Bitter Harvest (2 page)

When they reached the near side of the paddock, fenced in with sturdy posts and wire mesh around the perimeter, Meg examined the fence. “This side looks okay,” Meg said. “It’s cold out here! I thought maybe it would stay above freezing for a little while longer.”

“This is New England—get used to it,” Seth said. “Besides, your apples are safely harvested, so you don’t need to worry about weather for a couple of months, right?”

“If I don’t freeze to death first. That furnace is definitely not up to the job.” Meg followed Seth around the left side of the paddock, past the corner where the goat’s shed blocked her view from the house.

“Have you had it tuned up recently?” Seth asked.

“Uh, no. I took one look at it when I first got here in January and prayed it would survive until the spring, which it did. But this year it’s really limping along. Of course, I keep the heat cranked down, to save money. My sweater collection is growing by leaps and bounds.”

“I’ll take a look at it once we get your goats sorted out. Ah, here’s the problem,” Seth said, pointing. Meg could see where one post was splintered at the base, near the ground, and the wire fencing was trampled down.

“That wood doesn’t look rotten to me. To snap it off like that, the two of them had to have worked together, didn’t they?” Meg asked.

“Maybe. Goats are smart, and determined. Here, you hang on to them and I’ll get something to shore it up. Maybe we’d better inspect the rest of the posts while we’re at it.” Seth headed off toward his workshop at the end of the long driveway.

Meg stood with the goats’ ropes in hand and turned toward her house. She’d managed to get most of the trim painted over the past summer, but that only made the rest of the paint look shabby. The roof should be replaced sooner rather than later, but that was one expensive project she was going to put off as long as possible. Storm windows would be nice, but that was a pipe dream. Well, if her many generations of ancestors had managed to survive New England winters in this house, she could, too. She’d just have to toughen up.

Seth emerged from his workshop carrying several lengths of lumber and a toolbox, Max frisking around his feet. When he neared Meg he said, “I should train Max to carry my toolbox or something—he’s got far too much energy and not enough to do.”

“That would be cute. Maybe you could put him on your business cards. Do you need me to hold anything?”

“Just the goats, for now.”

That was enough to keep her busy, as Dorcas and Isabel kept tugging her in different directions, wrapping the rope around her legs, and fending off Max, who really, really wanted to play. She was relieved when Seth said, “That should do it. You can stick them back in the pen now.”

“Good.” Meg walked back to the front to let them in through the gate, and followed them in to check on their food and bedding. Everything looked okay. She scratched their heads one last time and let herself out of the gate again. “You want some coffee? Or are you busy?” she asked.

“Coffee sounds good. And I can take a look at your furnace.”

“Seth, you don’t have to do that.”

“Why wouldn’t I? I’m your tenant, sort of, so it’s in my best interest that you don’t freeze to death. Should I leave Max outside?”

“Won’t he be cold?”

“With his coat? No way.”

“Fine, then. Come on in.”

Meg led the way back into her kitchen, and while Seth stopped to secure Max to a handy hook outside her back door with a long piece of rope, she hung up her coat and put the kettle on to boil. Seth came in and started prowling around, and Meg suppressed a smile: he and Max shared the same kind of restless energy. They were a good match.

“What are you working on?” he called out from the dining room.

“Trying to sort out the financials for the orchard business,” she shouted back. When he returned to the kitchen she went on. “I didn’t have time during the season to keep any kind of running tally, although I probably should have. And Bree wasn’t much help—she still owes me a lot of information. I know we paid the workers what we paid them last year, but I have the feeling that’s not competitive. And I had no idea how to price my apples.”

“Are you worried?” Seth asked, finally sitting down.

“I really don’t know. At least I’ve still got a few dollars in the bank, but I don’t know what late invoices are lurking, and I know we haven’t been paid for some of the last deliveries.” Meg busied herself making coffee, then set a mug in front of Seth and sat down with her own. “Don’t laugh, but I really thought I’d have some more time to work on my family history, and to do some of the cataloging I promised the Historical Society. Silly me.”

“They’ll wait—they’ve waited this long. Any word from your folks lately?”

“We talked over Thanksgiving weekend. They send their regards.”

“I hope they’ll be back up this way sometime soon.”

“Wasn’t that one visit enough of a disruption for you? But I’m sure we’ll see them again soon. And it was lovely of Rachel to have me and Bree over for Thanksgiving dinner.” Seth’s sister and her family ran a bed-and-breakfast in a ramshackle Victorian house in Amherst, and Meg, Bree, and even Bree’s boyfriend Michael had all joined Seth and his mother at Rachel’s feast. “She’s such a great cook—I’m jealous.”

“She’d be happy to give you some tips.”

Meg laughed. “I’m sure she would, but I just don’t have the time. Maybe once I get these numbers lined up I’ll feel better. Right now it’s nagging at me.”

Meg’s cat Lolly strolled in and sniffed at her half-full dish, then looked plaintively up at her. “No, silly,” Meg said. “Finish what you’ve got.” She turned back to Seth. “You have any big projects planned?”

“Not at the moment. Most people don’t want to work on their houses during the holiday season—it’s either before, so they can show off to the relatives, or after, when the relatives have said nasty things about how shabby their place looks. Speaking of which, let me check out that furnace.” He stood up and plunged down the rickety wooden stairs to the cellar before Meg had time to protest.

She shivered. Even in the kitchen it was cold. Lolly seemed to agree, because she jumped into Meg’s lap and curled up in a tight ball, her tail over her nose. “So it’s not just me, huh?” She could hear Seth clanking and banging around beneath her feet. That furnace had to be at least thirty years old, maybe more. The last owners of the house had been a pair of maiden sisters who’d been born in the house and lived in it their entire lives—and hadn’t changed anything, as far as Meg could tell. She had a vision of them weathering each winter, adding layers one at a time to keep warm—and probably going to bed as soon as the sun set, in order to conserve heat. When Meg’s mother had inherited the place, she’d continued the long tradition of neglect, renting the house out to a series of tenants. Had they ever complained about the cold? Meg wondered.

Seth came clomping back up the stairs and dropped into a chair. When Meg cocked an eyebrow at him, he said, “It’s not good. Your firebox is cracked.”

“What the heck does that mean?”

“It means you’re losing heat, and possibly leaking fumes.”

Meg sighed: one more problem, and an expensive one, no doubt. “Do I have to do something right this minute? It won’t explode or anything, will it?”

“It’s not life-threatening, but I won’t promise it will last the winter.”

“There’s no patch job you can do?”

He shook his head. “Nope. It’s a cast metal heating chamber, and once it goes, it’s gone. From the look of it, it’s had a good long run, but it’s reached the end of its time. Sorry, Meg.”

“I guess I knew it was coming. Tell me, is the furnace more or less important than the roof? If I have to prioritize?”

“Can’t say without taking a look at your attic and seeing if it’s leaking, or maybe I should say, how badly it’s leaking. Have you been up there lately?”

“No. I don’t like it up there—it’s dirty, and kind of creepy. I took one look at it when I moved in and I haven’t been back since.”

“I can check it out for you.”

“Seth, I appreciate the offer, but you can’t do everything. You aren’t a roofer!”

“But I know some guys—”

Meg interrupted him, “Yes, and I’m sure they’ll give me a good deal.” When Seth looked hurt at her comment, she went on, “Sorry, I’m being ungrateful. It’s just that all these things that absolutely, positively must be done keep landing on my head, and I have no idea how I’m going to pay for them. That’s why I need to know if I’ve made any kind of profit this past year.”

Seth smiled. “I know. Houses—and businesses—will do that to you. You can plan all you want, but there’s always something that sneaks up on you. At least you don’t have to worry about floods. Or earthquakes—we don’t get a lot of those in New England.”

“Granford will probably be the epicenter for the first one in two hundred years, with my luck.”

Seth drained his coffee and stood up. “I’ve got some inventory to check, and I’ll let you get back to your paperwork. Let me look into options for a new furnace for you.”

There was no stopping him, the ever-helpful Seth. “Fine. Thank you. And thanks for catching the goats.”

“My pleasure. See you later.”

He headed out the door, leaving Meg at the table with her coffee and a warm and purring cat on her lap. On reflection, she realized she wasn’t devastated by the news of her ailing—no,
dying
—furnace; at least, not as much as she would have been a few months earlier. She’d proven to herself that she could cope with all sorts of crises, and at least this one had an easy solution, even if it was an expensive one. Funny, she’d left a job managing six- and seven-figure amounts of money for municipalities, and now she was worrying about a couple of thousand here and there.

She looked down at a very content Lolly. “Hey, cat, I’ve got work to do. Want to come along? The lap goes with me.”

Meg was enjoying breakfast the next morning when Bree stumbled down the back stairs that led from her room. Her slight frame was buried under layers; she had on a turtleneck under a heavy wool sweater, corduroy pants, thick socks, and even a hat jammed down over her long dark hair. “Morning,” Meg said. “Are you cold?”

“Freezing. Is the coffee hot?”

“It is. I’m sorry, apparently the furnace is on its last legs. Seth diagnosed it as terminal yesterday. Besides, I think your room”—Meg nodded her head toward the room over the kitchen—“was intended for the hired hands, and they didn’t need heat, right?”

“Well,
I
do.” Bree sat down with a mug of coffee and wrapped both hands around it.

“Then let’s hope it keeps going a little longer, because I can’t afford to do anything about it right now. Speaking of affording, how’re you coming with those figures?”

“I’m working on it,” Bree said, avoiding Meg’s eyes.

This was the part of being “management” that Meg really didn’t like. “Bree, it’s important. We’ve talked about this before. Working out our profit and loss statements may not be much fun, but it is necessary.”

“I hear you!” Bree snapped. “Look, cut me some slack, will you? I’ve worked hard, and I need a little downtime. I want to spend time with Michael, ’cause he’s just as busy as I am during harvest season. You have a problem with that?”

“No, not at all. Look, this is still all new to me, and it’s the first set of numbers I’ve run through, with nothing to go on from prior years. I’m anxious about getting all the details right, and I need to know how we came out. We’ve both worked hard this season, and I really want to believe it’s paid off. But I won’t know until I see all the numbers together, you know?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bree muttered. “What about that little surprise you and your mother found? You sell that, you’ve got a nice piece of change in the bank.”

Meg sighed: she’d thought of that, too, more than once. “I don’t feel right, doing that. I’m still thinking about it. But we can’t run a business here if we depend on windfalls to drop on our heads. We need to make this work. How about you get all the pieces together for me by midmonth? And by that, I mean
all
the invoices and statements and whatever other pieces of paper you’ve got, in some sort of order. Deal?”

“Whatever,” Bree said, sounding like a sulky teenager, and Meg had to remind herself that Bree at twenty-two wasn’t far past that age. “Listen, you need me for anything else? I thought I’d go over to Amherst to see Michael, maybe spend a night or two.”

“You tell me. We don’t have to think about pruning or anything until January or February, right?”

“You were paying attention!” Bree smiled. “Yes, you’re right. Right now, as you keep reminding me over and over, is the time to catch up on record keeping and make some assessments about how we did. We also need to review the trees we’ve got, and what you might want to put in, thinking ahead. Assuming there will be an ‘ahead’?”