Punch, Pastries, and Poison by Harper Lin (ebook reader for pc and android .txt) 📕

curled up quietly between us, seemingly understanding that neither of one of us felt well enough to walk or play with him as usual. The poor little guy would have to make do with us occasionally shuffling to the back door to let him run outside for a minute.

In the easy chair off to the side of the couch, Detective Mike Stanton sat hunched over with a cup of coffee cradled in his hands. He seemed to be holding it and staring at it more than drinking it, an indication, I suspected, that he didn’t actually feel much better than either of us did, even though he was up and dressed and out of his house.

He stared at the coffee cup for a few more seconds then put it down on the end table next to him and slowly drew a notebook and pen out of the pocket of his navy cargo pants. The detective flipped his notebook open and turned his bleary eyes toward me. “Any idea what happened, Fran?”

I started to shake my head but stopped as pain shot through my skull and the nausea kicked up again. I could hardly move without feeling like I was going to be sick again, although my stomach had long since rid itself of all its contents. “No,” I forced out.

“Not even a guess?” Even sick, Mike was a dogged investigator.

“Not really.” I tried to move my lips and nothing else. “I figure it must be food poisoning. I’ve been trying to think of whether I accidentally left something out too long or didn’t cool it fast enough, but I don’t think I did. I can’t imagine what happened unless maybe something came in contaminated.”

Mike nodded and scribbled something down on his notepad. “Where do you get your supplies?”

“Coffee I get from a distributor, mostly, but there are a couple of farms I order from direct—”

“The stuff you made last night.”

“Milk, butter, and eggs come from local farms. The Italian sausage came from a local farm. Flour and that kind of thing comes from a distributor. I got some stuff at the grocery store.” I was exhausted from just that little bit of talking.

Mike bobbed his head in what I took for a nod. “I’ll need a list of everyone you bought things from for last night.”

Did that mean he thought something had been contaminated before it got to me? And was that a matter for the police? As much of a relief as it would be to find out that it wasn’t my fault, it didn’t make up for all those people getting so sick by a long shot.

The detective leaned back in his chair, cringing as he did. He took a couple of breaths with his eyes squeezed closed. He opened them again, blinked a few times and tried to focus on my face. “They ran tests at the hospital on the people who were brought in.”

“Was it salmonella?” That was the first type of food poisoning that came to mind. And with the number of eggs I’d used, it would make sense if they were contaminated before I got them.

Mike inclined his head slightly.

“E. coli?”

His eye twitched like he would have raised his eyebrow if his head didn’t hurt so much.

“Trichinosis?”

“Did you clean everything up before you left last night?”

“No.” If I’d been feeling better, I would have been ashamed of myself for leaving the café a mess and all that food out to spoil. Of course, if the food had made everyone sick, there was no use saving it anyway, but it was still embarrassing to have left the café such a mess when anyone could walk by, look in the windows, and see what a disaster everything was. I was almost too sick to care about that, though. Almost.

“Sammy clean it up this morning?”

“No,” I croaked. “She’s sick too. And Rhonda. The girls are too young. And Ephy—” I stopped. I’d called Sammy and Rhonda earlier that morning to see how they were feeling, but they both felt like death warmed over. With all three of us sick, there was no point in opening the café, so I’d called the girls and then Ephy to let them know we would be closed. The girls had been feeling fine, but they were both picky eaters and left early besides, so it didn’t strike me as particularly strange. But Ephy felt fine, too, and even sounded almost perky. Perky for Ephy anyway. When I’d expressed my surprise, she’d volunteered that she must not have eaten whatever made everyone sick. But that wasn’t really any different than the girls not being sick, was it? “Ephy’s too new to be there by herself. We’re closed until we all get back on our feet.”

Mike grunted and wrote something down on his notepad. He stared down at it for a moment before turning back to me. He spent a long time looking at me, so long that I started to feel uncomfortable and shifted a little on the couch. “It wasn’t food poisoning.”

I stared back at him, trying to process what could have made all of us so sick if it wasn’t food poisoning.

“They were poisoned.”

If my abdomen hadn’t already ached from spending all night huddled over a toilet, I would have felt like someone punched me in the gut. “Poisoned? With real, actual poison? What? Why? Who would do something like that?”

This time, he did raise an eyebrow while looking me dead in the eye.

I waited for him to explain until my nausea seemed to fade away as realization slowly dawned for me. “You—you can’t—you don’t—Mike, you know me—” I searched his face for some sign that he wasn’t serious. It was cruel to joke about something like that, and I’d never known Mike to be cruel, but maybe the sickness was messing with his sense of decency.

He looked at me with expressionless eyes. “Fran, I’m going to need your permission to search your house and the café.”

Tears sprang to my