A Pour Way to Dye (Book 2 in the Soapmaking Mysteries) (2 page)

That brought a wicked little smile to his
face. “I decided to finally lay claim to what’s rightfully mine.
Your family has been squatting on my property long enough. I own
every inch of the land that runs right to the back edge of your
building. Just be glad it didn’t touch the place itself, or I’d
have that old rattrap torn down to the ground, at least as much of
it that stood on my land.”

“
I don’t believe it,” I said
fiercely.

He snarled, “Don’t doubt it for one second.
The bulldozers would be out there so fast you wouldn’t even have
time to grab a bar of soap before I knocked the place down.”

Ralph thought that quip was hilarious, but I
was focused on Earnest. It was all I could do not to shake him
silly.

“
I know you’d tear our place
down if you could, but that land belongs to us.”

“
Are you calling me a liar,
Ben?” Earnest asked in a serpentine voice. “I’ve got the papers
right here if you don’t believe me. I just had it surveyed, and
it’s all legal as can be.”

He handed me a stapled document, and I
studied it. There was a drawing taking up most of the top sheet,
along with a set of coordinates that didn’t make the slightest bit
of sense to me. In addition, there were several pages of legalize
attached that read like bad Lewis Carroll. The map was clear
enough, though. I saw the line drawn just at the edge of our
building. If it was true, it would kill us. Not only did all of the
Perkins clan park in back—a substantial number of vehicles given
nine family members who didn’t believe in carpooling—but it was
where we received our deliveries and shipped our soaps out into the
world. Without access to the back of our building, I didn’t see how
we could operate for very long. I started to tear the document up,
as if that would make the problem go away. Earnest must have
guessed my intentions.

“
That’s a copy I had made
especially for your grandfather. Ask him if it’s not true.” His
smug confidence made my belief in his insanity falter for a second.
Could it be that for once in his life, Earnest Joy wasn’t lying to
me? Was there something I didn’t know about all of this?

I’m not a violent man by nature, but at that
moment, I wanted to take a swing at him. Somehow I managed to fight
the impulse. It was time to get more information before I gave
Earnest Joy yet another reason to dislike us. It was pretty obvious
by the expression on his face that he’d expected a shouting match
or even an errant punch, and I took a little comfort in at least
denying him that.

I tapped the sheaf of papers with the back of
my hand, then said as I left, “This isn’t over. I’ll be in
touch.”

If I didn’t dislike Earnest so much at that
moment, I actually might have felt sorry for him. It appeared that
I’d robbed him of his eagerly anticipated glee by not reacting to
his overt aggression. Well, that was something, anyway.

I ran into his daughter, Terri Joy, on the
porch as I was leaving. Terri was my age, rail thin, and had frizzy
red hair. She was dressed rather stylishly in a dark tailored
outfit that looked expensive; I knew dressing well had always been
important to her. While many of the kids had teased her growing up
about her hair and lack of a real figure, I’d always been fond of
her. She was smart, and had a wit as sharp as honed steel that she
used to defend herself from our peers.

Terri frowned the second she saw me, honest
regret in her gaze. “Ben, I’m so sorry. I had no idea he was going
to put that fence up. I just found out about it myself.”

Terri and I had always gotten along
reasonably well— an aberration in the long-standing family
feud—though unlike Romeo and Juliet, we’d never been anything but
friends. “Can’t you at least talk some sense into him?”

Terri shook her head. “I wish I could, but
the two of them are being even more stubborn than usual. Lately,
Andrew’s been behaving as badly as Dad. I’m so sorry, but there’s
nothing I can do about it. You know how they both are.”

I nodded. “I understand, Terri. It’s not your
fault. I don’t blame you.”

“
I truly am sorry,” she
said. “I hope this doesn’t ruin our friendship.”

“
Me, too,” I said as I
walked away.

I left her on the jewelry store’s steps and
started back toward the soap shop. It was time to find my
grandfather and see if Earnest Joy was telling the truth. Like
everyone else in the family, I’d assumed all my life that the land
in question belonged to us, but now Joy was saying otherwise, and
he’d implied that the reason was because of my grandfather. I loved
Paulus, but he wasn’t an easy man to get along with. My grandfather
hated to be questioned by anyone, particularly someone from the
family. Interrogating him was a prospect I didn’t relish, but it
had to be done, and the sooner the better.

By the time I got back to the soap shop, Mom
was just pulling in beside my car on the tiny island of pavement in
front of the fence. There had barely been enough room for me to get
the Miata off the road, so my mother’s minivan was halfway out in
the turn lane when she stopped. At least she’d managed to keep from
hitting the fence, or me, for that matter.

Ignoring a bleating horn behind her, my
mother got out and looked at me severely. “Benjamin, what’s the
meaning of this?”

“
Hey, don’t blame me, I
didn’t put it up.”

She rolled her eyes as she
shook her head, obviously showing disdain for her eldest child’s
intelligence. “I know that. What happened?” She approached the sign
and read it aloud. “
property of earnest
joy. no trespassing
.” Has that man finally
lost what little of his mind he had left?”

A car drove by and honked its disproval of my
mother’s parking job with a steady blast as it barely missed the
rear end of her vehicle.

I suggested, “Why don’t you pull into the
customer parking lot and then we can discuss this.”

She shook her head. “If the entire family
parks there, we’ll have no room for our customers.” She had a
point. There were days when we had more Perkins offspring at Where
There’s Soap than customers.

“
Look on the bright side. It
will certainly look like we’re busy all the time.” She was ready to
reply when I cut her off, a dangerous thing in the best of times.
“Mom, why don’t we both move our vehicles and then I’ll tell you
all about it. I promise.”

I wasn’t sure if she’d do as I asked, but
thankfully she got into her minivan and backed up into the street,
nearly hitting a brand-new Mercedes in the process. After both our
vehicles were safely ensconced in the customer lot on the side of
the shop, I said, “Earnest claims that the land all the way to the
back of our building belongs to him. He just had a new survey
done.”

Mom asked, “Did you happen to see the name of
the surveyor?”

I thought about it a second, then said,
“Don’t quote me, but I think it said ‘Monk.’

“
I dug the document out of
my back pocket and handed it to her.

Mom shook her head as she accepted it from
me. “Try Thunk. David Thunk.”

“
Yeah, you’re right. It is
Thunk. I’ve never heard of the guy”

My mother frowned as she stared at the
papers, then said, “I wish I could say the same. He and Earnest go
way back. They’ve been lying and cheating for each other for years.
I suppose that the thing that amazes me the most is that he didn’t
try this sooner. The two of them would steal the shoes off a baby’s
feet without a second thought.”

I didn’t want to bring my grandfather’s name
up since he and my mother had been squabbling the last time they’d
been together, but I didn’t have much choice. Besides, how much
angrier could she get?

“
Grandpa’s involved
somehow,” I admitted.

Man oh man, had I been wrong. There was a new
intensity to her glare as she spat out her words. “What did he do,
lose our land in a card game, or was it betting on a coin toss? No,
he probably lost it playing checkers. Paulus is reckless, Ben. He
always has been. And now it’s going to ruin us.”

My grandfather was my father’s father, and
when Dad was alive, he and my mother appeared to get along just
fine. After Dad died, though, the tension between them started to
grow, and Paulus had mentioned loudly on several occasions that my
mother was running the family business into the ground. It was
clearly up to me to fix this, if I could.

“
We need to talk to him to
find out what’s really going on, Mom. Do you have any idea where he
is?”

She bit her lower lip, then said, “Benjamin,
I don’t have a clue, and that’s the truth. It’s your job to handle
this situation; you know that, don’t you?”

My frustration was starting to bubble to the
surface. “I’m trying to, but I need to talk to him if I’m going to
figure out if there’s any truth to this claim. Earnest looked too
smug about mentioning him to be lying. I’ve got a feeling there’s
more to this than a bluff, even if the surveyor is on his
payroll.”

Mom faltered, then said, “If you want to know
where Paulus is, you’ll have to ask your sister.”

My mother hated to admit that she didn’t know
everything that was going on with the family, so it was a startling
admission coming from her. “Which sister? I could go hoarse talking
to all three of them.”

She shook her head. “You only need one. You
know how close Paulus and Kate are. If anyone in the family knows
where your grandfather is, it’s going to be Kate.”

I should have known that without asking.
Though parents and grandparents weren’t supposed to show
favoritism, there had been a bond between the two of them nearly
from the start. “Then I need to talk to her right now.”

“
She’ll be here soon. Come
inside, Benjamin. We need to plan our course of action.” So now she
was stepping in? Mom could deal with the entire mess if she wanted
to, but there was something I had to do first. “You go on. I’ll be
in later.”

“
What do you have to do
that’s more important than this?” she asked as she gestured to the
fence.

“
I’m going to stand over
there and keep everybody else from wrecking into it.”

She wanted to fight me on it—I could see it
in her eyes—but with my mother, family came first above all else,
though I wasn’t sure she’d apply that particular philosophy to her
father-in-law. Reluctantly, she admitted, “That’s smart. I’ll talk
with you as soon as everyone gets here.”

Mom walked toward the front of the shop and I
moved in the opposite direction, heading back to the truncated
parking lot in back.

It took some doing—Jim nearly drove me down
before I could stop him—but I finally managed to redirect most of
my siblings to the alternate lot. None of them were happy about the
fence, but when I told them Mom was inside waiting for them, no one
lingered.

Finally, Kate was the only one who hadn’t
shown up yet.

I was about ready to give up on her when I
was surprised to see my three brothers—Jeff, Jim, and Bob—come out
of the shop together, and from their expressions of anger, it
appeared that the other Perkins men were spoiling for a fight.

Chapter 2

Before I could ask them what they were up to,
Jim said, “We’re not about to let him get away with this. Are you
coming with us, Ben?”

“
What exactly are you
planning to do?” I had a pretty good idea what they were up to, but
I had to buy some time so I could calm them down.

Known for his blunt demeanor, I knew Jim
wouldn’t soften his response. “We’re going to lynch Earnest Joy.
Come on, it’s going to be fun. It’s long past due, if you ask
me.”

“
And if his son’s around,
we’re going to string him up too for good measure,” Bob added. That
was a surprise, coming from the mellowest member of our
family.

“
Do you have anything to
add?” I asked Jeff.

He grinned as he shrugged. “Not a word. I’m
just here for the excitement.”

I held them back as they started for Earnest
Joy’s shop. “Guys, we need to be careful here.”

Jim tried to shove past me
as he said, “Earnest Joy should have thought of that before he
trespassed on our land and put that fence up.”

“
That’s the thing,” I
explained to them. “He might be on the level. I saw a survey map
that showed the new property lines and it looked pretty
official.”

“
It’s a lie,” Jim said
simply.

I’d wanted to keep our grandfather out of it,
but there was no way I could do that now. I didn’t want to see my
brothers compound our problem, which was bad enough without any
help from them. “Paulus might be mixed up in this,” I said.
“There’s more to it than we know right now. Why don’t we wait until
we have all the facts before we do anything we might regret?”

There were protests and denials, but I spoke
loud enough to override all of them. “Now why don’t you all go
inside so I can find out what’s going on.” There was still some
grumbling, so I added, “If it turns out that a lynch mob is what we
need, I’ll bring the rope myself, and that’s a promise.”

That finally won them over. They were walking
back to the shop together—and I was finally breathing again— when
Kate drove up.

She did the same thing I had, pulling in and
nearly tearing the fence down before managing to stop.

She got out of her car and asked, “Ben,
what’s that all about?”

“
That’s what I’m trying to
find out. Where have you been?”

She looked surprised by my question. “I’m
sorry I’m late, but Jacob’s got the flu. I’ve been babying my
husband half the night.” She pointed to the fence. “Do you mind
telling me how that got there?”