costs money.”

“I don’t give a damn about the money,” Peggy snapped. “If
you
can’t figure out what’s in that blasted casserole that made Sherlock sick, you can send a sample to the State of Georgia, a half dozen private labs and the CDC for all I care.”

“You got it,” Hank said with a grin and a glance at me. “If I can’t figure out what made fat Sherlock sick by noon tomorrow, I’ll call in the big guns.”

Twenty minutes later, Sherlock lay bedded down in one of the clinic’s hospital cages. He’d stopped shaking and no longer labored to breathe. When Peggy knelt beside him and rubbed her hand along his body, he purred groggily.

I left her beside Sherlock while I brought the tuna container to Hank. He put it in his refrigerator with a note taped to it saying, “
Specimen
,
do not touch. This means you.”
He drew a rough skull and crossbones on the lid with a magic marker. “You have no idea who could have sent it?” he asked.

“I looked all over the porch, the driveway and the street in case the label came off and was lying outside. I doubt there was a card in the first place. What would it have said? ‘Here’s to getting your just desserts?’ Only it wasn’t a dessert.”

“You don’t think it was an accident,” Hank said. It wasn’t a question.

I shook my head. “You don’t either, do you?”

“The only accident was Sherlock’s big mouth. If he hadn’t eaten that casserole, you and Peggy would have.”

“Unless it tasted weird, and Sherlock thought it tasted great.” I’d been running on adrenaline since Sherlock’s first howl, now without warning my legs turned to warm butter. I grabbed for the straight chair beside the examining table, sank into it and dropped my head into my hands.

“You okay?” Hank asked and laid a big, gentle hand on my shoulder.

I took a deep breath and sat up straight. “No, I am not okay. I am scared spitless and madder than homemade sin. Unless there’s a cook in Mossy Creek who believes a big glug of poison adds special flavor to her recipes, there’s a good chance somebody tried to kill Peggy and me tonight.”