Yvette Campbell quickly pushed the cart up and down the aisles at the grocery store trying to get everything on the list without thinking too much about what still needed to get done.
“Saturday is just not long enough,” she shouted over her shoulder to her husband, Bob as she ran out of the door. There was a Bunko game later and she was determined to get enough of her chores done so that she could relax tonight. Maybe even drink a glass of wine.
“Ah, boxed wine,” she said, smiling, as she reached into the glass cooler and pulled out a box of white chardonnay and a box of rose. There was a general agreement among the group to never bring anything in a deep red color that could leave a more obvious stain. Everyone at Bunko was firmly in the middle class and knew that each possession could not be easily restored. A stain would have to be endured until there was room in the budget for a replacement.
“Coffee, coffee,” mumbled Yvette, looking up at the markers at the top of each aisle. Two aisles down. She started to push the heavy cart.
There were three kinds of grocery stores in town. High end, discount and bulk and Yvette shopped at all three, never completely memorizing the layout of any of them.
She found the coffee at the far end of the aisle and pulled the cart as far over to the side as she could manage, trying to stay out of the way of other shoppers as she stared at the different brands of coffee. She was doing a social calculation in her head, trying to figure out just how expensive the coffee needed to be for her friends at Bunko divided by how much she had to spend this month. Her hand reached out for the Folgers. It was on sale and was fancy enough for the girls.
“Score,” said Yvette. “Now, maybe I can get a little somethin’-somethin’ for myself.”
She grabbed a small paper bag from the shelf and measured out half a bag of coffee beans from one of the more expensive gourmet bins. The one marked chocolate raspberry. The aroma wafted into the air as she breathed in deeply and her shoulders relaxed. She poured the contents into the grinder on the left with a hand-made sign taped on the front that said, ‘Flavored Coffee only’. The beans rattled down into the bottom as she turned the dial on the front till it pointed at the word, drip and she hit the on button.
“Click, click, click”
The dark coffee beans made contact with the sharp, rotating metal teeth in the grinder, picking up small chards from all of the people who had ground coffee that day. Mixed in were also the smallest bits of residue left by a shopper just as the store had opened that morning. A few small drops of polonium 210, popular among some of the deadlier arms of the Management, had been placed inside of the grinder. It was all it would take to end the life of everyone who had a cup of the fancier coffee choices. It was also the kind of poison a local coroner wouldn’t detect unless they knew to look for it.
Later that night the grinder would be flushed out with hot water as it was every night and along with it the evidence would wash away as well. The teenage boys who were charged with cleaning the store would be wearing rubber gloves and inadvertently saving their own lives. Just a small, diluted drop on the skin was enough to stop a heartbeat.
But until then, sixteen random shoppers would stop to fill the little bags with different varieties of coffee before heading home. It would take time for all of them to get around to using the coffee, spreading out not only the locations of the deaths but the times as well and make it just a little bit harder for a pattern to emerge and the local police to figure out exactly what had happened.
The method had been carefully chosen. The oil in the beans stopped the poison from becoming airborne, which could have lead to a death too close to the actual murder weapon. It wouldn’t be until someone brewed the beans that the hot water would wash through the grinds and pick up the traces of the radioactive poison, depositing it into the pot and then a cup.
Yvette rolled the top of the bag down, clamping the sides shut and placed the coffee on top of the tall pile in her cart.
I’m going to save that for later, she thought. She looked up and saw a familiar face.
“Hey, Ginger, you shopping for tonight too?”
“Oh, hey Yvette, no, I already have my dish. I forgot to get something for the kids. See you there? Oooh, the expensive stuff, nice.”
“Sshhhh, it’s my little secret. I hide it in the back of the cupboard.”
The two women laughed as Ginger patted Yvette on the arm of her quilted red parka.
“I know what you mean. If I go first Larry is going to find a treasure trove of chocolate all over that house.”
Yvette held up the little bag of coffee. “Yeah, their inheritance.” The two women broke into laughter all over again.