Trav hit the stop button and we sat in silence—out of respect and shock.
I’d wanted to hear this… now I wished I hadn’t.
The room suddenly felt hot and small and stuffy, and I realized my skin was sheathed in a cold sweat. I pulled a tissue from my bag and blotted my face.
“Well,” Trav said. “What do you think?”
Think? I was thinking it would be awful enough listening to that happening to a stranger… but this had been Marge… my Marge.
I finally found my voice. “That was… wrenching.”
He nodded. “I’ve listened to it a good three dozen times in the past two days, and it still gets to me.” He looked at me. “Still think my question this afternoon was crazy?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Doesn’t it sound as if someone’s strangling her? Yet there’s not a mark on her. How do you strangle someone without leaving a mark?”
“From the inside.”
Now it was his turn to look at me as I’d been smoking something.
“What? How?”
“In these fatal reactions, the inside of your larynx”—I touched my throat—“that’s your voice box here, the Adam’s apple on a guy. It’s the gateway to your lungs. But in an anaphylactic reaction its lining swells, narrowing, sometimes even sealing the opening.”
“The ME said it was ‘death by asphyxiation.’ So I guess you’re saying she was choked to death by her own body.”
“Right.”
I tried to imagine how Marge must have felt during her last moments…
I couldn’t. I wasn’t up to it.
“All caused by an allergic reaction?”
I nodded. “Right.”
“Then where’s the peanut?”
“Better question: Where was her EpiPen?”
“You mean the emergency adrenaline injection?”
I nodded. “I prescribed one for her when she left the hospital. It could have—should have saved her life.”
“We found it. In the master bathroom. That brings up another question: She had to know she was having a reaction. Why didn’t she just inject herself instead of wasting time calling 9-1-1?”
“Where’s the master bath?”
“Upstairs.”
“And where was Marge found?”
“Downstairs in a little room she used as her office.”
“There’s your answer. A severe reaction like Marge’s drops the blood pressure so low you can’t even stand; climbing stairs would be impossible. Making that call was her only option, and probably took every bit of will and strength she had.”
“Killed by a peanut.” He shook his head. “I can’t wrap my brain around that. I can see how a bee sting could kill you—after all, it’s a poison, right? But how does a person develop a fatal allergy to peanuts? They’re everywhere.”
I paused, gathering my thoughts and trying to convert them into layman’s terms.
“It boils down to a misfire of the immune system. Some even say it’s the result of a bored immune system.”
He frowned. “Bored? How does your immune system get bored?”
“It doesn’t really. I was anthropomorphizing a chemical process that no one fully understands.”
I saw his eyes cloud at “anthropomorphizing” and realized it was an unfamiliar term, but I didn’t want to bruise his ego by explaining.
“Let’s get down to basics,” I said quickly. “What do you know about the human immune system?”
Trav shrugged. “It protects you from infection.”
“Right. And in the old days, before indoor plumbing, it was going full blast twenty-four/seven. Pathogenic bacteria and viruses were rampant, on every surface, in every bite you ate. Plus everyone played host to a variety of intestinal parasites like tapeworms, hookworms, and round worms.”
He made a face. “How did we survive?”
“A lot of us didn’t. But the ones who did wound up with immune systems that were locked and loaded against a vast array of infections. A better armed system than we modern-day Americans have. Stick one of us in Elizabethan England and within twenty-four hours we’d be so sick we’d wish we could die. Montezuma’s revenge would be a walk in the park compared to what you’d catch there.”
“Yeah, I’ve always wondered why Mexicans can drink all the water they want and not get sick.”
“Because they’ve been exposed since birth to the bacteria that causes turista. They’re immune.”
“So what’s this got to do with peanuts?”
“Everything. Immune globulin E—IgE for short—is a protein the body produces to fight infections, particularly parasitic infections like intestinal worms and protozoans. In the good old days everybody carried one sort of worm or another, and so IgE had its hands full. But these days, at least here in the US, intestinal parasites are the exception, so there’s lots less call for that type of IgE. Some theorize that because of this modern lack of activity, IgE is reacting to proteins that are not a threat.”
“Like the proteins in a peanut?”
“Exactly.”
“So that’s what you meant by ‘bored.’”
“Right. Another example is a study that found that kids in daycare had a significantly lower incidence of asthma—another IgE-mediated reaction—than kids who stayed home with Mommy. The daycare kids were exposed to lots more infections, which kept their immune systems busy. The sheltered-at-home kids weren’t, leaving their immune systems free to start reacting against innocent inhalants.”
I searched for an analogy…
“Imagine a computerized antiaircraft artillery system. Every time it’s alerted, it responds with projectiles tailor-made to shoot down the invading planes. It stores images of those planes and keeps the special ammo handy for the next time it sees one. This is pretty much how the body fights viruses, and why you get chickenpox or measles only once: Your body has seen those viruses before and is ready for them.”
Trav was nodding. “Got it.”
“But if the system isn’t kept busy, it’s likely to start identifying neutrals or even friendlies as foes. Pollen isn’t a threat to the human body, and I’ll bet there wasn’t a single cavemen with hay fever—their immune systems were too busy with tapeworms and lice and ticks, and so on. You don’t have to go back even that far: There are no recorded cases of hay fever before 1800. But nowadays something like fifteen percent of the population suffers from it.”
“All because pollen is being entered into the databanks as an enemy.”
I nodded. He had it.
“Same with the peanut protein that triggers reactions in people like Marge. It’s a nutrient that will help feed the body, but it’s been tagged as an enemy and so the body attacks it with everything it has.”
Trav was shaking his head. “Scary. But people don’t die from hay fever. Or do they?”
“No, but that’s a local reaction. Bee-sting and peanut reactions are often systemic—anywhere from hives to vomiting and diarrhea to, well, death.”
Like poor Marge…
He slapped the tabletop and pointed to me. “See? I did the right thing bringing you in on this. You’ve earned that dinner.”
Dinner… the last thing I wanted to do right now was eat.
“The dinner was kind of a joke. I won’t hold you to it.”
“No way. I always pay my debts, and this is one I want to pay.”
That made me feel good enough to smile.
“Well, since you put it that way…”
“I mean it. But back to Marge: She’s having this reaction and she calls emergency services. All well and good. But then she tells the operator ‘He’s trying to kill me!’ Who’s ‘he’?”
“Isn’t the husband always the prime suspect?”
“Damn right. But Stan Harris says he was at a meeting in New York.”
“Is that confirmed?”
“Not yet. I’ve been trying to get in touch with the other people he said were there but they aren’t returning my calls.”
“Even if he was in New York, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have had something to do with it.”
“You mean he might have, say, hired someone to force a peanut into Marge’s mouth?”
“He wouldn’t have had to. He could have taken something she liked to eat and laced it with peanuts.”
“How do you lace coffee and a banana with peanuts?”
“I haven’t the faintest. Inject the banana with a smidgen of peanut butter maybe?”
He leaned back, frowning. “Hadn’t thought of that. The ME was specifically on the lookout for a peanut-containing product. He could have missed a tiny bit of peanut butter.” His frown deepened. “But then how would she have known it was Stan?”
Talking about possible ways my old friend could have been murdered was making the walls close in.
“Could we continue this somewhere else?”
Trav’s thick eyebrows shot up. “Hmm? Oh sure. Why don’t we go to Antoine’s and finish up there?”
Antoine’s Steakhouse was Lebanon’s only decent restaurant. But I’d had steak last night and, even if I hadn’t, I couldn’t face a big hunk of red meat right now.
“How about a raincheck? I’m not very hungry.”
His face fell. “Oh. Want me to take you home?”
I wanted that even less than a steak.
“No. But I’ll bet you’re hungry.”
“Starved.”
An idea hit. “Is the Gold Star still around?”
“Sure is.”
“Then let’s go there.”