Wicked Harvest

by Karen MacInerney

  I exchanged glances with Linda, then stood up and hurried over to Simon. His eyes fixed on his brother as I reached him. The blood drained from his face, and his mouth went slack. "No..."

  I took his arm and tried to turn him away, but he was rooted to the spot. "Is he..."

  "I'm afraid so," I said. "Come on. Let's find somewhere to sit down..."

  "No," he said. "No!" Before I could stop him, he wrenched free and ran over to his brother, pretty much throwing himself across him. "He can't be gone. Can't be." He stood up and looked around wildly. "Who did this? Who?" He ran a hand through his short hair, then said, "Max. It must have been Max Pfeiffer. Jealous of our success. He wanted the name back, so he figured..."

  "Don't you worry 'bout who did in your brother," Rooster said, hitching up his cargo shorts. "You leave that to the police."

  Simon blinked at Rooster. "You mean you?" he asked.

  "I'm the sheriff of Fayette County," Rooster said, his reddish wattle jiggling as he nodded.

  "You've got to be kidding me," Simon said, voicing what just about everybody I knew had thought at one time or another. "Aren't you the idiot who shot himself in the foot?"

  As he spoke, Rooster’s wife Lacey appeared, looking harried. She was a bright-eyed woman with dark hair and (rumor had it) an increasingly limited supply of patience with her dullard husband. She'd kicked him out a while back, and although they were together again, I'd heard a rumor that some of the locals were running a pool on how long it would be before she showed him the door again.

  Evidently she hadn't heard what Simon said, because she launched right into what she had to say. "Rooster, you're supposed to be off-duty today, remember? We're all waitin' for you."

  "I'm a little busy here, darlin'," he said, the words laced with sarcasm. He was staring at Simon with narrowed eyes... he didn't even turn to glance at his wife.

  "You're always busy," she complained. "The kids want funnel cake..." She broke off mid-sentence when she saw Felix lying on the ground. Her hands went to her face. "Oh. Oh, my," she breathed, then turned and plunged back into the crowd.

  Once Lacey had disappeared, Rooster stalked toward Simon, something about his gait reminding me of a little boy trying to be John Wayne. He stopped about just in front of him, rocking up on his toes to give him height (he still fell short by about six inches) and shoved a chubby finger in the younger man's face. "You watch yourself, boy," he hissed. "I'll give you a pass this time, since you're new in town, but one more word outta you..."

  "Sheriff Kocurek," Tobias said in a warning voice. Tobias's father had been a cop, and a good one. "That sounds almost like a threat."

  Rooster's head swiveled, and his beady eyes fixed on Tobias. The portly sheriff opened his mouth to say something, then evidently reconsidered. Instead, he turned back to Simon and jabbed a finger at the body. "That over there was your brother."

  The soul of sensitivity, I thought, cringing. Poor Simon.

  Simon nodded, his handsome face the color of milk, and turned away from his brother's remains, as if he couldn't bear to look at them. I totally understood. I wasn't even related to the man, and I couldn't bear to look at them, either.

  "I hear you two had a dust-up earlier today," Rooster said in a low, menacing voice. "You might start thinkin' about where you've been the past few hours, and who can vouch for you. I don't mind sayin', right now it doesn't look too good for you."

  Simon swallowed. Rooster might be a bad cop, but he wasn't wrong, and Simon grasped that immediately. "I would never harm my brother," he said in a tight, calm voice, the earlier near-hysteria now completely under control. "We loved each other."

  "Don't mix business and family, isn't that the sayin'?" Rooster said. Then he rocked back on his heels and smirked. "Maybe you shoulda listened."

  Simon took a step back, looking as if Rooster had slapped him. Then he seemed to pull himself together. "I'm happy to answer any questions you have, but this is a crime scene. Shouldn't you be doing something to secure it?"

  Rooster made a sour face, looking like he'd bitten into an overcured dill pickle.

  "Everybody step back," he said. "I'm closin' these doors. But y'all don't go anywhere; I've got questions to ask."

  "All of us?" asked a woman a little behind him, who had been watching the proceedings wide-eyed. "How are you going to do that?"

  "Just... just don't go home until we tell you," he said lamely, and then busied himself on his phone.

  "Are you okay?" I asked Simon in a low voice. He was staring at the closed double doors, looking haunted.

  "No," he said. "I just... we've been together our whole lives." He turned to me. "What am I going to do now that he's gone?"

  "It'll be okay," I reassured him. "Let's go get you a drink of water, get you inside where it's quieter." As I spoke, the wail of sirens pierced the air. I glanced over at Teena.

  "It's repeating," she said, quite loudly. Then she closed her eyes again.

  "Does she have a history of seizures?" Linda asked me quietly.

  "Not that I know of," I said. "We might want to get in touch with her parents, though. I've got their number on my phone; I'll give them a call in a minute."

  "Thanks," she said. "I'm sure they'll want to know."

  As I walked Simon over to the main office building, which was a Texas-style farmhouse with a long, wide porch a ways back from the brewhouse, he started rambling again. "I've got to find out who did this. I thought we were past everything, and now this. What will I tell Mother?"

  "Past everything?" I asked as we stepped up onto the porch. "How so?"

  He jerked his head around. "Did I say that? I just meant... all that work to get this place going," he said hurriedly. "Getting the loan, figuring out the distribution, doing the marketing... this dream took a lot of hard work."

  "I understand," I said. "I struggle with some of the same things myself. Can I go in and get you that glass of water?"

  "No... I'm fine," he said, looking anything but. "I'm... I'm just going to sit down for a minute. Then I've got to make sure everything's going okay... since I'm now the only one running the place." He looked miserable.

  "Are you sure?"

  "I'm sure," he said. "This whole thing has been a disaster."

  "The festival is going really well," I countered. "It's just there was a terrible accident."

  "Accident?" he said, looking at me. "That's not what Rooster thinks. And he thinks I'm the one who killed my own brother."

  I couldn't argue with him. "It'll all work out, I'm sure," I reassured him, although I did wonder. Felix had evidently been standing in the way of Simon expanding the business.

  "Right," he said, shrugging me off. "I've got to go make sure things are progressing," he said. "Thanks for the help... now, if you'll excuse me..."

  "Of course," I said, and watched him hurry across the field toward the festival tents. As I stood on the porch, I noticed a stack of envelopes on a table by the door. The top one was addressed to the brewery. "NOTICE OF LATE PAYMENT." It was from a mortgage company.

  I thought about the argument I'd overheard between Simon and his brother earlier in the day. Felix was against growing the business... but it looked like growing the business might the only choice the brothers had had if they wanted to keep the brewery.

  Had Simon been desperate enough to avoid bankruptcy that he'd eliminated the only thing standing in his way?

  Even if it was his own brother?

  5

  The tragedy had put a damper on the festive air, but there was plenty of gossip floating around the festival grounds as I walked through them looking for Quinn's booth. Even with the oompah band playing, I could still hear what people were saying. I'd called Teena's parents, but gotten voicemails both times; I'd asked them to call me as soon as possible, and made sure my ringer was on. Now, I was keeping an ear out for what the locals thought of the situation.

  "I heard it was a forklift," one woman said as she walked by me, her mouth h
alf full of bratwurst.

  "He was in the beer barrel when they opened it," another said.

  "I heard it was a skeleton in his closet that came back to haunt him," someone else commented. By the time I found Quinn counting out squares of bee-sting cake and boxing up gingerbread hearts for her customers, I'd heard at least a half a dozen accounts of how Felix had died. None of them were correct.

  "Oh my gosh!" Quinn said as she finished doling out another two of the honey-and-cream-laced bee-sting—or Bienenstich, as they were known in German—squares to hungry customers. "Everyone's flocking over here for comfort food after what happened. I hear Felix keeled over with a knife in his back and Teena had some kind of epileptic fit!"

  "Not exactly," I said.

  "What happened, then?" she asked, taking off her gloves and handing over the reins to one of her helpers for a few minutes.

  I gave her the rundown on what had happened, including Rooster's comments.

  "So Rooster's already decided Simon is guilty."

  "Honestly, he has a point. He and Felix did have an argument earlier today," I said. "And I think the brewery may be in some financial straits." I told her what I'd found on the porch of the house.

  "Ouch," she said. "Starting up a business is expensive. I'll bet Simon was banking on that distributorship to get things rolling. I wonder if the deal is scuttled after today? I mean, first that bad barrel of beer at the reveal, and now this..."

  "It's not good," she said. "And I know at least three reporters were here to do coverage; one of the TV stations was supposed to come out, too."

  "Well, they'll certainly be getting publicity."

  "But not quite the kind they were looking for, I'm afraid," Quinn said. "On the plus side, it's been good for the comfort food trade. Speaking of which, do you think Bubba has any more bratwurst?"

  "Let's go check," I said. "I could use another one myself."

  "And a glass of that Bluff lager," she said. "That stuff is just delicious."

  "I know. They make great beer, don't they?" I wasn't much of a beer drinker, but Simon and Felix had some kind of brewing magic; their stuff was amazing.

  "They've been trying to make it with local barley," she said.

  "I heard that. And I also heard it didn't work out."

  "Well, there was a bit of a brouhaha—no pun intended—with Adriana Janacek not too long ago." Adriana, I knew, came from a local farming family and had land a bit north of town. "She contracted with the brewery to grow a crop of barley and sell it to them."

  "Someone said something about it not working out, and Adriana being bankrupted?"

  "Maybe not bankrupted," Quinn said, "but not in great shape. It turns out the barley wasn't up to snuff. The brewery wouldn't buy it, so Adriana had to sell it for animal feed. She only got pennies on the dollars they expected."

  "Ouch," I said, wincing.

  "Yeah. She dedicated three-quarters of the farm to the barley crop."

  "That's a big risk," I said.

  "And a bad one. I heard she was talking about suing the brewery for breach of contract."

  "Everyone's talking about lawsuits, it seems. But if the crop was spoiled, the brewery would be paying for something they couldn't use," I pointed out, and let out a sigh. "That's the trouble with farming. Last week my squash and melon crops looked like something out of Modern Farmer Now the whole field looks like a worm farm."

  "Oh, no," Quinn said. "Are you going to be okay?"

  "It's a hit, but that's why I diversify," I said with a shrug. "The peaches are already harvested, the dewberries will be back every spring, and my summer greens have done well this year. If I get tomato blight on the fall crop, that would be a tragedy, but let's not think about that."

  "I'm sure you won't," she said. "And at least no one's died on the farm, right?"

  "At least not yet," I said, half-jokingly. "But now that you mention it, I think someone vandalized the Ulrich house."

  "What do you mean?"

  "They cut some of the cables Ed was using to brace the house. It almost fell down on Nick Schmidt's head today when he was in there working."

  "That's terrible!" she said. "Who would do something like that?"

  "I don't know," I said. "It makes me nervous to think someone was on my property messing with things and I didn't know about it. What if they decided to hurt my animals?"

  "Chuck didn't bark or anything?"

  "No," I said. "He used to bark every time a pecan dropped, but I think he's gotten so used to the cows and goats making noise that he's oblivious to anything short of a meteor strike. I sleep better because of it—usually—but it was kind of nice knowing he was on guard."

  "Particularly with someone sneaking around and sabotaging your property," Quinn said as we got into line for a bratwurst, right behind Flora Kocurek and her boyfriend, Gus.

  "Oh, Lucy! I heard you were there when they found Felix!" Flora gushed as she turned and spotted me.

  "I was," I confirmed.

  "Was he really in a beer barrel?"

  "No," I said.

  "I heard someone did him in with a pitchfork," Gus reported.

  "Not that, either," I said. "There was an accident; something fell on him."

  "Whatever it was must have weighed a ton," Flora said. "And I heard Teena Marburger went to the hospital with an epileptic fit."

  "I don't think it was epilepsy. And I don't know if she went to the hospital," I said. Which reminded me, I needed to check on her. "She fainted, but she seemed to be coming to."

  "I also heard she said something about a haunting!"

  "Uh, not that I heard," I said. She'd said that cryptic stuff about something repeating, but that wasn't out of the ordinary for Teena, who was psychic. Or for someone recovering from a faint. What, I wondered briefly, did "It's repeating" mean, anyway?

  "It's so sad, but also kind of exciting," Flora continued. "I mean, here we are with all these beers and pretzels and the oompah band and the decorations and all, feeling like we're living in Germany, and then there's a murder."

  "Who said it was murder?"

  "Well, somebody had to drop a heavy thing on him," she said. "Unless you think it was suicide?"

  "How would you manage to drop something on your own head?" Gus asked.

  "Good point. Murder, then," Flora said, playing with the blue ribbons in her hair. "His brother must just be so upset. But I hear they weren't getting along anyway."

  Flora seemed rather hooked into the gossip circuit. I was impressed. "No?" I replied. "What did you hear?"

  "I heard that Felix wanted to keep everything small, but Simon was like, 'Go big or go home.' And that he said he wasn't going to let Felix stand in the way of making Sweetwater Brewery a success."

  That was kind of what I'd gathered from what the conversation I'd overheard, too. That Flora knew it too wasn't good news for Simon. "Where did you hear that?"

  "Oh, everybody knows it," Flora said, waving a beringed hand.

  "What else have you heard?"

  "Well, I know about the whole barley fiasco. Adriana is fit to be tied. And then there's that talk about Felix's shady past."

  My ears perked up. "What shady past?"

  "Word is he was into some trouble before his brother invited him to go into business. If it weren't for Simon, Felix would be out on the street."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  Flora shrugged. "I don't know, but I got the impression he'd been doing something dodgy."

  "I haven't heard anything about that," I said. Not that that was saying much. I hadn't heard anything about all the gossip she'd relayed until an hour earlier. And it seemed like whatever her information source was, it was valid. "Where are you getting all of this stuff, anyway?" she said.

  "Oh, Gus and I have been hanging out at the Hitching Post lately," she said, referring to the bar on the town square. "The only things to do there are drink and talk, so there's plenty of both."

  "I haven't been there in a while... m
aybe Tobias and I need to go get a drink there sometime."

  "We go most nights," Flora said, then she added almost conspiratorially, "It's been so fun; after all those years cooped up at home, I finally have friends, it feels like."

  "I'm so happy for you," I told her. And I meant it. "If you hear anything else, will you be sure to let me know?"

  "Of course," she said. "Are you investigating?"

  "No," I said. "I'm just... I'm worried that Rooster might put the wrong person in jail."

  "So it was foul play," she breathed.

  "I don't know if it was or not," I said, although something told me it was. "But he's already giving Simon a hard time about it. There's a chance he'll leap to a conclusion whether it's the right one or not."

  "The easy way out," she said. "I heard he's trying to work less so he can be with his wife more."

  Was work the problem? I wondered. Or hanging out with his buddies hunting or fishing? "Lacey sure wasn't happy with him for responding to a call today, that's for sure," I said.

  "So he's more likely to go for a quick solution," Gus said. He'd been listening intently.

  "Exactly," I said. "So if you hear anything..."

  "We'll let you know," Flora promised.

  * * *

  Teena, as it turned out, was fine; she had a small bump on her head, but other than that, she seemed unscathed. She'd declined a trip to the emergency room, instead promising to visit her primary care physician the next day. As the festival-goers poured out of the front gate, a few employees handed out coupons for free beer. I wasn't sure how good that would be for business, unfortunately. If the Gustafson brothers really were behind on their mortgage, giving away more free product wouldn't help. Unless Felix had had a life insurance policy, I thought...

  I pushed the thought away. Until I heard otherwise, what had happened to Felix was an accident.

  Except it wasn't.

  Tobias looked grim when I saw him not far from the brewhouse.

  "Any news?" I asked.

  "It's looking like murder," he told me.