Mistleton and Other Men

Mistleton stared out one of the French doors connecting the living room to the porch, his expression flat as he slowly shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

Woody’s face lit up. “I know, right? Did you see how their jaws dropped? One guy’s plummeted so fast it almost hit his knees!” He laughed, mimicking the exaggerated expression.

“Well, if Noah was following the script, they must’ve been reacting to the hallway story right about that time.” Mistleton’s tone remained steady, almost dry.

“And the way they darted back to the van, like they were afraid of being poisoned by some gas or burned by a magnetic ray!” Woody’s eyes sparkled with delight. “People are so gullible and stupid. They’ll believe just about anything if they hear it from someone who seems to know what they’re talking about.” He paused, a fleeting shadow of guilt crossing his face. “I feel a bit dirty being involved in such a farce, Bush, like it’s a con game or something.”

Mistleton maintained his calm demeanor, his arms crossed. “It’s not a con game, Woody. It’s business. No one’s holding a gun to their heads and forcing them to buy tickets or believe the stories.”

“And no one’s fact-checking either!” Woody exclaimed, throwing his hands up in exasperation.

Bush’s expression didn’t waver. “People learn to live with lies. The truth is usually too much to handle. It’s easier to look away.”

Woody’s gaze once again sparkled as he looked out at the tour group standing near the hawthorn trees. “Don’t you want to follow the group to the Vine and grab dinner there? We can eavesdrop on their conversations about the tour.”

Bush shook his head, glancing at his phone with a hint of impatience. “You can go ahead. I’ll just have something quick.” He stepped back from the door, his voice monotone but slightly firmer. “I’ve got to meet Hunter at the machine shed about something.”

East Plainfield’s first standout attraction in over a decade, the “Mistleton and Other Mysteries” tour quickly proved its worth as an economic boon to the town and a gateway to the Tangled Vine tavern. The tour conveniently finishes just as most participants are getting hungry, leading them to the Vine, which offers Beaman’s Lorcan Lager, a Sky-Mother Vineyards chardonnay, and a fixed-price dinner special for tour guests. The highlight of the meal is the braised Great Lake short ribs served with Mistleton Farm haw jelly. On Sundays, the special is also available as a sandwich for lunch.

The Tangled Vine launched the tour at the start of the grape harvest to take advantage of the weekend wine enthusiasts from out of town who descend like bats on the lakeshore’s small tasting houses, sucking them all nearly dry to make room for the next year’s vintage, and then terrorize the town looking for local color. Woody and Holly Reese, the tavern manager, made fake beer and wine labels and whipped up a fixed-price menu laced with made-up “locally sourced” items—except for the Mistleton Farm haw jelly, which was truly local—so that the Vine’s customers could head back to Chicago or the East Coast believing they’d had an authentic experience. They often packed their bags with logoed t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters and coasters featuring Holly and Woody’s labels, and other merchandise before heading out the door.

When Bushman Mistleton, the sole heir to his family’s estate—including Mistleton Farm and the building at Lake and Main that housed the tavern—returned to town, Holly approached him for funds to cover repairs. As the Crooked Smile, the tavern had served its loyal clientele of locals for nearly 50 years but was now a neglected shadow of its former self. Sensing the potential for a revival but uninterested in handling the specifics, Mistleton offered to front the repair costs and invest further in the tavern. Rather than a loan, he proposed taking a percentage of the profits. To guide the transformation, he brought Woody into the project, who recommended a complete overhaul, including extensive interior renovations and a rebranding and marketing campaign.

At Holly’s suggestion, Woody brought in Julian Vex as a local advisor on the marketing campaign. Vex ran the creative writing program at the community college, where he specialized in storytelling. He also chaired the local history museum.

Tall and approachable in appearance, with short, dark hair with hints of gray, a neatly trimmed beard, straight nose, and a beguiling smile, Vex gained notoriety early in his teaching career for workshopping projects in an erotic novel writing course he once taught in California, where he encouraged his students to explore—and sometimes act out—provocative themes and daring narratives. However, that chapter of his career ended abruptly when a scandal erupted surrounding one of the course’s assignments—a student’s explicit content, in which Vex featured prominently, was leaked online, igniting a firestorm of controversy. The scandal led to Vex’s suspension, tarnishing his reputation and forcing him to leave the Golden State altogether, a setback that still lingers in whispers whenever his name is mentioned in certain literary circles. He reinvented himself by launching an unfiltered YouTube how-to video series titled “Facts on Their Own Are Boring!”

When the state university system eliminated its local liberal arts program and transferred the history and other faculty to the main campus, draining East Plainfield of much of its intellectual gravitas, Vex seized the moment. He charmed his way into the chairmanship and recruited his students to reimagine the exhibits. The first one to go was a dry and dusty installation about the history of viticulture in the area. In its place appeared a dubious yet surprisingly popular interactive exhibit featuring grapes intermixed with glass eyeballs that followed you when you walked by, called “If These Vines Could Talk!”

As part of the Tangled Vine’s marketing campaign, Vex proposed a guided tour that would feed people an embellished history of the area with just enough facts to make it believable, yet just enough fiction to give it entertainment value. The tour would include stops at Mistleton Farm and other local landmarks, but it would both begin and end at the Vine.

Although the tour was Vex’s idea, as a production it bore Woody’s unmistakable creative imprint. He contributed the poems and worked with Noah Wayman, the Vine’s new tour coordinator, on their delivery. After a disappointingly dull initial run-through, Woody suggested adding some pithy rhymes to liven it up and make it more memorable. He ran the hawthorn and other stories through his “writer’s little helper” and then wove the AI-generated poems into the script. He got the name “Quillsworth” simply by querying the app for quirky writers’ names.

Woody’s AI-generated flourishes did the trick. The poems were a hit with tourists and locals alike, especially those verses that wove in real elements in the landscape. A few of Vex’s students, inspired by the way the verses captured the soul of the land, formed an Indie folk band called Thorny Fingers and set the poems to music, creating songs that felt as rooted in place as the words themselves. Sensing their potential appeal, Holly hired them to play the Vine every weekend through the end of the year, hoping their songs would attract more customers to the tavern.