Someone's in the Kitchen, short fiction by MJ Jones in Web Mystery Magazine, Fall 2005

Someone's in the Kitchen

Strange as it seems, politicians don’t get murdered very often. Maybe that's why people still like to hear me tell about State Senator James R. Rowse being killed at that cooking contest. "There he lay," I always start off. "On the kitchen floor in front of the ice box, mouth full of Cornish pasty and arsenic."

Then, of course, I always have to stop and explain why a small town schoolteacher like me was there when it happened. And that involves a little history lesson, which goes like this –

Back in the forties and fifties, every church and lodge and rural township in southwest Wisconsin used to hold a pasty supper at least once a year. What made this particular year's Willow Township supper unique was that it included a pasty-cooking contest. They claimed they were doing it as part of the state's centennial celebration. But the reason was more likely that all the county fairs were over by then and plenty of women were still looking for a blue ribbon.

I went to the contest alone because my husband took our little girl to the movies that night. Some cowboy show, I expect, which Lyle used for an excuse not to endure another pasty supper. But I had to attend. I taught Home Economics at the high school in town. Such events may not have been mentioned in my contract, but, believe me, they were part of my job, even when the contest didn't feature any of my students.

Willow Township Hall's gone now. But it stood three miles out the County blacktop and then another three over a gravel road that wound and dove and rose through the hills, past farm houses and hip-roofed barns and fields full of corn and cattle. 'Til finally a crude wooden sign announced: WILLOW TOWNSHIP PASTY CONTEST AND SUPER, FRI OCT. 9 1948. COME ON! COME ALL! The hall itself was another half mile down a dirt lane, in a stand of willows by Oscar Creek.

It was a little after three in the afternoon, already looking like rain, when I pulled into the field next to the township's limestone hall. The field was already filled with cars and trucks – Fords and Nashes and GMCs, along with Tally Arndt's DeSoto and Ellie Verning's battered LaSalle coupe. There was a big black Buick, too, which I figured must belong to Senator James R. Rowse. He'd be judging the contest.

I was surprised to see so many people that early. The threat of rain must've pulled the men off their combines and away to the contest with their wives. A dozen families milled around the yard, shaking the senator's hand and waiting for someone to open up the locked hall.

I remember wondering how the contest organizers had managed to get Senator Rowse there. Sure, he lived in the township, a sort of gentleman farmer who raised horses and had a small lead mine on his property. But he wasn't running for reelection and since when did Jimmy R do anything without a political motive?

Early that summer, after four terms in the state legislature, the senator suddenly announced he wouldn't be on the November ballot. Maybe he thought he'd go down with Truman – he was a Democrat in a traditionally Republican district – or maybe, at forty-nine, he was already tired of politics. Too bad, people said. Jimmy R made a good senator. Did right by farmers and main street, too. He'd fought the smart city slickers from Milwaukee to a standstill over road money, even got some abandoned lead mines started up again.

Still, whatever his future plans might've been, old habits die hard. There in the yard, he was working the little crowd with every bit of his glad-hand charm. And they were eating it up as usual.

The senator wasn't much to look at – a tall, skinny man with hooded hazel eyes and a balding head. His smile was as crooked as his teeth, but there was something about Jimmy R. What people call charisma nowadays, I guess. Anyway, he could sure make you feel special.

Like when he strode up to me. "Fran Johnson, isn't it?" he said, wringing my hand. "Well, Mrs. Johnson, let me tell you that if any of these pasties belong to your pupils, I can't wait to dig in."

We'd only met once before, but here he was calling me by name and offering just the right compliment. I knew it was an old politician's trick, but when he gave me that crooked smile I couldn't help thinking what a handsome man Jimmy R really was.

Presently, a sleek yellow Cadillac glided up to the hall's front door and out stepped the township chairman's wife holding the hall key. Her name was Norma Morse and she was surely the most beautiful woman in Willow Township.

"Sorry I'm late," she said to the crowd as she opened the door.

"You're sorry all right," someone said and someone else laughed.

Obviously, what Norma gained in looks she lost in popularity.

Norma and Jack Morse couldn't even be called gentlemen farmers; they just lived out in the country. Nowadays, of course, lots of people do, but back then it was kind of unusual. Jack Morse owned a construction company and didn't keep so much as a saddle horse. Nevertheless, money talks; he'd been elected township chairman.

Until then, Norma, a city girl from Madison, never made much effort to fit in with her neighbors. She preferred a fast little clique at the local country club. Recently, though, with her husband being the new chairman and she being no fool, Norma helped him make some renovations in the hall, then organized this pasty supper and contest to show them off. Even more astonishingly, she had the sense to put Ellie Verning in charge. Seventy-year old Mrs. Verning's late husband had been township chairman for three decades.

Putting locks on the hall doors, though, wasn't viewed as the most neighborly of gestures. Most of the township felt like Mrs. Verning when she said, "Trusting soul, aincha?" as Norma let us in the kitchen door.

The kitchen, renovated or not, would never be called a Home Economics teacher's model of efficiency. But I could see that the Morses had done more than put in locks. True, an ice box did for refrigeration, but the high-backed sink had running water and the cupboards bore a fresh coat of white paint. New red oil cloth stretched across the counters and
long, center table. Even the ancient cook-stove looked polished and serviceable.

When I asked Ellie Verning how I could help, she said, "First off, Mrs. Johnson, you can get out the other one of these things." She grunted a little as she pulled a big white coffee pot down from the cupboard.

I suspected her arthritis was bothering her, though Mrs. Verning wouldn't be one to complain. She was the kind of energetic little woman who earned every wrinkle in her face and every sinew in her arms. She'd spent a lifetime plowing fields, milking cows, keeping house, raising children – chickens, pigs, and horses, too. This in a climate where, summer to winter, temperatures could range 125 degrees and in a time before telephones or electric lights or gas-driven tractors. Even after her husband died and she quit farming, Mrs. Verning still put in a full garden, which –to her daughters' horror – she tilled with a wheeled hand-plow, by herself.

Energetic, of course, doesn't always mean neat. This day, Mrs. Verning wore a wrinkled green dress and stained butcher's apron, its deep pockets bulging with all the things other women kept in a purse. Her thick white hair was pulled into a barely controlled bun. The eyes behind her rimless glasses, though, were the calm brown of a woodland pond.

When we had the pots on the stove, she said, "You got good handwriting, Mrs. Johnson. Why don't you write the entrants' names down? Then give 'em these little flags with numbers on to stick in their pasties."

She handed me a fistful of the numbered flags, then went to scrub what she called the zinc. "Norma Morse shoulda done this," she said as she reached under the sink for a box of Gold Dust cleanser. "But she's so lazy she even hires somebody to clean her house."

I pulled up a spindly wooden chair and sat down at the center table. In ten minutes, I'd checked in four contestants; four delicious-looking pasties lined the counter.

After the contestants were finished in the kitchen, they went into the main room to join their families for the musical program that Norma Morse had also arranged. Darleen Roberts, local girl and music major at the University, was already at the piano playing from a pair of thick books marked Mozart and Mendelsohn. A fair-haired young man – I thought he looked a little brighter than Dar's usual taste in boyfriends – turned the pages.

I'd not known the first four contestants well, but the next one I did. She was Maxine Kitto and I was glad to see her out and about. The year before, Maxine's oldest son had been killed in a mining accident. The poor boy survived whatever awful places the Marines had sent him during the war, only to die less than seven miles from home.

Over night, Maxine became an old woman. Her brown eyes turned muddy and her curly dark hair went lank and grey. She stopped going out, even to church. The only reason anyone in town knew she was still alive was that, after her husband left the house in the morning, she turned on the phonograph as loud as it would go. For the next six hours, Verdi and Puccini blasted through the neighborhood. Until one morning three months back. The music suddenly stopped. Maxine came out of the house, swept the porch, and when that was done, went grocery shopping. People said she was herself again.

I wondered, though. Maxine's son had a dreadful death – he'd suffocated in a mine cave-in. Could I ever find a way to get over it if something like that happened to my child?

But it was a smiling Maxine who stood before me now. "You don't need bother with the rest of 'em. This here's the winner," she said, sliding the flag numbered Five into the crust of her pasty.

"Better just take it on home, Max," said the little red-haired woman behind her. "You couldn't win if you was the only one in the contest."

Maxine turned and pointed to the redhead's newspaper-wrapped pasty. "That a pasty or your garbage, Doris? Not's anybody'd know the difference."

Maxine and the redhead – Mrs. Verning's married daughter, Doris Penhollow – had been talking to each other like this since they were six. That's when Maxine's mother died and her father disappeared into the bottle. Ellie Verning had taken Maxine home – you could do that in those days, before the social workers started sticking their noses in – and raised her like her own.

Best friends and all but sisters for forty years, Doris and Maxine stood up at each other's weddings, were godmother to each other's children. Not surprisingly, it was Doris who, that July morning, turned off the Puccini, handed Maxine a broom, then drove her down to the A&P.

Doris was as full of verve as her mother, one of those people who truly seem to have energy shooting out of every pore. She'd raised four children, kept the books at her husband's bottling plant, and when all but one of the kids were out of the house, she became an antique dealer. A prosperous one, too. She'd hit a farm auction, buy a walnut bedstead for a couple of dollars, then sell it to Chicago tourists for twenty. She once offered me a very nice sum for my Gone With the Wind lamp. But I figured if it was worth that much to Doris Penhallow, it was sure worth that much to me.

"Bout time you got here," Mrs. Verning said.

"It's started to rain," her daughter said, waving toward the window above the sink. "And you know Max can barely drive inside the lines on the best of days."

"At least I don't use speed tickets for wallpaper," Maxine fired back.

Mrs. Verning shook her head. "You two need something to do 'sides rip on each other," she said. "Start making the coffee, Maxine. And you, Doris, move them pasties onto the table.”

Grinning broadly, the women hopped to it.

But I didn't trust Doris Penhallow with other people's entries. Not after the 1944 County Fair when she'd "accidentally" knocked a rival's angel food cake onto the judging tent's dirt floor. And then stepped in it. "I stumbled," she claimed. "Ma always did say I was clumsy as a ox on ice." When her cake didn't take a ribbon after all, Doris consoled herself by winning the jitterbug contest.

"Somebody needs to set out the cups and plates," I said. "Maybe you could do that, Doris."

And she did, with such energy I thought she'd break half the set.

The next entrant was Tally Arndt. "Howya doing, Fran?" she said. "Missed you at bridge club the other night."

Tally wore a cream-colored Vera Maxwell-style suit that set off her dark hair. She was just about the best dressed woman in the county, but the really amazing thing about her clothes was that she made them. I was a pretty good teacher of sewing – if I do say so – but I've never claimed to be much of a seamstress myself. Oh, I could keep my daughter in skirts and shorts and me in house dresses. But never a suit like the one Tally had on. Nor, I have to admit, could I wear it with anything like Tally Arndt's style. She looked like a New York model, if not as tall – or, my husband pleased me by pointing out, as pretty.

As Tally added pasty Six to the ones already on the counter, Doris said, "Hope we can trust you not to try and poison Jimmy R even if he's not running again."

"Criminey, Doris," her mother said from the sink. "What's got into you?"

Certainly nothing new. Doris Penhallow went for the unprotected throat every time. In this case it was because Tally's husband had lost the last election to Senator Rowse by a landslide that completely buried any further political ambition.

But Tally was still a good political wife. With her warmest smile, she said, "Jimmy R's probably got a stomach of cast iron. Have to, after all the fund raisers he's been at. Democrats can't cook any better'n they can run the country."

It was a good line and Tally had the sense to exit on it.

"She can laugh now," Doris said. "But election time two years ago, she didn't think there was anything funny about Jimmy R, did she? And for sure not when he got through paying her husband back for daring run against him."

Maybe it was just coincidence, but the health department had begun seemingly endless inspections of Les Arndt's stock--for TB, for brucellosis, for hoof-and-mouth disease. And there'd been all kinds of trouble over some mortgaged cattle Les was alleged to have sold.

"A Republican woulda done the same," Maxine said from the stove where she'd started making coffee. "There's just no difference in the parties. That’s why I'm gonna vote Progressive. Henry Wallace, now –"

I was spared further political commentary by Norma Morse, who swept into the kitchen saying, "Didn't Tally stay to help? Guess she's worried about getting that pretty suit all full of pasty."

Norma didn't dress as well as Tally Arndt. She didn't need to. As I said, Norma was beautiful, even at forty and with her looks starting to fade. Like her blonde hair would've, too, without those biweekly visits to Bettsy's Beauty Parlor.

But no amount of bleach could hide the fact that Norma looked drawn. Had for quite a while, when I thought about it. Maybe the rumors were true – maybe her husband's construction company wasn't doing very well. In spite of the big postwar building boom, you saw more of Tom Schmidt’s signs around now and everyone knew Lance Trevalyan put in the low bid for blacktopping the county roads.

From behind her back, Norma produced a fat pasty. "Here's something that may surprise you," she said.

As a matter of fact, it did. By her own admission, Norma was no cook. But even more surprising was her offer to help in the kitchen. Seizing what was surely a rare moment, Mrs. Verning promptly told her she could haul the tins of sugar and salt and cocoa out of their storage place under the counter. Norma obeyed promptly, and with surprising good grace.

Everyone was busy fetching and pouring and mixing when I went to tell Senator Rowse he could begin judging the pasties any time. I should've known it wouldn't be any time soon. Jimmy R had to show off first.

I stood by the kitchen door as the senator stepped to the front of the hall and launched into a little speech explaining how our part of the state was one of America's real melting pots: Cornish, German, Welsh, Irish, Sicilian. But, he said, at the table everyone was Cornish – a Cousin Jack. In southwest Wisconsin, pasty and saffron bread were as common as hamburgers and ice cream. And, therefore, everyone was an expert on how a pasty ought to be made.

"As I know all too well, dear friends," he said. "I also know a politician can't really afford to judge a cooking contest. So I guess you could say I'm celebrating my retirement by being here today."

He paused to give the crowd a chance to moan its sorrow that he'd no longer be their dear friend in Madison.

"I'll miss you, too," he said. "And since this will be one of my last talks, I'll make it one to remember by keeping it short."

Of course, he didn't. He explained at quite some length how the Marshall Plan was a good thing and school consolidation was a bad thing and we should for sure vote Democratic in November. Finally, he recalled where he was and launched into a history of the pasty.

"Pasties, my dear friends," the senator said, "were eaten as far back as the Middle Ages but they only came to Wisconsin in the 1840's, brought by Cornish miners. On a cold Wisconsin morning, a Cousin Jack would stick one of those portable pies down his shirt to keep both him and it warm. Then come dinnertime he'd put it on his shovel and reheat it over a miner's candle."

Everyone in the room had known all this by the time they were ten, but they cheered anyway. Jimmy R could always get his audience involved.

"In the bad old days over there in Cornwall, some pretty disgusting things went in the pasties," he said with a grin. "Entrails and such."

"Yuk, blah," went the crowd.

"And you still never know what you might get from the Cousins up in northern Michigan."

Laughter from the crowd.

"But a pure pasty – a Wisconsin pasty –"

"Yay," went the crowd.

"Is onion and potato and round steak and that's all."

Now a few of the women cast nervous glances at each other. A recipe wasn't what you wanted to hear from a judge, especially if your pasty included turnip or carrots or rutabaga.

Perhaps Senator Rowse noticed the looks. Or perhaps, old pol that he was, he naturally sought compromise. "On the other hand," he said, "my dear old ma always claimed no two Cornishwomen would ever agree on what went in a pasty."

Nods from the crowd.

"So, dear friends –" He paused for effect, then finished with his best senatorial flourish. "As usual, the proof's in the pasty."

"Yay," went the crowd.

Yuk, I thought. I hadn't voted for Jimmy R and never would. I didn't doubt he was honest. Where money was concerned, anyway. And I knew his road initiatives had brought prosperity to the district. What I couldn't tolerate was his philandering.

My husband claimed the stories about Jimmy were just bridge-table gossip, but I knew better. Only the previous spring, one of my students had suddenly burst into tears in the middle of sewing class. When I asked if she wanted to talk, she said her folks were getting a divorce, all because of Senator Rowse.

Seems that a few weeks before, her mother told everyone she was going to visit a sick relative in Indiana. But that same weekend, Norma and Jack Morse saw her at the Palmer House in Chicago. She was arm in arm with Jimmy R.

As it turned out, the girl's parents hadn't divorced. Instead, the whole family moved to Sheboygan. And when I asked Norma Morse if the story was true, she said it had all come right in the end, so what did it matter? Besides, Norma said, if Madeleine Rowse could live with him, the district sure could.

I was left to wonder how many state road contracts Morse Construction would be getting.

When the applause finally died down, Jimmy came into the kitchen. Not quite finished with his antics, he soon had us singing "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" while he belted out the chorus in a pretty fair baritone. Of course, the crowd loved it. This time they took a very long time to stop clapping.

Finally, he shooed us into the hall's main room. "Lovely, ladies, just lovely," he said. "We should go on Amateur Hour for sure."

My last sight of James R. Rowse alive was as he was setting a plate of pasty on the center table next to his Camels and cup of hot chocolate.

"It's my show now," he said in that rich baritone. Then he flung out his arms like a vaudeville performer leaving the stage.

As Mrs. Verning and I took chairs in the back of the hall, she said, "Rain's really starting to come down. Knew it'd get bad. Durn arthritis makes me feel like Joe Lewis's punching bag."

Eight pasties can be judged in well under half an hour, but nearly forty-five minutes went by with the senator still at it. The crowd was getting restless even though Dar had sensibly switched from Mozart to Tin Pan Alley.

"He's sure taking his sweet time in there," Mrs. Verning said. "I better go find out what the problem is."

She started to get up, but I could see she was in pain. I went instead.

"Having a hard time choosing, Senator?" I said as I closed the kitchen door behind me. "Sometimes it's really difficult. I know when I have to judge ..."

My voice trailed off. I was talking to an empty kitchen.

The pasties were still there, in a neat line on the counter next to the stacked dishes. The pots of coffee and hot chocolate were on the stove. At one end of the center table sat a plate of partially eaten pasty, a fork, the senator's cigarettes and ashtray. Everything was just as we'd left it.

The senator, though, was nowhere to be seen.

His chair was pushed back from the table, and so, thinking he'd gone out to his car – forgotten matches could send a heavy smoker like Jimmy R into the worst of downpours – I started toward the back door. But, no,it was hooked shut.

I went around the center table. Senator Rowse lay between the table and the ice box.

He was dead. I knew that right away. And I also knew he'd died in agony. His knees were pressed to his chest, his face contorted with pain. He was covered in vomit.

At first, all I could do was stand over his crumpled body, unable to form a prayer for his soul, almost unable to form any thought at all.

Then Mrs. Verning came into the kitchen. "What's taking so long out here?"

Still shocked dumb, I waved a hand in the direction of the senator.

When she saw him, Mrs. Verning's mouth opened, closed, opened. "How are the mighty fallen," she said finally.

That broke the spell and I mumbled my prayer.

Composed now, Mrs. Verning said, "Lookit all that puke, will ya."

Brown vomit splattered the floor between table and ice box, then trailed along to the sink, which was also had some in it.

"Must be food poisoning took him," Mrs. Verning said.

My first thought was oh please, not food poisoning. Not with half Willow Township on the other side of the door. I didn't think anyone else had eaten or drunk anything yet. But if they had ... Thank God Mrs. Verning was a stouthearted farm woman who wouldn't panic.

To give myself some time to think, I went and put the hook on the door to the main room. Then I looked at the partially eaten pasty on the table and said, "I think he only had a few bites."

But Senator Rowse had vomited up what pasty he'd eaten. Some of the hot chocolate he'd drunk and a few undigested hunks of meat and crust and potato spilled down his white shirt and over his loosened tie. The rest of what he'd brought up was brown and blood-streaked.

One thing a Home Economics teacher knows about is household danger, about lye and rubbing alcohol and DDT. And certainly about food poisoning. So, unless the senator had been highly allergic to something, I was sure this couldn't be ordinary food poisoning or even botulism.

"They both take hours to kill," I said. "Or, sometimes, even to show up. And for certain to make someone as sick as this."

"That so?" Mrs. Verning said, glancing doubtfully from me to the senator to the pasty on the table. "Well, maybe he got it someplace else. Like at home. Madeleine Rowse ain't no great shakes as a cook."

"He said he hadn't eaten all day."

"So's he could give the contest his all, I s'pose," Mrs. Verning said and shook her head.

By then, I was thinking hard. Maybe the senator strangled on his own vomit. Or maybe he'd aspirated some foreign object. But that happened mostly to drunks and, as far as I could tell, Jimmy R had been stone sober.

"Could be a heart attack," Mrs. Verning said. "I heard it was on account of his heart he decided not to run again."

I'd heard so, too, but I didn't think that's what killed him. My father died of a heart attack and there'd been no vomiting. But this was like something else I'd seen – a long time ago, before Pop died, before we moved to town.

One of the hired men had killed himself, dying in such agony that Pop said, "If he'da just asked, I'da give him my shotgun."

Instead, the man drank arsenic.

His death taught me that arsenic may be tasteless and odorless but it causes the very worst kind of stomach pain. Nor is the pain made any better by the ceaseless vomiting that follows.

I went to the sink and yanked open the door to the cabinet beneath. There, lodged with the dish soap and the scrub brushes and the cleanser, was an open can of Atlas 60 weed-killer. It probably contained enough arsenic to kill everyone in the building. Twice over.

"We need to call the sheriff," I told Mrs. Verning.

"The sheriff?" she said. "He's pro'ly the other side of the county, joy-riding in his fancy new patrol car. What we need's an undertaker."

"The senator's been murdered."

Mrs. Verning shoved her hands into the big pockets of her apron. "You ain't a doctor," she said.

"No," I said. "But I know he's been poisoned."

After taking another look at the senator's body, Mrs. Verning shook her head and sighed. "McGuire's is pro'ly the closest phone. But you better go. My eyes ain't up to four miles in the rain and it getting dark, too."

I said we should both stay. "If anybody comes in and finds out the senator's dead, we'll have a panic on our hands. People'll be all over the ... the scene of the crime, destroying evidence and such."

"So what's us two gonna do? Set up Big Bertha in here, blow the curious away?"

"I'll take care of it," I said, then slipped through the door to tell the crowd that Senator Rowse was taking longer than planned. They shifted in the folding chairs, grumbling or laughing according to their natures.

To Dar, I whispered, "Get them singing. Hymns, The Old Gray Mare, Mairsy Doats. Anything, so long as they're amused."

To Dar's boyfriend, I said, "Come with me."

The young man turned out to be as sensible as I’d hoped. He barely blinked when I told him Senator Rowse was dead, nodded solemnly as I gave him directions to McGuire's. His driving might've been another matter, if the jack rabbit start he gave our Ford was any indication.

When I'd seen him down the lane, I turned from the kitchen window. "It's really coming down out – Oh my God, don't do that."

Mrs. Verning was clearing off the center table. She'd already pushed the senator's chair back to the table and now had his ashtray in her hand, ready to dump it in the garbage pail. I snatched it away and put it back on the table, next to his cigarettes and the plate of pasty.

"Just keeping busy," Mrs. Verning said in a defensive tone.

That's when it occurred to me that this stout farm woman might be as unhinged by the situation as I was.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It's just that a person doesn't often stumble across a murdered senator."

"You better be careful, calling this murder when you ain't got a scrap of cause."

Didn't I? There were any number of people who wouldn't mind seeing the senator dead. And some of them had just walked through this very kitchen.

Tally Arndt, for instance, might want to end her husband's difficulties with the state authorities. Norma Morse might be unhappy that no state road jobs had paid for the Morses' silence after all. And Maxine Kitto had an even better reason. The accident that killed her son happened at the Rowse lead mine.

Then there were the rumors about Jimmy R and Doris Penhallow – that she'd gone ahead and filed for divorce but when the star dust settled he was still married to Madeleine.

"I'll have the bastard's nuts," Doris told everyone in the Blue Goose and the Green Lantern and half a dozen other taverns spread over three counties.

And those were just the people I knew about. At the legislature in Madison, Jimmy R had probably made enemies from here in the Lead Region all the way up to the North Woods.

I suppose anybody else would have left it right there, for the sheriff to pursue. But my husband always said I was constitutionally incapable of passing up a puzzle. Not a jigsaw, not the crossword in the paper, not even an unnecessary double finesse at bridge. In other words, I couldn't help but try and figure out who killed Senator James R. Rowse.

And Mrs. Verning seemed just as engrossed. While I leaned against the counter thinking about people and their motives, she paced the kitchen from end to end and back again. Her old eyes seemed to study every detail. Sometimes she'd glance across the center table at Senator Rowse and nod her head.

Presently, she jabbed a finger toward the pasty on the table, the one he'd begun with. "Whose is that? It ain't got a number."

I looked at the pasties still on the counter. Number Seven was missing.

"That's Tally Arndt's number," Mrs. Verning said. "And it's the same number as on that flag over there by the corpse."

The little flag, which I hadn't noticed before, lay by the senator's elbow, in a puddle of brown vomit.

Mrs. Verning shook her head. "Always knew Tally held political grudges," she said. "But I never figured her for no killer."

Nor had I. I went back to the senator’s pasty. He’d only cut into one end, leaving the rest untouched. And something about the rest seemed wrong. Over the years I'd eaten enough of Tally Arndt's pasties to know that the crescent in its crust wasn't her work. The pasty's shape was wrong, too. With a clean spoon, I gently peeled back a bit of crust.

"Hey, there," Mrs. Verning said. "Who's destroying evidence now?"

"I don't think this is Tally's pasty. She's a steak-potatoes-onion woman. So Flag Seven can't go with this pasty. It's got rutabaga in it."

Mrs. Verning came for a look. "So it does.”

“And what's this stuff all over the top?" In my concern with the ingredients and the numbers, it hadn't registered that the pasty was sprinkled with something that looked like sugar. Now I dipped a finger in it and darn near took a taste before I realized what I was doing. The stuff might be weed-killer.

I rushed to the sink and washed my hands. "Maybe I better stop playing Nora Charles and just wait for the sheriff."

If he ever got there. Not all the roads were paved and in heavy rain even new patrol cars could get stuck. Leaning across the sink's high back and moving a cup off the window ledge behind it, I pressed my face against the window. It was so dark I could barely see to the outhouse, and raining harder than ever.

Out in the other room, Dar had done as I asked and kept the crowd well entertained. But now someone was knocking at the kitchen door.

In a firm voice, Mrs. Verning said, "Go on. He ain't finished."

The knocking stopped and she said, "I could use a cup of coffee. How 'bout you?"

She poured coffee from one of the big white pots on the stove.

I took a cup and went to inspect the line of pasties on the counter. About half were sprinkled with the same pale powder as on the pasty Senator Rowse had tasted.

"Poison, huh?" Mrs. Verning said when she joined me.

"Looks like it. And it looks like whoever killed the senator wanted to make sure they got the job done."

Or maybe not. Arsenic is lethal, no question of that. But the light dusting on these pasties just wouldn't do the trick. The same was true of the one Jimmy R had sampled.

That's when it occurred to me something very strange was going on. Jimmy had eaten a little of the pasty on the table, that was clear. But it hadn't killed him. Nor, I felt sure, had the weed-killer sprinkled on top of it.

The real poison must have come from some other source. Why, then, bother putting arsenic on top of this pasty? The obvious answer was so the blame would fall on Tally. Her pasty, her arsenic.

But maybe it didn't matter to the killer whose pasty Jimmy chose first. Maybe that was the reason for arsenic being sprinkled on the others, too. Its presence would make any owner seem guilty.

Again I looked at the line of pasties on the counter. Setting down my coffee, I touched each of their flags. They were in no particular order – number Six, then Three, One, Five, and so forth. But the crystals were only on those closest to where Jimmy had sat. In other words, on the ones he would have reached for first.

What could all this mean?

Bamboozled and restless, I went back to the window. It was so dark now I not only had to lean across the sink and press my nose against the pane, I also had to put my hands around my face to see outside. Of course, there was nothing to see. I gave the window a hard rap.

"What was that?" Mrs. Verning said. She sounded thoroughly alarmed.

"Just me," I told her. Then I told myself to calm down. And think.

I turned from the window, picked up my coffee cup, leaned back against the sink. To watch Mrs. Verning pace the kitchen – and to think.

What if the sprinkled arsenic was just a ruse to confuse matters? But even if it was, the killer must have known it would only work for a little while. So again, why bother?

And something else. The seven pasties still on the counter all had flags. So if the pasty that Jimmy tasted, the one with rutabaga in it, wasn't Tally's, the killer must have switched flags.

"Whatcha thinking?" Mrs. Verning asked.

“That the killer tried to muddy the ... uh ... crime scene by sprinkling around arsenic and, maybe, switching flags."

"I don't get it."

"Me neither. Especially the flags being switched."

"Let's have some more coffee," Mrs. Verning said. "Maybe it'll help you see things clearer."

She reached for my cup. But by then I was hanging onto it like it was something out of those silly magazines my husband read – a time machine that would transport me back to the scene in the kitchen just before Senator Rowse came in –

Tally puts her pasty on the counter, then fends off Doris's nasty comment. She goes into the hall's main room. Norma comes into the kitchen.

I'm at the center table, with Doris putting out the supper dishes while Maxine deals with the pots on the stove. Norma gets out the sugar and cocoa tins. Later, she sets an ashtray on the table next to the dishes Mrs. Verning has lain out for Senator Rowse. "Jimmy R'll need this," Norma says. "The man smokes like a chimney."

After that, I go to fetch him and, when he finishes his speech, he comes to the kitchen. We all sing.

No, only Mrs. Verning, Maxine, Doris, and I sing. Norma left the kitchen when I went to get the senator. Now she's across the room, sitting with her husband.

Mrs. Verning's voice returned me to the present. "More coffee?"

I glanced down at my cup. And did a double take. Whatever was in it didn't look like coffee. Hot chocolate, I thought. Or it had been. Now there was only some brown muck in the cup, along with a gob of white stuff that had separated out.

Arsenic, I was willing to bet. And more than willing to bet Senator Rowse had drunk enough to kill him.

I set the cup on the drain board and, pushing Mrs. Verning away from the stove, pulled the lid off the pot of hot chocolate.

It looked all right. When I poured a little into a saucer, that looked all right, too.

"What you up to?" Mrs. Verning said.

I pointed at the cup on the drain board. "I'm sure not going to sample it, but I'm positive there's arsenic in it."

"But I seen you drinking out of it."

I went and picked the cup up. "Not out of this one. I drank out of that one."

I waved at a cup sitting by the other dishes on the counter. The two cups looked alike. In fact, all the cups looked alike, heavy war surplus mugs marked U.S. Army Medical Department. But the one I meant was half full of coffee.

"This cup," I said, now meaning the one in my hand. "This is the one I picked up before. It was on the sill between the sink and the window."

Mrs. Verning's gaze went from one cup to the other and back again.

"This is the senator's hot chocolate," I said. "But I can't remember who gave it to him."

Then I did remember and in that moment the puzzle came together.

"You killed Jimmy R," I said.

Mrs. Verning laughed.

"Doris, then. Or Maxine."

She stopped laughing.

"All three of you had plenty of opportunity to spike that cup of chocolate when you were in the kitchen by yourselves."

"So did Norma Morse," she said. "Or, for that matter, yourself."

"But Norma didn't have any real reason to kill the senator. And I, even less. You, on the other hand – you and Doris and Maxine – had Joe Kitto."

Joe Kitto, Maxine's son – Mrs. Verning's all-but-grandson – had died in James Rowse's lead mine.

We stood staring at each other, until she said, "I s'pose that's what you'll tell the sheriff."

“I’ll sure say Maxine had a motive.”

Mrs. Verning glanced at the door to the room where Doris and Maxine sat. She looked back at me, then at the door again. Her lips twisted. "The son of a bitch let Joe stay down that mine shaft, choking to death on poison gas. Said Joe was all right. Said after the vent quit, the other men seen him run out a drift. Said nobody could get killed in a mine of his. Said just go on home and wait."

She fished a handkerchief out of an apron pocket and swiped away a tear.

"We waited and waited. But Joe never come home and Jimmy Rowse never sent nobody down the mine to find him. Not till it was too late, anyhow."

"So Maxine – or maybe it was Doris – decided to get even by poisoning Rowse. And where better than at the cooking contest."

"Maxine didn’t do nothing. Doris neither. Anyhow, it was Norma Morse that convinced the senator to judge the contest.”

“Well, someone brought arsenic in here,” I said. “Or maybe it was already here – in that open can of weed-killer under the sink."

Again, I summoned my mental picture of the scene in the kitchen.

“When you got out the things to scrub the sink, you could have slipped the can into one of those big apron pockets. Then, while everybody was busy with her own chores, you set a place for the senator at the table. Knife, fork, spoon, and a nice cup of hot chocolate laced with weed-killer."

Mrs. Verning took off her glasses and polished them with the handkerchief.

"But afterward you wondered where his cup went, didn't you? That's why you kept pacing the kitchen, looking everywhere. Well, he must've carried it over to the sink, maybe when he went to throw up. Anyway, he set it down on the window ledge, where it happened to be out of sight. Then I moved it off the ledge without even looking at it and later mistook it for my cup of coffee."

Mrs. Verning put on her glasses and stuffed the handkerchief into an apron pocket.

“What I don't understand is why you tried to pin the murder on Tally Arndt."

I glanced at the pasty Senator Rowse had sampled. At the yellowish pieces of rutabaga in it.

"That’s it!” I said. “Tally Arndt doesn't put rutabaga in her pasty but Doris sure does."

Mrs. Verning shoved both hands deep into her apron pockets.

“I think that when you came back into the kitchen just after I found the senator's body, you saw that he'd picked number Six – Doris's pasty – to begin on. A tough few minutes, even though I didn’t even notice the number on the flag. Then I went to talk to Dar Roberts and you could switch Doris's number for a different one."

Mrs. Verning’s face gave nothing away.

"Probably at that same time you sprinkled weed-killer on the other pasties. A clever enough red herring, I guess. But your arthritis slowed you down. You didn't have time to sprinkle the arsenic around and get the weed-killer back under the sink and exchange the two flags. You only had time to pull flag Seven, go to the counter, switch Six for Seven. Then I was at the door and you were still holding flag Six. So you tossed it next to the body."

Mrs. Verning dug her hands deeper into her apron pockets.

"But I don’t think you were in this alone," I said. "Maxine was the one I saw with the pot of hot chocolate in her hand. And Doris--"

It was the wrong thing to say. Mrs. Verning's hands shot out of the apron. With one hand she grabbed my belt and yanked me close. With the other she put a boning knife to my throat.

"Doris always claimed you was too smart for your own good," she said. "Guess she was right."

The thin blade had drawn blood. When I felt it ooze down my neck, I decided I didn't care if she was an old lady or not. I smashed a fist down on her wrist. The knife flew out of her hand.

After that, I should’ve dealt with her pretty quickly. She was twice my age and I'd been a darn good athlete. Unfortunately, I forgot the obvious – I was no longer jump-center on my class basketball team at Milwaukee-Downer College but Ellie Verning still plowed her garden.

Next thing I knew, she had me on the floor, on my belly with one arm pinned behind my back. Then she was astride me working the arm off its shoulder. I howled like an animal.

I also fought like one. She might've been stronger but I was heavier. Besides that, she was arthritic. I reached back with my free hand, grabbed her by the hair, and bucked and yanked and screamed until she fell off. Then I rolled on top of her and gave her a hard elbow to the solar plexus. Her breath rushed out. She let go my arm.

When the sheriff finally showed up, I had her hog-tied with my belt and two dish towels.

* * *

The following spring, Ellie Verning – and Ellie Verning alone – was tried and convicted of killing Senator James R. Rowse. Three years later, she died. Not, however, in the State Penitentiary for Women at Taycheedah. At seventy-one she was too old for prison.

Or so the governor said when he granted her clemency. Strange as it seems, politicians back then were even dumber than they are now.