A Berry Horrible Holiday

by A. R. Winters

  “About a couple of years now,” Mama Hendrix said.

  “Any idea why anyone would want to kill him?”

  “Noooo, none at all! That man, he was a good man. A saint! Why he… He… He turned my entire orchard around. It got real sickly under my old orchard manager. I thought I was going to lose everything. It was Doug who stepped up—he was the orchard assistant back then—and put everything to rights.” Her voice trailed off. “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

  Mama Hendrix had to have been a bread making machine—the old-fashioned kind of bread making machine, that is. Every bit of it was handmade. I cut open another loaf of bread, this time a braided brioche. I piled four different kinds of meat on it plus half the condiments on the table.

  “Sauerkraut and pickle relish on the same sandwich? My dear, you are brave!” she said.

  “It’s all the rage back home,” I said with a weak laugh. I hoped she never gave it a try to find out, and I hoped no one from the geek squad complained after I fed it to them.

  I thought about Doug out there in the woods for however long he’d been there. The empty holes around him still bothered me. I wanted to ask Mama Hendrix about the other holes, but I didn’t want to unnecessarily alarm her with the implication that there could be more murders on the way. “Mama Hendrix, are you familiar with all the orchard grounds?”

  She paused. “Well, I’m not as spry as I once was. The orchards had been more George’s thing than mine, but I try to stay aware of how it’s all doing.”

  “Hmm…” I wrangled the pimento cheese onto a slice of brioche, plying it good and thick.

  “What aren’t you saying, girl?”

  Sigh. Busted.

  I slapped a piece of bread on top of the pimento cheese and added the sandwich to the growing platter of sandwiches. “There are more holes out there where Doug was found, holes like the one he was found in. Narrow and deep.”

  Her brows went up. “Well, I would hope so.”

  “Huh?” I stopped mid tomato slice.

  “I made them myself.”

  I gave her a sweeping once-over with my eyes. Suddenly, she was looking decidedly more spry. “Come again?” My grip tightened around the knife it was using to cut the tomato. I hadn’t told it to do that, but I didn’t object.

  Whatever amount of energy Mama Hendrix had regained while we’d been talking left her. Her shoulders slouched, her back became rounded, and even her face sagged. “I was going to have a gazebo built there. It was George’s favorite spot.”

  “A gazebo,” I repeated after her in a whisper. My mind’s eye saw the holes and how they were laid out. Then it saw the gazebo that fit neatly above them. “Ohhh. But how…” My words trailed off. I’d been about to ask her how she’d managed to dig the holes. She was old. Old people didn’t dig great big holes, did they? Then I wondered what kind of arrogance that assumption would fall under. Youthful arrogance?

  I glanced at her again, assessing.

  “You wondering how an old fart like me dug holes for a gazebo?” Mama Hendrix asked. She seemed amused rather than annoyed, which was a relief.

  I nodded yes.

  “The tractor has a post hole digger on it. Push this lever this way, that lever that way, and it gets the job done.”

  “Oh!” I said again. “Had anyone known you’d dug them?”

  Mama Hendrix thought a moment. “Doug did. Pretty sure Tim did too.”

  “Doug’s assistant?” I asked for clarity.

  “Yeah.”

  I recalled Tim getting chewed out by Doug during those first minutes after we’d arrived at the B&B. He would have fit in seamlessly with a cohort of Marines jogging in formation on a beach. If I’d have been pressed about which one would win in a physical fight, I would have guessed Tim, hands down.

  “Did Doug and Tim get along?” I asked.

  “Well, they’ve been working together for months, and this is the first time Doug’s turned up dead, so I’ll have to go with yes.” The was a sharpness to her tone that hadn’t been there before. “You’re not one of them people who gets all morbidly curious about the dead, are you? ‘Cause you’re asking some awful pointed questions.”

  Chapter 12

  Mama Hendrix was right, I was asking a lot of questions, but if I wanted to show up Sheriff Palke and win back Brad’s unflinching admiration, then I had to be willing to push and pry a little. Besides that, if whoever murdered Doug had the intent of filling the remaining holes, then I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by playing nice.

  “I’m sorry, Mama Hendrix.” So much for dropping the nice routine. Being nice was simply a part of my DNA. I was pretty sure I couldn’t scrape it off my soul with a wood planer. “I guess my brain just can’t leave an unsolved puzzle alone.”

  I finished with the sandwiches. They were stacked on a platter that could have held an entire turkey. Mama Hendrix left to take a nap, and I headed to the Citizen Justice League’s tent with the bounty of food balanced on one hand and one shoulder.

  I’d like to say that I sashayed across the yard to the tent. The truth was more akin to a stumbling, huffing stagger while sweating bullets and praying that I didn’t drop all the food. I didn’t know how waiters and waitresses did it. The tray hadn’t been that heavy when I walked out of the kitchen. I swear it hadn’t. I was sure someone was secretly walking behind me slipping tiny weights onto the tray, but whoever it was, they were sneaky. So sneaky they didn’t make an ounce of noise, cast a shadow, or—cough—even exist. Yep, they were that good.

  When I get back, I’m gonna have to give Melanie and Sam raises, I thought to myself. They were my servers at The Berry Home, and they’d been with me from the very beginning. I’d never fully appreciated how hard their jobs were until this moment.

  Loud voices rumbled out through the tent’s opening as I approached, but that’s not what held my attention the most. A man was kneeling at the tent’s edge not far from the wide-open entranceway. His back was to me, but I guessed him to be Lucas, the B&B’s handyman. He seemed to be working on something, but I couldn’t tell what. Nothing looked out of sorts to me.

  “Hi,” I said, putting my best cheerleader pep behind it.

  The man froze. He sat unmoving like a gargoyle. Then he slowly turned his head, snaking his back around until he was twisted around enough to look up at me.

  “Hi,” I said again. I had a toothy smile plastered on my face, but I was no longer feeling the joy. But as they say, fake it ‘til you—

  “Hello,” Lucas said, cutting my thought short. His eyes were haunting. One might even say dead.

  “Hi,” I said again. Embarrassment quickly set in. I’d repeated myself three times in a row. “I’m Kylie B—”

  “Berry,” he finished for me.

  I’d like to say that he stood up, but I really couldn’t describe it as that. It was more like he unfolded himself in a twisting screw motion that had him at his full height directly in front of me when he stopped moving. He was tall—taller than Brad, although shorter than Joel. But the whole world was shorter than Joel. Still, something about him made me feel unnerved. There didn’t seem to be anything to the man. My eyes would’ve had me call him scrawny, but I suspected that he was scrawny in the way that Alexander Skarsgård looked scrawny—until he took off his shirt.

  The man’s wide shoulders seemed to curve in toward me, making me feel like I might be ensnared during the unfortunate blink of an eye. I wanted to back a few steps away from him, but my pride had rooted my feet to the ground. Since putting physical distance between us didn’t seem to be an option, I did the next best thing. I put something literally physical between us.

  “Want a sandwich?” I asked, shifting the tray to hold it in front of me.

  His gaze did a slow roll up from the sandwiches to my face. Then, without looking at the sandwiches, he selected one and took a bite. I’m not sure if he’d been trying to be intimidating on purpose or not, but the whole I-could-kill-you persona slipped when
his jaw stopped working two chews into his bite.

  His gaze went from me to his sandwich, and his face soured in a what-did-I-just-eat look.

  Then his gaze went from side to side, as if involuntarily looking for somewhere to spit out the bite. Eventually, his soulless eyes settled back on me, and I finally got a smile. A fake one.

  “Thank you,” he said around a full mouth before forcing his food down.

  He must have gotten one of the sauerkraut and pickle relish sandwiches.

  The way he’d finished my introduction for me hadn’t slipped my mind. “How did you know my last name?” I asked.

  Rather than answer, he took another bite of his sandwich. He didn’t even make a face this time. He just chewed… and chewed… and chewed.

  The rising sound of Zoey’s voice cutting through the low cacophony of the tent’s inhabitants stole my attention, and I looked away. When I returned my attention to Lucas a second later, his back was to me, and he was walking away.

  Arrgh! I vented my frustration in the most ladylike manner I knew how: I buried it deep, deep inside.

  I had wanted to ask that man questions. Lucas seemed to always be around here or there, always on the periphery. If he wasn’t the killer, I guessed he had a good idea who might be.

  But I couldn’t do anything about that right now. I didn’t want to be dubbed the resident crazy lady by running after him with a tray of mismatched sandwiches. If I did, it was likely that no one would want to talk to me. Certainly, no one would want to confide in me. So, I did the thing I didn’t want to do: I completed my newly acquired yet wholly unwanted duties as sandwich girl.

  Voices were raised in a heated debate when I entered the tent. From outside the tent, everything inside had been draped in menacing shadow. Once inside, though, my eyes adjusted quickly, but I hadn’t been prepared for what I was about to see.

  The far end of the tent had me mentally teleporting back to Zoey’s apartment. The look was staggeringly identical, and I knew that she had to have been behind it.

  The entire end of the tent was a huge wall of computer monitors. Each one illuminated a face, ones we all had seen. They were the faces of everyone who had been at the B&B over the last twenty-four hours. There was mostly only one face per screen, but one of the screens held the images of the geek squad members themselves.

  “You’re nuts! Why would it be any of us?” a short guy with the body language of TNT yelled.

  The guy he was yelling at was at least a foot taller and might not have seen the sun in all the years of his life prior to this weekend. “You can’t be that much of an idiot! This—that guy out in the trees—is not part of the Justice League competition. I waited around. Saw them pull him out of the ground. The guy was real, and he was dead.”

  “Real dead,” another guy snickered from a spot to the side.

  “Shut up!” the two men arguing yelled in unison.

  Someone breezed by me, snatching a sandwich off the platter as they went. There was no acknowledgment of me or the fact that I was standing there holding an increasingly heavy platter of food. I was pretty sure that no one in the tent even registered that I existed.

  I stepped to the side and lowered the platter down on top of a black hard-shell case.

  Every face in the tent turned to look at me. “Not there!”

  I managed to pull the platter up and away from the box before the platter even connected with its intended destination. Everyone in the tent went back to arguing amongst themselves, rendering me nonexistent again.

  “Aren’t they great?” a voice said near my ear.

  I jumped and practically gave myself whiplash spinning my head toward the voice. “Zoey!” She was standing right next to me. I didn’t even know where she’d come from. She’d materialized out of nowhere.

  She took the platter out of my hands and slid it onto a center table overflowing with a techie’s Christmas morning fantasy. It didn’t sit on anything and somehow managed minimal jostling of the overloaded table’s contents. No one complained.

  I picked one of the sandwiches off of the platter and handed it to her. “Pimento,” I said.

  Zoey’s grin was like the sun coming breaking through the clouds on an overcast day. Then she took a bite. Her brows went up and her grin fell away. “It’s good!” she said in surprise around a mouth full of food.

  “What the heck’s on this thing?” someone from across the tent exclaimed, a sandwich in his hand. The yell had contained equal parts dismay and disgust.

  “Ahhhh, there it is,” Zoey said, her smile back. “All's right with the world again.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her, thinking of all the laser-targeted meanness I could shoot her way, but I wasn’t here for that. I was here to deliver the sandwiches and go. I needed to find Brad so that I could learn more about how—and when—Doug died. I just hoped he wasn’t so goo-goo-eyed over Sheriff Palke that he refused to share any of the information he’d managed to glean from her.

  “Any idea where Brad is?” I asked.

  Zoey’s smirk was all too wise, and it had absolutely nothing to do with me figuring out what had happened to Doug.

  “I legit need to know,” I said, defending myself against her silent smirk. “We need more information about Doug’s death.”

  “No!” Gaunt-Face had detached himself from whatever shadow he’d been lurking in and now was standing in front of the monitors with his fists on his nonexistent hips. “We don’t need some housewife wannabe mucking around and messing things up,” he declared.

  His self-confidence was as astounding as it was arrogant. I found myself both admiring and loathing him.

  “Paul, your face has that problem again,” Zoey said, swirling a finger in his direction.

  “What problem?” he asked, clearly alarmed.

  “Your lips are moving and words are coming out,” Zoey told him.

  The collective geek squad—minus Gaunt-Face, also known as Paul—snickered.

  “Shut up!” he screeched at them. The loss of his perceived control over everyone and everything did not look good on him.

  Zoey chose that moment to climb on top of the already overloaded table. It groaned under her additional weight, and the already pale group of men went even paler with obvious fright.

  “What are you doing?” and “Get down!” filled the air in repeating cannons of testosterone-imbued panic.

  “Behold!” Zoey leveled a finger at me. “This woman will solve Doug’s murder.”

  Snickers from the group.

  “And she will do it before anybody else.”

  More snickers followed by guffawing and the swiping away of laughter tears.

  “Zoey, don’t.”

  But I might as well have not bothered trying to stop her.

  She leaped off the table with all the grace of Zorro and planted herself in front of the wall of monitors. Her fingers flew across a keyboard. My image came up on the central monitor—the biggest one. Then the results from a search about Camden Falls murders came up next to it.

  Zoey started clicking through articles, scrolling to the tidbit she wanted to show off the most each time. “Kylie Berry.” Click-click. “Kylie Berry.” More clicking. “Kylie Berry.”

  “We get it,” Paul said, cracking his fingers by flipping his laced hands and stretching his arms out before him. “Your girl here’s a psychopath, and it’s our job to take her down.”

  One of the other guys slapped him on the back of the head. “You really are an idiot.”

  Paul pushed the head slapper. “No, you’re the idiot!”

  Greco-Roman wrestling ensued. Paul had the arm length, but head-slapper had a better center of gravity.

  “Guys, knock it off,” said the fellow who’d swiped the first sandwich from the tray. “Look at this.” He was continuing what Zoey had started by flipping through the various websites. “Camden Falls is murder capital of Small Town, USA. And check it out.” The screen flickered to reveal analytical statistics. �
��According to my webcrawler hack, Kylie Berry was mentioned by someone somewhere in eighty-seven percent of those cases.”

  “Right! She is a psycho!” Paul ground out through clenched teeth while doing his best to trap head-slap guy in a headlock.

  “Naw, man, she was solving them! Look at this word cloud. A third of the people there who are posting on social media about it thinks she’s doing the killing, but the rest…” His voice trailed off, and he turned to look at me. Awe lit up in already glow-in-the-dark pasty features. “She’s solving them, man. She’s the real deal.”

  Everyone’s eyes were now on me.

  “Noooo…” I took a step backward toward the tent’s still open flap. They were looking at me with the same adoration they’d previously reserved for Zoey. “Zoey, fix this,” I whisper-hissed.

  “Stay close to her, boys!” Zoey yelled. “She’ll show you how it’s done.”

  “I’m gonna kill you,” I mouthed at her.

  “See? Psycho!” Paul screeched.

  “Lime Jell-O” I fumed at Zoey. “That’s what I’m making you for your next birthday! Lime, Zoey. Lime! ... Lukewarm!”

  Chapter 13

  “I can’t believe you did that. Why would you do that?”

  Zoey and I had the tent at our backs, and we were heading across the yard in an aimless path that skirted the house. I glanced over my shoulder. Three of the geek squad were following, their faces full of adoration.

  But this time, they weren’t staring at Zoey. They were staring at me!

  Zoey looked back too. “Ahh, they’re cute,” she purred.

  Rounding the edge of the house, we passed Lucas, who appeared to be tightening down the edge of a stair. I hadn’t recalled any squeaking when I’d been on them earlier.