Pumpkin Pie

TW: Death and brief mention of rape

He was universally hated.

             Not really.

             He had charisma. He was good-looking with an athletic build and a charming smile. He was a diligent employee, putting in extra hours to get ahead, putting in extra hours to help out co-workers. He was good with babies.

             Amongst strangers and acquaintances, he was universally liked. Amongst family and close friends, well, that was another story.

             And that was why, when he died after eating several slices of pumpkin pie after dinner with family and friends at a rustic cottage in the snowy mountains, the first thought in everyone’s mind was, Good riddance!

             And then –

             How did he die?

             It looked like an allergic reaction – anaphylactic shock.

             He’s allergic to nuts, everyone knows that.

             Yes, but that’s why no one brought nuts.

             Did the pie have nuts?

             A race to the kitchen, to the remnants of the pie – it was store-bought.

             Who brings store-bought pie to a party?

             Not all of us have time to cook.

             Or the skills.

             A rummage through the trash to find the wrapping. The ingredients. Nuts. A nut-based crust.

             I always thoroughly check the ingredients.

             Of course, we all do.

             It’ s a habit.

             What kind of pumpkin pie has nuts in the crust? Did you taste it?

             It did taste differently.

             I don’t care what I’m buying, I always check the ingredients.

             Who brought the pie?

             Eyes darting nervously around the room. Someone in here murdered Oliver. Intentionally or not. And yes, it was a good thing he was gone, but no one was about to admit it.

             Doesn’t he have an EpiPen?

             I couldn’t find the EpiPen.

             Wasn’t it in your bag?

             I looked!

             Sammy’s eyes were brimming with tears, not because her cheating husband had died but because the others were looking at her accusingly. She always carried his EpiPen. He was too arrogant to manage his allergy himself.

             Well, we’re snowed in with a dead man. And a murderer.

             Not a murderer!

             Was it you then? Did you buy the pie?

             Of course not!

             Lisa, the mother-in-law of the deceased cheater, stood and cleared her throat loudly. The group stopped chattering and looked in her direction, fiddling with their fingers and too nervous to look anyone in the eyes. Too nervous to look towards the rug in front of the fireplace, where the dead man lay.

             Lisa’s silver-grey hair was pulled back crisply in a bun; her lavender-framed reading glasses perched on her sharp nose. Her face, covered with a light dusting of natural shades of make-up, had just enough wrinkles to look wise and not enough to look senile. She was in charge.

             “Once the snowstorm clears, we’ll call 911, of course,” she said. “And the EMTs will arrive and perhaps the police – to rule out foul play.”

             There was no foul play!

             It was an allergic reaction!

             An accident!

             “Of course I know that,” she answered the mutterings. “So it should be easy. Ask a few questions, jot a few notes, and that’s that. I doubt they’ll really care. Unless…” And here she paused for effect and quietly, firmly surveyed the room. “Unless they ask who bought the pie. If we don’t know, that will look suspicious.”

             Throats cleared. Eyes looked down, to the side, anywhere but directly at someone else.

             “Fine,” Lisa said. “No one wants to admit it. We know it wasn’t here when we arrived. Ria and I arrived together, same time as Thea and Chelsea. We surveyed the place, made sure it was acceptable. No complaints to make to the hosts. The fridge was empty then. And at some point, the pie was placed in the fridge. It’s been snowing all afternoon, we’ve had no visitors. So that means one of us put the pie in the fridge.”

             Who served the pie?

             What about the EpiPen?

             “Motives,” Lisa continued. “Let’s start with that. Get it out in the air. If the police investigate, they’ll find motives in us all.”

             “You read too much Agatha Christie, Mom,” Ria said.

             “We all had opportunity,” Lisa said. “We all arrived a few hours ago, we ate and drank and wandered freely. We all know about his allergy. We all know about his flaws. Let’s see… We’ve got the mother-in-law – me; the wife – Sammy; the wife’s sister – Ria; the wife’s stepbrother, Theo, who also happens to be a co-worker; and another co-worker, Chelsea.” She looked around the room and nodded. “These are the suspects. What are our motives?”

             “It’s not a murder,” Ria said.

             “Once the police find out that no one will admit to bringing the pie, they might view it as such. I’ll begin: I hated my son-in-law for how he treated my daughter,” Lisa said resolutely. “Ten years of a miserable marriage… five years of roller-coaster dating before then. I wanted him gone before they went too far, before IVF succeeds.”

             “Mom!” Sammy and Ria said simultaneously.

             “You’d kill for that?” Theo asked.

             Lisa snorted. “Of course not,” she said. “I don’t have the nerves to pull off that sort of thing.” She smiled feebly at her daughters. “I love you girls, but I just couldn’t kill for you.” She turned to the others. “Well? What are your motives? What could the police pull out of you if they tried? I can guess Sammy’s – same as mine? Anything else?”

             Sammy gulped. She was the one who carried the EpiPen. She was the wronged wife. She felt like a prime suspect. “Same as you,” she said. She cleared her throat, made the announcement that up till now she’d kept secret. “He’s expecting,” she said. “His … lover … is pregnant.”

             “Oh, honey,” Lisa said tenderly as she reached out and clutched her daughter’s hand. Sammy had been trying for years to get pregnant. It had been a hard journey, and Lisa had been her shoulder to cry on. “You should have told me,” she murmured.

             “I just learned,” Sammy said. “I’m still in shock.” She looked around her, at the shocked, sympathetic faces. “I wouldn’t kill over that, of course.”

             After a long, awkward pause, Chelsea looked up. “I’ll go,” she said quietly. “It’s been burning in me for some time now. I’m tired of hiding. I’m not a crook.” She sniffled and shook her head, her silver-tinted auburn waves bouncing. “You know I’m an administrative assistant at our firm… A few years ago, I started snooping. I’m too curious.” She paused and cleared her throat. “I discovered that Oliver’d been cooking the books. Really cooking the books. Skimming from the top, bottom, every which where. I confronted him, and…” She bit her lip and looked earnestly into everyone’s faces, her eyes wet and shining. “He offered me hush money. And I took it.” She waited for the condemnation.

             “Claudia?” Theo asked. “Your daughter?”

             Chelsea nodded, grateful that someone understood without her saying.

             “That’s how you paid for her cancer treatment,” Theo said. She nodded once again.

             “But now the company’s called in an external auditor,” she said, her voice starting to break. “And if Oliver goes down, he’ll take me with him.” She glanced over at his lifeless form. “Unless he …” She stopped.

             The room was quiet, save the crackling of the embers in the fireplace.

             “I would never kill someone,” she whispered at last. “I just couldn’t.”

             “My turn,” Ria said, her voice small and uncertain. “I’m pregnant. I’m the other woman.”

             The room gasped and turned to Ria, standing against the couch, her shoulders hunched over, her dark hair hanging in strings in front of her face, hiding her eyes, her trembling lips. Her hands shook as they clutched the back of the couch.

             Sammy felt the world spinning around her, her mother’s arms around her, Theo’s strong hands guiding her. She was placed on the couch, her mother still holding her in a warm embrace.

             “I didn’t want it,” Ria said, her voice so soft she was barely audible. “I don’t know how to refuse him.”

             Lisa sat up stiffly, her mother’s instincts picking up on the truth. Oliver was far more horrible than she had imagined.

             “He raped you,” she said flatly.

             Once again, silence. The flames crackled. A window chattered in the wind.

             “Well,” Theo said, “I’ll go. But I don’t have much to say. I’m afraid I don’t have a motive.”

             “You know he raped me,” Ria said.

             “Yes, well,” Theo said, “that was a long time ago. And I didn’t know it was … I didn’t know what to call it. I knew you were distraught. But I didn’t know he’d done it again, recently. And I wouldn’t kill over it.”

             “None of us would kill,” Lisa said, “but that’s the point of getting our motives out. If we’re found to be hiding a motive, then we look suspicious. Might as well get it all out now, before the police arrive.”

             “They might not arrive,” Chelsea said, panicking over the revelation she had made. Would she have to tell the police the truth? Her complicity in Oliver’s fraud?

             “You’re right,” Theo said to Ria. “I was home – your home – fifteen years ago, when Sammy and Oliver had just started dating. I’d introduced them – I hate myself for this. I will always hate myself for this. Sammy, you were working at the diner, paying your way through vet school; Lisa, you and Dad had a date night. Remember how he used to take you to that Italian restaurant? You’d dress up in some fancy dress, Dad would wear a suit and tie? It made me so happy, to see him happy, to see how he made you happy.” Lisa smiled at the memory. Her husband – Sammy’s and Ria’s father and Theo’s adopted father – had passed away just a year ago. The memory still hurt, but good memories helped.

             Theo continued, “Ria, you’d gone out to some party with your friends. I wasn’t your parent, I couldn’t say anything. You came home around midnight; I remember, Oliver brought you home, and at first I thought he’d been so sweet, helping out his girlfriend’s baby sister.”

             “I don’t want to remember,” Ria said, her body crumpling up. Theo rushed forward, grabbed her and held her.

             “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help you then. My best hope was that Sammy would shape him up, he’d turn into a real man. I guess I was wrong.” He looked around the group. “My motive is that he hurt my stepsister years ago, and I was there to hold her after the fact.” He turned to Chelsea. “I didn’t know about you. I didn’t know what he was doing at our firm.” He looked glumly to the ground. “I should have known. I’m not an accountant, and I trusted him too much. I should know better.”

             “He fooled a lot of people,” Chelsea said. “He’s great at crunching numbers, he’s great at BS’ing. Everyone thought he was good at his job.”

             “But I’m his best friend,” Theo said. “I’m Ria’s and Sammy’s stepsister. I know him better than that.”

             “He was great at fooling others,” Lisa said. “That was his thing. At least we can all agree – he was a horrible monster.”

             “Shouldn’t we speak well of the dead?” Sammy said instinctively then grimaced, remembering what she had just learned about her baby sister.

             “We’ve got motive covered,” Lisa said. “Now, let’s go back to opportunity. We’ve all been bustling back and forth, and drinking wine and eggnog, so we’ve all had ample opportunity to sneak in that pie. What about the EpiPen? What happened to that?”

             “I always carry it with me,” Sammy said. She stood up and got her purse from the long, wooden dining table. The main course had been cleared; the dessert plates were still on the table, with half-eaten slices of pumpkin pie on each plate. A few wine glasses had been knocked over, staining the white lace table runner.

             She brought the purse to the coffee table and dumped out its contents one more time. She’d done that just thirty minutes ago, as Oliver lay on the rug, clutching his throat, his lips swollen and his face red.

             Lisa helped her sort through the contents and thoroughly check every nook and cranny in her purse. The others watched attentively.

             “I’ve been with Oliver for fifteen years,” she said despondently. “I never forget.”

             “So it must’ve been in your purse at the beginning of the evening,” Lisa said. “Did you keep an eye on your purse the whole time?”

             “Of course not. I set it down. It’s just us… friends.” She hesitated on the last word.

             “So someone went through your purse and took it out,” Lisa said.

             Murder.

             “It can’t be murder,” Chelsea said. “We’re not that evil.”

             “What will we tell the EMT when they ask?” Lisa said. “How did a nut-based pumpkin pie enter the kitchen? What happened to Oliver’s EpiPen? If we say we don’t know, we will all look suspicious.”

             “Let’s get this over with,” Theo said, and heads turned, confused. “He’s dead, it likely was an accident, but we’ve got unanswered questions. We all had opportunity. We’ve all got motives. We’re all glad he’s gone but none of us are murderers. All we’ve got to do is tell the police who brought in the pie – it was a stupid oversight – and what happened to the EpiPen.”

             “Well, what happened to the EpiPen?” Sammy asked.

             A search party began. The five friends turned over every pillow and chair, looked under every piece of furniture, searched in shelves, cabinetry, in the fireplace toolkit.

             It wasn’t hard to find.

             It was under the china cabinet, next to the dining table where Sammy had first emptied the contents of her purse.

             “It must have rolled out,” Theo said.

             “And I was so panicked, I didn’t notice,” Sammy said in despair.

             “This isn’t so hard,” Theo said. “It was a pure accident. We panicked. But now that we have the EpiPen, we know it wasn’t taken on purpose.”

             “Which just leaves the pie,” Lisa said. She took a deep breath and patted her hair, still in place despite all the chaos. “If no one claims it,” she said, taking one last glance around. “Well, that’s strange, but it is what it is. I’ll claim it.”

             “You brought the pie?” Chelsea asked.

             “You’re always so careful,” Sammy said.

             “No, yes,” Lisa said. “I didn’t bring it, and I am careful. But I’m getting old, sometimes I forget what I’m doing. Perhaps when I was at the store, I read the ingredients for one pie but picked up the other. That’s the sort of things old ladies do. I’ll say I bought the pie, Sammy will say the EpiPen fell out when we all panicked, and that’s that. Oliver is dead, it was an accident. Case closed.”

***

             Several hours later, after the storm abated, the EMT arrived with one police car. Two policemen took the story while the EMT dealt with the dead body.

             We were so shocked – horrified!

             His face! I’ll never forget it!

             We’ve always been so careful! Sometimes you get so used to being careful, you forget.

             The pie tasted different – but I didn’t think it was nuts. Couldn’t be nuts.

             I just can’t believe it…

             The officers were satisfied with the story. Oliver had been an upstanding guy – a dedicated worker, a devoted husband, a compassionate co-worker, a darling son-in-law. But accidents happen to the best of us.

             The EMT and police left, and the guests were left behind to clean up, murmuring softly to themselves, feeling confused and lost, hopeful and concerned.

             I still can’t believe it.

             It was an accident, wasn’t it?

             Of course.

             Can I admit I feel relieved?

             Sh! Not yet!

             Then, one by one, they retired to their rooms.

***

             Theo sat in front of the fading fire and smiled. He’d gotten away with it. The perfect murder.

             His motive?

             He was a loyal employee and not a gullible friend. He knew about the fraud. He knew about Chelsea’s predicament. He wanted to set things right in his company without impacting a hard-working woman whose only crime was loving her daughter.

             He was a close friend to Lisa, Sammy, and Ria. When his adoptive father had married Lisa, he was a brooding teenager, and Lisa had taken him in and cared selflessly for him. Sammy had been born soon after, and he felt the bonds of brotherly love towards her. He had to protect his family at all costs.

             Ria had been born after he’d graduated from college. He’d visited rarely. But one summer, not long after starting the job at the firm and introducing Oliver to Sammy, he’d moved back home.

             Ria was a shining, radiant young lady. He’d fallen in love.

             He’d kill to avenge his love.

             And he’d gotten away with it.