Sketch № 2: The Poisoned Pie
At six a.m. last Tuesday, April 10, under a rainstorm that flooded the town’s corroded gutters and bubbled over broken streets, I knocked on the door of Café Confictura. The inside was dark, the sign turned to “closed,” and yet the place, a big Cape-style house with two stories, still felt welcoming. Its lemon chiffon exterior shone against the gloom like a porch light left on for the wanderer returning home.
My umbrella had barely survived the storm’s onslaught, my boots were taking on water, and it seemed as though Phillipa Creaverton had forgotten her offer to meet me here an hour before they opened. I got up close to the front door and peered in, my breath fogging the glass and obstructing what little I could see. I wiped away the fog with the side of my fist.
A face just inside the glass peered back at me.
“Jeez — ” I jumped, clutching my throat. The shopkeeper’s bell shuddered as the door flung open.
“Who are you?” demanded Violet in her French accent. She shook a ripple through her short black waterfall of hair. As far as I had been able to tell during my first week in town, she managed the café, an omnipresent queen of the baristas; and she had a wardrobe with Fifth Avenue style. Usually she was quite personable.
“You served me all last week,” I said. “A woman said to meet her — ”
“What woman? Nessie? Did Nessie send you because she is too cowardly to show her face?”
Nessie. The name had bounced around a few of the café’s rooms I’d frequented, but never close enough to me to catch just who she is.
Behind Violet’s shoulder came the warm smile under the dollop of white hair that, last night, had invited me here. But now Phillipa Creaverton lurched forward, clutching her stomach.
“Vi, let the poor girl in,” she said, gently shoving past Violet and pulling me inside.
“Do not drip on Mrs. C,” Violet barked at me as I passed. “A cold could be lethal. She is quite old.”
Mrs. Creaverton scowled at her. “Thanks.”
I tried to keep my drippage to myself. “Are you all right?” I asked Mrs. Creaverton, whose arm was still wrapped around the front of her red cardigan.
“Just a bug. I’m sorry it kept me from meeting you on time.” She slipped into an ice cream parlor chair at a nearby table and gestured for me to do the same. I hung my wet utility jacket on the brass coatrack at the door and sat down.
“It’s not just a bug,” said Violet. “It is Nessie trying to kill you.”
“Yes, of course it is, sweetie,” Mrs. Creaverton said. “Would you get my friend here her usual raspberry latte?”
It was then I noticed the smell of coffee already brewed and the heated sugar of a pastry warming. “How did you know my drink?” I asked.
“It’s my business, Blogger,” she said. “Literally.” She threw her arms wide, glancing around the place. “Welcome to Café Confictura: Phillipa Creaverton, proprietor.”
“I never saw you around here until yesterday.”
“I live upstairs,” she said, waving toward the staircase behind the registers. “I was . . . preoccupied all week.”
“With what?”
“Vi,” she called over her shoulder, “black coffee for me.”
“She tells me like this is news,” Vi murmured behind the counter, already pouring her a cup.
“Now, Blogger, you’re looking to get folks around here to open up to you, tell you about all the oddities that started when the Quake hit us, right?”
I slid my trusty notepad out from my blazer pocket. “I’ve heard whisperings here, at your café, about illness cropping up suddenly, or the people with Father Jack’s Table who haven’t slept in almost two weeks and spend day and night feeding the displaced, or . . . I mean, you go down any street and the houses and businesses look like they were abandoned twenty years ago or something.”
“The rot,” Mrs. C named it, nodding.
“Right,” I said. “Every place except yours.”
Vi broke in: “Which is why Nessie is trying to kill you. She wants the café. For its power.”
“Power?” I said.
Mrs. C ignored her. “You’re on to a story, Blogger, I’ll tell you that. Quake messed up this town. Stick around here, talk to me. When people see you’re okay by me, they’ll open up to you. Might take a little while, but one day Amy the librarian’ll tell you her theory about the Quake started in the supposed tunnels under the town that all lead to the old O’Connor house, or Roscoe’ll tell you how his writing group went from brainiacs to ‘Which way did he go, George?’ overnight.”
I said, “And what about this Nessie? What will I learn about her?”
With a deep frown at us, Violet jammed the milk pitcher under the steaming wand, and it gurgled and hissed at us. When she was done, Mrs. C said to her, “You know, if it were poison, I’d be dead. She gave me that key lime pie two days ago. Why would I just be feeling the effects now?”
“Why did Radinka Popov and Mr. Aoki say the ghosts made them kill people? These are nice customers who don’t kill people, or see ghosts,” said Violet, her accent intensifying as her voice rose. “Why did four people die from allergies they never had before? Why do any of the things happen?”
Mrs. C turned her smile back to me, returning to our conversation. “Several of my regulars have specific days they like to come in. Here’s who to watch for over the next week . . .”
By the time she was done, my notebook read like a café who’s who: what customers drink, which of Confictura’s many themed rooms they prefer, whether any of the strange phenomena that came with the Quake have touched them. Several times I thanked her for her help, and once I asked why she wanted to help me, a stranger, blog about her town. She didn’t answer. At 6:56, Mrs. C went back upstairs to lie down, and Violet unlocked the front door as I drained my last sip of my day’s first raspberry latte.
“What’s this power Nessie thinks the café has?” I asked Vi.
At first, I didn’t think she’d answer. I was learning Vi’s inclination to share was as unpredictable as a kindergartner’s. But then she replied, “Pastor Sweeney says Confictura is on blessed ground. Nessie believes him. Now, since the Quake, she believes him more.”
Later that afternoon, Mrs. C came back downstairs looking more energized. As the week went on, she gained more of her strength back. Despite her advice and open warmth toward me, my second week in Applewood didn’t net me any more interviews than my first, but at least now people weren’t running from me like I was Typhoid Mary back from the dead. I sat in various rooms, working my way toward the back of the café from the front room — the only unnamed room — to the Box Room to the Fireplace Room to the Riverfront Room and all the rooms in between. With today as the start of another week, I started the cycle again in the front room, plunking down in a booth on the side wall. It’s how I had a front-row view of the excitement.
About an hour ago, around 9:30 a.m., I noticed Violet whispering with a woman; and then Violet rushed out of the café. She got back a little while ago practically dragging a man with her — thirties, short brown hair, wearing a white coat that read Doc Graham. Vi pulled Mrs. C from behind the front counter and the three sat down, in my earshot I’m happy to say.
Doc Graham said, “I was just down the street with Evvy Addington, who seems to have similar symptoms to what Violet just described you have: a bout of stomach pain and nausea before bouncing back . . . for a time. I’m sorry, Mrs. Creaverton, but I’ve been seeing this condition — ”
“Illness,” Violet broke in.
“Whatever it is,” said Doc Graham, “I’ve seen it since the Quake. I don’t know if it can be contracted as Violet has suggested, via food, but food can trigger a reaction. It’s not quite poisoning, but I’d like to examine you and run some tests. We won’t know definitively for at least a few days if you’ve contracted this, but I want to start you on a restrictive diet and start monitoring your activity immediately. Because if you have contracted this condition, Mrs. Creaverton, I must stress, you may be in grave danger.”
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This and any related blog posts are works of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any reference to living or dead public figures, entities, places, events, and the like, are of a fictional, opinioned, and/or parodic nature. No healthcare professionals have been consulted in writing this. Any advice given or inferred is anecdotal and used at your own risk. Consult your doctor in all healthcare matters.
Clarissa J. Markiewicz is the author of Christmas In Whimsy — a heartwarming, fun novel readers compare to Hallmark Christmas movies, and recipient of Readers’ Favorite 5-star Seal — and the genre-bending new-age mystery The Paramour Pawn.
