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Authors: Lesley A. Diehl

Tags: #Mystery

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BOOK: A Deadly Draught
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*

After I turned out the light, my mind wouldn’t let go. I’d spent several hours going through all of the letters, most from Dad’s pals. Cheerful notes about the good old days in college sent to the man in Korea. A few were letters from girlfriends. I noted the signatures but wanted to avoid reading missives from his love life, no matter how ancient and removed from me it was. There couldn’t be anything of importance there anyway. I’d burn those tomorrow. They were yellowed and falling to pieces.

Then I ran across a small packet held together with a rubber band. It looked much newer than the rest. The paper was whiter, not as discolored with age, and the postmarks on these envelopes were newer, some during the seventies. The handwriting was too flamboyant to be anything but a woman’s. It reminded me of Mom’s. Dad and Mom were married during those years. Why would Mom write to Dad, when they were living together in this house? Some romantic game the two of them played? I didn’t want to know about it. I had set the idea and the letters aside, but now they were keeping me awake.

I tossed back my covers and went downstairs to the kitchen. The letters lay on the table waiting for me to discover their contents.
Oh, what the hell.
Dad is gone now, so what can it matter about his love life with Mom?

I plunged in. After an hour of reading, I knew tonight was a night I wouldn’t sleep. I blushed as I read the scorching passion coming through the words in the letters. Did my father return this woman’s lust for him? As I read on through them, it appeared the two of them met often. So I had my answer. My father had had an affair.

What were you thinking, Dad? Did Mom know? Who knew? Did he? Did Mr. Ramford know? If he did, he was a man who would kill you for messing around with his wife.

Seven

I should just go over there right now. So what if it’s three in the morning.
I’d tell her a thing or two, let Claudia know she ruined my life, that she was a slut. Or maybe I should demand she tell me there was no truth in those letters, that they were the product of a delusional mind, hers.

The sad truth was, it wasn’t Claudia Ramford I had a need to confront. I wanted to yell at my father. Anger roared through my head like a summer tornado. My father, my own father.
How could you do this to me, to Mom?
I pounded my pillow and shrieked out my bedroom window into the darkness.

By the time the sun came up, emotional and physical exhaustion overwhelmed me. Anger, grief, blame, and disbelief had fled, leaving behind them the smallest grain of rational thought, but enough to take me down another road, one more reasonable. I would talk to Claudia. Yes, I would, but not until I knew exactly what I wanted from her.

I suspected the affair between my father and Claudia Ramford somehow figured into recent events, but I wasn’t certain how. Until I knew more I had to be careful. Whoever the brewer was concocting this murderous recipe, he or she was deft at stirring in a deadly product at just the right moment. So for once in my life, I decided to rein in my impulsive nature and hold my stubbornness in check.

I grabbed cleaning supplies and headed for the small shed standing near the brew barn. Good, old-fashioned heavy labor might free up my overloaded brain and allow me to think my way through to some sensible action. If not, it would exhaust me enough that I could nap in the afternoon and count on a clear mind later.

Dad had used the shed to store supplies, but since his death, I’d been throwing anything I couldn’t decide what to do with into it. There were old hoses, parts from brew kettles, gardening tools, buckets, and who knew what else. It had been years since I’d taken inventory of its contents. Now I needed the space to rent to Marni Henley, who was joining our Saturday tasting sessions with her herbs and flowers. The shed would be the perfect place for her to sell, display, and store her merchandise. She wouldn’t have to load everything in her van each Saturday and cart it to and from my place, and the area to the side and back of it would afford her room to grow some of her herbs.
It would look pretty, too,
I thought.
She and I could share the responsibility for taking care of the small garden during the week. In fact,
I said to myself, as I threw another rusty bucket out of the shed into the dump pile,
maybe Marni would like to use a half-day on Wednesday to open the shed for business also.

Ned Potter’s homemade sausages, which he was going to sell out of the back of his truck, Sally’s breads, Marni’s herbs and flowers, and my brews would provide summer tourists with a fun Saturday afternoon adventure. The other breweries—Rafe’s, Teddy’s and the Ramford facility—scheduled brewery tours every day between the months of May and October. If anyone wandered into my place on a weekday, I was happy to give them a walk through my small facility.

What the Ramford brewery might do for tours under the new brew master’s and Michael’s direction remained a mystery. Francine was too new to the business to decide yet how she would manage her own marketing and publicity, but she’d better get something together, or she’d lose the summer tourist season.
I should help her,
I thought first, but then reminded myself,
I should mind my own business and help myself by pushing for another meeting with the bank president.

Money, money, money was the refrain foremost in my mind as I worked. In the background, my father’s relationship with Claudia Ramford provided dark undertones to a chorus of concerns about the financing with the bank. I closed out the noise by digging more deeply into the junk in the shed and pulled out a spade shoved into the pile of items at the back. It looked new, but I didn’t remember buying it or putting it in here. Could Jeremiah have gotten it? He usually told me if he needed new equipment. I’d have to ask him. It was too good to thrown in the discard pile, so I carried it outside and leaned it against the building. The spade would come in handy digging Marni a small herb bed.

In the bright sunlight, I noticed something on its blade. Oh, damn. It wasn’t as good as I thought. It was covered with rust … or was it blood? I threw it on the ground and backed away as if it were a rabid animal about to attack me.

*

“You just found it in the shed? No idea who put it there? Do you keep the shed door locked?” asked Jake. I had dialed him as soon as I suspected the shovel could be the missing murder weapon, not that I wanted to call him, especially after our unpleasant parting. I preferred not seeing him ever again, and from the awkwardness he evidenced when he arrived, he felt the same way about me.

“Could you not keep pacing around and around with your back turned while you fire questions at me?” We were standing at a distance from the shovel, which still lay on the ground near the shed.

“I’ll check it for prints, of course,” he said.

“You’ll find my prints on it. And that’s blood, isn’t it?”

“Of course. Your prints. Could be blood. Probably is.” He walked away from me and back to look at the shovel. He was doing his best to treat me civilly, like a witness. So I settled on returning the favor. I would behave like one and handle him like a cop.
He is a cop,
I reminded myself,
even if he is one who looks damned good in the uniform.
The short sleeves showed off the muscles in his forearms, and the scattering of hairs there glistened in the sunshine.
Oh, man. Would my hormones ever learn to behave?

“What now?” I asked.

“Like I said, I’ll check this for prints, take it to the lab. I’ll have my men go over this area and see what else they uncover.”

“I need the shed back by this Saturday, actually before. I’m going to use it.”

“I don’t know if you can have it by then. Make other plans.”

“Fine. Anything else?”
Should I ask him?

“How long since you went into the shed?”

“Years?”

“How’d all this stuff get in here then?”

“Jeremiah and I just tossed things in from time to time. It’s like a storage area for stuff we had no use for but couldn’t throw away. It’s never locked. What for? It’s filled with useless junk. Is that a problem?”

“I wouldn’t call a possible murder weapon useless junk. Where can I find Jeremiah? Is he working today?”

“Jeremiah is off today. He’s a part-time student at the college. He should be in classes this afternoon. You can’t think he could be involved.”

“Everyone in this brewing community is involved one way or the other. A murderer, a thief, and those who would cover up for these acts.” He turned and met my eyes for the first time today. “What’re you hiding, Hera?”

I thought of the letters. “Nothing. Nothing.” Now was the time to ask him, to change the subject. “Uh, what about the yeast? Anything?”

“I’ve been doing some reading, very interesting stuff on brewing. Now I know bottom-feeding yeast produce lagers and top-fermenting yeast create ales. Oh, yeah, the bottom fermenters work at a lower temperature than the ale yeasts.”

“Oh, good for you. I hope you didn’t think learning this was beneath your finely honed cop mind.”

“I also found out there’s a way to determine the owner of a particular yeast.”

“How would that be?” I knew the answer, but I was testing him.

“A DNA analysis of the yeast. Fortunate you called me today. I’m visiting all the brewers, asking for a sample of each of the yeasts they use. I’ll need some from you. The stolen product possessed a specific profile, which Rafe gave me. Now we’ll see if any of the yeasts in the brew barns have the same make-up.”

“Except for Rafe, most of us make both ales and lagers. I make only one ale, but I’m planning to add another when I get the money for the malt and hops.”

“Ah, yes. That nasty issue of money again. So you should be my top suspect, then.”

I ignored him and continued with a line of reasoning that didn’t point directly at my vulnerabilities. “I can’t understand why any of us would take Rafe’s yeast. And why would the thief be so stupid to store the yeast in a place where you could find it, in our barns?”

“That’s a terrific point. You’re thinking like a true criminal, Hera. Now, how about it?” He held out his hand.

Jake left with the shovel and my yeast sample. The same thought kept running through my mind:
someone could plant the stolen yeast in a brew barn just as an unknown party stowed the shovel in my shed. What about the missing key to my house? Was there a chance someone had a key to my barn or to another brew barn?

*

I shoved everything associated with the chaos in the brewing community into the back of my head, including my concern over Claudia Ramford’s relationship with my father. The first tasting of the season was this weekend, and I had to be certain there were adequate supplies of the beer I wanted to promote in the brew barn’s tasting room and the gift shop. The bottling line was cranky again, and Jeremiah and I had the devil of a time rolling out the supply I needed for the tasting. I picked through the bottles by hand to make sure each was filled and not merely halfway to the top.

Jeremiah directed a pretend kick at the bottler and looked at me. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s what we’re reduced to now, kicking our equipment to make it respond.”

“I hear Michael’s brew master wants a new bottler. Maybe he would sell you their old assembly. It might hold us for a few months until we got a new one.”

“This one came from Ramford’s. It seems like I depend on their operation to provide me with my equipment.”

“Yeah, and it’s lousy stuff besides. Sorry. You already know that.”

I hesitated, not wanting to ask Jeremiah to do what I knew I should do. Knowing me, he offered.

“I could drop by there and ask, when I get out of classes,” he said. Not awaiting an answer, he pulled his dark glasses down over his pale eyes, clapped his Yankees’ cap on his head, and stepped out into the sunshine. I didn’t have to tell him what I would pay for the machinery. He knew. Nothing, if they would donate to me. Cheap, cheap, cheap, if they wanted a few bucks for it. Getting the bottling assembly would hold off the wolf at the door, if only for a few weeks.

*

I didn’t have the time to complete renovating the shed. Jake released it to me the Friday before the tasting, but ever the inventor in times of need, I had a plan for Marni’s herbs.

Early Saturday morning, Marni and I constructed tables out of plywood and saw horses, decked them out with colored cloths, and set her herbs and flowers in brick tiers on them. Neither she nor I wanted to lose the opportunity to promote her offerings, but the weather was against us. The skies brought up black towering clouds around ten in the morning.

“We sure can use the rain,” Marni said, “but I hope it either pours down right now and gets it over with or holds off until late afternoon.” She extracted basil and thyme out of the back of her van and placed the containers on the table, wiping her hands on the denim apron she wore. Both of us were hot and sweaty from the work. I had tied my blonde hair back into a ponytail. Marni’s short, dark locks, usually so smooth and sleek, curled in disarray over her ears and down her neck.

“Looks good,” I said. “You should just give up and let it curl.”

“Oh, right. Why do I bother with all the gel? I don’t know. I always wanted straight hair like yours.”

I chuckled. “And what do we gals with straight hair usually say? ‘We want curly hair!’” A clap of thunder beyond the ridge cut short our laughter.

“Here she comes. Let’s get in the barn.”

Ned closed up the cap of his truck, and he, Marni and I ran for shelter. I slammed the door of the gift shop against the sudden wind, and we watched from the windows as the rain came toward us in a solid wall.

“Your herbs are taking a beating. I hope they survive the downpour and the wind.”

A gust took a corner of the red cloth and whipped it over the pots. “There. Now they’re protected,” Marni said. The next gust pulled at the cloth, lifted it off the plywood and took the pots with it.

BOOK: A Deadly Draught
13.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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