Unknown Victim by Kay Hadashi (classic books for 11 year olds .TXT) 📕

Gina lowered her hand again. She looked at the egg cradled in the palm of her hand. It was the same as any other brown egg, cool to her skin, slightly heavy for its size, the surface somewhat course. It had an odd color, somewhere between brown and green. She knew the yolk inside would be bright, a deep yellow if not orange, and stand up from the runny whites. All she had to do was give it a whack on the rim, and plop it into the bowl.

She put the egg down and picked field work dirt from under a fingernail. She gathered the egg again, knowing she was stalling for time.

“Gotta crack it open, Gina, gotta crack it open,” she muttered, staring at the egg nestled on the palm of her hand.

She raised it, looked at her target on the rim of the bowl, and prepared to swing.

“Oh, come on. Just crack the stupid thing already.”

She began to swing, but stopped.

Not today.

She put the eggs away and made a cheese sandwich for breakfast instead. Taking that and a mug of coffee, she went to the front porch, her newly chosen place to eat breakfast, taking enjoyment in watching the sky lighten at dawn. She had company when she got there.

“Oh, you’re back, and you’ve brought your own breakfast again, I see.”

Leaving her coffee and breakfast on the seat of the patio chair, she went back inside for a tissue. By the time she got back to the porch again, the black cat had dropped the rat. This one was still alive, though. Wounded, its little legs were working overtime trying to get away.

“You’re kinda mean, you know that?” she said to the cat, as she picked the rat up by the tail and carried it off toward the stream. The cat trotted along behind, watching carefully. Gina dropped the rat in the deep grass and stepped back. “You don’t need to bring me these. Just eat them out here where I can’t watch, okay?”

***

Gina had decided to get things organized with her work crew. She had too many little jobs going here and there, and wanted to focus their efforts. She decided the priority would be on Flor and one team pruning the fruit trees, while another team continued to dig the pond, leaving the search for ornamentals in the old Japanese garden for later. Most of all, she wanted to see real progress on something. But both teams needed more tools and better wheelbarrows than the rickety old thing they’d been trying to use, so when Felix showed up for work, she gave him the credit card.

“I should’ve gone in yesterday afternoon so we wouldn’t waste time waiting for a store to open this morning.”

“Hardware stores will be open pretty soon,” Felix said.

“Just figure out with Flor what he needs, and if the diggers need more shovels. When you’re there, see if you can price chippers. I want something that’ll chip the branches but also shred all the weeds into smaller stuff that’ll compost faster.”

“Wood chips don’t decompose so fast,” Felix said.

“I know. I want to use those to cover walkways.”

He looked out at the farm. “There’re walkways?”

“Someday. I need to mark where I want the paths, and someone needs to go through with the weed whacker to chop down the weeds to the ground.”

“Need a better whacker for that.”

“Okay, fine. One, and I want it industrial sized, something that will chop down anything that gets in its way. I want to get to bare dirt. Get extra string for it, too.”

“Good idea.”

“Really?” she asked.

Felix flashed his usual smile. “You have a lot of good ideas.”

Gina chuckled. “Yeah, like taking on a project I know nothing about in a place I’ve never lived.”

“Why don’t you come to the hardware store with me?” he asked.

“Maybe I should. It would be nice to see where the money is going.” As the rest of the crew slowly arrived one vehicle at a time, she got out her phone and found the images of the bottle cap. “Have you ever heard of Tuyo beer?”

“Where’d you find that?”

She wasn’t going to tell him it was something found in the dead man’s pocket the day before. “Just around.”

“You haven’t been drinking it, have you?”

“No. Why?”

“Pretty nasty stuff. I’ve been here for a long time, but I still remember seeing guys drink that stuff when I was a kid. The ones that drank it all the time got pretty sick.”

“Sick how?” she asked. Gina wondered if that might have something to do with how the man died. He’d been stabbed in the liver, and the liver was what processed alcohol. Maybe Tuyo was made with the wrong kind of alcohol, something his liver couldn’t deal with. Gina still couldn’t understand how being stabbed with only an ice pick could kill a guy, but maybe that coupled with bad beer did him in?

“Really bad quality control in making that stuff,” Felix said. “You know anything about beer?”

“Only that it doesn’t taste good. I thought it was pretty easy to make beer?”

“You’d think so. From what I’ve heard, there’s two different ways of making it. One is pasteurized. That’s when they go through the entire brewing process until they get the alcohol content to the level they want, and then they boil it to kill the active yeast. The other way is cold filtered. That’s when they put formaldehyde in the beer to kill the yeast to stop the fermentation process.”

“Formaldehyde? Isn’t that poisonous?”

Felix nodded. “That’s why they put it through a filtration process to neutralize the formaldehyde and draw it off, leaving only pure beer behind. Those beer makers say it tastes better, and that the pasteurized beer isn’t as flavorful after it’s been boiled.”

“So, what’s the problem with Tuyo then?” she asked.

“Tuyo cold filters their beer because it’s a faster and cheaper process in the long run, at least for them. Their problem is that they