Dead End in Norvelt (25 page)

At dinner that night Mom looked at Dad and me as if she were being washed out to sea. “I have a terrible confession to share,” she said, and lowered her fork. Her lips quivered and then she cried out, “I think I may have killed those old ladies!”

“What!” I shouted, and the food spit out of my mouth.

“You
should
spit it out,” Mom agreed, “because that’s how I think they died—from eating my food. You know how thrifty I am. Well, in the evening I’ve been picking mushrooms up by the trash dump and I think I’ve been making a mistake between the
Amanitopsis
and the
Amanita virosa
, which is called the Destroying Angel mushroom because it is deadly to eat. One tastes heavenly and the other will send you to heaven. So depending on what I picked, I may have been adding those killer mushrooms to all the casseroles I made for the old folks.”

“Should we tell someone?” I asked, and patted her hand.

“Maybe Miss Volker,” Mom guessed. “She’s the nurse.”

“Then she’d have to report you to the police!” I announced dramatically.

“And they’d put me in jail for murder,” Mom cried, and the tears ran down her pale cheeks. “And I’d never see you grow up,” she said to me, sobbing. “And I’d even miss your bloody nose, which, by the way, is bleeding all over you again.”

I grabbed my napkin and held it beneath my nose.

Then Mom turned toward Dad. He was eyeballing us as if we were insane. “I’ll never grow old with you, honey,” she whimpered, and reached out for his face.

Dad slowly shook his head back and forth. “Before you two hopeless cases go off the deep end,” he said bluntly, “may I ask a question: Have you been putting these poison mushrooms in
our
food?”

“Yes,” she blurted out. “Oh my! I’ve been killing you too.”

“Well, I have a news flash for you—we aren’t dead,” I said, “so that shoots down your poisoning theory.”

“Point well taken,” Dad pitched in. “If we eat what they eat, it figures that we’d be dead too.”

“You think so?” Mom asked, and a note of relief buoyed her voice.

“I think you need to settle down for now,” Dad advised. “But don’t tell a soul. This is how awful rumors start. If you tell one person about the mushrooms they will tell others and the others will tell even more, and before long an angry mob will surround our house and burn it to the ground.”

“Good Norvelt people wouldn’t do that,” Mom replied. “People trust each other around here.”

“Good Norvelt people wouldn’t be suggesting that the old ladies are being knocked off like this is some kind of cheap murder mystery,” Dad said. “We have to face facts that times are changing around here, and I’m planning on changing with the times.”

“Times might be changing,” Mom echoed. “But my values won’t.”

“I’m not asking you to change who you are,” Dad said. “Just where you are. We could sell our house to Mr. Huffer and he’d pay me to move it to Eleanor, and we could keep right on going and leave this town to die behind our backs instead of in front of our eyes.”

“Let me think about all of this moving business,” Mom said reluctantly. “But for now let’s just keep this murder talk in the family. We can trust each other, but something is wrong and I’m not sure why.”

*   *   *

When I went to bed I began to think that Mom was right about something being wrong in Norvelt. In a lot of the history books I read, I learned about dates and people and events, but I wasn’t always sure
why
people did what they did.
Why
wouldn’t the English king and church not share all their land with their own starving countrymen? And
why
did the conquistadors think it was okay with God to kill the Incas and steal their gold? And
why
would the rich coal mine owners work the miners so hard they died young with their lungs hardened up with coal dust? How could history be filled with so much horror and so few reasons
why
?

And now all those old ladies had died. But
why
? If they were poisoned, it had to be the 1080. Miss Volker had killed all those rodents with it and I had buried their bodies by the dump. Spizz used it in traps he set at the dump for the rats that bred in the old mine shafts and came out to swarm the town. Plus I had seen Mr. Huffer’s name on the list of people who had bought 1080, and he threw funeral parlor gunk and dead rodents into his trash cans, which were emptied at the dump. And even my name was on the 1080 list. If the police asked me what I did with the poison I bought, I would tell them I gave it to Spizz.

But what if Spizz denied it because he didn’t like me anyway? Then I would be the suspicious one—the prime suspect. Everyone else had a reason why they used poison, but I didn’t have a reason for what I did with it. I didn’t even have the tin of 1080 I bought, which would look to the police like I had tried to hide the evidence. All night I kept thinking it through, and still I didn’t have an answer to why all the old ladies were dying.

But somewhere inside me I must have known I was onto something ghastly, because when I woke up in the morning my pillow looked like a big loaf of bread pudding soaked through with blood.

26

On Sunday
after church I made an appointment with Miss Volker to fix the leaky side of my nose. I told Mom I had to go down to her house and help with her laundry, which was sort of true because she had trouble getting the washing machine started and she definitely couldn’t pin her clothes onto the outside lines to dry.

When I arrived at her house I quickly went into the basement to get a load of sheets going. When I turned on the light I saw that Miss Volker had put out more chocolates sprinkled with 1080. There were a few dead mice scattered around, which only reminded me of the dead old ladies. I tried not to look at their tortured little bodies as I filled the washing machine, added the soap, and got it started.

I dashed up the stairs as quickly as I could and went into the kitchen.

“Would you like some cookies before your operation?” she cheerfully asked, and nodded toward where she had a package of them spread out across the kitchen counter. They were the same cookies she packaged up for the old ladies.

“No—no thanks,” I said hesitantly. Mushrooms, casseroles, chocolates, and cookies were suddenly off my food list.

“It’s always good to have a little something in your stomach before an operation,” she suggested. “How about just one little cookie to help settle you down?”

“I’m just eager to get this over with,” I replied. I went to her linen closet and got a sheet for the kitchen table. Then I gathered up her special tools.

She got her bucket of paraffin heated and dunked her hands into the hot wax while I numbed my nose with the anesthetic. Once she got her fingers moving she peeled off the wax, then grabbed the cauterizing instrument and held the sharp tip of it under the flame until it turned a painful shade of bright red.

“Now,” she said, pivoting quickly from the stove and staring as she pointed the menacing wire toward my nose, “let’s get this done once and for all.”

“Are you sure?” I asked in a small voice.

“You know I don’t like to be questioned,” she said sternly.

“Okay. Do it—but don’t make it painful,” I begged and gritted my teeth. She looked like she had just one purpose on her mind as she aimed for the dark cave of my left nostril. Maybe she knew I thought she could have poisoned those ladies, and now she had me pinned to the table and she was planning to jab that sizzling hot blade and wire right up into the caramel center of my brain. I’d be dead in an instant and all she would have to say is that I sneezed and jerked my head forward and impaled my own self on the wire.

I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. She peeked up my nose and then, as steadily as she could, she inserted the tiny blade. I felt the fierce heat inside my nostril and knew that one false move, one little hiccup …

And then the telephone rang.

“Don’t bat an eyelash,” she whispered, and carefully lifted my hand to the wood handle of wire and blade. “Just … hold … it … right … there. I’ll be quick.”

“But…”

“Hush!” she snapped, and turned toward the telephone. “Or your hand will move and you’ll deform yourself.”

She had enough flexibility in her hot fingers to pick up the receiver. “Miss Volker here,” she announced. “Make it snappy. I’m in the middle of a nose job.”

Someone said something to her.

“Okay,” she said hastily. “I’ll be right there. No problem. My driver is with me now.”

Just then I had to sneeze. “My nose!” I wailed. “Hurry.”

“Don’t jerk your hand!” she hollered from the phone.

But it was too late. I sneezed and scraped the blade and wire against the inside of my nose as I yanked it out.

“Bless you,” she said.

“I think I sliced half my nose off,” I cried. “I’ll be a freak on one side of my face and have to walk around in profile like an Egyptian drawing for the rest of my life.”

“Relax,” she said, standing over me. “It’s just a small burn blister at the tip of your nose.” Then with her other hand she shined a flashlight up the nostril. “Hey, not bad,” she concluded. “Not bad at all. Looks like that sneeze helped you cauterize the rest of the capillaries. You might make a good doctor someday.”

I sat up. I still couldn’t feel my face. “You didn’t stick a pin in my nose this time, did you?” I asked.

“No,” she said impatiently. “Now let’s get going. I just found out Mrs. Droogie will no longer be sharing air with us on this planet.”

We left the house so quickly she didn’t see the box of chocolates and note sitting outside by the porch door. It wasn’t there when I arrived this morning, so Mr. Spizz must have sneaked over when I was on the operating table.

*   *   *

As usual, I drove and she talked. “Well, this is a day I’ve been waiting for a long time,” Miss Volker said, and sighed as if a great weight was off her chest. “Now it will all come down to me and
him
! We are the last two Norvelters standing.”

“Are you going to have a shoot-out at high noon?” I asked.

“That’s not how I operate,” she replied. “He’ll never see me coming!”

But Mr. Spizz did see us coming. When we pulled into Mrs. Droogie’s driveway he was sitting on his tricycle with a superior smirk on his face, as if he had just won a super tricycle road race. Behind him were two county troopers standing in front of the doorway and they had their thumbs hooked into their pants pockets. With their puffed-out chests and thick necks they looked like owls rotating their carved faces back and forth. Off to one side Mr. Huffer stood next to a twiggy, water-starved azalea and posed like his usual wilted teapot self.

When Miss Volker stepped out of the car they all stared at her, but she was accustomed to being the center of attention.

“Gentlemen,” she announced to the troopers, “this is my jurisdiction and I’ll take charge of the examination.” They nodded and quietly the five of them filed into the house. I lagged behind and stood in the doorway. Mr. Huffer had Mrs. Droogie laid out on the couch in the living room, where she had died while watching TV after dinner. As soon as I caught sight of the body I hopped back and gazed off to one side, but I could still hear.

Mr. Huffer pulled the sheet back from Mrs. Droogie’s heavy body. “No unusual marks on her face,” Miss Volker announced, “other than the bruise from where she fell from the couch to the floor. Her belly’s not swollen. Her legs are contorted but that is just the rigor mortis having set in.” I knew Miss Volker’s hands must have cooled down and would be seizing up, but she just took a deep breath and proved to the police that she could complete a thorough job.

Miss Volker went over Mrs. Droogie from top to bottom. I heard Mr. Huffer pull the sheet back up over her, so I stuck my head around the corner. Miss Volker stood fully erect and looked at Mr. Huffer and the unblinking troopers and Mr. Spizz. “It is death from natural causes,” she said with confidence. “All very routine. Looks to me like it was a stroke, given the burst capillaries in her eyes. Her gums are badly infected too, and often that infection spreads to the heart so it is possible she had a heart attack. She had high blood pressure, minor diabetes issues, and if you look at her foot you will see that one shoe is partially cut open across the side because she had gout in her foot, and the only way she could get her shoe on was to split the side to accommodate the swelling. Gentlemen,” she said, summing up her case, “what you see before you is the result of eighty-three years of growing old.”

It was a top-notch examination. She showed off all her skills and perceptions and I was very proud of her. It went well until she turned to Mr. Huffer and asked, “Cremation as usual?”

That was when the two troopers stepped forward and one of them said, “We have an order to take charge of the body and send it to the lab for a full autopsy. After that we’ll release it back to Mr. Huffer.”

“Suit yourself,” Miss Volker said, “but you are wasting your time and taxpayers’ money.” Then she turned on one heel and marched out the front door with me right behind. She was quiet in the car except to point out, “The dear lady died on a day with some great history. August 12 is the day on which we remember the death of Antony and Cleopatra two thousand years ago.”

“I know she was the last Egyptian pharaoh and died from a snake bite,” I said. “Poisoned by asps. But how’d her boyfriend go?”

“Self-inflicted wound,” she recalled without sympathy. “He and another Roman general, Octavian, were fighting over who would rule the Roman Empire. Once Octavian had conquered Antony and Cleopatra’s army, someone told Antony that Cleopatra had been killed during the battle. In grief Antony fell on his sword but did a crummy job of killing himself, so he was very slow about dying. However, Cleopatra wasn’t dead. She was hiding in a little fortress palace, and when she heard about Antony she had him brought to her. He moaned and groaned and whined and cried, and after he finally died she allowed the asps to bite her on the breast with their deadly poison.”