A Deadly Draught

by Lesley A. Diehl

  “Brian’s out at the barn now, so I’d better get going. Take what time you need. Rest and get better. You get out of bed too soon, and there’ll be no more pastries for you.”

  “I’m sorry about leaving you.”

  “I understand. If I got a better paying job, I’d be out of here, too.” I thought joking about his pay at my place might encourage Jeremiah to reveal where his other job would be, but he kept that to himself, and I decided not to pry. At the door, I asked his sister where his bike was.

  “In my truck. I picked it up off the road taking him back here from the hospital. I thought about just throwing it out, but he assured me it could be fixed.” Good old Jeremiah. He could fix anything. I would miss him.

  “Mind if I take a look at it? Maybe I can get the spare parts for it while he’s recuperating.” She pointed toward her truck in the back of the house.

  I leveraged my body onto the tailgate. The bike was in better shape than I hoped. A few of the spokes were broken on the front wheel, and the handlebars were twisted, but the frame looked undamaged. When I examined the front tire, looking for a replacement size, I saw the rubber that gave him the trouble. A five inch slit appeared along the tire, not all the way through the rubber, but deep enough that a bumpy road blew the damaged area open. It reminded me of my slit boiler hose. It was past time for me to let Jake know about these so-called accidents.

  *

  I called Jake on his cell but got no answer. It was now around midnight. No word from Jake or from Ronald and Deni. I was lying on the cot I set up in the tasting room of the barn, trying to keep my eyes open. An hour earlier, I had turned off the old gooseneck lamp, which I had bungee-corded to a chair back next to the cot. It gave me light by which I could read my book, but the story was boring, and I kept nodding off. I gulped down a cup of coffee while I was reading and another as I lay in the dark. Usually caffeine keeps me awake, but tonight, for some reason, it wasn’t working.

  I sat up, pulled on my sweatshirt, and was considering a walk around the outside of the building when I heard a noise from the other end of the barn. It sounded as if someone stumbled into the stack of kegs Brian cleaned the other day and left in the middle of the floor near the fermentation vessels. I grabbed my flashlight. I was familiar enough with the layout of the floor that I wouldn’t need the light, but it would make a fine weapon.

  A wave of dizziness forced me back onto the cot. What the hell? I grabbed the chair to rise and managed to pick my way toward the brewing area. My head continued to spin, and I feared I would fall, alerting whoever was there to my presence. I gripped the side of one of the tanks to remain upright.

  “Crap,” I heard a voice say as I struggled to stay on my feet behind my cover. I tried to let my eyes adjust to the dark, but that did little good as the images in the dim light spun around me. I intended to nab whoever was breaking into my operation and sabotaging it. This time, surprise was on my side, and I meant to take advantage of it if only everything would stand still.

  I could just make out a figure near the stack of kegs. Using the tanks as support, I moved toward it but stopped when another person emerged from behind the first. They outnumbered me. As courageous as I wanted to be, tonight I was a dizzy blonde and no match for two of them. I stepped behind my mash tun and waited.

  “You told me someone would be here.”

  “She’s here. She’s in the tasting room, probably asleep. I put something in her coffee to make her drowsy.”

  “Hadn’t you better check to see if she’s out?

  It’s now or never, I thought and flipped on my flashlight. It caught both figures in its beam. I slipped to the floor in a faint.

  Twenty-Two

  “Wake up. Wake up.” I was at the bottom of a deep well, and Jake was shouting at me from the surface. Then I felt something cold on my face. It wasn’t icy water.

  “Good lord, you’re pouring cold beer on me. You could drown me.” I grabbed the bottle out of his hand and looked at it. “It’s a bottle of Ginseng Rush. That’s no way to treat my lager.”

  “It was the only thing cold enough to revive you. I tried tap water, but you weren’t coming round.”

  “What happened?” I took in my surroundings as I sat up. I was in my own living room on the couch. “How’d I get here? Last I knew, I was in the barn about to catch two prowlers. Did you get them?”

  “Sorry. I heard someone run out through the gift shop when I entered your barn door. I thought it was kind of funny you’d leave it open, after Rafe and I took the time to install new locks and all.”

  My head felt as if it were about to explode, and there was a funny taste in my mouth. “I think someone drugged me. I heard them say they put something in my thermos.”

  “Where’s the thermos now?”

  “In the tasting room.” Jake started toward the door.

  “No, don’t leave me. You can look at it later.”

  “Who had access to it?”

  I thought over yesterday’s events. I filled the thermos here right before I left for Sally’s shop, stopped by the barn to check on how Brian was doing. It was in my truck at Sally’s and when I visited Jeremiah. I took it out of the truck when I got home and put it on the bar in the tasting room. I told Jake what transpired.

  “I drank several cups of coffee from it while I was reading last night. I wondered why I kept falling asleep. That book was supposed to be a thriller.”

  “Did you get a good look at them?”

  “Uh, not really. I dropped my flashlight on the floor.”

  Jake got out of the chair he was sitting in and walked toward the kitchen. “Now where are you going?”

  “Just to get you a glass of water.” He brought it back, and I drank it down in several gulps. It took the vile taste out of my mouth and quenched the parched feeling in my throat.

  “What were you doing here? Isn’t it kind of late for official business, although I know you like to take people off guard?” I asked.

  “Looking for you. I couldn’t sleep thinking about what you’d said earlier today, well, yesterday. I thought we should talk.”

  “Talk?” I swung my legs to the floor and sat up. My head spun only slightly.

  “Yes, but first, would you mind telling me why you were sleeping in the barn?”

  I told Jake about the cut hose and Jeremiah’s bike.

  “Did you keep the old hose? I’d like to see it.”

  “Sure, I’ll get it for you, but about that talk.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not interested in talking.” I reached out, grabbed him around the neck, pulled him down onto the couch, and let him figure out the rest.

  *

  Later, we were reacquainting ourselves for the second time tonight with each other’s bodies, now a little older than when we were in law school, but perhaps a little less rushed in our passion. Oh, yeah, there was a lot of passion there, but we both seemed more interested in taking our time, letting the lust ooze out of our pores rather than racing to a finish line. I think we began to understand better the reason why the tortoise won that race. As we neared the end again, an explosion rocked the night air.

  “Wow,” we said in unison, then realized the blast came from outside the house and not from the bed we were thrashing around in. Through the bedroom window, we watched a red ball of light and flame shoot toward the heavens.

  “It’s up there beyond the ridge. It’s got to be the old well.” I grabbed my jeans and shirt as Jake searched around the room for his clothes.

  “Here.” I handed a pair of jeans to him.

  “No, these are yours.”

  “Sorry.” I stripped off the too-large jeans I was zipping up and threw them in his direction.

  “Shirt. Where’s my shirt?”

  “Downstairs. You took it off while we were on the couch.”

  In the distance, I could hear the wail of a siren. Jake’s cell phone began to ring. I dove back into the rumpled bedcovers and extracted the
cell from the other side of the bed. I tossed it to him. He flipped it open and began making official sounding grunts into it. I leaned over his shoulder, trying to hear what was being said, but he fended me off with his arm. He closed the phone and ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time. I was right behind him, matching him step for step, the advantage of being a tall woman.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he turned to me. “Bad news. Your well blew up.” I already figured that out.

  “Wells don’t just blow up. How the hell could it?”

  “I’m going to find out.” Jake strode toward the door and threw it open.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said.

  “No, you don’t. You’re staying here and locking yourself in.” He slammed the door. I could hear the cruiser speed out of my drive.

  That’s no way to treat your partner, an old friend, and a new and old lover, I thought. The hell with staying here. I grabbed my keys, locked the house, checked the doors on the barn to make certain they were secured, and set out for the well. I might make it there on foot faster than Jake could in his car.

  As I topped the rise that led into the small valley where the well was situated, I could see emergency vehicles wending their way over the rutted fire trail leading to the area. It had to be slow going. There was nothing much else to see, just the sun coming up over the pine trees on the eastern hill and illuminating a large, blackened hole in the earth at the well’s location. Once I got close enough, I recognized the lone figure standing there, his shoulders slumped forward and a beat-up leather hat in his hand.

  “Rafe? What are you doing here?”

  He turned to me with eyes that looked as dark and deep as the well that used to occupy this site.

  “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have refused his demands.”

  A few twisted lines of pipe littered the area, blown into the air and then tossed like matchsticks onto the ground. I turned my attention back on Rafe.

  “You’re not making any sense. Who?”

  Jake pulled up in one of the sheriff’s department’s four-wheel-drive vehicles, followed closely by two fire trucks. He jumped out and strode up to where we were. “Better stand back. It’s still pretty hot around here.” Like a good sheepdog on duty, he herded Rafe and me back from the depression in the ground. Then he turned to me. His face no longer held the look of a man glad to see his woman. More like a parent about to scold a child.

  “It’s my well. Or it was. I’ve a right to be here.”

  “I’m surprised to see you, Rafe,” Jake said.

  “Makes it a lot easier to arrest me, I guess. I’m the one responsible for this mess.”

  Jake’s face showed no expression.

  “No better time than now to tell me what’s going on.”

  The three of us retreated farther from the hole while several fire trucks pulled up. There was little flame and smoke now, because there was nothing left to burn.

  “Lucky there were no trees close by, or with this drought, we’d have quite a fire on our hands.” The fire chief directed his men to put out the small clumps of burning grass and spray the area with water to make sure nothing caught again. Then he called in his arson crew, and they began sorting through the tangled pipes.

  Rafe, Jake and I walked to the tree line and sat on a downed log, watching as the men traversed the area, picking up objects from the ground. “Parts of a pump, looks like,” one of them said. “Wow, that blew over fifty feet at least.”

  “How’d you know it was my well so soon? Was someone up here when the call came through to your cell?” I asked Jake.

  “Someone placed a call to the dispatcher’s number a few seconds after the explosion just in case anybody in the county was still sleeping after that roar.” Jake turned to Rafe. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?”

  “No, not me. It had to have been Bernie.”

  “Bernie, as in Bernie Fisher, your employee? The man you were so keen to get out of jail and hire. You never did tell me what that was all about. I guess now it’s a little too late to explain your motives, but give it a try anyway.” Jake worried the muscle in his cheek. He was working up a big mad, and I was grateful it was directed at Rafe and not me.

  Rafe appeared eager, even relieved to tell his story. “I know Bernie from England. We got pretty drunk together one night, and I got in a fight with another man, some stranger in the bar where we were drinking. The three of us left the place, and the fellow and I began to argue over some silly thing. I can’t even remember what it was now. Anyway, I landed a good one on his jaw, and he went down, hit his head on the pavement. Bernie tried to rouse him, but he was dead. I killed a man that night, and I never paid for it.”

  “That’s an interesting story, but I can’t see how it relates to Hera’s well being blown up.”

  “Bernie did it. He’s a master with explosives.” Rafe dropped his head into his hands.

  “And you were the one who had him do this?” Jake seemed puzzled. I was, too.

  “I might as well have. You see, I stopped paying him to keep his mouth shut about the murder. He decided to get back at me through Hera.”

  “Where’s Bernie now? I’d better have a talk with him. Meantime, one of my men will take you back to headquarters, where we’ll get your statement about tonight’s events.”

  Rafe nodded and got up off the log, rising with the stiffness of a man twenty years his senior.

  “I’m sorry, Hera,” he said. He reached out his hand to me, but I ignored the gesture.

  “I don’t know what to say. I thought you were my friend. You knew he was a scoundrel, yet you hired him and let him work on my well. You had to know what he was capable of. I just don’t understand at all.” I shook my head, turned my back on him, and started home.

  “No, you don’t. You wait right there,” Jake called to me. He walked with Rafe to a sheriff’s car and exchanged a few words with one of his men, who held the back car door open for Rafe. Jake returned to my side, grabbed my arm, and walked me back to his vehicle.

  “Ouch, you’re hurting my arm.”

  “Sorry, but it seems I’d better get a firm grip on you, or you’ll be off to who knows where. I’m taking you back home, and this time I’m warning you. You stay put. Whoever drugged you and broke into your barn is still roaming around free.” He shoved me into the passenger’s seat of his SUV.

  “Fasten your seat belt,” was the only thing he said to me as we drove back to my place, except for a romantic “Get out and lock your doors. I’ll be back,” when he dropped me off.

  I sat at my kitchen table and thought about everything that had happened so far this summer. My business life was like an old carnival. Most of the rides were broken down, and the ones that worked had pieces falling off them. As for the games of chance? Well, I’d run out of quarters to toss on the plates, and the ones that did stick only returned a paper fan. Shit!

  My personal life had looked good at around four in the morning. I glanced at the kitchen clock. On the other hand, now that it was seven in the morning, I wondered if I’d just dreamed last night. Of course, I was about to do something to jeopardize any hope of that dream repeating itself.

  A vehicle pulled into the drive. Great. Reinforcements. Ronald jumped out of his van and rushed up to my kitchen door.

  “The cops are looking for you. Did you know that?” I swung the door open, looked around the back yard as if I expected Jake to materialize from under the lilac bush, and pulled Ronald into the house.

  “Why are they looking for me?” He raised his eyebrows in astonishment.

  “Sit down. I made some coffee. We need to have a long talk. Then I’ll need your help, assuming you give me the straight story on why you came back here and what was going on between you and your father.” He opened his mouth to interrupt me. “Don’t even try to sell me some stupid half truths. I’ve had a bad morning, and I’m in no mood for fantasy. Bring your cup. I need to check on the barn.”
<
br />   Ronald sat on some barley sacks while I climbed the steps to the fermenter.

  “Deni got a call from her mother. Her younger brother went into the hospital with some abdominal pains and was rushed into surgery for a burst appendix. We were in a hurry when we left, and I didn’t think of leaving a note. I’m sorry if I worried you.”

  “How’s her brother doing?”

  “Fine. I wanted to stay, but she knew I was worried about what was going on here, so she encouraged me to come back.”

  “Hmmm.” I checked the temperature gauge on my fermenter. I was cold conditioning the beer. I had dropped the temperature in the cone-shaped vessel. Soon I would know how good an ale I had produced, but before that happened, I wanted Ronald’s story about why he returned to his father’s house when he did. I could be patient with cold conditioning my beers, but I’d be damned if I was in any mood to wait long for his tale, so I may have jumped the gun a little with my next question.

  “The shovel. Why did you need that shovel?”

  “What’s so important about a shovel? I needed it to dig up some stuff, things I’d buried a long time ago when I was a kid.”

  “You weren’t going to use it to do in your father?”

  “What?”

  “The shovel you bought. It was the murder weapon, and it has your fingerprints on it. That’s why Jake is looking for you.”

  Ronald began laughing.

  “It’s not funny. Your shovel killed your father.”

  He extracted a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away his tears of laughter.

  “No, it’s not funny, but it is ironic that only here at home do I get in any trouble. I’m sure your cop friend told you I have no record of any kind. Away from these parts, I seem to have no difficulty leading an exemplary life.”

  “The shovel.”

  “Right.” He dug into his other jeans pocket and extracted something which he held out to me in his closed fist. “Take a look. My reason for the shovel.” He opened his hand and in it I spied several pieces of pointed stone. Arrowheads.