A Peach of a Murder (9 page)

An uneasy silence hung over the living room of Phyllis's house later that afternoon as the four women-and Samsat there. Mike had promised to drop by as soon as he could, to let them know how the investigation into Donnie Boatwright's death was going, but they had no way of knowing when he would get there.

Down on the square, the peach festival continued. One tragic death, even that of someone as well-known as Donnie, wasn't enough to make the festivities come to more than a temporary halt. Once the ambulance was gone, everybody had returned to what they were doing before the commotion broke out. The only indications that something had happened were the yellow police department tape strung around the site of the cooking contest and the presence of an unusual number of officers in that area.

Finally unable to stand the awkward silence any longer, Phyllis declared to the room at large, "I didn't poison him, you know."

"Of course you didn't, dear," Eve said quickly.

"I'm not a murderer." Phyllis leveled a glare in Carolyn's direction.

Carolyn glared right back. "I never said you were a murderer. I never even thought that. It must have been an accident. You put something in your cobbler you shouldn't have."

"There was nothing in that cobbler that could kill anybody!" Phyllis insisted.

Mattie spoke up, saying, "All this fussin'. It just doesn't make sense. Donnie was an old man. His heart gave out, more than likely. No sense in fussin' over it."

"That makes the most sense to me, too," Sam put in. "You'll see. When Mike gets here, he'll tell us they've decided that Mr. Boatwright died of a heart attack or something like that."

Carolyn gave a dubious snort.

Phyllis tried to ignore her. "I don't know. Donnie was acting awfully strange just before he keeled over. And not once did he grab his chest or anything like that. Isn't that what you do when you have a heart attack?"

"That's what people do on TV," Sam said. "It might not always be like that in real life."

"There's not really any point in speculating," Eve put in. "We'll just have to wait and see what the police and the doctors find out."

Phyllis knew Eve was right, but waiting was hard. Especially when, no matter how much she denied it, deep down a part of her worried that she had somehow caused Donnie's death. As she sat there, she went over in her mind again and again the steps she had taken and the ingredients she had used in preparing the cobbler that morning....

There was nothing, she finally decided, nothing in it that could have hurt anybody. The other judges had eaten it, too, and they hadn't died. At least, they hadn't gotten sick there at the festival, and she hadn't heard anything about any of them falling ill later.

A heart attack, a stroke, things like that were the only possibilities that made any sense, no matter what color Donnie's face had been.

The sound of a car door slamming outside made everyone look up. Phyllis got to her feet and went to the front door, opening it to look out. It was late afternoon by now evening, really, and shadows had started to gather under the big trees in the front yard. There was still plenty of light, though, to reveal the worried expression on Mike's face as he came up the concrete walk toward the house.

Phyllis pushed the screen door open as Mike climbed the steps to the porch. "Come in," she said.

"Can I get you something?"

"No thanks, Mom," he said as he stepped into the living room. "Sarah will have supper waiting for me by the time I get home. I just wanted to stop by, like I told you I would, and let you know what we found out."

"Sit down." Phyllis realized just how nervous she really was as she steered Mike toward one of the sofas and then perched on the front of the cushion next to him. Everyone else in the room leaned forward, anxious to hear what he had to say. Phyllis couldn't stop herself from asking, "Was it a heart attack?"

Mike shook his head. "No, the autopsy ruled out a coronary. Dr. Lee said Mr. Boatwright's heart was in good shape for a man his age. It wasn't a stroke, either."

"Then what was it?" Carolyn demanded.

Mike sighed and said, "Poison, just like we thought. Cyanide; to be precise. That blue tinge to his face was a strong indicator of cyanotic poisoning, and that turned out to be right."

Phyllis closed her eyes for a second and felt dizzy again. But when she opened them, she took a deep breath and forced herself to remain calm. "There's no way I put any cyanide in that cobbler,"

she said. "I know every ingredient that went in it, and cyanide just wasn't one of them!"

Mike let himself smile a little. "No, the poison wasn't in your cobbler, Mom," he told her. "You can stop worrying about that. We gathered up all the, contest entries and tested them, and there was no cyanide or anything else bad in any of them."

Phyllis turned her'head to look at Carolyn, as if to say See?

Carolyn got the message, because she said indignantly, "Well, what did you expect me to think?

The way Donnie fell over as soon as he finished that cobbler of yours, any reasonable person might think that it killed him."

"I didn't," Sam said, and Phyllis could have kissed him for it. "The thought never crossed my mind."

Eve added, "I never believed it, either." Mattie just shook her head solemnly.

"I see," Carolyn said. "You're all ganging up on me, are you?" She got to her feet. "Well, I don't have to sit here and take it." She started to march toward the stairs.

Phyllis wanted to stop her. She felt a little vindicated, of course, but she didn't want it to ruin her friendship with Carolyn. Even though she was still a little mad at her for saying those things, she had seen the hurt in Carolyn's eyes and knew that to her, at least, it did seem like they were all turning on her.

But before Phyllis could say anything, Mike spoke up again. "Uh, Miz Wilbarger, if you could sit back down, please? I still need to talk to all of you."

Carolyn paused at the bottom of the stairs and asked, "What about?"

"About Mr. Boatwright's death. It's going to be officially declared a murder, and everybody who was there has to be questioned."

"Everybody at the peach festival?" Phyllis said. "That's going to be an awfully big job!"

"No, not everybody who was at the festival. Just the folks who talked to Mr. Boatwright or were around him when he died." With a rueful expression on his face, Mike shrugged. "And yeah, even that is going to be a big job. But I told Chief Whitmire I'd take statements from the five of you. The Weatherford police and the sheriff's department will be working together pretty closely on this."

Reluctantly, Carolyn went back to her chair and sat down. "I don't see why you need to question me," she said. "I can't tell you anything that will help. Donnie was past my place in the contest before he collapsed."

Sam leaned forward and clasped his big hands together between his knees. "Let me ask you a question, Mike, if that's allowed."

"Sure, Mr. Fletcher, go ahead."

"You said the poison wasn't in any of the contest entries. If that's true, how did it get into Donnie Boatwright?" Phyllis's eyes widened as a thought occurred to her. "His water bottle!" she exclaimed.

Mike turned his head to look at her and nodded. "That's exactly right. We found amygdalin in the little bit of water that was left in the bottle."

"I thought you said he was poisoned with cyanide," Eve said.

Mike nodded again. "It was hydrogen cyanide that killed him, all right, but that was because he had ingested a lot of amygdalin. That converts to hydrogen cyanide in the human digestive systerh."

With a humorless chuckle, he spread his hands and continued, "I'm no chemist or forensic scientist, you understand. I'm just repeating what Dr. Lee told us."

Phyllis knew that Dr. Walt Lee was the county coroner; as well as being in private practice. He was Phyllis's doctor, in fact, as well as Mattie's and Eve's. She had faith in whatever conclusions he drew.

Sam asked, "Where'd this amygdalin stuff come from?" "Well, that's sort of interesting," Mike said.

"It's a chemical that's used to make the cancer treatment drug called laetrile. It's found in various nuts and in the pits of certain fruits. The apricot pit has the most amygdalin in it ... but the peach pit comes next, right after it."

"Peach pits!" Carolyn said. "Good Lord, at this time of year there are peaches everywhere you look around here. How can they be poisonous?"

"The peaches themselves aren't. Just the pits. And even they won't hurt you unless you eat a bunch of them, like fifty or sixty, Dr. Lee said:'

Phyllis shook her head in confusion. 'This doesn't make sense. Donnie didn't eat peach pits. Even if there were a little of this chemical in the fruit, how many peaches would a person have to eat to get sick from them?"

"More than anybody reasonably could," Mike assured her. "The doctor wasn't sure how it was done, but he thinks somebody managed to extract the amygdalin from a bunch of peach pits and then somehow doped Mr. Boatwright's water with it. Everybody knows he carries around a big bottle of water all day at the peach festival, and he's always drinking from it." Mike corrected himself, "He did, anyway."

Sam said, "This stuff doesn't have any taste or smell to it?" "Odorless, tasteless, and colorless, the doc said," Mike confirmed. "The cyanide that it converts to smells like bitter almonds, but the original form doesn't have that smell."

"I've heard of laetrile, of course," Phyllis said. "For a while there, a lot of people were using it as a cancer treatment:' Mike said, "Yeah, the government never approved it, though, and by now there's been enough research to show that it's really not effective. The theory was that the small amounts of cyanide created by it in the human system would attack just the cancer cells and kill them off"

He shrugged. "It didn't really work out that way, and not nearly as many people use it now. But some people with cancer still believe it works, and you can get it in Mexico."

"There's no chance Boatwright was taking the drug and maybe got an accidental overdose?" Sam asked.

"No. He didn't have cancer, and that's the only reason anybody would use laetrile. Besides, patients who are taking it are warned not to eat peaches or apricots or anything like that, just on the off chance they'd get too much of the stuff in their systems that way."

It was quiet again for a moment as they all thought about what Mike had told them, and then Phyllis said, "You wanted to ask us some questions?"

"Yeah. Did any of you see anybody messing with Mr. Boatwright's water bottle during the festival?"

Silence reigned again as they pondered the question. Finally, Carolyn said, "I didn't see anything like that." "Neither did I," Phyllis said. "But Donnie carried that water bottle around all the time and sometimes set it down while he was talking to people. I even picked it up and handed it back to him when he was about to walk off without it." Her eyes widened suddenly as a thought occurred to her. "That means my fingerprints are on it!"

"We'll check on that," Mike said, "but there are probably a lot of fingerprints on it, mostly Mr.

Boatwright's. I don't know if any of the others will be usable."

"Someone must have been able to get hold of it, just for a minute or two, and dumped that chemical into it," said Phyllis. Then they could just put it back and Donnie would never know the difference."

Mike nodded. "That's what we think happened, all right. And it must have been not long before the cooking contest started, because he was drinking a lot from it then. If somebody had doped the water earlier in the day, Mr. Boatwright would have collapsed before it was time for the contest."

He looked around the room. "What about the rest of you? Did you see anything suspicious?"

Sam said, "I never even met the fella until yesterday morning. If I saw him during the day, I didn't really pay any attention to what he was doing or what was going on around him."

"I didn't talk to him," Mattie said. "I was sitting there at the Quiltin' Society show."

"I saw Donnie several times during the day," Eve said. "I even got him to promise me a dance later on." She shook her head. "But I didn't notice anything odd, and now I won't get that dance, or any of the others I was promised. After what happened, I just don't feel like it:' She sighed.

After a moment, Mike asked, "Do you know of anybody who had a grudge against Mr.

Boatwright? Somebody who might have wanted him dead?"

"Donnie Boatwright was an institution in Weatherford," Phyllis pointed out. "Everybody knew him. We certainly all did."

"Just because everybody knew him doesn't mean everybody liked him," Mike said.

Sam grunted. "Somebody sure didn't. Unless ... Is there any way this could have been an accident, Mike?"

"No, sir," Mike replied with a shake of his head. "It was deliberate:'

With a frown, Phyllis asked, "What if somebody just wanted to make him sick? Maybe whoever put that stuff in his water didn't actually mean to kill him."

"I don't understand, Mom. Why would anybody do that?"

"Well, I don't know. I was just trying to think of some other explanation for what happened. But if Donnie had gotten sick just then, instead of dying, it would have interfered with the judging. And it certainly would have looked bad for whoever's entry he had just sampled, which turned out to be mine..:'

As her voice trailed off, Phyllis turned her head to look at Carolyn.

"My God!" Carolyn burst out. "Now you're accusing me of murder?"

"Not murder," Phyllis said. "But if you wanted to ruin my chance to win the contest, having one of the judges get sick right after he ate my cobbler would do it:'

Carolyn came to her feet. "This is outrageous! How dare you accuse me-"

Eve broke in, "The first thing you said after Donnie collapsed,, dear, was that Phyllis's cobbler had, killed him. That's an even worse accusation."

Phyllis shook her head, stricken by Carolyn's expression

and wishing now that she hadn't brought up the subject. "I'm sorry, Carolyn. Please forgive me, and forget I said anything. I was just thinking out loud. I didn't really mean to accuse you."