Wined and Died: A Home Crafting Mystery

by Cricket McRae.

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs surprised me, and I whirled to find Barr standing at the bottom of the steps.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?” I asked.

  “I was until my phone rang. Have you been down here all night?”

  “Not all night.” I winked.

  “Honey, you have to get some sleep.”

  “I was just coming up.”

  “And I have to go out now,” he said.

  I limped over, and he helped me get up the stairs. “Where are your crutches?”

  “Can’t maneuver with them. I’m fine. I take it the phone call is the reason you’re going out?”

  “Someone found a car on fire northeast of town.”

  I stopped halfway up the stairs, my hand on his arm. “Northeast?”

  He nodded. “Near the Grendel meadery.”

  I had a bad feeling. “Not your jurisdiction, is it?”

  “The troopers ran the plates on the car. It’s registered to Victoria Swenson.”

  Great. Like I was going to be able to sleep now.

  Exhaustion helped. Unconsciousness swept over me moments after I lay down. Unfortunately, it only lasted about an hour before worry tore me back to awareness. The sky outside my window began to lighten. I fluffed my pillow and flopped onto my back, staring at the ceiling. My ankle throbbed quietly beneath the covers, the pain almost like an old friend now. Thoughts stormed though my mind, unbidden and unorganized. I struggled to wrestle them into some kind of order.

  Elizabeth Moser, starting a new life after a bad divorce, in a new town with a new profession. Alone, but connected to other fiber artists. Uneducated as a therapist but relying on practical common sense to help her vulnerable clients. Afraid but resolute, ready to tell the police and the Swenson family they might be in danger. Dead from a heart attack in her home, discovered by a pizza delivery boy.

  Quentin Swenson, dead from a heart attack in his living room after drinking a glass of mead. Before his demise, he’d been a friendly pharmacist indirectly involved in a young woman’s death, a dark cloud of a lawsuit shadowing his reputation. Reluctant connections to the family business, but his wife, recently in remission, worked there, and they lived practically next door to the meadery.

  Not that I’d been able to find their house.

  Dorothy Swenson, imperious and demanding, orchestrating the whole family. Keeping them close with promises of money, dictating decisions, barking orders at Normal, at Glenwood, at her assistant, Cabot.

  Cabot. No one ever called her anything else. I wondered what her first name was. She looked like a Margaret, an Inga, or a Helga. How had she come to be in Dorothy’s employ? She must have a special relationship with the Swenson matriarch to be able to spend so much time with her. Live with her. Over fifteen years, Glenwood had said the other day in A Fine Body. Dorothy seemed to respect her, though—certainly more than she did Glenwood himself. Maybe it was easier not to be one of Dorothy’s family members.

  But maybe Glenwood would have engendered more of his grandmother’s respect if he’d managed to run his business without her help or her money. If he wasn’t such a sycophantic little weasel when he was around her. I found it disappointing that his temperament and personality were at such unfortunate odds with his devastating good looks; Dorothy’s disappointment must run much deeper.

  Then there was Victoria, in her late forties the oldest of the four grandchildren, a divorced and remarried empty nester still mothering her siblings. Also a master herbalist, sanctimonious about using natural means to control her arthritis while downing the OxyContin. OxyContin provided by her brother Quentin—either illegally or with a valid prescription. Either way, he knew her secret.

  How did that painkiller affect her? She’d never struck me as someone who was high. Just sad, sometimes. And certainly in pain. But could the pills be the reason she’d run her car into the ditch tonight?

  More like this morning. Gray hints of future blue sky winked at me through the window. The clock on the bedside stand said 5:34.

  Her sister Willa, on the other hand, seemed happy. She had a girlfriend and enjoyed being up to her earlobes in meadery business. She appeared to be the only normal, well-adjusted one. I instinctively trusted her, a feeling I instinctively distrusted. None of these people were turning out to be what I’d thought they were at first.

  And speaking of normal, how about Dorothy’s brother? What a character. No, that made him sound irascible yet adorable—like Felix. Normal, old-timey moonshiner turned mortgage scammer and drug kingpin. Cadyville might be a small kingdom indeed, but people here were just as damaged as anywhere else when it came to drugs like meth.

  If Normal was the kingpin, Jakie was his jester. His relationship to the others was still unclear to me. Glenwood had referred to him as Normal’s lackey, and he’d certainly seemed to fill that role the previous afternoon. Yes, he was definitely on the outside of things, yet up to his tweaked-out eyeballs in the drug business.

  I shivered, remembering how he’d grabbed me and how helpless I’d felt. What would have happened if Normal hadn’t come in and told him to let me go? I still wasn’t sure why he had.

  Then I remembered him yelling at Jakie as I left. He’d known who I was. And who Barr was.

  Did he also know he was being watched? Did he know my husband was part of the team trying to put him behind bars? I wouldn’t have been surprised. Normal was mean and lucky, but also smart and wily.

  And let’s not forget the poison hemlock found in Quentin’s mead—and photographed by yours truly in the meadery herb garden. Willa had a deep interest in herb-laced honey wine. Victoria’s extensive knowledge of herbs surely covered poison hemlock. Both had opportunity since they worked in the herb garden. Of the two, I’d go with Victoria as the killer, and I had the feeling Barr was more interested in her, too.

  But all of the Swensons had access to the garden. Even Iris.

  Head pounding from too much information and not enough sleep, I sat up and put my feet on the floor.

  And thought about the bottles of mead I’d seen in the closet with Elizabeth’s fiber stash. Would a toxicology report on those show hemlock as well? I was willing to bet the farm that it would. But what if Barr couldn’t get a warrant for them? What if they weren’t there anymore? What if the sister had given everything away already?

  Or worse, what if she took a nip out of Elizabeth’s bottle?

  I stood, slipped on my ducky slippers and shuffled to the bedroom door. I knew where Elizabeth’s mead was. If I came in through the alley, especially this early in the morning, Elizabeth’s neighbors probably wouldn’t see me. And if they did, well, Barr could—

  My thoughts screeched to a halt. Not only would Barr kill me if I got caught breaking and entering, but it was possible that acquiring the mead that way would eliminate it as viable evidence, even if it had enough poison hemlock in it to kill all the residents in Cadyville.

  In the bathroom, I downed more aspirin, praying it would kick in quickly. My ankle had stopped throbbing, but it still hurt like the dickens to walk on. I lurched downstairs to the living room. My plant books were still scattered everywhere. I found the one that had the most information in it about poison hemlock and searched for the physical effects.

  Dizziness, nausea, vomiting, then slow paralysis moving inward from the extremities until the lungs and heart stopped working.

  Poor Quentin. Poor Elizabeth. Heck, poor Socrates.

  _____

  Erin was still asleep when the front door opened and closed. Brodie lay in the hallway where he could keep an eye on the doors to the kitchen and her bedroom and now sprang to his stubby legs in order to greet Barr.

  I was two cups of coffee into my morning and considering a third. Mushrooms, peppers, and onions, already browned, waited in the skillet on the stove. Rye bread poked up from the slots in the toaster, butter at the ready. Bacon was piled high on a plate on the table, the smoky arom
a combining with the scent of rosemary and new potatoes roasting in a hot oven.

  After being out most of the night, I figured Barr would be hungry. When he walked into the kitchen, I met him with a steaming cup of black coffee and a kiss.

  “Thanks.” He slumped into a chair and took a sip.

  His eyes were red, and the gray stubble on his cheeks betrayed his age. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and make it better, but we were grownups and that didn’t work anymore.

  Instead, I poured my third cup and sat down across from him. “Is she dead?”

  He looked up. “Who?”

  “Victoria.”

  He shook his head. “No. She wasn’t in the car.” Something in his voice.

  I waited.

  “Jakie was. And yes, he’s dead.”

  “Jakie,” I breathed. “That’s … well, I don’t really know what that is.”

  Barr blinked bleary eyes at me. Poor guy.

  “Hungry?” I asked.

  “I could eat a whole cow.”

  “Hmm. All I can offer is pig.”

  “I’ll take it.” And he did, snagging a piece of bacon from the plate on the table and biting into it.

  I got up, limped to the stove and warmed the vegetables in the pan. I whipped the eggs with a fork and poured them in, punched down the lever on the toaster, and removed the potatoes, brown and puffy, from the oven. The fact that I was walking on my bad ankle didn’t elicit a single comment from my hubbie, testimony to his physical and mental exhaustion.

  A couple minutes stirring the eggs, a quick butter of the rye toast, and I set a steaming plate in front of my husband.

  Sitting down again, I asked, “Why was Jakie in Victoria’s car?”

  “Mmmph,” Barr said around a mouthful of potatoes and eggs.

  “Was it an accident?”

  He shook his head. Took another bite.

  “Did she kill him?” After all, she was currently the prime suspect in her brother’s death. But how she’d manage to kill that behemoth I couldn’t imagine.

  Oh, wait. Poison, of course.

  But Barr wagged his chin in the negative again.

  I tried again. “Was it supposed to be her in the car?”

  He swallowed and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “I don’t think Victoria Swenson had anything to do with it. See, the surveillance team never saw Normal return her car. He had it ever since you saw it in the driveway of the meth house yesterday afternoon.”

  “So … Jakie was driving it in the middle of the night and ran into the ditch?” I was still trying for the accident angle, afraid of the alternative.

  “Not exactly.” His expression was grim. “Not unless he was driving with a fatal gunshot wound in his chest.”

  “Someone shot Jakie.” The concept was disturbing, of course, but I didn’t exactly feel deep mental anguish at the thought of his exit from this world.

  “Not someone. Normal Brown.” He forked in another bite, smaller this time.

  “Did the surveillance team see him do it?” I asked.

  A big swallow of orange juice then, “No.” A lot of gloom in that single syllable. “They weren’t paying enough attention at two thirty in the morning. Granted, there’s never been much activity then, but still. Normal and Jakie both slipped out. Must have walked to the meth lab—they sleep at Normal’s house, which I mentioned is near Quentin’s.”

  I nodded that I remembered. I wondered how Iris, all alone now, liked having Great Uncle Normal living next door.

  “Somehow he got Jakie in the car. He shot him either before or after running the car into the ditch. Then he set the whole thing on fire, probably hoping evidence of the murder would be erased by the heat. Heck, it might have worked if another driver hadn’t seen the fire right away, driven up there, and hit it with an extinguisher before the fire department arrived.”

  “Why are you so sure it was Normal who killed him? I mean, they were dealing drugs, right? Isn’t sudden death kind of an occupational hazard in that line of work?”

  He snorted an unamused laugh. “I won’t rule it out. But I think Normal killed Jakie because he’d been sampling the product. Addiction to methamphetamine occurs very quickly. Jakie was becoming a liability, and fast.”

  “Unreliable?”

  My husband’s intense gaze held mine captive. “Your visit to the meth lab yesterday was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  I blanched. “You’re saying I got Jakie killed?”

  “His drug use and the paranoia and bad decisions that went along with it got him killed. Normal’s backwoods business acumen and his ability to cut his losses—however extreme that might be—got Jakie killed. But you may have been the catalyst in an already volatile situation.”

  The coffee sliding down my throat was tepid, but the acid roiling in my stomach felt hot as Hades.

  “If Jakie had just come to the door when you knocked and said you had the wrong house, everything might have been fine. At least for a while. But he went a little bonkers.”

  “I’ll say. Is there any possibility Normal could know you guys are watching him?”

  He didn’t look surprised at the question, which surprised me. “It’s possible. He’s got the survival instincts of a cockroach. Why?”

  I told him about Normal yelling at Jakie as I was getting ready to drive away from the house. “I remember the words ‘cop,’ and ‘wife.’ So he knows more about either you or me or both of us than he ought to.”

  “Great.” I hadn’t thought Barr could sound any more tired, but he could. Did.

  “I need to get on the horn and call some people, let them know,” he said. “Normal could very well be getting ready to scamper.”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and pushed back his chair. I heard him murmuring in the living room. Half his breakfast remained on his plate.

  I picked up his fork and took a few mouthfuls, hoping the solid food would help settle my stomach. It seemed ages since last night’s spaghetti dinner.

  When I heard him say goodbye, I carried his coffee out to the living room. He was looking through my book on poisonous plants.

  “Thanks,” he said as I handed him the cup for the second time that morning. “I’ve got a couple hours before I need to be back. The commander’s stepping things up regarding Normal, but he told me to take a shower, maybe get in a nap.”

  “Well, at least he’s letting you do that,” I said.

  “You know, I don’t like how much this drug case is siphoning attention and resources away from the investigation into Quentin Swenson’s death.”

  “Murder,” I corrected, not mentioning that he hadn’t been so excited about preventing Quentin’s death in the first place. But that was probably unfair. He’d had valid reasons for focusing on the cases he already had.

  “Presumably, though we need the official tox report to confirm. But yes—murder.”

  “Is Robin spending all her time on the drug case, too?”

  A crooked grin flashed across his face. “On the drug case and on the state patrol’s lieutenant liaison.”

  “Oooh.”

  “She’s making noises about applying for a crime scene investigation position with the state laboratory. They deal with drug labs all the time, and apparently she’s having a ball with this.”

  “And with the lieutenant.”

  “Him, too.”

  “Where would Normal go if he left?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “I don’t know. He’s lived here his whole life. You know what really chaps my butt about this case?”

  I smiled and shook my head.

  “It started out being about marijuana. Lots and lots of it suddenly available in town. Then the pot became less available, and the meth increased. Like one was taking over for the other. At first we thought it was supply and demand. But now the marijuana consumption is starting to increase again.”

  I thought for a long moment. “Like maybe it’s more a case of
supply and supply.”

  He pointed a finger at me. “That’s what I don’t get. It’s like the pot conduit dried up, and Normal replaced it with meth to make up for his lack of profits. But he hasn’t been doing it for that long, so the local damage is still relatively low. We want to stop it before we have a real problem on our hands. Then the pot conduit opens again, and we’ve got both to deal with. He’s created a strong starter market for the meth.”

  The blood drained from my face. “Barr—how strong are we talking about? Are there meth addicts at the high school?”

  “A few, according to the kids who are our sources, but so far they’re more interested in drinking and smoking pot. The meth seems to be filtering into a slightly older population.”

  I wondered whether Normal had anything to do with that. Wasn’t he concerned about getting kids hooked on something as serious as methamphetamine? Then I mentally slapped my forehead with my palm. Duh. Barr said the guy had killed Jakie. What was I thinking? Normal Brown obviously didn’t care who he hurt.

  “So I wonder what happened to the marijuana supply,” Barr said, looking out the window at the sun trying valiantly to break through the early morning clouds.

  “Dang it,” I said, struggling to remember.

  Barr looked the question at me.

  “The first time I went to the meadery with Erin, I overheard something. Dorothy was telling Normal he couldn’t do something he’d been doing. She’d made other arrangements. He said he hadn’t, though. She seemed fine with that.”

  His narrowed eyes were almost a glare. “First off, how did you happen to hear a conversation like that?”

  “I, er—”

  “She snuck down a hallway and listened outside their office,” Erin said from the doorway. She yawned high and wide, remembering belatedly to cover her mouth. She wore white pajamas with blue stars on them that made her look eight years old.

  “There’s stuff to eat in the kitchen,” I said quickly.

  She didn’t budge.

  Barr didn’t say anything, but his glare deepened. Then he rubbed his fingers across his unshaven chin and said, “What exactly did you overhear at the meadery?”