Deadly Row to Hoe (16 page)

Twenty-nine

Tom came out to
meet us when I pulled into the gravel lot at the farm, looking harried and tired. Even his overalls, hanging limply on his lanky frame, appeared exhausted.

“Thank God you two showed up,” he said. “No one would come
out yesterday, and the guys scheduled for tomorrow just called and bailed on us. With Nate in the hospital, I’m short handed as it is.” He ran his palm over his face. “Sorry. That must sound pretty insensitive. I only meant—”

I held up my hand. “We know what you meant. I talked to Daphne this morning, and she said he’s doing a lot better. They’ve moved him out of the ICU.”

We exchanged a long look, but neither of us brought up his sister-in-law. Bette, standing with her hands on her hips and looking toward the pumpkin patch, didn’t seem to notice.

“I spoke briefly with him on the phone,” Tom said. “He still sounds groggy, but thank the good Lord he’s going to be all right. He’s a good guy, you know?”

Bette and I murmured our agreement.

“Okay, then,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “There’s a pile of things to do. Why don’t you start with harvesting green beans—they’ll be too big if we wait for distribution day and will stay fresh in the cooler—and then the cucumbers. Same thing. The pickling cukes are priority, because if they get too big, no one will be able to use them.”

Bette’s nod was brisk, the picture of efficiency. “You’ve got it. We’ll check in when we’re done to see what else you have for us
to do.”

We loaded bushel baskets into the back of the second yard cart.
The other one was still out where I’d found Nate the day before, no doubt covered with crows feasting on popcorn. I added a folding step stool since I wasn’t as tall as Bette, and we rattled down the path toward the towering bean teepees. We went through the gate that separated the rows of vegetables from fowl and swine and trundled past the herb bed. The oregano and basil had begun to flower, and the plants were crawling with happy bees. Their low drone whispered behind us as we continued on.

Down the hill, near the farm house, Allie worked at her large potting bench, transplanting what I guessed were fall starts of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and the like. She didn’t look up, and her hands flew. Everything needed to be done in a hurry right now or it wouldn’t get done at all. I was happy to see Clarissa appeared to be helping her mother.

We passed by the raspberry canes. Weeds crawled beneath, and ripe berries begged to be plucked and eaten. I couldn’t bear the thought of those raspberries going to waste. As we continued on, my companion eyed the yellow tape that still festooned the popcorn field. She didn’t say anything, so I didn’t either.

At the end of the row of bean poles we stopped, and I craned my neck back. “Oh, boy. Look at all those. We might be here for a while.” The forty-foot row of pyramidal structures was seven feet high in places, and absolutely covered with the clinging vines of heirloom pole beans—a variety amusingly called Lazy Wife because they were stringless.

Bette’s lips curved into a smile as she closed her eyes and tipped
her face to the sky. “That’s okay. It’s a glorious day. There won’t be many more of them.”

“No kidding. The rain will be here soon enough.”

We set to work, picking fast and dropping the ripe cylinders into the baskets at our feet. My tailbone quietly throbbed, but nothing else hurt. A light breeze kept the air cool as we raced along the row, and for a moment the world felt golden. I had helped grow these beans. Now I harvested them—for myself, and for other people. It was a reassuring connection to life that grounded me and provided perspective.

That feeling lasted as we worked along the first teepee, listening only to the birds and far off traffic and the rustle of cornstalks in the wind. But Zen is Meghan’s thing more than mine and soon my mind had darted back to the grisly discovery of Darla’s body.

“So one of the reasons I was awake last night was because I was thinking about how the killer must have buried the body in the compost pile,” I said. “See, Clarissa told me Hallie doesn’t do any work on the farm, and that she hates to get dirty, so that would be a strange thing to do. Burying Darla Klick in the compost, I mean. Don’t you think?” I glanced over at Bette.

“Mmm,” she murmured, reaching to the top of the teepee for a handful of nice-sized specimens. Plucking them, she dropped them in the basket and went back for more.

She didn’t seem interested in my theories, but didn’t seem to mind my thinking out loud either, so I went on. “That’s one strike
against it being her. On the other hand, the blows to the head didn’t kill either Darla or Nate, so the idea that a woman did it makes
sense. No offense to our gender, but it’s a simple fact we’re not as strong as men. I figure the killer planned to come back and move the body later. I mean, they couldn’t think she’d stay in the compost forever, right? Unless they thought she’d eventually turn
into
compost. I suppose someone might think that if they don’t know you have to turn a pile like that pretty often.”

Bette had stopped picking altogether and now stared at me with huge eyes. “What do you mean—the blow to Darla’s head didn’t kill her?”

“Ah—that’s the kind of inside information you get when your husband is a police detective. Darla Klick didn’t die from blunt force trauma. She died from suffocation.”

“From … from …” Now she was gaping at me.

Remembering the horrible dream I’d had right after Barr told me, I couldn’t blame her. I nodded. “Whether it was on purpose or not, she was buried alive.”

“That’s awful,” Bette whispered.

“I
know
. If it hadn’t been for that, I don’t think I would have involved myself with any of it.”

Was that true? Maybe. Probably not. Either way, Nate would have identified Darla eventually, Clarissa still would have come to stay with us, and Hallie would still have knocked me down in the yard. I might not have tried to chase a Camaro on a bicycle, though. So there was that.

Looking over, I saw Bette had begun to pick again, but her hands were shaking so badly she could hardly hold onto the beans.

“Oh, gosh,” I said. “I guess I’ve gotten used to the idea over the last few days. It’s a creepy thing to think about, isn’t it?”

So low I could hardly hear her, she whispered, “It would be like drowning.”

I paused, and tipped my head. “Kind of.” I eyed her. “Are you afraid of the water?”

“Terrified.” Her hands continued to tremble.

Darn it. I’d totally ruined her enjoyment of the sunny day. Nice job, Sophie Mae.

“No one should ever have to drown.” She dropped a double handful of beans into her basket. “It has to be the most horrible death ever. I’ve imagined it so many times, how it would feel, not being able to breathe.”

My dream came flooding back to me. “I guess it would be like drowning.” Drowning in dirt. But I didn’t say that. I’d said enough.

“Head pounding, trying to wait just one more second to breathe,
hoping you’ll be saved, finally giving in, and there’s no air, only water. Water filling your lungs, cold, so cold and still you can’t breathe, even though you broke down and inhaled. And there’s no going back.” She stilled, and slowly her head turned until she was looking me straight in the eye. “No going back.”

Standing there in the full August sun, a shiver crawled all the way down my spine. What on earth … ? I felt the skin tighten across my face, and my mind started chugging. Fitting together what had seemed like random events over the last few days. Faster then, making connections, assembling a whole story out of bits of information. A commune, two teenagers with their lives ruined, a mask of a woman on a wall. A drowning.

The friend who had come to Happy Daze with the accident victim. Someone Leigh had been seeing for a while that Faith had only mentioned in passing, not even by name. Not even by gender.

“Bette?” I licked my lips and struggled not to look away. “Did you know someone who drowned?”

Her pupils widened, but otherwise she didn’t respond.

“Someone you cared about?”

She flinched.

I took a deep breath. “Did you know Leigh? I’m sorry, I don’t remember her last name.”

Tears filled her eyes, spilled over, but she never looked away. We stood like that for what felt like a long time. The only sound was the hum of Tom’s trackhoe on the other side of the farm and Bette’s ragged breathing.

She looked off into a distance that wasn’t there, into the past. “Weber. Leigh Weber. Yes, I knew her. I loved her, and they took her from me.”

Thirty

I chose my next
words with care. “Nate’s mother told me a little about what happened. She said it was a horrible accident.”

A sob ripped from her throat, and she shuddered. “If those kids
hadn’t been so selfish, if their parents had
thought
before sending them out in that little boat. But no, they weren’t thinking about anything because they were going to have a party, a nice big party and a bonfire, with music and dancing and that was more important than making sure there were enough life jackets, more important than keeping Leigh alive.”

We were alone, out in the middle of a field. Me and a killer. Allie was too far away to hear, and the engine of the John Deere would drown my call anyway. Still, I wasn’t afraid, so intense was my sympathy for this woman I had called my friend, this woman who carried a grief so deep none of us had known anything about it.

“Bette,” I said. “Come sit down. Here, on the step stool.” I took it out of the cart and unfolded it.

Ignoring me, she gestured wide with both arms. “Happy Daze. Exactly what a bunch of idiots would call an over-romanticized place like that.
Commune
.” The word dripped with sarcasm. She sniffed and swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a damp smudge of dirt across her temple. “More like a bunch of infantile wannabes. Dreamers. Fools. They almost starved to death the first couple years they were out there, you know. But Leigh had been friends with them in college, and she loved the place. Spent as much time as she could out on Camano Island with her friends, always threatening to join.”

That jived with what Faith Snow had said.

“I would never have even considered such a thing, if it weren’t for her. She took me for the weekend three different times. It was hard, hard work, just feeding themselves and staying warm. Work that took up all their time, even the kids’ when they weren’t in
school. They said they loved it though. Leigh wanted to slow down
to that kind of pace. Her job as a bank manager was stressful, and she worked long hours. I understood why she wanted to quit, I did. It was just that I needed time for my pottery, for my sculpture. My work was developing a following, and it looked like I could really make a living as an artist. I didn’t want to give it up,
but I would have. I would have done it all differently if only I could
have her back.”

Her eyes pleaded with me to understand.

Inclining my head, I said, “Tell me what happened.”

“The kids, Darla and Nate, went out to pull crab pots. Leigh insisted on going with them. She said she’d done it lots of time, that it was fun.”

I’d meant that I wanted her to tell me what had happened with Darla and Nate at the farm. But this was okay, too, even if I’d heard the story from Faith Snow.

“She couldn’t swim worth a lick, but that didn’t stop her. Leigh had lived a charmed life, and she never thought anything bad could happen to her. Said they’d been doing it for years. That there were life jackets on the boat, that I worried too much for my own good—and hers. Our last words were an argument about how I worried too much about her. She went out on that boat with those kids, and I went back to help build the bonfire.” She stopped and hung her head, staring down at the dirt at her feet.

“Two hours later, Nate and Darla came back. Alive. But Leigh was gone.”

My throat ached from hearing the emotion in her words, from wondering how it would feel to lose someone I loved so suddenly, so out-of-the-blue. I’d been as prepared as a wife could be when lymphoma took my first husband, and far away from home when my brother had committed suicide. What Bette had endured was a different thing altogether.

It didn’t justify murder, however.

“It turned out there weren’t enough life jackets.” She picked a handful of beans and began snapping them off, inch-by-inch, and dropping them on the ground. “Both those kids could swim, but they took the life jackets and left her without one.”

Faith had said Leigh was the adult, so she insisted the teens use the safety equipment. Bette wouldn’t want to hear that right now, though.

“They should have been able to save her. I’ve imagined it over and over and over. I never got a chance to say goodbye.”

She threw the ends of the broken green beans down and looked up. Her gaze snagged mine, and I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t move. My feet had grown roots down into the soil, leaving me captive to her story.

“They took her from me, and they took the chance for me to say
goodbye, to tell her one last time how much I loved her. Oh, sure, they said it was an accident, but I could tell from the way they acted that something had happened. Something that shouldn’t have. Their guilt followed them home like a deep brown haze.” Her voice had taken on a dreamy quality. “I kept making them tell me what happened, over and over, until their parents made them stop. They said it was traumatic for their children.” She grimaced. “Traumatic—for their children who were still alive and not blue and cold and gone forever.

“I lived in a fog for a while after that. Numb. Clay saved me. Art saved me. But then that crystal-clear image I had of Leigh in my mind began to fade.”

“And you made a mask to remember her by,” I said. “Like you did with your mother.”

She nodded. “Leigh’s was first, then my brother, and then my mother. I did my best to remember Leigh, to keep her alive in my heart, not to forget her. I replay memories of her every day.”

Oh, Bette. That’s not good. That’s not right.

“Then Nate moved to Cadyville. He recognized my name from the CSA member list, and came to see me. Just showed up at my door, unannounced. I was furious. But he talked me into letting him inside, and then he told me about the terrible guilt he carried with him. He said he’d always feel guilty, as long as he lived. I could see he was haunted. After talking to him, I was upset, of course, but not as angry. I’d wanted those kids to suffer. I wanted them to pay for taking Leigh away from me. But now it seemed Nate had been paying all along. It made me feel better.”

I stared at her, stunned.

She began to pace, her pent-up story spilling out in a tumble of words now. “Then months later darling Darla called me. She was staying with her parents in Arlington, and had tracked down Nate. He’d told her that I lived here in Cadyville. That he’d talked to me. She called my house, said she wanted to speak with me, too, about what had happened all those years ago.”

Bette sighed, and I could feel her dread about telling me what happened next.

“I didn’t want her to show up at my house like Nate had, and
she was so insistent. So I suggested we meet here on Sunday night.”

“Did you drive?” I blurted.

“I rode my bike,” she said.

“Did you plan to kill her?”

She threw up her hands. “Of course not! Sophie Mae, don’t you
get it? None of this was supposed to happen. Nate told me Darla’s life had been ruined when Leigh died, just like his. I wanted to see if that was true. She was supposed to apologize to me like Nate did.” She stopped in front of me, her eyes boring into mine, willing me to see.

And I did see. I saw that Bette had nurtured her loss until it had grown and mutated into such a skewed view of the world that it bordered on insanity. How could this have happened right under everyone’s noses? She’d always been eccentric to a degree, but we chalked that up to being an artist. On the surface, she’d always come across as pretty darn normal.

I didn’t trust myself to say anything. She moved closer, too close. I could smell toothpaste on her breath. The bean teepees were behind me, so there was no place I could go without pushing her out of the way. All my instincts told me that was a bad idea, so I simply nodded and tried to hide my increasing fear.

“But she didn’t apologize! Darla wasn’t at all like Nate. She wasn’t suffering. Oh, she said she did for a long time, until she realized she had to give up her guilt. Therapy helped her to let it go, she said, and now she could finally be happy. Happy!” She glared at me.

I tried a tentative smile. It was completely lost on her.

“How dare she be happy?” Bette raged. “And then she had the utter audacity to suggest I do the same thing. That obviously I hadn’t let go of the past, and getting professional help could help me do that.

“She couldn’t see that I don’t
want
to let go of the past, that it would be letting go of Leigh. It made me so mad, so angry. No, mad is right. I went crazy for a minute or two, maybe only seconds, I don’t know, and the next thing I knew I’d hit her with the shovel.” Bette backed away and slowly spread her hands, palms up.

Asking for something, but I didn’t know what.

Turning, she stepped away and gazed out over the pumpkins. I inhaled quietly, relieved to get a break from those intense eyes and her close proximity.

“When I realized what I’d done, I panicked. I took her wallet, dragged her to the compost pile, and buried her as best as I could. I thought maybe I could come back with my car and retrieve her, dump the body someplace else. But I didn’t really have a plan, and the next day Meghan found her. I knew Nate would suspect me as soon as he realized it was Darla. I thought he’d just go to the police, that it was all over for me. So I kept working and waited for them to come for me.”

Her shoulders slumped. “But Nate didn’t call the authorities. He contacted me.”

“Why?” I couldn’t help asking. Blackmail was a possibility, but from what I knew of Nate it seemed out of character. Still, I didn’t exactly trust my ability to judge character at the moment.

She shrugged. “I told you he felt guilty. If I didn’t have anything to do with Darla’s death, then he didn’t want to cause me any trouble.”

“He called you?”

“No. He came by my house the night of the vegetable distribution. Tuesday. Late.”

After driving back from telling Darla’s parents she was dead. I remembered Bette’s hurry to leave that evening when I asked her to stick around. Late for a dinner date, she’d said.

Right. I wondered whether she had been expecting Nate to stop by after all.

“I tried to assure him that I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. That Darla hadn’t shown up at the time we’d agreed on, so maybe she’d already been dead by then,” Bette said. “But I’m not a very good liar.”

Hmm. I had to disagree.

“I could tell he didn’t believe me. I thought there still might be a chance to go on with my life.”

By getting away with murder.

“So I took the shovel I’d hit Darla with—I’d taken it home with
me so no one would find it at the farm—and followed him in my car. It was dark, and late, so I thought I could risk it. I turned my headlights off once I got to the farm turnoff, and no one saw me. He was still in his car, outside his trailer when I got there.”

She cocked her head in puzzlement. “He stayed there for a while. At first I thought he might already be on the phone, but it didn’t look like it. He stared straight ahead for the longest time.”

Probably thinking about what to do next. Poor guy.

“Is that where you hit him? By the Airstream?” I asked without thinking. But Barr hadn’t said anything about Nate being dragged, and strong as she was, I didn’t think Bette could have carried him to the popcorn field. Yard cart? Could he have come to and wandered away before succumbing to his head wound?

But she shook her head. “I was afraid someone in the farmhouse would see me. So I made some noise down by the corn when he finally got out of his car. Sure enough, he thought it was raccoons or something and came down to scare them away. The shovel had worked the first time, so I hit him with it again.”

“Except it didn’t,” I said. “Work I mean. You really did bury that
poor girl alive.”

She hung her head and covered her face with both hands. Sometime during her confession, Tom had finished with the trackhoe. Now I could only hear the cries of crows in the cornfield and the quiet weeping of Bette the potter.

Careful step by careful step, I backed down the row of beans.

She dropped her hands and looked up at me through red-rimmed eyes. “What are you doing?”

I turned and ran. Footsteps pounded behind me.

“Sophie Mae! Wait! I’ll come with you.”

A hand fell on my shoulder. I flinched. Strong fingers dug into my shoulder, and I slowed to a stop. Faced her.

Her tears had stopped. She offered a small smile. “What’s wrong?”

I blinked. “What’s
wrong
?”

“Why … you don’t think I’m going to hurt you, do you?”

Shrugging off her hand, I stepped away. “The thought had occurred to me.”

“Sophie Mae, I wouldn’t do that.”

Right.

“I know it’s over,” she said. “I’ve always known someone would figure it out, even if Nate didn’t recover. I’m glad it was you.”

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder.

“Will you take me to the police station now?”

My lips parted in surprise. “Um, sure.”

“Hang on. Let me get the beans we picked.”

I watched with numb wonder as she walked back, placed the baskets into the yard cart, and pulled it to where I stood waiting. Together we walked to the farm stand and stepped inside.