09 The Clue at Black Creek Farm (5 page)

“What makes them unsafe?” Sam shot back. I
recognized the same hardness in his dark eyes that I'd seen in Jack's the night of the buffet.
They're both stubborn,
I realized.

“The fact that they're crawling with some kind of contaminant?” Jack replied. “The fact that they made my wife so sick she had to be brought to the ER? Dad, really.”

“I washed them thoroughly,” Sam insisted. “And I cooked them well.”

“It's still a risk!”
Jack's voice rose to a yelp.

Abby cleared her throat. All eyes turned to her.

“Why don't we set this subject aside for the moment and invite our
guests
into the kitchen to sit down?” she asked. “Pancakes or no, we have plenty of coffee and fresh blueberry muffins—made with blueberries I
bought
, I should add.”

There was silence for a moment, and Bess smiled eagerly. “That sounds great,” she said. “Blueberries are
my
favorite vegetable.”

Sam chuckled, and Abby and Jack soon joined in. I felt relieved. Bess always seemed to know the right thing to say to lighten the mood.

But Jack glared at Sam as we departed for the kitchen and shook his head. “I'm going out,” he muttered. He walked out the front door, and a few seconds later I could hear a car starting up, and then driving down the driveway.

We settled in the kitchen, where Julie, looking much healthier than the last time I had seen her, sat sipping from a mug at the table. There was a plate near the stove piled high with orange pancakes, and a plate sat near the sink, swiped clean, dripping with syrup. I noted a small pile of pancakes in the sink. The pancakes Sam tried to serve Julie, I figured.

Julie gestured to a blueberry muffin sitting on a saucer in front of her. “If it's all the same to you guys, I'll just eat this,” she said with a wry smile. “Hello, girls.”

“How are you feeling?” Bess asked, moving forward and taking a seat at the table next to Julie.

“
Much
better,” Julie replied. “The hospital did a great job of stopping the nausea and keeping me hydrated. But I was still feeling tired until this morning. Now I
just feel . . . well, as tired as an eight-months-pregnant woman should feel.”

I laughed quietly, along with my friends. George and I took seats at the table, and Abby served us coffee, tea, and warm muffins with butter. The conversation turned to gentler topics, like the weather and what we were studying in school. After a few minutes, Abby turned to Sam. “Why don't you take the girls outside?” she asked. “Show them around. Show them what
happened.
”

I glanced at Sam. “Yes, what is it that happened yesterday?” I asked. Abby hadn't given me many details on the phone and had told me it was nothing to worry about, but of course I was worried. Under the circumstances, anything unusual that happened at Black Creek Farm seemed like something to worry about.

Sam shook his head. “It's . . . no big deal,” he said. “Just unusual. Yes, girls, if you're finished, perhaps we can head out?”

I glanced at my friends. They made murmurs of
agreement and pushed back from the table. Sam rose and led us to a screen door off the back of the kitchen. We followed him out and onto another low porch, down a ramp, and out toward the fields of crops.

Sam looked up at the sun and let out a satisfied sigh. “What a day, what a day,” he murmured. “You don't get weather like
this
on the twenty-sixth floor of an office high-rise, I'll tell you that.”

“Why don't you tell us about how you built the farm?” George suggested. “Last night Holly told me that this was all an unused field before you bought it and started building Black Creek Farm. How did you plan it? How did you figure out what to do?”

Sam smiled, surveying the farm with a look of contentment. “Oh,” he said.
“Well . . .
”

He went on to tell us a complicated story about agricultural research, irrigation theory, nutritional optimization, and a bunch of other terms I didn't fully understand. But as Sam spoke and lovingly pointed out his fields of greens, corn, peas, eggplants, summer
squash, zucchini, and tomatoes, one thing was clear: Sam
really
loved farming and, despite what Jack had said the night of the buffet, had put a
lot
of thought into how his farm would work best. When George asked a throwaway question about why he'd planted greens in a certain field, and not closer to the house, Sam went into a long explanation about hours of direct sunlight, evaporation levels, and soil composition.
He really knows what he's doing,
I realized. I remembered my conversation with Ned the day before:
Isn't it likely that this guy just screwed up and put something on his plants that he wasn't supposed to?

Sorry, Ned, but I don't think Occam's razor holds up in this case.
I watched Sam's eyes light up as he plucked a perfect red tomato from a plant that snaked up a crosshatch of wire.

That's the thing about solving mysteries. It's not always the simplest solution that turns out to be true.

“Sam, can you tell us more about what happened yesterday?” I asked.

Sam's face fell as he handed the tomato to George. “
Take that home,” he encouraged her. “Just . . . be sure to wash it thoroughly.”

George nodded, raising her eyebrows at me.

Sam cleared his throat. “The
incident
, if you could call it that . . . it happened over here.”

We followed obediently as Sam led us through the tomatoes, up a small hill, past the barn and chicken coop (filled with the trilling, clucking sounds of birds), and toward a large glass greenhouse.

“Oh, you have a greenhouse!” George observed happily. “Does that mean you can grow crops all year long?”

Sam waved his hand to indicate
more or less
. “Almost. Hearty plants like kale and cabbage, beets and parsnips, those do best. But yes, the greenhouse is very helpful. With it, we can produce cucumbers and tomatoes in the spring, and going well into the fall. We can start seeds in a safe, nurturing environment. It was an excellent investment.”

He pulled a key from his pocket and fitted it into the lock in the door, twisting and pushing the door open. He walked in, gesturing for us to follow, and I
entered first, followed by Bess and then George.

“Oh . . . oh
no
!” George cried. I looked around and realized what my friend was reacting to: the greenhouse had been
trashed
. Dirt, uprooted plants, pots, and trays littered the floor, and it looked like someone had taken the time to carefully rip each plant apart. There were even broken panes in the greenhouse's glass walls.

Bess and I gasped. “When did this happen?” I asked.

Sam shrugged. “Sometime between seven a.m. and three p.m. yesterday,” he said. “It was stupid—I always keep this locked, but yesterday morning I forgot. Guess my mind was on other things.”

I stepped farther into the greenhouse, trying to take in every detail. As I picked my way through the dirt and shattered pots to the far wall, I caught sight of something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Oh my gosh!” I pointed, and Bess and George ran up behind me to take a look.

Someone had used dirt to scrawl a message on the floor:
KILL THE FARM!

George's mouth dropped open. “Sam,” she called, “did you see this?”

Sam, who was lingering by the door, moved forward, climbing through the overturned pots to the spot where George was standing. He surveyed the words with a stunned expression. “I'll be . . .” He stopped and shook his head. “No,” he said to George. “I didn't see that yesterday.”

“It seems like a pretty clear message,” I said, stating the obvious.

Sam nodded slowly. “I . . .” He gave a nervous laugh. “It's strange. Of course it makes me angry, seeing this. But it also makes me feel . . .”

“Scared?” asked Bess. I noticed then that she looked a little alarmed. Her blue eyes were wide, her brows raised.

Sam thought a moment. “Not scared, though maybe I should be. No . . . I feel relieved.” He chuckled again. “Because this proves it, doesn't it? It proves that I'm
not crazy. Someone out there is trying to sabotage me. Someone out there wants to destroy Black Creek Farm!” He brought his hand down, slapping at the table beside him, strewn with torn-up pepper plants.

“But . . . why?” I asked. I understood what Sam was saying, about the relief. This made it easier for me, in a way: now I just had to find the culprit. But I had a feeling that was going to be the hard part.

Sam sighed, seeming to think. “I . . . don't know,” he said finally.

Of course you don't.
It's kind of amazing to me, how many people who are being targeted have no idea that anyone's mad at them. And with Sam, I could understand: he seemed like a perfectly nice guy. Who
would
want to destroy a kind man's organic farm?

“You don't have any enemies?” Bess pressed, looking around at the damage.

“I don't.” Sam shrugged, as if to say,
What can you do?
“Not that I know of, anyway.”

“Maybe someone from your lawyering days?” I suggested. “Someone you defended but couldn't get off?
Someone who was on the opposing side of a case you won?”

Sam looked thoughtful, as though he was searching his memory, examining each case one by one. “Every lawyer has those sorts of enemies, if you could call them that,” he said. “But I can't think of a single person who might be angry enough to track me down and try to destroy my farm.”

Hmmmm.
George knelt down and picked up a pepper plant that looked more or less intact, carefully placing it on the table. “What about the farm?” she asked.

“What about it?” Sam asked, confused.

“This might sound strange, but does the
farm
have any enemies?” she asked. “Someone who was inconvenienced, or lost money, when you guys set up the farm here?”

Sam frowned, looking off into space.

“Someone you're competing with?” I prompted. “Maybe a bigger farm nearby?”

“There's a bigger farm down the road, sure, Sunshine Farm,”
Sam said. He turned to look me in the eye, and his expression was uncomfortable. “There are farms all over this area. And I did have a brief . . . disagreement, I guess you'd call it, with them.”

“What was it?” Bess asked, looking eager.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Oh, it was silly. Just a little thing. They had planted their spinach very close to my berry fields, encroaching onto my land, and the chemicals they treat their crops with were leaching into my strawberries. I couldn't let that go on, since strawberries soak up a lot of chemicals. So I complained to them, and they weren't happy about it, but they eventually had to replant their spinach farther away from my land.”

This was intriguing. “Did it cost them money?” I asked. Most of the cases I work on have money at the root of them.

Sam shook his head. “Some, sure. A little. But I really don't think Sunshine Farm is holding a grudge,” he said.

Just at that moment, the door to the greenhouse
was pushed open. An older man with leathery tan skin and a grizzled gray beard stood there, wearing a baseball cap and a black hoodie. He looked startled.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't know anyone was in here. . . .”

But Sam was already waving his hand like he was waving away the man's concerns. “Don't worry about it, Bob,” he said. He gestured to Bess, George, and me. “These are just friends of mine. They're looking into the vandalism here and what's been happening with the vegetables.”

Bob nodded, a little nervously, I thought. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.” Then, after a few seconds: “It's a terrible thing, what's happening with the vegetables. People getting sick.”

“Yes,” Sam replied shortly. He turned back to us. “Bob helps us pick the produce when we have a busy week. He lives in town. Rides his motorcycle out here.”

Bob nervously fingered the string of his hoodie. He looked at me, like he felt he had to explain himself. “Sam has been very good to me,” he said. “I hope you catch whoever's doing the bad stuff.”

Huh.
I nodded. “Yeeeeeah, I hope I do.” I smiled, and he backed away.

“I'll come back later,” he called to Sam.

We all watched the doorway after his retreat, and after a few seconds, Sam said quietly, “Bob's had a tough life. He's a Vietnam vet, you know. He's been a little down on his luck, and we can use extra hands on the farm, so I've been paying him to help out on the weekends.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You . . . don't think he might . . . ?”

Sam turned to me, his forehead wrinkled with concern. “
Bob?
Oh, gosh. No. He has absolutely no issue with me. I've done nothing but help him.”

There was silence for a minute.
So Sam doesn't want me to suspect Bob,
I thought, frowning.
Which makes me even more suspicious.

“So, why?” Bess asked suddenly, seemingly out of the blue.

Sam looked at her in surprise. “Why have I helped out Bob?” he asked. “I don't know. It seemed like the decent thing to do.”

“No.”
Bess shook her head. “Right before you came in, you were saying you don't think Sunshine Farm holds a grudge. I was just wondering why.”

“Oh.” Sam laughed, still seeming a little uncomfortable. “Well, in short, because of their daughter,” he replied. “Lori Park. You met her at the dinner the other night.”

At the dinner.
My mind flashed back to the young girl who'd been helping prepare the food. “The girl around our age who was working in the kitchen?” I asked.