Killer Jam (A Dewberry Farm Mystery) Read online

  “Nettie Kocurek,” he said, lifting the camera and snapping another shot. Nettie Kocurek was the woman who had sold me the property several months ago.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Why drill now?” I asked. “She owned the place for fifteen years.”

  “You’ll have to ask her that,” he said, taking a photo of the pasture, where Blossom was munching on grass.

  “Believe me, I will,” I said. “But in the meantime, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  He took one more picture, then turned off the camera. “I’m done for now anyway. We’ll have a thumper truck later this week, likely.”

  “A thumper truck?”

  He nodded. “Get a read on what’s underneath. Shouldn’t take more than a day or two.” He tipped an imaginary hat before turning back to the truck. “Thanks for your time, ma’am.”

  Chuck didn’t stop growling until the truck had turned out of our driveway and headed back toward town, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.

  “He says he’s sending a thumper truck out this week,” I said, rinsing several pints of dewberries in a colander as my friend, Quinn Sloane, wrestled a mound of bread dough onto a floured marble board. Despite the interruption, I’d picked about twenty pints that morning and taken them to the Blue Onion. Quinn had snagged a few pints to add to her fruit salads—she often bought my extra produce for the cafe, which had gone a long way toward helping me make ends meet—and I was processing the rest. I could have made jam at home, but after the visit that morning, I needed company. I had spent many afternoons in Quinn’s kitchen, enjoying the breeze that wafted through the red-checked curtains and the delicious smells emanating from her oven.

  “A thumper truck?” Quinn dropped the dough with a thwack. “What the heck’s a thumper truck?”

  “I tried Googling it, but the wireless is down,” I said, pouring the berries into a large pot. The signal, which came from a transmitter located at the top of Buttercup’s water tower, was notoriously spotty. “Apparently it has to do with oil exploration.”

  “Not fracking, though,” she said.

  “Fracking?”

  “That was a big deal in town a few months back. Some company called Frac-Tex came into town trying to lease everybody’s mineral rights to get to the natural gas.” She reached for a canister of flour. “They were negotiating with half a dozen farmers to agree to terms before the mayor found out and got involved. Thing is, fracking on one property can really mess with the water for everyone else—and water’s a big deal in this part of the world.”

  I knew water was precious here; although it had been a wet spring, Texas had been teetering on the edge of a drought the last few years. “I read about fracking a few months ago. It uses a lot of water, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded. “And the chemicals they pump down mess with everybody’s wells. It can kill grass, cattle . . . pretty scary stuff. That’s why the town passed a resolution prohibiting leasing to companies for fracking.”

  “But not putting in oil wells?”

  She shook her head. “Unfortunately not,” Quinn said, the flour on the tip of her nose belying the serious look in her brown eyes. Topping out at just over five feet, she wore a white apron over jeans and a T-shirt; this afternoon, her curly red hair was only slightly tamed by a pink plastic headband and gave her a few extra inches. “I’m not surprised to hear she’s going after your land, though; that woman is mean as a snake.”

  “Mrs. Kocurek? You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said as I measured out sugar and turned the burner on. I’d sterilized the jars in the dishwasher at home and busied myself laying them out on the counter as the berries began to cook. The yield for twenty pints of berries should be about ten pints of jam, so I’d prepared eleven, just in case my count was wrong. I’d leave one for Quinn and one for Bessie Mae Jurecka, who lived down by the railroad tracks in a small cottage that used to be a way station for railroad workers. According to Quinn, she’d been born “not quite right.” Now, in her early sixties, she spent her days in a rocking chair on the old depot platform, waving at the engineers and keeping a tally of them on the steno notepads supplied by Edna Orzak of the Red and White Grocery. When Bessie Mae had lost her parents ten years ago, the town took up where they left off, helping keep her lights on and the small dorm-style fridge Alfie Kramer had given her filled with goodies. The Blue Onion was on Bessie Mae’s regular rounds; Quinn always passed on the tidbits I brought from the farm along with her day-old baked goods.

  “Don’t let Nettie Kocurek’s southern charm fool you,” Quinn said, a note of warning in her voice.

  “She looks like she couldn’t hurt a fly.” When I met her at the closing, Mrs. Kocurek had been the incarnation of a sweet little southern lady; her white hair had been teased into a spun-sugar confection around her powdered face, and she was as soft-spoken and gracious as any woman I’d met. I couldn’t imagine her having a mean bone in her body.

  “Trust me,” Quinn said. “You haven’t tangled with her yet.”

  “What does she do if she doesn’t like you?” I asked as I filled a canning pot with water and put it on the back of the range. “Poison your tea?” I found it hard to imagine her doing anything worse than a “Bless your heart” accompanied by a pitying look.

  “She had a luncheon here with the Moravian Daughters of Buttercup six months ago, and then decided she’d gotten food poisoning from the chicken salad . . . even though the rest of the ladies ate the same thing and felt fine.” Quinn buttered loaf pans as she spoke.

  “That doesn’t sound too awful,” I said.

  My friend gave me a look. “She called the paper and insisted they run an article on it, and called the health department and had them do a surprise inspection. She then told everyone she knew to boycott the restaurant.”

  “Maybe she’s a hypochondriac,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Quinn said, “but it happened the week after the paper asked me what I thought about raising funds to put a statue of her granddaddy in the middle of town square.”

  “What did you tell the paper?”

  “I said I thought the money would be better spent on the library.”

  “Ah.” I gave the berries and sugar a stir. This was not welcoming news—not at all. “Still. Surely there’s some mistake with the mineral rights,” I said, trying to push down the uneasiness that was welling inside me. “I’ll go talk with her today.”

  “She’s not the person you need to talk to,” Quinn said. “I’d call a lawyer if I were you.”

  “Lawyers are expensive,” I said, looking at the row of jars. If the jam set, it would net me maybe fifty dollars. Twenty minutes worth of legal fees. I’d have to make a lot of jam to pay for an ongoing legal battle.

  She looked up at me. “Cheaper than having an oil well in your backyard.”

  I pulled two vanilla beans from the jar I’d brought from the farmhouse, trying to ignore the uneasiness that was lodging in my stomach. “What I don’t understand is, if it is Mrs. Kocurek who ordered the drilling—which I still haven’t confirmed—why do it now?” I asked, slicing one of the beans in half. “That property’s been sitting there unused for fifteen years.”

  “She sells the property before destroying the property value this way,” Quinn said, sprinkling more flour on the dough. “Probably why she decided to sell in the first place. You know, she and your grandfather were an item when they were in high school.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. I couldn’t imagine Grandpa with anyone other than Grandma Vogel.

  “Nope. They were homecoming king and queen, but your grandpa dumped her soon after the big game.” She looked up at me. “For your grandmother.”

  “Ouch!”

  “Which may be the real reason she’s now drilling on your land,” Quinn suggested.

  “You really think she’d hold a grudge over . . . what, sixty years?” I scraped the seeds from the second bean and dropped both beans and their seeds into the pot.

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p; “Can’t think why she wouldn’t,” my friend said, leaning into the dough as she spoke. “She ended up marrying the biggest jerk in town, but I think she always carried a torch for your grandfather.”

  I thought of my grandfather, with his engaging smile, his slow drawl, and the lump in his cheek from the tobacco he always chewed. I’d never thought of him as a heartbreaker before. “What made her husband such a jerk?” I asked.

  “Apparently he ran around on her for twenty years before he died of a cardiac arrest.” She cocked a dark eyebrow at me. “There were rumors that he was in someone else’s bed at the time.”

  I sucked in my breath. “Oof.”

  She nodded. “Nettie Kocurek got the ranch when he bought the farm, so to speak, and she’s a smart businesswoman. Turned it into something of an empire; she’s known as a hard bargainer. She was head of the chamber of commerce for ten years.” Quinn was a font of local information; she had grown up in Buttercup, but moved away after high school and studied English at the University of Houston before marrying Jed Stadtler, her ex. Working in restaurants to put herself through school had taught her to cook—and to run a restaurant—so when she left her husband, she started the Blue Onion Tea Shop and Cafe.

  “Why did she let the farm go derelict for so long?” I asked.

  “Good question,” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. If she knew you were Elsa Vogel’s granddaughter, she never would have sold it to you.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m sure of it,” she said, starting to divide the dough into equal parts and placing them in pans. Most of the loaves would be used for the sandwiches in the cafe, I knew, but she also sold a few at the front—and occasionally slipped an extra to me. “What are you selling at the Founders’ Day Festival, by the way?” she asked.

  “I’m going to cut and wrap a few batches of soap tonight, and I’m hoping to pick up some beeswax from the Bees’ Knees to make some more candles.” Nancy Shaw supplied me with honey and beeswax at wholesale prices and had promised to help me set up hives of my own in the next year. “I’ve got plenty of lettuce, broccoli, and radishes, and I’m hoping to put together some larkspur bouquets, too,” I said.

  “Sounds like things are humming along,” she said.

  “The plan seems to be working,” I said. I’d spent months putting together a business plan, consulting with several other small farmers and listening to their advice, and the hard work had paid off so far. “But this oil drilling is the last thing I need; I’m just barely making it by as it is. How can I farm around an oil well?”

  “It’ll all work out,” Quinn said, giving me an encouraging smile that showed her chipped front tooth. I’d thought it was an endearing flaw until I learned the history behind it; it was a souvenir of the time her ex-husband, Jed, slammed her into a wall. “You’ve got to fight Nettie Kocurek, of course,” she continued, pushing a stray strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, “but it takes time to get a farm up and running. You’ll get there.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  She gave me an encouraging smile, her nose and cheek dusted with flour. “You’re going to pull through. Mandy Vargas was asking about you the other day; I’ll bet the paper would be interested if you’re looking for a part-time job.”

  “That might not be a bad idea,” I said. Not only would it provide some welcome income as I got the farm business going, but it would be a good opportunity to get to know the town better.

  Although I’d moved to Buttercup to live independently, I was finding that it was the connection to the other folks in town that made life here so special. When I’d taken up residence at my grandmother’s farm, there had been a parade of home-cured ham, bacon, tomatoes from neighbors’ garden . . . the first week, even the mayor turned up in jeans and cowboy boots to welcome me to town and drop off one of her famous chocolate silk pies. Buttercup, I was learning, was a friendly place. With the exception of Nettie Kocurek, anyway.

  Quinn was sliding the first loaf into the oven when the phone rang. As always, she eyed it warily before picking it up.

  “Blue Onion Cafe, can I help you?”

  I could hear the voice from across the kitchen and winced. It was her ex-husband, Jed. Since the divorce, Quinn had been taking karate twice a week; she was now a brown belt, and I knew she hadn’t taken it up just for the exercise.

  She put down the phone a few minutes later, looking rattled.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron, her face pale under its dusting of flour. I knew she was lying, but I also knew better than to pry. She’d tell me when she was ready.

  I was carrying a dozen jewel-like pints of Killer Bourbon-Vanilla Dewberry Jam and a loaf of Quinn’s fresh bread when I stepped out of the Blue Onion into the tree-lined town square an hour later. A banner advertising the upcoming Founders’ Day hung across the front of the white-painted town hall, and a soft breeze ruffled the leaves of the sycamore trees whose branches shaded the sidewalk. I was looking forward to the event, a town celebration that I’d heard would involve Bubba Allen’s legendary barbecue brisket and the town “Jam-Off.” I was planning to submit a jar of my jam to the competition. With luck, I would be able to add “award-winning” to my handmade labels.

  There was a commotion near the town hall; I squinted into the afternoon sun to see what looked like a bronze statue with a nose the size and shape of a bratwurst on the back of an ancient Chevy pickup truck. Next to it was Nettie Kocurek’s enormous white Cadillac, whose front wheels were parked, as usual, on the sidewalk. A group of a half dozen men stood in a semicircle around Mrs. Kocurek and Mayor Niederberger, who appeared to be in the midst of a disagreement.

  As I crossed the grassy lawn, I could hear Nettie Kocurek’s soft, drawling voice. She wore a flowered dress with a lace collar, a sturdy pair of beige SAS shoes, and a floppy white hat with cabbage roses drooping over the brim. Mrs. Kocurek looked every inch a soft-spoken church lady, but now that Quinn had filled me in on her history, I noticed a firmness in her high-pitched voice that unnerved me. Perhaps, I reflected, I had misjudged Nettie Kocurek. “I think it should be right in the middle of the square, in front of the town hall, don’t you?” she said. “Otherwise it’s just not symmetrical.”

  The mayor hitched her thumbs in her belt loops and rocked back and forth on her snakeskin boots. Her belt buckle flashed in the afternoon sun. “Nettie, when I told the historical committee they could go ahead with the statue, the deal was that it would go in front of the library.”

  Nettie smiled sweetly. Behind her, looking almost as uncomfortable as the mayor, was her middle-aged daughter, Flora. Where Nettie had the figure of a woman with a long and undying devotion to the local bakery’s kolaches, her daughter, whose face was pinched and pale, appeared to be constructed of coat hangers. As Nettie put her hands on her hips, Flora seemed to shrink a little. “But he was the founder of the town!” Nettie protested. “That’s why the historical committee paid for the statue.”

  “Actually, the founder was Hermann Mueller,” Mayor Niederberger pointed out. She unhooked her thumbs from her belt loops and raised and lowered her own hat, which was a straw Stetson. She looked unusually agitated.

  Nettie waved the mayor’s assertion away with a bony hand. “He doesn’t count; he was German. This is a Moravian community, and my great-grandfather, Krystof Baca, was the first Czech here. That’s what that professor up in Austin put in his book.”

  Mayor Niederberger settled her Stetson back on her head and widened her stance. “Nettie, I’m sorry, but you can’t put the statue in the middle of the square.”

  Nettie put her hands on her hips. “Now, Rose, I remember when you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Always were stubborn. Why don’t we just put it here for now, and then we can go back to the ranch and talk about it over a nice slice of icebox lemon pie?”

  “Nettie, it just won’t work. I know it’s a wonderful statue,” Ma
yor Niederberger said, steel in her pale blue eyes, “but the middle of the square won’t work. This is where the polka bands play for the Founders’ Day Festival. This is where the barbecue tent goes for Lick Skillet Day. This is where the judging tent goes for the Moravian Festival, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Pepaw would love that!” Nettie said, clasping her hands together. “He’d still be part of the town!”

  The mayor’s voice was firm. “Nettie, the answer is no.”

  For a moment, Nettie Kocurek’s mouth looked as if she had just sucked a lemon, but in a flash, the sugar was back. “Let’s bring this up at the next council meeting. That’s tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  “Nettie . . . ”

  “I’m sure they’ll see reason,” Nettie said. “Boys, in the meantime, why don’t we just leave the truck here. That way we won’t have to drive it all the way back from the library tomorrow.”

  Leaving Mayor Niederberger openmouthed, she hobbled past the sausage-nosed statue to her Cadillac, her gangly daughter in her wake.

  “Mrs. Kocurek?” I said, putting on my best smile and stepping forward before she reached her car. The timing was less than terrific, but I couldn’t let the opportunity slip by. “Do you have a moment?”

  “What can I do for you?” she asked, turning to look at me with an appraising eye.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I think there’s been a little mix-up. There was a geologist out at Dewberry Farm today talking about drilling for oil.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, nodding. “My accountant told me it would be the wise thing to do. I’m a pensioner, you know.”

  A pensioner who had just gotten a giant wad of cash for an abandoned piece of property, I thought.

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to let the strain show in my voice, “but I plan to make my living from the farm. I can’t farm around an oil well, can I?”