Manic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 6) (3 page)

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.

We stood there in silence for a while, reminiscing about those days. Then Warren let out a long, beleaguered breath.

“What’s troubling you, Grandpa?” I asked, noticing the abrupt change in his mood.

He stroked his white beard and looked off into the distance the way he did when he was worried about something.

“Aw, nothing.”

“What is it?”

He looked around the brew house.

“Just a feeling, I guess. Like I might be a fool for doing something like this at my age,” he said. “Maybe I ought to be setting myself up on some nice tropical island instead of starting a brewery. I hear Kauai is nice. I’m no young buck, you know. And this line of work was made for young bucks.”

“That’s not tru—”

“Yes it is,” he said. “I’m an old man. But that’s okay. I never much minded being different from all the rest, Cinny Bee. I’m an eccentric. Always have been and always will be. But it’s just that sometimes I wonder if I’m not being foolish thinking I can do something like this at my advanced age.”

He looked down for a moment.

“I guess I’m just afraid of looking like a fool and falling flat on my face for the whole town to see. That’s all.”

Being his granddaughter, I sometimes forgot that Warren wasn’t invincible. He was human, just like the rest of us, and had his share of doubts. Though he rarely let such doubts show to anyone, least of all, to me.

“
Are you kidding?
” I said. “You know how much buzz you’ve got going around this place? People are just
dying
to see what kind of beer Warren and his young, pretty Scottish wife are cooking up. This place is going to be packed all summer, and you know it.”

“But what if I’m in over my head, Cinny Bee? What if I can’t make the cut?”

I looked into his eyes.

“You’ve got me,” I said. “And you’ve got Aileen. And you’ve got Daniel. Okay? Everything’s going to be just fine. I promise. Come hell or high water. Or plumbing problems, for that matter.”

I smiled again. But he just sighed and then pulled something from his pocket.

“I got another one of these today,” he said, pushing a folded-up piece of paper into my hand.

My heart sank as I unfolded it. My eyes scanned over the crude scrawl, that familiar feeling of anger and helplessness coursing through me as I read the cruel words:

“
Go Back to Scotland
,
Gramps
.”

I bit my lower lip and shook my head.

It had been the second menacing note of its kind to grace the brew house door in as many weeks.

“Where’d you find it?” I said.

“Taped to the front door,” Warren said, sighing. “Like always.”

“I’m going to have Daniel look into this,” I said, stuffing the note into the pocket of my jeans, feeling mad as a pack of killer bees.  

“Cin, it was probably just kids,” Warren said. “There’s no use in taking up the Sheriff’s time with any of it when—”

There was a sudden loud rap on the doorjamb separating the brew house from the pub, followed by the sound of footsteps.  

“Sorry to interrupt,” a deep voice boomed.

Chapter 7

It wasn’t lost on me that while the man had knocked, he had stepped into the brewery without really asking.

I wondered how long he’d been standing there, listening to our conversation.

“Why, howdy Rip,” Warren said, nodding in the tall man’s direction. “It’s awful early for you, isn’t it?”

“Aw, you know,” Rip Lawrence said. “Early bird catches the worm and all that. We were supposed to have an early delivery at the brew house this morning, but they’re behind schedule. Thought I would take the opportunity to come down here and see how progress was going.”

While Rip spoke, I sized him up.

Easily over 6 feet tall – Rip sported a thick ginger-colored beard, the way he’d always had, and he still had those shifty, hawk-like eyes that had a way of putting me on edge. Today he was wearing an oversized black hoody with the words “Back Alley Brewery” on it next to the logo of a tattooed 50s pin-up model. He finished the look off with a bright green elf’s hat – something that seemed wholly out of place, bizarre, and uncharacteristic.