by Meg Muldoon
He shot me one of his million dollar smiles.
“You’ve got yourself a partner, little lady.”
Chapter 3
Once we got to the campground, it wasn’t all that difficult to locate the man of the hour.
Hell, anybody within a ten-mile radius could have easily found George Drutman, what with the RV’s horn blaring and him screaming a vodka-soaked rendition of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for all to hear.
Daniel spotted Billy standing by his patrol car and pulled the truck off to the side of a bumpy dirt road. He put the truck in park and killed the engine, but kept the lights on.
He silently shook his head as George let out several long honks that echoed through the still forest, following it up with an obnoxious “Woohoo!”
“Remember,” Daniel said. “Stay here.”
He unbuckled his seatbelt and put his hat on.
“Be careful,” I said.
I watched as he got out of the truck, closing the door quietly behind him. As he approached Billy, a look of relief swept over the young deputy’s scrunched-up face. Billy started waving his hands wildly, gesturing toward where the noise was coming from, obviously implying that George Drutman III was clear out of his mind. Daniel nodded, and a moment later, they were walking down the road. Daniel’s hand rested calmly over his holster.
I finished the rest of the coffee, tried to block out the intermittent horn blasts and bad singing, and focused on the serenity and calm of the woods.
The pines were swaying peacefully in the cool early morning breeze. Fresh forest air filled the cab, and I took in a deep greedy breath of it, closing my eyes for a moment, savoring it like an inmate who’d been behind bars for decades.
If I had any chance at getting at least one weekend of camping under my belt this summer, then I would really need to hire another employee at the pie shop. I had lost Chrissy, one of my best workers, earlier in the spring after she decided to go back to school fulltime to pursue a career in nursing. Tobias and Tiana were both hard workers, but I could tell they were feeling the pressure. The other day, I had caught Tiana on her break. She was sitting on a bench in Meadow Plaza, the park area that served as a community hub a couple blocks down from the pie shop. She looked like she’d been crying, and when I asked her what was wrong, she said she was fine, but that she’d just been feeling a little stressed out lately.
I needed to hire somebody. And quick.
But taking time to find another employee – a good, honest, hardworking employee at that – was easier said than done. Overall, I’d been lucky with the folks I’d hired. But I’d been burned in the past. Nick Calder, the arsonist who had set fire to several local businesses a few years ago, had worked for me. He’d been right under my nose without me knowing who he really was. I couldn’t afford to have somebody like that in my employment again.
George’s shouting, which had continued to echo throughout the forest, stopped abruptly. A peaceful silence took its place. The honking stopped too.
I leaned my head back on the seat and let out a short sigh of relief.
Daniel must have used his mediating skills to talk George Drutman down.
My husband was always good at getting folks to see the logical side of things. He had a way of talking to people that made them feel like he was their friend, and that he just wanted what was best for them. That skill was one of the many reasons why Daniel had been elected sheriff, and why he was regarded so highly in the community. Because the truth was that when Daniel mediated, he wasn’t putting on an act. He really did want the best for folks. Even for drunk idiots like George Drutman. Daniel had more compassion for his fellow human being than just about any man I had ever m—
My thoughts came to a screeching halt as something in the distance caught my eye.
It was something down the road, just beyond the high beams. Just a flash. A glint. Followed by a distant roar. Something moving swiftly through the trees, something moving toward m…
“Oh my G—” I said, my voice giving out before I could finish the phrase.
My body froze and I felt my eyes grow bigger than a couple of monster truck wheels as I watched the shiny, newest-model RV barrel down the road in the darkness like a train bound for hell.
Heading right for me.
I grabbed the door handle and screamed.
Chapter 4
I exited the truck the way a pilot might jump out of a 747 with four dead engines. I landed hard in the ditch, face first. By the time I got to my feet and started running, the RV was just upon me.
Then, came the moment of impact: The gut-wrenching sound of metal ripping into metal.
I screamed again, my legs pumping hard while my heart hammered like a paint mixer in my chest. The screech of metal filled the forest with its deafening sound. A burst of wind licked at my heels, and I felt another scream rise up in my chest.
I shut my eyes tight and ran blindly through the forest, expecting to be flattened like a bug on a windshield at any moment.
Somewhere behind me there was the roar of an engine and the sound of cracking and splintered wood. The sound of metal twisting. Then the sound of something heavy coming to an abrupt and unnatural halt.
I kept running. I didn’t stop until I found myself deep in the woods. Then, and only then, did I finally turn around to see the wreckage.
My mouth fell open in shock.
Daniel’s truck lay on its side in the ditch, the ditch that I had just been in, looking like a capsized ship on its way down to the ocean floor. The truck’s lights were still on, facing into dirt, and smoke rose up from the demolished vehicle.
On the opposite side of the road, some ways down, sat the RV.
After hitting Daniel’s truck, it had ricocheted to the other side and smashed into a stand of pines. Its engine was sputtering and wheezing, and the singed aroma of burnt oil smelled strong on the wind.
I stared at the destruction, stunned beyond belief.
Because aside from the smoke, the twisted metal, and the thought of how close I’d come to being a part of the wreck, there was something else terrifying.
Laughter.
The ghostly, sadistic, twisted-as-the-truck’s-fender laughter that was coming from the RV across the road.
George Drutman laughed like taking out Daniel’s truck and almost killing me was the funniest thing in the world.
My knees grew weak and I felt something crawl up the back of my throat as his merriment grew louder. I leaned against a tree, trying to steady my insides before I lost all that coffee, when I suddenly heard a loud voice sound through the woods.
“Cin?!Oh my God, Cin!?”
My heart stopped in my chest as I listened to his cries. I almost didn’t recognize the voice – panic and fright had changed it so.
“Cin?!”
The figure ran down the forest road, his flashlight dancing wildly as he approached the truck. In the vehicle’s muted light, I saw a defeated, broken expression spread across his face as he surveyed the carnage.
He looked like a man who had just been struck in the knees with a two by four.
“Cin?!” he said again, looking around.
I willed my legs to move and finally found my voice.
“Daniel!”
He looked in my direction, searching the woods until he zeroed in on me.
Then he dropped his flashlight and ran across the ditch. He pulled me toward him, squeezing me so hard, I lost my breath for a moment.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded into his chest as he hugged me tighter.
I could hear his blood pumping hard.
“If something had happened, I would never have—”
But he stopped talking as the laughter across the way thundered through the trees. Nails on a chalkboard would have been music in comparison to that terrible, terrible laughter.
I looked up at Daniel, his face illuminated by the blue moonlight.
And that’s when I saw it in his eyes.
Something snapped in them.
And I knew that soon, George Drutman was going to wish he’d never taken so much as a sip from that bottle of Grey Goose.
Chapter 5
Daniel climbed up the side of the RV and forced the driver’s door open. George Drutman sat hunched over the wheel, his shoulders convulsing with laughter. A minute later, Daniel had his hands on his shirt, ripping the top-heavy man down from the seat. George tumbled out easily, landing hard onto the dirt road.
He continued laughing, untroubled by any of it.
I felt more frightened than I had after seeing the RV rumble toward me in the dark. More scared than when I had jumped from the truck, thinking I was about to be crushed right then and there.
Because the look in Daniel’s eyes before he stalked over to George Drutman had been one of unpredictable, crazed rage.The kind of look that led to moments of madness. Moments that would cause regret and suffering. Because such moments could never be taken back.
I watched as Daniel grabbed George’s shirt collar and dragged him into the middle of the forest road. Even though George was easily 100 pounds heavier than the Sheriff of Pohly County, Daniel was pulling him as if George wasn’t any heavier than a jockey. The big man didn’t appear to be fighting very hard. He just laughed some more, as if he was only getting jostled by a ride at the county fair.
“Aw, c’mon. It was jest a truck, Sheriff. Just an old, beat-up, poor man’s truck. I bet ya needed a new one anyway,” he shouted, slurring just about every word.
A few folks from the nearby campground were starting to walk down the road toward us, drawn by all the commotion, looking like zombies in the white smoke.
“Hell, Sheriff, I’ll buy you a brand new one,” George continued. “Something even better. Something you wouldn’t ever be able to afford on your pissant salary.”
He rummaged around in his pocket, pulling out what looked to be a credit card. He waved it in the air above him.
“Take it, Sheriff,” he said. “Go and git yourself something real nice, now.”
Daniel let go of George’s collar and leaned over him.
“You don’t even know what you just did, do you?”
George’s body convulsed with more high-pitched laughter.
“No, but I had a hell of a time doing it. I know that,” he said.
“You almost killed my wife, you bastard,” Daniel said, his voice thundering with rage.
George didn’t seem to get the message.
“Well, I’ll get you another one of those too if you want,” he said, still waving the card around in the air. “From what Meredith tells me, that woman of yours won’t be much to cry over anyhow.”
I felt my stomach drop.
I knew that was it.
The final straw.
Daniel wasn’t going to let that one go. George Drutman had pushed him too far. And now, now, the fool had sealed his own fate.
It was like watching a train speeding toward a bundle of dynamite on the tracks.
“Daniel, don’t—!” I shouted.
But it was too late.
Daniel had already slung his hand back and was half-way through a punch.
I closed my eyes, too scared to watch.
“Sheriff! Sheriff, don’t!”
When I opened my eyes again, Deputy Billy Jasper had jumped on Daniel’s back and was using all of his strength to keep the Sheriff from throwing a killer punch into the side of George’s face.
George Drutman just kept on laughing.
Chapter 6
I pulled back the heavy pine door, slipping into Geronimo Brewing Company just as the first misty orange light of the day stole across Main Street.
I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep since the early morning fiasco. Though I had tried, something about being nearly crushed to death by a madman in an RV made it hard to go back to bed. Sleep didn’t come easy to me even on the most peaceful of nights, let alone on ones when I’d come within inches of being roadkill.
The door shut behind me with a dull thud. The dimly lit brewpub smelled strongly of concrete, fresh paint, polyurethane, and sawdust. I paused for a moment, glancing around the empty pub at the new items, the way I often did when I walked through these doors. Today, there was a new row of barstools beneath the smooth juniper bar, and the beer menu was finally written up in jagged, familiar scrawl on a large chalkboard. There was something else new, too: a large, framed photo hanging above the bar that hadn’t been there the other day.
The corners of my lips turned up. The heaviness of the morning faded for a split second as I studied the faded picture.
The girl in the photo wasn’t much older than eight or nine. She was standing by a lake, holding up a fishing pole, a look of pure delight on her youthful face. The reason for that joy being the fat trout dangling on the end of her line.
I grinned, reaching up and touching the photo for a second, as if touching it would make the memory more vivid.
Her grandpa had never been prouder of her for reeling that beast of a fish in that morning.
Those carefree summer days out on the lake felt like a lifetime ago, if they ever existed at all. Before my mom died. Before my dad left. A time of complete blissful ignorance. When the very worst thing that could happen was that I didn’t come home with a fish in my basket. And even then, things would be okay, because Warren could easily fry us up his world-famous banana flapjacks if the fish weren’t biting.
I let out a nostalgic sigh.
In just a few years after the photo was taken, I’d learned that there were a lot worse things that could happen than fish being fickle.
A noise sounding from the brew house wrenched me from memory lane. I left the picture and the recollections behind, and headed toward the sound. I walked through the plastic dividing door, and into the industrial, concrete room behind the pub.
He was stooped over the large copper brew kettle with his back toward me. Tufts of white hair jutted out from the back of his head like cotton candy, just touching the collar of his flannel shirt. He jerked his arm into something, and a loud metal clang reverberated suddenly around the room.
“Blast it all to pish-poshery and then some!” he muttered under his breath, taking the wrench in his hand and hitting the kettle again.
I let out a laugh at the colorful use of his trademark phrase, and he jumped slightly.
He turned around, and his eyes brightened at seeing me. Then he placed his old hands on his old hips.
“Cinny Bee, you can’t be sneaking up on a man on his way to 90 like that. Don’t you know you could have killed me just now?”
I went over, placing an arm around his shoulder.
“Aw, c’mon,” I said. “Everybody knows you’re a young whipper snapper at heart, old man.”
He smiled slyly at that, deep, jagged crow’s feet pulling at the skin around his youthful eyes.
“Not these days,” he said. “Opening up this brewery’s making me old and making me old fast.”
He wiped at his forehead, as if to exaggerate the point.
“Takes a lot of work to get one of these up off the ground,” he said. “More than I thought, to be honest.”
He looked up at one of the brew tanks in the corner.
“I just pray that everything will be in place for the grand opening. Wouldn’t want to let the town down.”
“That’d be impossible,” I said.
There had been considerable buzz around the grand opening of Geronimo Brewing this Independence Day. It seemed that I couldn’t go to the grocery store or the gas station without hearing somebody talking about it, especially as we drew closer to the big event.
“Everyone loves you around here like you were their own grandfather, and you know it.”
“Not with the way I’ve been playing at poker nights lately,” he said, grinning. “I know of several fellas who would much rather I had stayed in Glasgow.”
“Aw, I’m sure they’re happy you’re home, too,
” I said. “Even when you’re on a winning streak.”
After spending the year studying beer in Scotland, my beloved grandfather had once again gone and surprised all of us in Christmas River. He’d come back home with a beer-brewing Scottish girlfriend 15 years his junior, gotten eloped, and decided to use his retirement savings to open up a brewpub in downtown Christmas River at his ripe old age.
While I was surprised as anybody else in this town by my grandfather’s actions, I also knew that it was just the kind of thing the old timer would do. And I, for one, wasn’t complaining about his decision: having Warren back home after him being away so long was a dream come true. I’d missed the old man something awful.
But Warren’s decision to open up his own brewpub hadn’t come without its challenges. It had taken him half a year to get to the point where he was ready to open. He’d leased a space and the apartment above it on Christmas River’s Main Street, just a couple of blocks away from my pie shop. The building had once been a fudge factory, and it had taken a lot of work to turn it into a brewery. The old man had done admirably, and the grand opening was all set for tomorrow.
“The place is looking great, Grandpa,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.
“Ya think?”
I nodded.
“I especially like that new photo above the bar.”
He grinned.
“Those were the days, weren’t they, Cinny?” he said. “Remember those long summers up at Sparks Lake? You caught that fish on your birthday. Remember that? How you named that trout Bartholomew and refused to let me kill him? You said he was too kingly to eat.”
“‘Course I remember,” I said. “That summer was pure magic.”
“It kind of was, wasn’t it?” he said.
I nodded, smiling at the memory.
You wouldn’t think it to be so simple, but sometimes all you needed to be happy in this world was a fishing pole and a bounty of fresh mountain air to go with it.