A Catered Thanksgiving, page 6
Libby and Bernie were searching for the silver polish in the kitchen utility closet when Monty Field came traipsing in.
“Ladies, how’s the turkey doing?” he asked.
“Cooking along,” Bernie said.
Monty Field rubbed one of his hands along the side of his beaklike nose before bringing it back down to his side. “I thought I’d check on the bird.”
Libby nodded toward the oven. “Be our guest.”
“This is my favorite part of the holiday,” he confided as he walked toward the oven. “Alma always told me that the turkey would roast without my help,” he said with a smile. “But I don’t believe it. Actually, I don’t think she liked me in her kitchen. Not one single bit. I know her son certainly didn’t. He’d glare at me every time I came in.” And he gave a self-deprecating laugh.
“I can’t imagine why,” Libby said as she and Bernie laughed with Monty to be polite. “After all, if you’re not entitled to be here, who is?”
“That’s what I told him,” Monty replied. “He was better behaved after that.” Monty bent over and opened the oven door. “But she did make a good turkey,” he continued. “I’ll give her that.”
“Hopefully, ours will be, too,” said Libby.
“Better than your mother’s chicken, at any rate.”
“Excuse me?” Libby said, thinking she hadn’t heard Monty Field correctly.
“You were not my first choice,” he informed them. “However, since I’m not paying, I acceded. Perhaps you will prove me wrong, although in my experience the apple never falls far from the tree.”
Bernie and Libby were both too flabbergasted to speak. They simply watched as Monty reached over and pulled the rack containing the turkey out a couple of inches. Then he bent down even farther and inhaled.
“Smell that,” he said, using his hand to waft the aroma up to his nose. “There’s nothing like it. They should bottle it. Don’t you agree, girls?”
But Libby wasn’t listening to what Monty was saying. She was focusing on the turkey. She didn’t get it. The turkey had been roasting breast side down, but now it was breast side up. That made no sense. The only possible explanation was that Bernie had turned the bird. But why? It wasn’t time yet. She turned to Bernie to ask why she’d done that, but before she could get the words out, Monty reached over and tapped on the pop-up button embedded in the turkey’s breast with the forefinger of his right hand.
He went tap, tap, tap.
On the third tap the turkey exploded.
Chapter 8
Bernie and Libby stood there with their mouths hanging open. They were too stunned to move. Or speak. Their ears rang. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
Finally Libby said, “Tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”
“It is.” Bernie pointed to the oven.
Monty Field lay sprawled half on the floor and half on the oven door. His head had been turned sideways by the blast. The upper half seemed to be gone.
Libby put her hand to her mouth and averted her eyes. She didn’t want to look, but Bernie couldn’t tear her eyes away.
“Ugh,” Bernie said as she gingerly stepped around the blood dripping onto the floor. Monty’s eyes seemed to follow her as she reached over and turned off the heat. “Death by turkey,” Bernie said, the words flying out of her mouth before she could stop them. “That’s a new one.” Then she gave a nervous giggle, which was something she always did when she was extremely upset. “Who would have thought?”
“Who indeed?” Libby took a deep breath. She still hadn’t moved from the spot she was standing in. Her legs felt wobbly, and her stomach was doing odd flip-flops. “I told you those pop-up buttons were no good,” she wailed.
“Evidently not,” Bernie replied. She was still having trouble thinking clearly.
“We killed him,” Libby continued. “The stuffing made the turkey explode, and we killed him. I can’t believe it.”
“Don’t be silly,” Bernie said automatically.
“No. We did,” Libby insisted.
“That’s ridiculous,” Bernie told her.
“Well, can you come up with another explanation?” Libby demanded.
“Possibly.” Bernie studied the oven and the area surrounding it.
Of course, there was another explanation. There had to be. It was just a matter of reading the scene and coming up with one. She put aside her queasiness and told herself to focus.
“Well?” Libby said after a minute had gone by.
“No oyster stuffing,” Bernie finally said.
“No oyster stuffing?” Libby repeated. “What do you mean, no oyster stuffing?”
“Exactly what I said.”
“Which makes no sense,” Libby said, raising her voice.
“Calm down.”
“I am calm. I just want to know what you meant by ‘no oyster stuffing.’ Under the circumstances I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
“I meant exactly what I said, Libby,” Bernie replied in a voice that Libby found infuriating. “There’s a lot of other stuff on the walls”—Bernie didn’t think she needed to be more specific—“but I don’t see any oyster stuffing, do you?”
Libby looked around for a moment. She saw turkey and sweet potato casserole and corn-bread stuffing and some pieces of what she thought might be Monty Field’s head—better not to speculate on that—but Bernie was right. No oyster stuffing. Or so it would appear. Frankly, she didn’t want to get close enough to find out.
“Maybe, there isn’t any stuffing,” Libby conceded. “But so what?”
“Well, then, where did the stuffing go?”
“Who cares?”
Bernie rolled her eyes. “You should care. Our insurance will care.”
“Maybe it got atomized,” Libby suggested. “Maybe the explosion turned it into tiny particles that we can’t see.”
Bernie waved her hand around the kitchen. “Nothing else did.”
Libby put her hands on her hips. “So, Bernie, exactly what are you saying?” she demanded.
Bernie rocked back and forth on the heels of her boots. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Not to me.”
“I’m saying that someone took the stuffing out.”
“So?”
“So think about it, Libby.”
“I am.”
“Think harder.”
“I hate when you do this.”
“You need to pull yourself together,” Bernie told her.
Libby had to admit that was true. She chewed on her lip while she thought, but she couldn’t focus on anything. She was too rattled to think. She took a couple of deep breaths. That didn’t work. No. What she needed was a piece of chocolate. Which she’d had the foresight to pack. Actually, she never left home without it. Who knew when a chocolate emergency might arise? Some people had tranquilizers. She had chocolate.
After she’d eaten a couple of Lindt’s extra dark truffles and taken a couple more deep breaths, she began to understand what Bernie had been saying. “I get it,” she said. “Someone took the stuffing out and replaced it with an explosive device. And that’s why the turkey was breast side up. Because whoever did it was in a hurry and they put the turkey back in the pan wrong.”
Bernie nodded her approval. “Exactly.” Then she had another idea. “Or they might have substituted an already roasted turkey, which they’d jerry-rigged with a bomb, for ours,” she posited. “Smell that?” she asked.
Libby sniffed. “Now that you mention it, yes.” She’d smelled it to begin with, but with everything going on, it just hadn’t come to the fore of her consciousness.
“That’s gunpowder,” Bernie said. “That’s what they use in fireworks.”
Libby offered a truffle to Bernie, who took it—a mark of how upset she was. Then Libby took one, too. In her opinion, sisters never let sisters eat chocolate truffles alone. For a moment, both women stood there, allowing the chocolate to melt on their tongues and coat their mouths.
“Whoever did it must have done it when we were in the dining room, setting the table,” Libby finally said.
“Had to have been,” Bernie agreed. “We were in the kitchen the rest of the time.”
Now that the shock was wearing off, Libby was indignant. “We could have been killed,” she said.
“Indeed, we could have. Although,” Bernie said thoughtfully, “it was tapping the pop-up button that set the device off.”
“Maybe we were the targets,” Libby said.
“No,” Bernie said. “I think Field was.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m not sure,” Bernie said. “But first of all, I can’t think of any reason why anyone here would want to kill us, and secondly, neither one of us would have tapped that button. Think about it. It’s not something people usually do.”
Libby made a clicking sound with her tongue. “I wonder if that’s something that Field usually did.”
“Yes, it was,” Bernie said, remembering a conversation she’d had with Perceval. “It was one of Monty’s foibles.”
“Foibles?”
“Shtick.”
Libby absentmindedly reorganized the Parker House rolls in the breadbasket. “Well, it’s good that this isn’t our fault,” she added.
“Not even remotely our fault,” Bernie said. “Turkeys do not explode without a lot of help. At least not like that they don’t.”
“There was the ‘exploding snail in the puff pastry’ incident that happened somewhere in upstate New York a couple of years ago,” Libby pointed out.
“That was different,” Bernie told her. “That was a temperature–air pocket thing. That was completely different than what happened here. And the lady just got a minor burn. She didn’t get her head blown off. No, we have no liability with this whatsoever.”
Libby decided Bernie was probably right. She gave a sigh of relief. Even though Bernie had already mentioned the insurance thing, she wasn’t going to admit to her that one of the first things that had occurred to her after the explosion was whether or not their insurance policy would cover this. What clause would something like this fall under? she wondered. Sometimes she couldn’t believe how crass she was.
“Who do you think did this?” she asked.
Bernie shook her head. “Some pissed-off Field family member,” she said.
Libby rubbed her hands together. She was beginning to feel cold. It could be shock, or it could be the temperature of the house. “I wish Dad was here,” she blurted out.
“Me too,” Bernie said.
“Maybe we should call him.”
“And tell him what? That Monty Field died from an exploding turkey?”
“I guess,” Libby answered,” when you put it like that, there’s really no point in worrying him. I mean, it’s not as if there’s anything he can do from Florida. He’ll insist on coming right back.”
“Exactly.” Bernie tapped her nails on the kitchen counter. “Not to mention the fact that we’re going to have to hear how he told us not to take this job every day for the next year.”
“Two years, at least,” Libby said.
“The police can handle this,” Bernie said.
“I don’t envy them their job,” Libby commented.
“Me either,” Bernie said. “Everyone here knows about fireworks, everyone has access to them, and everyone here apparently dislikes Monty.”
Libby looked around and shuddered. “I’d hate to be the one that does that cleanup.”
“Well, they’re definitely going to have to get rid of the oven,” Bernie said as she went over and fished her cell out of her tote bag so she could call the cops. “I can’t imagine ever baking anything in it ever again.”
She’d just started to dial 911 when Ralph and Perceval came running into the kitchen.
“We heard a noise,” Perceval said.
“It sounded like an explosion,” Ralph added. Then he caught sight of the blood and his brother lying half in the oven. “Oh my God,” he cried. “They’ve killed Monty.”
There was no doubt in Libby’s mind that the “they” Ralph was referring to were her and Bernie.
If there was any doubt at all, it was dispelled when Perceval turned to her and Bernie and said, “Why did you do this?”
“Us?” Bernie countered. “You’re kidding me, right?”
She would have said more except that Lexus came running in, took one look at her husband’s body, shrieked, and commenced a graceful swan dive onto the kitchen floor, after she’d picked a spot where she wouldn’t stain her white cashmere sweater and slacks.
As Libby watched Lexus do a bad imitation of a woman fainting from grief and fear, it occurred to her that as improbable as it might seem, she and Bernie were being set up to take the fall for Monty Field’s death. The whole thing had been preplanned, and they’d walked right into it. At least, that was how it looked to her at the moment, she thought as she watched Perceval take out his phone and call the police.
Chapter 9
“I wish I hadn’t given up smoking,” Bernie said as she brushed the snow off her pants.
“I wish I had started,” Libby told her as she did likewise.
“Well, one thing is clear. We’re not getting out of here now,” Bernie said, gloomily surveying the van’s wheels, which were buried under the snow.
“Not without a snowplow and snowshoes we’re not,” Libby agreed, amazed at how much effort it took to walk in snow up to her knees.
Bernie studied the blizzard raging in front of them. She figured the wind was gusting at a good forty miles an hour, making visibility impossible. They couldn’t see the road they’d come up on, much less the fireworks bunker near the house.
The moment Libby and Bernie had gone outside, they’d known they weren’t going anywhere, but they’d cleared the snow off the van and started it up, anyway. It had been a futile gesture. The wheels had spun around, digging deeper into the snow, and the windshield wipers hadn’t been able to keep up with the onslaught.
Then they’d called Brandon and found out that even if they could get the van out and make it down the hill to the highway—which was extremely doubtful—there would be no place to go. A state of emergency had been declared for Westchester. All the roads were closed, and people were being told to stay off of them.
“We’re stuck,” Libby said, stating the obvious.
“No kidding,” Bernie replied.
“This is not good.”
“Why?” Bernie asked. “Just because we’re stuck in the house with a corpse and the person who made him one?”
“There’s that and the fact that whoever killed him is trying to pin the murders on us,” Libby countered.
“I say it’s the entire family. Witness Perceval’s and Ralph’s whole ‘Oh my god, you’ve killed Monty’ scene and Lexus’s ‘Oh, the horror of it all’ after she revived.” Bernie bracketed the word revived with her fingers.
Libby grimaced. “Yes. That was some of the worst acting I’ve seen since the Longely Playhouse rendition of Our Town. I mean, if you’re going to do something, do it right.”
“Well, they did it right with Monty. I’ll give them that.”
“Maybe they all killed him,” Libby said.
“An attractive thought, but I don’t think they trust each other enough to be able to coordinate something like that.”
“Any chance it could have been an accident?” Libby asked.
Bernie looked at her. “Yes, someone just happened to lose an explosive device, and by some quirk of fate, it ended up in the turkey. It happens every day.”
“Maybe it was supposed to be a joke.”
“In other circumstances, I’d say that might be the case, but not in this one. All these people work with explosives. They know what they can do. If they wanted it to be a joke, they would have put something small in the turkey, not something that would blow off Field’s head.” Bernie stamped her feet up and down to keep the circulation going. “Just thinking about it makes me want a drink.”
“Me too,” Libby said. “I bet Monty kept a really good liquor cabinet.”
Bernie gave a wistful sigh. “A shot of decent brandy would be incredibly nice right now.”
“Yes, it would be,” Libby agreed, despite the fact that she usually didn’t drink. However, she was willing to make an exception in this case.
Suddenly Bernie’s cell phone rang. Both women jumped at the noise. Bernie took it out of her pocket and looked at who was calling. She frowned.
“It’s Dad,” she said.
“That’s bad,” Libby replied. Their dad rarely made calls on his cell unless it was an emergency.
Bernie tried to reassure her sister. “He’s probably just calling to wish us a happy Thanksgiving,” she told her as she moved to the shelter of the doorway to shield the phone from the snow. If there was one thing she’d learned over the years, it was that water and electronics didn’t mix.
Libby moved next to her so she could hear both sides of the conversation. “He did that this morning,” Libby reminded her just as Bernie pressed the talk button. “He knows. Clyde called and told him.”
“What does Libby say I know?” Sean asked Bernie.
“She was saying you know about the storm,” Bernie told him in the most cheerful voice she could muster.
Libby gave her a thumbs-up for fast thinking.
“But don’t worry about a thing,” Bernie continued. “We’re fine. How’s it going in Florida?”
“I guarantee that it’s going a lot better down here than it’s going up there,” Sean said. “And I’m not referring to the weather, either.”
“You’re right. He does know,” Bernie mouthed to Libby.
“When were you going to call and tell me about Monty Field having his head blown off?” Sean demanded.
“Soon. We just didn’t want to interrupt your family reunion and all that bonding that must be going on,” Bernie said.
“Really?” Sean said.
Bernie winced at the sarcastic tone. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “We have everything under control.”
