Killer Jam (A Dewberry Farm Mystery)

by Karen MacInerney

  “What was the feud over?” I asked.

  “Nettie’s family owned one of the two cotton gins in town; the Muellers owned the other. The Bacas—that’s Nettie’s maiden name—anyway, the Bacas’ mill outbid the Muellers on cotton, so everybody brought their crop to the Bacas. It got so that the Muellers didn’t have enough money to stay in business. You can guess who bought their land when they had to sell.”

  “The Bacas,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” She shook her head. “The Bacas always had their fingers in other pies, so they could afford to lose money on the cotton business for a few years, but cotton was all the Muellers had. Of course, once the Mueller gin folded, the Bacas paid rock bottom prices for cotton and made a killing. They’d gotten rid of the competition, you see.” She shook her head. “Lotta people still don’t like them for that reason alone.”

  “Wow.” These days, most of the fields around Buttercup were pasture, but I’d heard that fifty years ago, cotton had been king in this part of the world. “I can’t imagine a cotton gin in town.”

  “Oh, yes. There were two, right by the railroad tracks. One’s Fannie’s Antiques now, and the other is Ed’s Service Station. Right next to where Bessie Mae lives.”

  “What happened to the Muellers?”

  “Ursula’s head of the Daughters, of course. The family still has a small house in town and a couple of acres, but nothing like they used to.”

  “They’re still upset about it?”

  “Long memories here in Buttercup,” Myrtle said. “In fact, years ago, there was at least one murder people say came out of that feud. One of the Mueller brothers wound up dead by the train tracks, shot in the chest. Police never solved it—said it must have been a hobo—but everybody in town figures one of the Bacas did him in. Rumor had it he was sweet on one of the Baca girls, and her daddy didn’t like it.”

  “Why would they do that? They’d already run the Muellers out of business.”

  “There was a lot of bad blood back then,” she said. “I think the Muellers weren’t exactly quiet about what they thought of the Bacas—and the Kocureks, who weren’t any prize package, either.” She adjusted her poppy-covered blouse. “I don’t know the whole story. I just know those two families get along like oil and water.”

  I thought about the paper that had blown down from the hayloft last night. “Was the murder back in the 1940s?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said.

  “I found an old newspaper in the barn that must have come out right after it happened,” I said.

  “It was all in the papers. A lot of excitement for Buttercup.”

  “Was there ever even a suspect?” I asked, curious about this half-century-old crime.

  “I just don’t remember,” she said. “I do know it was never officially solved, though.”

  “Do you have the old papers on file?”

  “Sadly, no. I wish I had them on microfiche here, but you know how budgeting goes; we’re lucky we can afford the latest Darling Dahlia mysteries!”

  “Those are terrific, aren’t they?”

  “The latest one just came out,” she said, retrieving a hardback book from behind the counter. “Once we get you a library card, you can be the first to check it out.”

  “Thanks!” I said, glad for the mystery but disappointed about the lack of papers.

  “If you’re really interested in the murder, you might want to check out the archives at the Zephyr,” Myrtle suggested.

  “Good idea,” I said. If I had time, I might drop by. “I’ll bet Mandy is all in a tizzy about the latest series of events. Murder is something you just don’t expect around here.”

  “If you do go down to the Zephyr, you might want to tell Mandy I heard somebody else get into it with good ol’ Nettie the other day.”

  “Who?” I asked, my interest piqued.

  “That fellow from Austin—the one with the bus that runs on fry grease? They were yowlin’ like two tomcats down at the general store.”

  “What were they arguing about?”

  “I couldn’t catch all of it,” she said, “but he said something about sustainable something.”

  “Probably has issues with the way she keeps her land,” I said. “He’s an organic farmer.” And his land, like the Bees’ Knees, was right next to one of the Kocureks’ fields. “Still, that doesn’t sound like it would be enough to kill someone for,” I said.

  “Well, somebody has it in for the Kocureks lately.” Myrtle lowered her voice. “I’ve heard rumors someone was sabotaging their equipment. Pouring sugar in the gas tanks at night, disabling the tractors.”

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

  “A month or two,” she said.

  “Think it might be Nancy? Trying to keep them from spraying?”

  She shrugged. “Nobody knows. But there’s another thing, too.”

  “What?”

  “Nettie wasn’t too happy with one of the men her daughter was dating. Thought he was a gold digger.”

  “Wouldn’t her daughter be, like, fifty years old?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter to Nettie,” Myrtle said. “He’s a distant relative of the Mueller family, which makes it even worse.”

  “Like Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Only far less attractive,” Myrtle said. “And a lot older. Evidently they had a crush on each other in high school, and it took thirty-five years for either of them to do anything about it. Largely because of Nettie, I imagine.”

  “Love is a good thing at any age,” I said. I sure hoped so; I was thirty-seven and still waiting for my Prince Charming. My mind wandered to Tobias, and the companionable time we’d spent on the porch the day before, before I yanked it back to the library. Too early for romantic fantasies. I barely knew the man, after all. And besides, my future was looking a little shaky right now.

  “Poor Flora,” Myrtle said. “She’s spent her whole life living under her mother’s thumb. I don’t know how she’s going to figure out what to wear without her mother to tell her.”

  “Based on the outfit she had on at the festival, it might not be a bad thing,” I said. “Besides, it sounds like she’s been finding her way pretty well lately, if she’s defied her mother enough to take a suitor. She’s never been married?” I asked.

  “No, but from what I hear, things with Roger are getting pretty serious; he proposed a few weeks ago. Nettie wanted her daughter to get a prenup signed.”

  “Does the sheriff know about this?” I asked, feeling a swell of hope. Not that I wished Nettie’s daughter ill; it was just that someone in Buttercup had skewered Nettie, and at least I now had an idea of who might have wanted to.

  “Of course,” she said. “But what’s he going to do? Make his cousin—or his cousin’s fiancé—a suspect?” She snorted. “You haven’t been in Buttercup very long, have you?”

  “Still. There are lots of people who had a bone to pick with Nettie Kocurek. You just listed . . . what, a half dozen off the top of your head?”

  “And those are just the ones we know about,” Myrtle said. “That woman made a career out of steamrolling everyone around her. It’s a wonder no one stuck a fork in her twenty years ago.”

  It was early evening by the time I arrived home with two books on cheese making and three on jam, as well as a few new cozy mysteries by Ellery Adams and Susan Wittig Albert. Chuck greeted me at the door, licking my hand and then waddling back to the fridge, where he sat down with a hopeful look on his face. I fished out a cooked carrot slice, which he declined, then grabbed a few eggs from the refrigerator and a tub of the goat cheese Peter Swenson had given me in exchange for a candle at the last market. I headed outside and pulled a few spring onions and some baby spinach, then returned inside to toss them into a pan with a small knob of butter. While the veggies softened, I formed a few loose balls of goat cheese and laid them on a plate.

  I thought of all the librarian had told me as I whisked a few eggs together with a bit of wa
ter. Nettie wasn’t at all popular in town, it seemed. Nancy Shaw definitely had frustrations with her, but were wayward pesticides worth killing over? I knew she was protective of her bees. But how protective?

  Peter Swenson was another intriguing possibility, I reflected as I added more butter to the pan, swirling it as it melted. His farm adjoined some of Nettie’s property. What had they been arguing about? I wondered. He hadn’t mentioned any disagreement at the Founders’ Day Festival, though—and had struck me as too mild-mannered to attack an old lady with a bratwurst skewer. Still, I thought as I salted the wilted vegetables, you never could tell. Ted Bundy’s neighbors always said he “seemed like a nice guy.”

  And then there was Nettie’s daughter, Flora, and her fiancé, Roger Brubeck. Had Nettie pushed too far when she demanded Flora call it off with her beau? Had she perhaps threatened to take Flora out of the will unless she put her boyfriend aside? It sounded as if the daughter had been growing a backbone recently. And skewering someone with a bratwurst fork in the middle of a festival didn’t exactly smack of planning. More passion than premeditation—although along with the risk of being discovered, the murderer was at least assured a plethora of likely suspects, since the entire town was in attendance. Had Nettie and Flora had a showdown in the jam tent? Or had Roger confronted his fiancée’s mother and lost his temper?

  And why, of all the jam jars in the tent, did she have to pick up mine?

  I sighed and poured the eggs into the pan, pulling the edges back with a spatula as the yellow liquid began to turn custardy. If it was Flora who killed her mother, there was probably no way Rooster would ever arrest her; after all, she was his cousin.

  I poured the veggies into the pan with the eggs and laid the goat cheese rounds on top of them, then flipped the pan so that the omelet folded over and cooked it for another minute. As I eased the golden omelet onto a plate, another cool breeze wafted through the kitchen, raising goose bumps on my arm. The paper on the table flipped open with a rustle. Chuck barked once, then settled back down in front of the fridge.

  The paper had flipped open to the article on Thomas Mueller’s death.

  I set down my plate and took a deep breath. For a moment, I fancied I caught a whiff of my grandmother’s lavender scent in the air; then I glanced at the article again, shaking my head at my active imagination. Doubtless the air conditioning had just kicked on. And there was nothing unusual about an old paper being stuffed up in an old hayloft. Chuck had probably just barked at a noise.

  Even so, I found myself combing the article more carefully as I ate my omelet, which was a delicious mix of creamy and crisp, with the tang of goat cheese and a welcome touch of bitterness from the spinach. I smoothed the paper out as I read. Was there something relevant in the yellowed pages? It did, after all, involve the murder of one of the Bacas’ rivals: an odd coincidence, to be sure. Thomas Mueller, twenty-five years old, had been discovered next to the train tracks in Gruenwald, the next town on the rail line, with multiple contusions and a hole in his chest that appeared to have been caused by a shotgun. His wallet was missing. According to the article, the theory was that he had been robbed by a hobo or a migrant train worker. He was survived by parents, Tom and Uschi Mueller, and two sisters. The article gave facts, but little else. Had more been discovered later on?

  I forked up another bite of omelet, ignoring Chuck, who had now stationed himself at my feet, and chewed it thoughtfully. It was odd that there should be two unsolved murders—and that the paper detailing the first had been the only one left in the barn. Had my grandparents kept it for some reason?

  And if so, why?

  I finished my omelet and set the plate down for Chuck to lick—after all, a few smears of goat cheese couldn’t be that bad for him, I told myself—then grabbed a flashlight and headed out the screened door. I had assumed the paper was a random dropping from the past, but what if it weren’t? What if there was something else up there? Something that maybe linked my grandparents to Thomas Mueller’s murder?

  The thought made my stomach churn.

  The barn was silhouetted against the sky—a tapestry of peach, orange, and gold fading to a deep, almost robin’s egg–blue—and a warm breeze brought the scent of my grandmother’s roses to me on the evening air as I stepped outside. Chuck sniffed the air appreciatively, glad to be at my side. Normally, I’d leave him behind, but since Blossom wasn’t near the barn, I decided to take him with me for moral support.

  He trotted a few feet behind me, pausing to water a tuft of grass, then panted as he hurried to catch up. I was pleased that he showed no hesitation as I opened the barn door—in fact, he seemed to view the whole expedition as an olfactory field trip and immediately started snuffling around the perimeter. I, on the other hand, headed to the ladder leading to the hayloft. If there was some sort of eerie presence in the barn, my chubby poodle wasn’t picking up on it.

  With my confidence boosted slightly by Chuck’s nonchalance, I tucked the flashlight into the waistband of my shorts and climbed the ladder, then clambered onto the loft, where I shone the light into the dim corners of the space.

  From what I could see, nothing had changed since the last time I was up here. The pile of hay and mouse droppings still littered the floor, and the windows were still painted shut. The air was warm and still, making me wonder yet again where that stray breeze had come from. The boards creaked ominously as I walked; Chuck, evidently not noticing that I had adjourned to the upper level, growled. I hushed him gently and pushed the straw around with my feet, wondering where the newspaper could possibly have come from.

  Dust poofed up in clouds as I shifted hay with the toe of my boot. As I lifted one wad of hay, a small furry body skittered away, and I almost jumped out of the hayloft. I uncovered several more mice as I pushed through the straw—was the hay from 1940, too? I found myself wondering—and was about to give up when my toe hit something solid tucked up into a corner, between two studs.

  I cleared the straw away to reveal a metal lockbox. It was mint green, heavy, and about the size of a shoebox, with a keyhole at one end. I tried the lid, but it was locked. The box wasn’t empty, though; when I picked it up and shook it gently, I could hear something solid slide back and forth, hitting the metal sides. Unfortunately, the key was nowhere to be seen.

  I sifted through the dusty hay for another twenty minutes, searching for the key, until the sunlight seeping through the dirty, cobwebbed windows faded to nothing, and the narrow flashlight beam was pretty much the sole source of illumination. I pushed the last of the dry straw aside and sneezed. If it was here, it wasn’t where I was going to find it—at least not tonight.

  With the flashlight tucked into my shorts and the box under one arm, I climbed back down into the dimly lit barn to join Chuck, who was eyeing me with concern. Blossom snorted from just outside the barn; it must be milking time. The cow formerly known as #82 might be an escape artist, I thought to myself, but at least I didn’t have to track her down twice a day. She didn’t like to miss meals.

  I took the box and Chuck back to the house, then returned to the barn, where I pulled the string on the sixty-watt bulb that dangled from the tall ceiling and opened the door that led to the pasture. Blossom came readily, walking into her stall and nosing around, looking for cow chow.

  As I milked her, my thoughts kept turning to the hayloft. Who had left a lockbox up there—and what was in it? My mind turned to the breeze that had blown the newspaper down the day before. Almost as if the barn had wanted me to find it. Did the lockbox have something to do with the unsolved murder by the railroad tracks? How long had it been in the hayloft? And why had no one found it earlier?

  After finishing up with Blossom and turning her out to pasture, I turned off the light and lugged my bucket of milk to the house, where I poured it into sterilized jugs and stowed it in the refrigerator. The milking chores done, I turned my attention back to the box, which I’d left on the kitchen table.

  I attacked it with a
screwdriver, a hammer, and finally even a saw, but the box refused to give up its secrets. Frustrated, I stowed it on a shelf above the fridge and looked at the old newspaper once more, my eyes skimming over the article.

  A Mueller and a Kocurek dead, both at someone else’s hands. Were the two connected somehow?

  I’d have to ask Quinn about it tomorrow, I decided, and headed up the creaky stairs to the small bedroom with its homemade quilt and the nightstand my grandmother had painted blue thirty years ago.

  “I hear Rooster wasn’t impressed with our discovery,” I told Quinn the next morning as I handed her a carton of eggs. Now that the hens were laying, I was sharing the wealth with friends.

  “Nope,” she said. “But I did convince him to go and collect the jam jar and the pin.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I suggested the paper might like to hear about the evidence the sheriff had missed,” she said with a slight shrug as she put the eggs into the refrigerator.

  “I’ll bet that went over well.”

  “At least he collected the evidence,” she said. “Whether or not he’ll do anything with it is something else again.”

  “Does he have any suspects other than me?” I asked.

  “Not that I’ve heard,” Quinn said. Her curly hair was tied up in a frizzy knot on top of her head today, and the kitchen smelled deliciously of cinnamon, yeast, and maple syrup. She wore a yellow checked shirt and denim shorts that made her look like she was sixteen. “I heard he stopped by your place, but Dr. Brandt scared him off.”

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “Small town,” she said, measuring confectioner’s sugar into a large mixing bowl and glancing up at me. “I also heard you owe Rooster a new pair of pants.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Chuck kind of went crazy—like Rooster was a threat to me. I’ve never seen him act like that around anyone else.”

  “His instinct’s good,” Quinn said. “Rooster always gave me the creeps in high school.” She shivered. “When I told him I wouldn’t go to the prom, he started spreading nasty rumors about me. And his wife sure does end up with a lot of bruises.” She gave me a pointed look.