“Ya’ll make yourselves at home,” Hattie said. She shuffled back to the kitchen.
Nellie and I looked at each other, and I could see that she was as confused as I was. Something wasn’t right. This situation was too well put together.
“He doesn’t seem dangerous,” I whispered. “And he has teeth.”
“I don’t know where he got them,” Nellie whispered.
We both shrugged and sat down in wicker rocking chairs. The dog put his head back down on his paws and continued to watch us. We looked out at the bayou. We could see a stretch of open water and a small dock with a row boat tied up.
In a few minutes Hattie returned with a pitcher of sweet tea and a couple of glasses filled with ice cubes. “You take lemon in your tea?” she asked.
“Please Ma’am,” Nellie said. I nodded.
She disappeared again. She returned with lemon wedges in an ancient crockery bowl and two more glasses. Conway came in with a plastic container of Girl Scout cookies.
Nellie laughed. “Daddy Phlint, the Girl Scouts find you way out here?”
“If you ever get lost,” he said. “Just wait and them scouts will find you. But somebody brung us these from Paudy.” He sat down in a rocker. “Sorry they’re cold. If we don’t keep ‘em in the refrigerator, they grow stiff pretty quick.”
Hattie poured the tea in our glasses. We sat and rocked and sipped our tea for a minute.
“It’s good of you girls to come see us,” Conway said.
Nellie cleared her throat. “I reckon you’re wondering why we came out here.”
Conway took a cookie out of the container and looked at her. The dog lifted his head and looked at the cookie. Conway bit the cookie in half and chewed, and then put the rest of the cookie in his mouth. The dog put his head back down on his paws.
“It’s just that we’re trying to find out about somebody in Knockemstiff,” Nellie said, “somebody who was in Knockemstiff, who you might know.” She took a sip of her tea.
Conway took a sip of his tea.
“I saw you in town last week,” she said, “so I thought you might know something.” She sipped more tea. “About Annie Simmerson.”
Conway stopped chewing. “What about her?” he asked.
“You probably haven’t heard out here,” Nellie said, “but she was shot last week.”
Conway started chewing again. “That’s good,” he said.
“She was murdered,” I said.
“Glad to hear it,” he said evenly.
“So you know her? Knew her?” Nellie asked.
“Why are you asking me this, Nellie?”
“We’re worried about a murderer on the loose,” I answered. “And we’re also finding out that Annie was a bad person. So we’re trying to understand what’s going on.”
“She was a witch,” he said. “I knew her. Way out here, I knew what she was. I know people she was torturing.” He stood up and glared at us. I wondered if the knife was about to come out.
“Now you tell me something,” he said to us. “How is it that you people in town didn’t know what she was? You people who were around her every day? How is it you let her go on hurting people for so long?”
“We didn’t know, Daddy Phlint,” Nellie said. “She was nice to us.”
“Blast it!” He shouted, stomping the floor. “Nice?”
“Now mind your blood pressure, Conway,” Hattie said.
The dog got up and sidled out into the living room.
“It’s past now,” Hattie said. “Somebody dealt with the woman.”
“Well,” Conway said. He sat down in the rocker. Then he turned toward Nellie again. “I still don’t understand why you are talking to me. You say you saw me in town?”
“I saw you bump into Annie,” Nellie said. “With something long and heavy in your gunny sack.”
He continued to look at her quizzically.
“She said something to you, and you said something back. You seemed upset.”
“At the hardware store,” he said. “Yes. She said she knew about… something I was doing.”
He stopped and thought for a moment. “You think I had a rifle in my gunny sack. You think I shot her, don’t you?”
“We’re just trying to find out who knows what, Mr. Phlint,” I said. “We’re just trying to understand.”
“Well, understand that I had a length of steel pipe in my gunny sack. I was hoping Botowski Hardware could get me more pipe just like it.” He stood up again. “And understand that I never shot nobody who wasn’t cheating at cards.”
That’s when we heard a noise that sounded like an airplane landing out on the bayou and Rudy cruised up to the dock on an air boat.
Chapter 11
Rudy shut down the engine on the air boat, and the big propeller at the back slowed to a stop. He took off his ear muffs and goggles and looked up at the house. Nellie stood up and stared down at Rudy in disbelief. He began tying off the boat. Clearly he hadn’t seen Nellie or he would have restarted the air boat in reverse immediately.
“I thought you said he'd be staying at the shed overnight,” Conway said to Hattie.
“Reckon not,” she said.
Rudy picked up a knapsack and a rifle from the boat and stepped onto the dock. He walked to the side of the house and came up the back steps. Nellie met him at the top.
“Tickfaw, Rudy. You are on the Tickfaw River,” she said.
He looked up at her with his mouth open.
“Is this the Tickfaw River? This is not the Tickfaw River, Rudy. This is the Knockemstiff bayou. This is one hundred blessed miles from the Tickfaw.”
“Ah,” he said.
“Where are the boys, Rudy?”
“Ah, the boys are on the Tickfaw, Sugar.”
“The boys are a hundred miles away on the Tickfaw. In the swamp. By. Them. Selves. Is that right?”
“Well, they’re in a state park campground. They’re all right. They have free Wi-Fi.”
Nellie stood there for a moment. I knew she was picturing Dale, her youngest, wandering around the swamp with both alligators and crocodiles close behind him.
“Is someone looking after them, Rudy?”
“They’re fine, Sugar. They can look after themselves. I left them the four-ten.”
“Good, Rudy. The four-ten. They can defend themselves if they get attacked by a bunny rabbit.” She turned and slammed the heel of her hand against the side of the house.
“Come on inside,” Rudy said. He took her hand to see how much damage she’d done to it. She snatched it away from him.
“Let me explain,” he said. “I was saving it for a surprise.”
I thought he had managed to surprise her pretty well.
Rudy saw me as they came up onto the screened porch. His mouth dropped open slightly again, but he was just about surprised-out from seeing Nellie.
“Hey Savannah,” he said.
“Hey Rudy.”
“What’re you all doing out here?” he asked.
“Road trip,” I said.
“I see,” he said. He exchanged heys with Hattie and Conway.
Hattie said, “I would of called you, but I thought you were staying there.”
“Forgot my phone,” he said.
“You have a connection way out here?” I asked.
“No, no,” Rudy said. “It’s useless as a phone. I play games on it.”
Then how could Hattie call him, I wondered. Walkie-talkie? But Nellie was fuming and impatient to hear what Rudy thought he was doing. Rudy told his grandfather and Aunt Hattie that it was time to show us Barn 2.
The way he said Barn 2 made me think it was one of those places that once they show you, they have to shoot you. Something about staring down the barrel of Hattie’s 12-gauge had made me even less curious than I might normally have been. I’ve seen lots of barns. None of them was worth getting shot for.
Still, I didn’t feel like I was in a position to say “No, thank you.” Nellie was on Rudy�
�s heels as he went out the back door, demanding to know if this barn somehow justified abandoning their children by the Tickfaw River. Rudy would only say, “You’ll see, you’ll see.” He was leading us down to the dock.
“You know,” Hattie called out from the top of the steps. “Barn 2 will only make sense if you show them the original.”
“Yeah,” Rudy said after a pause. “Ask Granddaddy is it OK, and I’ll take them over there.”
“It’s his idea,” she said. “I’ll bring the keys. Meet you at the front door.”
We walked around to the front of the house, where Hattie was coming down the front steps. We walked past the rusted tractor, around a stand of pines, past several submarine-shaped propane tanks, and found ourselves at a corrugated tin barn that looked about as old and operational as the tractor hulk next to the house.
Hattie unlocked three locks on a small side door, and we went into an open barn containing a number of 55-gallon drums, two larger drum-shaped tanks and lots of metal tubing. But the most noticeable thing in the barn was the overwhelming odor of smelly feet.
“Do you have secret gym classes in here?” I asked.
Hattie didn’t even laugh. “That’s what it smells like, all right. You should smell it when it’s cooking.”
“Moonshine,” said Nellie, glaring at Rudy.
“I knew you’d get it,” Rudy said a little more brightly than seemed warranted.
He explained to me that one of Nellie’s uncles had been a moonshiner. Nellie had visited the still when she was a girl and grown up seeing the effects of “white liquor” on family members. When Rudy had found out after they were married, he knew it would be a good idea to keep Nellie away from his granddaddy’s place, so his granddaddy had gone back to behaving like his river-barge deckhand self to discourage family visits.
“Wait a minute,” Nellie said. “That scary-granddaddy thing was an act?”
At this Hattie did laugh. “I wish. Conway was always scary. He had wore out on it over the years. When you were around, he just let himself go more.”
“I had to come visit in secret,” Rudy said.
“So this is where you were always running off to,” Nellie said.
“Right,” Rudy said, as if it had just occurred to him that this could account for all his gallivanting.
He explained that he had helped his granddaddy work the still over the years. “All that time you thought I wasn’t working, I was applying myself to upgrade the product.”
“So I should be proud of you,” Nellie said. “For moonshining.”
Rudy let that comment bounce off and went on with his story. Before Prohibition, this still had been in town. In fact, the original name of the Knockemback Tavern had been the Knockemback Bar and Still. The Phlints had been known as local corn-whisky makers who were making a product a cut above the people like Nellie’s uncle who used old car radiators and whatnot in their stills.
“So I should be proud of you,” Nellie said, “for not giving people lead poisoning.”
Rudy let that comment bounce off as well. He was maintaining a remarkably cheerful attitude in the face of a bad situation. He went on with his story.
“Lately we’ve come up with some pretty good ideas. Granddaddy always thought that white liquor could be as good as any other whiskey if he could push it a little. He could never make his mind up whether he wanted to push it toward bourbon or gin, so he experimented with both ways. We couldn’t afford oak barrels, so bourbon seemed out of reach until I realized we could get the oak in another way.”
He was clearly dazzled by his own creativity here. Even Nellie was becoming interested in the story.
“We cut up live oak branches and let them dry next to the propane flame that heats the still. Then we put the dried pieces of oak in 55-gallon drums with the white liquor and let it age. It wasn’t bourbon, but it wasn’t half bad. We called it Oak Kool-Aid.”
At the same time, Rudy’s granddaddy had been trying out local plants to see if any of them gave the liquor an interesting taste. He would toss in handfuls of whatever bushes he found growing around the bayou. Gradually he decided that a half dozen of them made him happy. He and Rudy combined the bush-flavored liquor with Oak Kool-Aid, and a star was born: Bayou Shine.
“At last year’s American Alcohol Association conference, Bayou Shine won an Artisanal Spirits Star award.”
“Rudy, that spells ASS,” Nellie said.
Rudy grinned. “Yes, that’s an inside joke.”
“It’s not inside anything, Rudy. It’s hanging out there mooning anybody who cares to look. If it’s real.”
Hattie said, “It’s real, all right. We’re not just ‘shiners. We’re distillers of artisanal spirits. And you haven’t heard the best part.”
Rudy said he ought to show us the best part. He led us back toward the house, explaining that we needed to go for a little boat ride.
As we approached the front steps, Conway was coming down holding a mason jar half full of greenish-brown liquid. It looked like bayou water. “It’s bad luck to look at a still without trying the liquor,” he said.
“He made up that line a while back,” Hattie said, “so we’d have a good reason to take a sip every time we tended the still. Not that we were needing a good reason.”
She unscrewed the lid of the jar and handed it to Nellie, who sipped cautiously. Her eyebrows went up and she worked her mouth a little. She handed the jar to me. Was this really safe? I sipped anyway. My eyebrows went up. I worked my mouth a little. I’d never tasted anything like it, and it wasn’t half bad. We passed the jar around a couple of times. I was starting to think this might be the first hard liquor I’d tasted that I might like.
“Impressed?” Conway asked. “See, we folks out here on the bayou might be poor, but we rich in spirits.” He cackled at his well-practiced joke.
As we walked around to the dock, Rudy told us that they had been selling lots of Bayou Shine on the Internet. “Norris came up with a great description for our web site: Artisanal spirits aged in oak with 16 botanicals unique to the Louisiana bayou.” Norris was their middle boy.
“You have a web site?” Nellie asked.
“Norris and Aubrey manage that,” Rudy said, “and they’re running a great social media campaign. They must have a thousand different identities that drive traffic to our site.”
“I don’t have a clue what you just said except that you seem to be saying that our sons are participating in the commission of a felony. Selling moonshine is a felony, I think?”
“Felony, yes,” Rudy confirmed breezily, “but only temporarily. Here.” He handed Nellie and I ear muffs and goggles and started the air boat’s engine.
The boat had only one proper seat, so Nellie and I sat on flotation cushions and held on to cleats in the bottom of the boat. In a minute we were waving goodbye to Hattie and blasting across the surface of the bayou, the propeller making a tremendous noise even through the ear muffs.
We went around a stand of bald cypress and through a grassy area, where it was hard to see that there was enough water even for the flat-bottomed air boat. 15 minutes later we skirted another stand of cypress and arrived at a floating dock.
After walking through a grove of live oak, we came to a clearing and saw maybe 20 enormous mirrors surrounding a corrugated-tin building and a very, very bright light.
“Best to not look directly at it,” Rudy said. “The mirrors direct sunlight onto a tower on top of the barn. This was Aubrey’s idea, by the way.”
“This is a solar power generator?” Nellie asked.
“Sort of.”
We went around the mirrors and into the building, where we saw lots and lots of steel pipes and tanks, all spotless and new. The only sound was from electric motors, obviously driving pumps. The dirty-feet smell was powerful here. This was a second still.
Rudy looked up toward one end of the space and waved at someone in a glassed-in booth. “Cousin Roebuck,” he said. Roebuck waved back.
“Granddaddy let him know we were coming. He’s putting the new still through its paces.”
“This is a solar-powered still.” I said. It was amazing.
“Aubrey calls it the most technologically advanced moonshine still in America,” Rudy said. “Technically, that’s only true for another week. In about seven days, we should get our license. We’ll no longer be ‘shiners. We’ll be artisanal distillers.”
***
As we were driving home, Nellie said that this had been the weirdest day of her life. Possibly because it was so weird, she allowed Rudy to talk her into letting the boys stay on the Tickfaw for another few days, even though she really thought she should drive straight over there and fetch them home.
I agreed that the day had been exceedingly weird. And it all came about because we were looking for information about a murder. We were no closer to figuring that out, were we?
We were pretty sure that Rudy’s granddaddy hadn’t shot Annie, but Rudy had said something disturbing when Nellie had told him in a private moment why we came. Rudy had gotten agitated and pooh-poohed the idea that Conway could have murdered Annie.
“He’s just not that out of control these days,” Rudy had said. “I mean, she somehow knew what we were doing out here — that woman was a fiend, and she knew all kinds of things she used to torment people — but we didn’t have anything to do with getting rid of her.”
“It wasn’t entirely convincing,” Nellie said.
Chapter 12
After our weird day in the swamp, Nellie was delighted to help me weed the garden. It’s amazing how “down to earth” you can get when you weed a garden. It made the episode in the swamp seem more unreal than it had at the time. It also made Nellie feel that it was crazy to allow her boys to stay at the Tickfaw River by themselves.
I offered to drive with her to get them, but she said she could use the time to think. “Besides, you need to invite Connor for dinner,” she said. While we were weeding, I’d told her about my thought earlier in the week to invite him. That thought occurred to me a few minutes before I found Annie dead. That seemed like a long time ago.
A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 9
