Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [36]
Harold Peabody put an arm on the woman and pulled her back, saying, “Marie, let the deputy do her job.”
Claire knelt down by the big man and started to arrange him in the recovery position. He was already prone, so she turned his head to the side, making sure he was breathing; then she put an arm up on that side to give him some support and pulled up the leg on that side too. She had learned in her latest Red Cross class that this was the safest position for victims who were unconscious but breathing—as long as they hadn’t been seriously injured.
Rich came to get her. “Another person, a little girl, is throwing up.”
Claire turned to him, horrified.
He guessed her thoughts. “Meg is fine. She’s still at the swings.”
“Watch her,” Claire begged him, then turned back to Harold and Andy’s wife. “Can you take care of him? I need to check on someone else. Watch him. Make sure he’s breathing. Try to keep him from vomiting until we know what it is. The ambulance should be here in moments.”
Claire went to minister to the girl, an eight-year-old blonde named Shawna whose mother told Claire that she had taken only a sip of the lemonade. The young girl was lying with her head in her mother’s lap.
“Shawna,” Claire said, bending over the child. “What happened when you drank the lemonade?”
“It made my throat feel dusty.” The young girl clawed at her tongue, trying to get the drink out of her mouth. “It tasted like grass.”
Claire worried that such a small child would suffer much worse effects. But she was relieved that Shawna seemed more alert than Andy.
By the time the ambulance arrived, four people were sick with whatever had been in the lemonade. The emergency technicians took over and examined the casualties before loading Andy into the first ambulance.
Claire stepped back from them all for a moment and looked around for her daughter. She saw that Rich was standing at the swings, pushing Meg into the sky. She wanted them to go home and lock the door. She wanted her daughter out of here, away from this danger.
She took a deep breath and headed toward the lemonade stand to find out what had happened there. As she approached it, a large bang went off and she jumped. Then glowing lights filled the sky. The fireworks blazed from the far shore of the lake, seemingly arising from another, more peaceful country—a country where it was still a holiday.
When the man came charging up, yelling at them to stop selling the lemonade, Dot decided to shut down completely. It could kill her business if someone got sick from something she served. She was racking her brain, trying to imagine anything she’d done wrong, but she knew she had meticulously followed the state’s thorough guidelines. She hoped that it wasn’t botulism or E. coli.
She thought of taking a sip of the lemonade herself to test it, but then she saw a man stretched out on the grass, throwing up. She didn’t need that.
Remembering something, she checked the lid on the big silver cylinder that contained the latest batch of lemonade. She had seen something there when she had moved the new lemonade dispenser into the trailer to start selling it, but had been too busy to stop and see what it was. Sales had been brisk. It was a nice hot evening and everyone had eaten too much and needed something to drink to wash it all down.
She had been hoping to make enough money from this event to make the last payment on her trailer. When Guy had left her last year, telling her he couldn’t sleep with a woman (actually he had said cow) when she weighed more than he did, he had left her with all their bills to pay. Since he had left, she had tried to lose weight, hoping he might show up again, but the harder she tried, the more weight she gained. It didn’t help to be working with food.
Just as she had remembered, there was a small white plastic joint under the handle on the lid. She didn’t touch the lid or the cylinder. She had watched enough