Another beautiful Thanksgiving evening. The family was all together, sitting around the dining table, while the delicious scent of food wafted in from the kitchen. Hunger had been clawing at my stomach for hours, and the tempting smell of turkey was making the pangs of starvation more and more frequent. Maria and Joe, my aunt and uncle, kept assuring us that the food would be ready soon, but “10 minutes!” had turned into “Don’t complain, the food will be ready when it’s ready.”
Would it ever be? Emma and Nina’s shrieks and cries had been an endless nuisance. My young cousins had been pushing each other around the house, arguing over some imaginary friend that betrayed Nina by befriending Emma. Trying to win the fight, they were shoving each other into tables and walls, occasionally knocking each other to the ground. Twice in the last hour, Nina has thrown Emma into my chair, making me startle.
“Emma!” my cousin Emilio shouted. “Did you push Nina into a chair again? You can’t do that in here. You’re annoying Bill.” He gave me a knowing wink. “Go play outside.”
Accepting defeat, the kids pulled on each others’ hair as they walked toward the front door.
Thank you, I silently mouthed to Emilio. He responded with a thumbs up and a grin.
“What is she doing here?” Grandma Laura’s harsh whisper caught me off guard, and I spun around to face her. She was sitting in the seat to my right, but she had moved her chair closer to mine so she could talk at a lower volume.
“Who are you talking about, Grandma?” I asked her, playing dumb.
“Oh, you know. Her.” She tried to discreetly point to my cousin Greg’s boss, Amelia, who was in conversation with my cousin Wren. Her back was to us, so she thankfully couldn’t see Grandma’s not-so-sly pointing.
“Greg invited her. He told me that she seemed kind of sad and lonely at work this morning, so he asked her to come to dinner with us,” I answered. “Is it going to be a problem?”
“Oh, no. No problem at all.” she responded, shaking her head. “Don’t worry about me.” She smiled.
“Oh, Mom.” My father sat on the other side of the table, but leaned across it to speak to us. “She seems perfectly fine. Get over it.”
“No, I can’t get over it. She wronged us, Bobby!” She whisper-shouted the last sentence a bit too loud. Wren snuck a quick glance over Amelia’s shoulder and gave us a look of warning.
“Mom!” my mother hissed.
“Don’t start. You know what she did to us. She—”
“Dinner is ready!” Uncle Joe shouts from the kitchen.
A sudden cacophony of cheers and “It’s about time!” filled the dining room, accompanied by the screech of chairs sliding along the wood floors. The kids raced to the kitchen door, pulling each other back in an attempt to be the first in line. Nina and Emma must have heard the commotion from outside, since they darted back into the house and through the dining room, driving everyone out of the way. Emma won, of course. Being the first in line, she had full access to all of the food, and she really liked to eat.. We all stood behind her in line, anxiously hoping that there would be enough for the rest of us.
The rest of the family formed a line, stretching all the way from one side of the dining room to the other. Aunt Maria moved down the line, handing a ceramic plate to each person that she passed.
After several minutes, the line finally shrunk enough for me to make it to the kitchen.
There wasn’t a single square inch of available counter space. Pans of food completely covered every surface. That’s what happens when you have 18 mouths to feed on Thanksgiving. Plus Amelia, so 19.
Amelia was in line directly ahead of me. As she filled up her plate, I noticed that she didn’t take any of Uncle Joe’s cranberry sauce, his specialty. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice, or else he would certainly be offended.
I piled every type of dish onto my plate. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and the like. I sat back down at the table and waited for everyone else to sit. When the entire family surrounded the table with their heaping plates of food, my mother spoke. “Now, let’s all say what we are grateful for this year. Bill, you start.”
“Sure.” I looked around the table at all of my relatives. “I’m grateful for—”
“Oh my gosh, let’s just eat already,” Tina, Nina’s twin sister, interrupted. The whole family burst out in laughter.
“Okay, okay. But let’s just make a toast first,” my father compromised. Everyone raised their glasses. “To family.”
“To family!” we all echoed. I took a shallow sip of my water and began to eat. Finally.
A half-dozen conversations broke out at once. Grandma somehow looped me into her chat with Wren about taxes.
“Well, they keep getting higher and higher. Soon, I bet that—”
A sudden choking sound cut through the noise. Everyone quieted and looked around at each other. I snapped my head to my right. “Grandma, are you okay?” I asked, concerned.
“That wasn’t me. I don’t even know what that sound was.”
The noise came again. My gaze darted around, searching for the source.
“What is that?” I urged, worried. A strangled sob sounded to my left.
Oh my. Sitting at the end of the table, Amelia’s face was…unnaturally swollen. It looked like she had been stung by a dozen bees. It was nightmarish. She made the same sound once more, a horrifying, suffocating sound, before her head dropped onto her plate.
Potatoes splashed onto the table as her face hit the dish.
Nobody moved. I didn’t breathe. What on Earth?…
“Oh my goodness. Is she…?” my mother panicked, beginning to hyperventilate.
“No, she can’t be,” my aunt Barb decided as most of the family scrambled from their chairs. I followed suit. “How could she be? I’m sure she’s just sleepy.” She started to poke at Amelia’s arm. “Wake up, sleepy woman. Wake up.”
“Stop!” Aunt Maria screamed. “Don’t touch a dead woman!”
The family broke out into frantic shrieks and whispers, asking each other if she was really dead. My mother tried to lead the three kids out of the room, but they resisted, morbidly intrigued by the death. “I wanna see!” Emma whined.
This can’t be real.
Uncle Joe carefully stepped over to her, reaching out two fingers to her neck to read her pulse. Then his shaky voice boomed through the suddenly too-small space.
“She’s dead.”
Oh my gosh. There’s no way.
My family’s shrieks and whispers became screams and accusations while I just stood in the middle of the room, frozen.
“Well, it must be Grandma!” Wren pointed to her. “She hates Amelia! Likely poisoned her food!”
“Laura?” Uncle Joe scoffed. “She’s an old lady. She can’t kill someone!”
“Well, it’s you then, Joe! You and Maria!” Emilio accused, “You made the darn food!”
Allegations flew across the space, screeching in my ears. I tried to slink away from the hotspot of anger in the center of the room.
“Going somewhere, Bill?”
Greg’s voice boomed over the screaming match. Some people kept shouting, but most had quieted so they could hear Greg. “It’s probably him. He’s trying to escape, after all.”
My parents gasped. My aunts and uncles still barked their accusations at each other. It was getting to be too much.
“I can’t focus on anything when you’re all being so darn loud!” I wheezed. Then everything was quiet for a moment. Then another. Two silent moments hung in the air. “We’re not gonna get anywhere with this. We have to think. We have to dissect the situation.”
“And what? You’re some kind of detective now, Mr. ‘Small Business Owner?’” Aunt Maria punctuated the last words with air quotes.
I ignored that. “Did any of you see what food she ate? Emilio, you sat across from her. What had she eaten?”
“I don’t think I saw her eat anything. We all took a swig from our drinks for the toast, but me and her started talking, and we were joking about how Greg keeps asking for a raise, and I don’t think that either of us had taken a bite before—” he broke off. “Y’know.”
“Thank you, Emilio. Who served the drinks?” I looked around.
“I did,” Nina spoke proudly, puffing her chest.
“What did you give her?” I could see the dark-red liquid in her glass, but I just wanted to confirm.
“Wine, I think. All the grown-ups got wine.”
“Could you please go into the kitchen and get the wine bottle that you poured it from?” I requested. She huffed but complied.
When she came back with the corkless bottle, I lifted it to take a sniff. “Smells fine. Like any wine would. Who else drank the wine?”
All of the adults in the room raised their hands. They were all fine, so why wasn’t Amelia?
“Wait a second,” Grandma Laura interrupted. “Are you suggesting that one of us actually killed her? I mean, I know we were talking about it just now, but I didn’t think that we were all truly being serious.” Her voice became small. “Were we being serious?”
Aunt Maria gently grabbed her arm and started to lead her away. “Let’s go lie down, Laura.” They walked out of the dining room and toward the stairs.
“Wren,” I searched the crowd for my cousin. “You were talking to her earlier. You were sitting near her, too. Did you notice any strange behavior?”
“No,” she answered. “Not before the toast or after. Not until she made that horrible sound. I didn’t even think that it was coming from her at first. I thought the fan broke or something,” she admitted with a shudder.
I shuddered too. “We have to inspect the body.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Greg heaved in the corner of the room.
“You do it, Bill. None of us want to. Except Barb, maybe, but she’s insane,” said my mother.
I nodded. I can do this. I can do this. I took a few steps toward Amelia, then felt my stomach flip. Maybe not. I started to turn around, but my father turned me back. “You have to,” he whispered to me.
Great. I stood over Amelia and picked up her head from her plate, inspecting her face. “Her lips and throat look swollen. Her entire face is puffy too.” I opened her mouth. “Tongue swelling as well. Given the sounds that she made, there are three possibilities: choking, poison, and allergies. This sort of swelling is uncharacteristic of choking, and she didn’t eat any food, so that option is off the table. Poison wouldn’t have caused this reaction from her, either.” I paused. “So, there’s only one left. It must have been allergies.”
“Allergies?” my mother gasped. “You think she was allergic to grapes?”
“Maybe, but grape allergies are rare. At her age, she would have been very aware of her intolerance, and refused the wine. She wouldn’t have drank it if she had that allergy.”
“Yeah, I saw her drinking on the job sometimes. Always red wine,” Greg supplied, looking lost in thought before suddenly snapping back to life. “Yeah…it couldn’t have been an allergy! You’re wrong, Bill! So much for your Sherlock Holmes bit.”
No, I’m not wrong. “There’s no other possibility.” But what would she have been allergic to in this wine that wasn’t present in other wines? I picked up the wine bottle again and read the ingredients list. It looked just like it would for any other bottle.
Some of my cousins began to question what I was doing, but I disregarded their concerns when I noticed her wine glass. Its color was slightly lighter than the wine in other people’s glasses. It didn’t have as much of a purple hue. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I don’t think I would have noticed the difference.
I picked up her glass and lifted it to my nose, despite protests from my family. I took a sniff. It smelled like—oh my goodness.
It was cranberry juice. Not wine.
And she hadn’t taken any cranberry sauce.
She had died of anaphylaxis.
She was allergic to cranberries, and somebody in this room knew that.
Illustrated by Jasmine Ye
The Roar 