“So they come for taxes while you come for corpses?”
Ethan’s jaw twitched, but he didn’t answer. His attention returned to the old tobacco barn. “That one looks fine. Any idea what it’s used for these days?”
“Squirrel nests and enormous cobwebs?”
Daisy said it with hope, not confidence. The last time she had been inside the Fox Hollow tobacco barn was well over five years ago. Then it had been filled with an eclectic collection of tired furniture, empty crates, and broken tools. There was a chance that they were all still there, but by her estimation it wasn’t a very good chance. She could tell what Ethan was thinking, and she thought the exact same thing. The corn was planted darn close to the barn. The barn was tucked quietly behind the house. The house wasn’t visible from the road. And the road was pretty much in the center of nowhere. That made it a really good place to do something illegal, like distill a big batch of unlicensed likker.
“I guess we better take a look,” Ethan said.
As he started toward the barn, he moved his hand toward his lower back. Daisy couldn’t see the gun, but she was confident enough that it was there. Ethan was ATF, after all. He needed to be prepared. Except she couldn’t figure out what on earth he was preparing for. There was no one around, probably not for miles. No vehicles. No voices. Only a few noisy goldfinches fighting over sunflower seeds.
When Daisy caught up to him, Ethan nodded at her, but he didn’t speak until just before they reached the edge of the corn.
“Daisy?” he asked in a low tone.
“Yes?”
“Is there honestly a difference between a creek and a brook?”
She almost laughed at the inanity of the question. “A brook is smaller than a creek, and a creek is smaller than a river.”
“So how do you know that the one over by the cemetery is a creek?”
“From the name. It’s called Frying Pan Creek.”
“And what about a stream? How does a stream fit in?”
“A stream—”
Daisy broke off, suddenly realizing what Ethan was doing. While she was busy prattling on about various bodies of water and their relative sizes, he was surreptitiously inspecting the tobacco barn. And he was speaking so softly that anyone who might be inside would only catch her voice. They could have heard the car engine, the slamming of the doors, even the rustling footsteps through the vegetation, but they would be expecting her and not him.
“You’re a sneaky—”
Ethan tried to silence her with a stiff motion across his throat.
“Cut it out,” she snapped. “I’m not playing cloak-and-daggers with you.”
“Daisy,” he said warningly.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Who exactly do you expect to be in there? A secret gang of bootleggers? We’re on an empty farm. How many times do I have to tell you Fred was a recluse? He lived alone. He ate alone. And he drank alone. So if there’s anything inside that barn, it’s alone.”
“Don’t!” Ethan exclaimed.
Not listening, Daisy marched to the door, found it wide open, and stepped boldly inside. When her eyes adjusted from the glaring sunshine to the shadowy light, she saw the equipment. A burnished copper pot still. Plastic buckets waiting for mash. Small white oak barrels used in aging. And rows of canning jars lined up clean and neat, like a battalion of soldiers ready to be called into battle. Then she saw Rick Balsam, leaning back in a rickety chair, boots up on a nail keg, jelly jar in hand, smirking at her.
CHAPTER
13
“Hey there, darlin’.”
Daisy was too astonished to do more than blink.
“I was wondering when you’d come,” Rick went on.
As he spoke, Ethan appeared in the doorway. He moved much more cautiously than Daisy, taking just one small step inside the barn and keeping his right palm steadily positioned at his lower back. If he was at all stunned to see a man lounging in front of him with his boots up on a nail keg and a jelly jar in his hand, he didn’t show it.
Rick’s smirk changed to a sneer. “I thought you’d probably have Sheriff Lowell with you, Daisy. Clearly I was wrong.”
“I…” she stammered.
She didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t expected to find him there. If the gate at the head of the driveway had been open, or Rick’s truck had been anywhere in sight, or he had ever even remotely implied that he was going to start spending time at Fox Hollow, she never would have come, especially not with Ethan Kinney.
“I…” she tried again. “I’m surprised to see you here.”
He gave her an arch look. “I don’t know why.”
Daisy bit her lip. He was right. She had no real reason to be surprised. Rick was certainly entitled to be there. It was his property. She was the one who didn’t belong on the land, not him.
Rick turned his attention to Ethan. “Who’s your friend, Daisy?”
She bit down harder. How should she introduce Ethan? Rick was bad enough with the law of Pittsylvania County. How in the world would he handle a federal agent? And in their neck of the woods, Ethan was the worst kind of federal agent.
It took her too long to answer, and Rick’s gaze darkened suspiciously.
“You do know the man standing next to you, don’t you, Daisy?” he said.
“I was about to ask her the same thing about you,” Ethan returned.
The two locked stares like a couple of rank bulls sizing each other up. If they had been at the diner or roadhouse with lots of people in a public setting, Daisy would have simply shrugged her shoulders and let them sort it out for themselves. But the tobacco barn was awfully isolated and she was the only potential keeper of the peace should the situation happen to take an ugly turn, which it often did when one of the Balsam boys was involved.
“Rick, this is Ethan Kinney. Ethan, Rick Balsam.”
They acknowledged each other with a slight inclination of the head. The appraising stares continued. Neither spoke.
“Where’s your brother?” Daisy asked, searching for a harmless subject that could break the tension.
“Bobby’s out trackin’ some critter,” Rick replied with an exaggerated drawl. “And he’s plannin’ on shootin’ it if he doesn’t like what he finds.”
It might have meant nothing, but Ethan took it as a rather unsubtle hint. His right arm shifted behind his back. Rick immediately dropped his own arm into an open sack of corn that was leaning against the side of his chair.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Daisy cried. She could guess what Rick had stuffed in his sack just as easily as she could guess what Ethan had tucked behind his back. “Let’s all relax. There’s no need to get testy.”
An uncomfortable silence followed. Without removing his arm from the corn sack, Rick lifted the jelly jar in his other hand to his lips and took a long, slow drink of the amber liquid it contained. When he had drained the last drop, he set the empty jar on the floor and gave a grim smile.
“You’re right, Daisy. There’s no need to get testy. At least not until you tell me what he’s doing here.”
“It’s none of your business what I’m doing here,” Ethan answered for her.
“The hell it ain’t!” Rick retorted.
“If you’ll just wait and let me explain…” Daisy began.
They didn’t listen to her.
“I don’t like your tone,” Ethan said sharply.
Rick snorted. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you like.”
“I’m only going to ask you this one time. Take your hand out of that bag and—”
“And what? What are you gonna do if I don’t?”
In one swift unbroken movement, Ethan pulled a black semiautomatic from the waistband of his slacks, threw back the slide, and pointed the barrel at Rick’s chest. If he expected to have the faster draw because of his training with the bureau, then he grossly underestimated the speed and skill of a man from the backwoods who had started handling a pistol the same day that he had learned h
ow to crawl. Before Ethan could even open his mouth to issue the first syllable of an ultimatum, Rick had his arm out of the sack and a revolver with a rosewood grip and cocked hammer directed straight at Ethan’s neck.
“Aw jeez,” Daisy muttered. This was exactly what she had been hoping to avoid.
Rick chuckled. “He thought he was quicker than me, Daisy.”
“Rick—”
He stopped her. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”
“You’re already doing something stupid. He’s the law.”
“The law?” Rick’s taut wrist twitched once, but he didn’t lower his gun. He examined Ethan closely. “You don’t look like one of Sheriff Lowell’s incompetent deputies. Maybe a yahoo from Danville? But I didn’t think they carried Glocks down there. That’s a nine millimeter, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Ethan confirmed.
“So I suppose that makes you federal,” Rick said with unconcealed disdain.
“I am,” Ethan confirmed again.
“Hell, Daisy,” Rick growled. “What on earth was going through that pretty head of yours? Bringing a federal out here.”
“Don’t blame me,” she scoffed. “I didn’t know you’d be around. And it wasn’t my idea anyway—”
“It was mine,” Ethan interjected coolly. “I asked her to take me to Chalk Level, and she did. Now I’m going to ask you to put down your weapon.”
“You first,” Rick countered.
“We just covered that I’m the law.”
“The law that’s trespassing. You got a warrant?”
“I don’t need a warrant. You’re not Frederick Dickerson.”
Rick paused. He looked at Daisy. “Does he understand old man Dickerson’s dead?”
She nodded. “That’s why he came.”
“So how does that change him trespassing?”
“It doesn’t,” she said. “He didn’t read his file. He doesn’t know that Fred never owned Fox Hollow and that you do.”
Startled, Ethan snapped his head toward her. “This guy owns this place?”
Daisy took a deep breath. “He does.”
Ethan frowned. “You could have mentioned that little fact when you introduced us.”
She shrugged. “You could have asked too. Or you could have read your file.” Secretly she was thrilled that he hadn’t read his file—or at least not much of it—because that meant he didn’t know anything about her or her family’s history with the bureau.
“I did ask,” Ethan reminded her crisply. “When we were driving up to the house and talking about how the property was two hundred acres. You never finished explaining why those acres weren’t valuable to Mr. Dickerson’s family. If you had, I would have known about Mr. Balsam.”
His memory was annoyingly good. Daisy frowned back at him. “Maybe I was trying to ease into it. Maybe I was trying to keep you and Mr. Balsam from popping each other full of holes.”
He replied with a dubious grunt, then he turned to Rick. “Okay, let me put it this way. Trespassing or not, I’ve got ten rounds. What do you have in that Ruger forty-four? Five, six, if it’s even fully loaded, which I doubt?”
Rick raised an amused eyebrow. “You could have fifty rounds. All I need is one. You wanna bet which one of us goes down first?”
Daisy’s purported excuse for not immediately setting forth every detail in regard to the ownership of Fox Hollow may have sounded flimsy to Ethan, but she honestly wasn’t interested in witnessing a gunfight between him and Rick. It was common knowledge throughout Pittsylvania County that Rick Balsam had a very itchy trigger finger, particularly when he had been drinking. So unless she wanted to call Sue Lowell and her ace paramedic team over at the Glade Hill Fire & Rescue Squad to come clean up the ensuing mess, Daisy realized that she had better scratch his itch fast.
“I thought you said you weren’t going to do anything stupid, Rick.”
He directed the amused eyebrow at her. “Are you trying to protect me, darlin’? That’s mighty sweet of you.”
“Of course I’m not trying to protect you. I’m trying to protect myself. You think I want to spend the rest of the day with the law, answering their hundreds of questions and filling out their endless forms because you couldn’t resist arguing about magazines and calibers with a federal agent? Well, I’ve got news for you, darlin’. I have other places I want to be and money I need to earn. So quit being such a dang fool.”
She thought the last part would anger Rick and he would do what he usually did when he got mad at her—mumble a choice expletive or two, then storm off and keep his distance for a while. But this time he didn’t. On the contrary, he didn’t even look irked. His eyebrow went right on being amused.
“If you’re not careful, Daisy,” he responded with a teasing laugh, “I may just start to believe you like me more than you want me to know.”
“Knock it off.” Her patience for his arrogant smugness had reached its end. “And for God’s sake, put down that gun! There’s been too much death on this land already. Do you really have to add to the body count?”
The eyebrow fell, Rick’s face paled as though an arctic wind had whipped across it, and he immediately set the revolver on the ground.
“Thank you.” Daisy said it so softly, it was almost a whisper. She had gone further than she intended, but it was the truth nonetheless. She couldn’t stomach another killing at Fox Hollow, accidental or intentional.
“I … I didn’t mean to…”
Although Rick didn’t finish the sentence, she understood. He may have been a snide, egotistical weasel, but even he had his limits. And her daddy was one of them.
“Ethan?” Daisy turned to him expectantly.
“All right.” Slowly and with obvious reluctance, Ethan lowered his weapon. But instead of putting it back in the waistband of his slacks, he kept the gun in his hand at his side. “If he makes one move—”
“He won’t,” she promised on Rick’s behalf.
“I won’t,” Rick agreed. Dropping his boots from the nail keg to the floor, he scooped up a trio of fresh jelly jars. “And now that we’re all friends”—he gave a little cough—“why don’t we have a drink?”
“I think you’ve had enough to drink,” Daisy remarked wryly.
“It’s never enough when it’s this good, darlin’.”
He reached toward a row of canning jars that were filled to the brim with amber liquid. After a brief hesitation, Rick selected one, unscrewed the metal lid, and poured a short thumb’s worth into each jelly jar. Keeping a jar for himself, he placed the other two on the nail keg for Daisy and Ethan.
“There you go. Don’t be shy now.”
Predictably, Ethan didn’t budge an inch. At first neither did Daisy, but then she changed her mind, walked over, and picked up a jar. She swirled its contents like a fine wine, debating whether or not to take a sip. She didn’t drink much ’shine. It was too strong, and she worked far too many hours on far too many days to drink much of anything at all, other than seriously caffeinated coffee. But she wanted to keep Rick calm and content, and she was genuinely curious. She had always known that the Balsam boys dabbled in wet goods, but she had never tasted any of their creations. And she was surprised by how appetizing and artisanal the whole operation appeared. Everything was clean and tidy. There wasn’t a cobweb, squirrel’s nest, or anything filthy and rotten in sight.
She took a good look. The whiskey was crystal clear, with not a tinge of cloudiness or speck of sediment. Then she took a sniff. There was the expected ethanol punch, followed by a slightly sweet aroma. Daisy couldn’t help being impressed. Before he died, Matt’s daddy used to play with corn and sugar and malt, but he always ended up with a colorless bubbly swill that smelled like a fetid cross between moldy onions and pig’s feet boiled in vinegar. Daisy raised the jar to her lips. No more than a thimbleful touched her tongue. It was warm and spicy, with the barest hint of honey. She swallowed. As the liquid flamed down her throat, an equally inte
nse chill raced up her spine. She suddenly remembered, and her eyes filled with horror.
“Rick?”
“Yes, Daisy?”
“Did you just poison me?”
CHAPTER
14
In an instant Ethan’s gun was back up and pointed at Rick’s chest. “What did you do?”
Rick ignored him and the Glock. Instead he stared at Daisy.
She put a hand to her throat. It was hot and tight. Her head swam, and her vision blurred. She grabbed the back of an empty chair to steady herself.
Ethan rushed forward. “What did you put in her drink?”
Rick remained silent.
“Tell me, goddamm it!” The barrel of Ethan’s gun was no more than a few inches from Rick’s heart. “Tell me right now or I’m going to blow a hole the size of a golf ball through your lung!”
Heedless of the threat, Rick rose from his seat.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Ethan shouted.
Daisy was going outside. The humid air inside the barn seemed suddenly stifling. She was having trouble catching her breath. She stumbled toward the open doorway.
“Is it the same thing you used to poison Frederick Dickerson?” Ethan bellowed at Rick.
Although Rick’s dark eyes had been following Daisy, they shifted abruptly to Ethan. “What the blazes are you talking about? I didn’t poison old man Dickerson!”
“Is it arsenic?” Ethan demanded.
Arsenic. Daisy’s stomach shook. Arsenic was both an herbicide and pesticide. It was often called the king of poisons, because it was able to kill just about everything, from plants to insects to animals to humans. It could be used on so many types of agriculture. Cotton, rye, barley, millet, rice. And corn. Some people didn’t work with it anymore. They considered it too toxic. It contaminated the groundwater and frequently destroyed unintended species. There was no question that arsenic was about as far from environmentally friendly as you could get—not to mention that it was classified as a human carcinogen—but that didn’t mean everyone shunned it. On the contrary, members of the old school couldn’t seem to get enough of the stuff, even showering it like lethal dewdrops on their lawns.
Murder and Moonshine: A Mystery Page 12