Northern Star Podcast Grain Journal

The murderer makes an attempt to escape. The murderer is caught, ironically, with the help of Michelle’s High John Conqueror root. Gil accepts the position of general manager at Northern Star but only after extracting a promise from Bob Alsup that he would be able to run the day-to-day operations of the cooperative without undue interference.

Eddie and Bob exchange harsh words with members of the Northern Star board of directors, and after several county sheriff’s deputies show up to keep the peace, the two of them leave. Later Gil receives a call from Michelle Lofgren who has decided to come to Iowa after all to help the police with their investigation and exonerate her father. Gil arranges to put Michelle and her boyfriend Charlie Toussaint up at a motel outside of Monrovia. The next morning, Bob Alsup, Curly Petersen, and Gil go to the coop office and deliver the news to Ole Torvaldsson that an outside accounting firm was coming in to go through Northern Star’s finances, and Ole has been suspended as general manager. Bob names Gil acting general manager in Ole’s place. After Bob and Curly leave, Gil confronts the actual murderer of Marcus Grover and Sollie Finkel and explains how he solved the puzzle.

At home, Gil examines the Blue Sky Farms files. It was a shell company involving Ole, Eddie Lofgren, and Eddie’s son, Bob, set up to speculate on the futures market in violation of cooperative rules. They had lost a huge sum of money that way, then began stealing grain from the elevator and selling it to cover those losses. Criminal fraud, no doubt, but no apparent connection to the murders at Northern Star. Gil takes the files to Bob Alsup. Bob is appropriately appalled but suggested hiring an outside accounting firm to conduct a third-party investigation, since the computer files Gil had obtained had been gotten illegally and would not hold up in court. That would take a vote of the board of directors, so Bob convenes a meeting at his farm with a bare quorum of members known to dislike Ole. The board goes along with doing an outside investigation and to suspend Ole with pay. Eddie Lofgren arrives with his son.

Michelle Lofgren refuses to return with Gil to Monrovia, but she does give him a small piece of wood she calls High John Conqueror Root as a “protection from evil.” Gil returns alone to Monrovia and decides to visit Calvin Fogerson at the trailer park where he lives. Gil recruits Calvin to pick his way into the wall safe in Ole’s office to find out what’s on the laptop the general manager keeps there. That night, Calvin brags about how he controls all of the video cameras at the elevator, then gets to work on the safe. On the laptop inside, they find a big file named Blue Sky Farms, the outfit Gil caught stealing soybeans from the elevator. He has it downloaded onto a disk.

Gil finds Michelle Lofgren tending bar at a beachside bar and grill. Michelle tells Gil about the harassment and shunning she and Marcus Grover endured in Monrovia when they were dating. She also tells Gil that Eddie Lofgren could not have killed Marcus. That’s because the night of his death, her father beat her and locked her in a bedroom closet, then spent the rest of the night ranting at her through the closet door. After she heard about Marcus’ death the next day, she left Monrovia forever.

Gil is questioned by a Monrovia police detective. From the line of questioning, Gil discovers he is a suspect in Sollie Finkel’s murder, and Ole Torvaldsson has been encouraging that suspicion with the police. The detective advises Gil not to leave town. Meanwhile, Northern Star Chairman Bob Alsup hires Gil temporarily as an equipment mechanic on his farm and encourages the ex-assistant manager to continue pursuing his inquiries around town. Gil still has a key to Sollie Finkel’s house, and goes inside to search it for more clues. He finds a postcard from Michelle Lofgren who had disappeared after Marcus Grover’s death indicating she was in Grayton Beach, a small resort town in the Florida Panhandle. Gil seeks permission to go out of town for a “funeral.” Detective Kellerman gives him three days, and Gil flies to Florida.