A Killer Crop (29 page)

“And you think Daniel found something like that?”

Susan nodded. “I do, or at least he thought it existed. I’ve been thinking back over the kinds of hints he kept dropping, and I don’t think it was simply a new take on her sexuality or her clinical depression or her love of strawberries. I think it’s almost got to be something original.”

“Okay, but what would it be? You’ve been through the major collections of Emily materials?” Great—now she was on a first-name basis with the poet, too.

“Of course. At Amherst, and there’s another library in town here that has a decent collection, but there’s lots more—at Harvard, Yale, Brown, the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, lots of other smaller collections. I’ve been studying her for years, you know, and I’ve seen pretty much every surviving piece of paper she ever laid a hand on. Daniel and my other advisors were a big help, pointing me where to go and getting me access to the original documents. You don’t just walk in and ask to see special collections in a lot of places.”

“So you think that whatever Daniel was working on, it wasn’t in anyplace obvious like the collections you’ve mentioned?”

“Right.” Susan nodded again.

“But where is it? It’s clearly not at his home or his office.”

“I think if Daniel already had it, we would have found it by now. It seems more likely to me that maybe he knew where it was, but he hadn’t laid hands on it yet. But he was pretty sure he’d be able to, and maybe he wanted to spring it on the audience at the symposium. That’d really get attention.”

“So it had to have been somewhere nearby, right? He didn’t have time for an out-of-town trip.” Meg was thinking out loud. The fact that he had invited her mother up for a visit certainly reinforced the idea that Daniel wasn’t about to leave town. “Okay,” she said slowly. “So if it’s not in a university library or a well-known collection, are you thinking it’s in private hands? Or on eBay or in an auction somewhere?”

“I’m thinking it’s somewhere local, and somebody may not even know they have it. But Daniel knew where to look.”

Meg sat back and looked at the young woman across the table from her. Obviously she’d convinced herself she was on the trail of something, but Meg still had no idea what or where. “Susan, this is all very interesting, but it’s not a lot to go on.”

“I’m not done yet. You said you and you mother had been doing some genealogy, right?”

“Yes, but mostly playing around with the easy stuff, what’s available on the Internet.”

“And your mother said she’d found some Dickinson connections, right?”

“Yes, but only remotely. And as you probably know already, there are Dickinsons all over the place around here. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re connected to Emily, any more than everybody’s sort of connected around here. What’s your plan? Call on every Dickinson, past and present, in the county and ask them if they knew Daniel Weston or if they’re sitting on something that belonged to Emily Dickinson?”

“Meg, I don’t think it’s that complicated,” Susan said, her eyes pleading. “Look, what do you know about Emily?”

“The stuff most people know, and what I’ve learned on the house tour.”

“So how did she communicate?”

“Ah, I see what you’re getting at. She wrote letters. That’s what’s in the collections? Her letters?”

“Mostly. Remember, if she didn’t go out, the only way she could contact anyone, apart from face-to-face, which she didn’t do after about 1860, was to write letters. And she did. For example, there’s a big stash of correspondence with her future sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert—there are over three hundred surviving letters to her from Emily. She even wrote letters to her nephew who lived next door. But who’s to say that there aren’t other letters squirreled away somewhere? You know how exciting that could be, to find a new batch?”

“And you think that’s what Daniel thought he had found?”

“Yes! And it’s somewhere in this general area. It’s got to be.”

Susan was stringing together a lot of assumptions, Meg thought. “That’s all very nice, Susan, but what’s it got to do with me?”

“I thought that since you know something about genealogy, you could put together a family tree for Emily and the other local Dickinsons, figure out who’s connected, and where they were in the 1850s and 1860s.”

“Whoa!” Meg held up a hand. “For one thing, I’m a novice at genealogy—I have no idea how long that might take, or even where to start. For another, I don’t have the time. I’m running an orchard here.”

“You’re not out there now,” Susan wheedled. “Look, it’s pouring!”

She was right, Meg noted when she looked out the window. That should drive her parents home—unless they found a cozy inn to huddle in, in which case who knew when they’d be back.

Susan went on relentlessly. “You’ve got this afternoon. And your mother can help, right? She was the one who was working on it before. She probably already knows about some of those connections. And there’s Alfred Habegger’s biography that includes a nice family chart for Emily, so you can start with that and kind of work outward. Please?”

Susan looked like an eager puppy, but Meg could drum up no more than a mild enthusiasm for looking at Emily Dickinson’s family ties—heck, she hadn’t even worked out her own yet. The real question was, would this bring her any closer to understanding Daniel’s murder? “Susan, before I say anything, tell me this: do you think somebody would have been willing to kill Daniel to get hold of whatever it is we’re looking for—either to keep it from him, or to claim it himself? I mean, does this kind of thing really go on in the academic world?”

Susan’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe. It means a lot to me to be part of that, so of course I don’t want to think so. But if this is what Daniel died for, it would be a shame if he didn’t get any sort of recognition for it, right? I’d like to look, for his sake. Please?”

That made a certain sense. Meg wondered what her mother would think—and how it would impact her plans for dinner. With Seth. When had her life become so complicated?

“Okay, Susan, let me think about this, and talk it over with my mother. It’s not like there’s any deadline, is there?” After all, the symposium was over, and Daniel was already in the ground.

“I guess not. Do you mean you’ll help?”

“If I can, and if my mother agrees, and if we can find the time. Can I let you know tomorrow? I’ve got plans for tonight.”

Susan stood up abruptly and unexpectedly hugged Meg. “Oh, thank you, Meg—you’re the best! I’d do it myself, but I’ve never done that kind of research, and I figured you could do it faster than I could. I’ll get out of your hair now.”

When Meg shut the door behind Susan’s retreating back, she turned to Lolly, perched on the back of one of the decrepit armchairs. “What? Like I don’t have enough to keep me busy? Let’s see what Mother thinks about all this before we decide anything.”

Lolly went back to sleep, and Meg went to take a bath and soak her aching muscles.

As Meg came down the stairs after her bath, Elizabeth and Phillip came through the back door, laughing and dripping.

“Hi, Meg,” her mother said, shaking water from her coat. “I didn’t think New England weather could change so fast! One minute it was lovely, and the next, whoosh!”

“You should have been here for the hailstorm last month,” Meg said.

“Good heavens! How frightening. Was there any damage?”

“No, my orchard came through all right, but there were others that weren’t so lucky.”

“Drat!” Phillip stopped in the midst of removing his coat. “I forgot to stop at the liquor store.”

“Did you remember groceries?” Meg asked.

“Of course, dear. We’re all set for dinner. Phillip, why don’t you bring in the food and then you can go find a liquor store? Meg, where would the nearest one be?”

“Go out to the highway and turn left, toward Holyoke. There are a couple along that road.”

“Anything in particular you want, Meg? What does your young man drink?”

My young man?
“Beer and wine mostly. You can pick something that goes with the meal.”

“I won’t be long, ladies.” Phillip retrieved the groceries, then took off again. Elizabeth bustled around Meg’s kitchen, looking quite at home.

“Your father does like to keep busy, and I wanted him out from underfoot. I thought I’d make a roast chicken. Will Bree be joining us?”

“No, she went looking for Michael when it started raining and we had to halt the picking.”

“You’re done for the day?”

“Yes, Bree let me off the hook. But it’s supposed to be nice tomorrow, so this is a short break. Listen, Mother, I need to talk to you about something.”

“If it’s about Seth, I didn’t tell your father anything, I swear. But he’s not blind, you know, and he figured it out for himself.”

Meg really didn’t want to get into that now. “No, it’s not that. Susan Keeley stopped by while you were out and asked if we could help her. She’s got an idea about what Daniel was so excited about.”

“And she thinks
we
can help?” Elizabeth hadn’t stopped moving around the kitchen, checking the oven and assembling supplies.

“Yes, she wants us to do a little genealogy work on Emily Dickinson and her local connections. Susan thinks that Daniel’s surprise could be an unknown cache of letters from Emily.”

“Interesting.” Elizabeth took a chair opposite Meg. “I know I’ve seen the Dickinson name on a lot of the online lists that I’ve been looking at, but I’m not sure I’m qualified to sort out who’s who and how they’re connected. Did Susan have any suggestions about how to narrow the search?”

“She thinks it’s got to be close, in this area, near Amherst, because Daniel seemed confident that he could lay hands on whatever it is quickly.”

“And why would nobody have come across this before?”

Meg shrugged. “I don’t know. This is Susan’s theory. She seems very eager to do it for his sake. Maybe she’s chasing smoke, but it couldn’t hurt to put together a family tree. You said you’d already found some connections between the Dickinsons and the Warren family?”

“Yes, but very distant. It was more an exercise in ‘find the famous relative.’ We’re about as closely related to Ethan Allen and Johnny Appleseed.”

“Well, Christopher Ramsdell once told me that it’s altogether possible that some of the apple trees in the orchard are descended from old Johnny’s trees, so maybe that’s not so far-fetched. Are you up for it?”

“Can I get dinner started first?”

“I wouldn’t stand in your way on that, believe me. And I don’t think there’s any big hurry. I told Susan I’d call her tomorrow, after I’d talked to you.” Meg watched as Elizabeth lined up the ingredients for stuffing a chicken. “What did you see today?”

“Oh, mostly we drove around on back roads. It was rather nice, just wandering. And I’d forgotten how pretty it is around here. If you’re just sitting there, you can make yourself useful. Grease this cake pan for me, will you, please?”

Elizabeth soon had a ginger cake in the oven, with the timer set. She washed her hands, took off her apron, and said, “Why don’t we sit down and go over this family tree stuff? Your laptop’s still in the dining room, isn’t it?”

“It is. And while I think of it, I’ve also got some old maps from the Historical Society, and a lot of them have the names of property owners on them.”

“Well, let’s see how much we can get done while the cake bakes. When it comes out, I’ll have to put the chicken in.”

Half an hour later, Meg had decided that what they really needed was a giant piece of paper so that they could map out all the connections between Dickinsons. There certainly were plenty, scattered all over Hampshire and Hampden counties—no way was she going to look any farther afield than that. It was daunting. “I think I’ve got a big piece of Tyvek somewhere, and we could sketch this out on that. Maybe it would look clearer to us if we could see it, rather than trying to keep all these people straight in our heads.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I’ve got to take the cake out, and I could use a break anyway. Do you think Susan had any idea of the scope of what she was asking us to do?”

“Probably. Did you see anything like Emily’s family tree lurking among Daniel’s papers?”

“Not that I remember, but I certainly wasn’t looking for anything like that. Or it could have been on his computer. Do you really think this will lead to anything?”

“I don’t know, but it can’t hurt, I guess. And you can learn a lot about the Warren family while you’re at it.” Meg followed her mother into the kitchen. “It’s kind of sad that the line dwindled out like that. From what little I’ve seen, there were Warrens all over Granford, especially within a mile or two of here, and most of them were related. And they all had plenty of kids. Mother, why didn’t you and Daddy have more kids?” A question that Meg had somehow never asked.