Julia's Child (9781101559741) (30 page)

When my lips became salt puckered, I gave up on my McMeal. A tank of gas and several gulps of iced coffee later, I was back on the highway, speeding for the Vermont border.

It was a lucky break that I didn't get pulled over. Vermont isn't heavily patrolled, but I'd never driven faster. I was racing the daylight, the GPG deadline, and my own sanity. At least I had the good sense to slow down when I left 91 for the curvy road to Gannett. I wasn't too far gone to realize that a number of people required me to avoid wrapping the Subaru around one of the northern white pines along the route.

The sun had already set, but the sky was still light when I finally gunned the motor up our dirt road. I pulled up hastily on the barn side of the road and hopped out of the car. I didn't have a soil test kit, just a burning desire to see the dirt and touch it and try to understand.

After two minutes of squatting over the clods of soil, the cold brown dirt still hadn't spoken to me. Why had I thought it would?

I didn't know farming, yet I'd bought a farm. I didn't know the food business either, yet that hadn't stopped me from plowing straight in. At that moment it was painfully obvious that I should have remained a corporate accountant, employed and flush with cash. If I had, I might be standing in my kitchen at home right this minute, cooking the most glorious organic meal for my family. My kitchen countertops would be covered with the purest ingredients—purchased at the farmers' market, of course, from somebody who knew what they were doing.

Instead, I hunched alone in the darkness over dirt that was afflicted with some mysterious chemistry that I had no idea how to cure.

My back was killing me. I rose to look around. The tall grasses of summer had fallen, brown and dried. But the earth was still soft underfoot. Several sets of footprints circled me. Kate must have seethed as the Organiquest folks tromped here, compacting the soil with their shoes.

I followed the tracks to our second plot, marked off with stakes and string. The footsteps became muddled here, as if people had stopped to chat or perhaps to take a sample. Then they went on back toward the final planting area, mingling again near the goat enclosure.

The light was nearly gone. I gathered my jacket more tightly around me, feeling the day's urgency slip away. There was nothing to be learned from staring at some footsteps in the lonely dirt. Even the goats were missing. Kate housed them for the winter in a shed adjacent to the Barker farmhouse.

A single set of heavy footprints diverged from the others and headed toward the barn. In the dim light, I followed it. We went around the corner, the footsteps and I, until we came to face the great sliding doors. That was a little odd, because Mary from Organiquest had mentioned skipping the barn. It was hardly a big deal, but I slid open the great red door anyway, wondering if the footsteps' owner had done the same.

Messy. It was my first thought when I saw all the little empty cartons thrown just inside the door. Who would leave such clutter? But as I stepped over them, I saw that they weren't just any boxes. The package design was familiar from my childhood—its green and yellow colors, with the prominent juicy tomato on the front—my father had used this product every summer. He'd carefully mix the right amount of bright blue powder with water from the hose. He had drizzled it lovingly onto the roots of his beefsteaks and Early Girls. They were his only contribution to the family cuisine.

Miracle-Gro.

There must have been fifty empty packages. This simple commercial product—the blue stuff, of a peculiar color not found in nature—was the very last thing I expected to see in my own barn. But it certainly would make a soil test sky-high for nitrogen.

But who would do this? And then leave the boxes here? Surely not Kate. And not the folks from Organiquest. This product, carefully applied by home gardeners all over America, might as well be arsenic. Once doused with an industrial fertilizer, three years would need to pass before the farm could be considered organic again.

The only person who would want to pour Miracle-Gro here would be someone who did not wish to see an organic farm succeed on the hilltop.

With that thought, my stomach clenched. I knew only one person who was against our farming here. One guy who would rather see condos than veggies. It was, I understood as tears pricked my eyes, a genius plot. To “poison” my land in a way that most of the world would consider harmless, except for me and a few other uppity organic purists.

I'd been defeated, and by a guy who had simply to make one trip to the local nursery in his pickup truck. I put my head down on my knees and cried.

Chapter 27

I
woke up to the taste of fire.

The salsa. It had been too spicy. A few stale chips had been all I could find in the house to eat. That and plenty of beer.

Bracing myself, I sat up and opened my eyes. Our Vermont bedroom swam before me. I sank back down onto the pillow and closed my lids again. Thank God I'd stopped short of Luke's single malt scotch.

The house was quiet—too quiet. I'd never slept there alone before. In spite of the familiar surroundings, I could have been on the moon. The silence was that deep.

This is what my life will sound like if I totally fuck everything up. I turned the idea over in my mind. It was a sobering thought. So I sat up again, more slowly this time, and came face-to-face with a Playmobil figure on the bedside table. He stood there, all three inches of him, staring at me.

He was a cop, I could tell by the uniform. But not an American cop. Playmobil was made in Europe, so he looked like the Eurotrash equivalent of a police officer. His tight plastic pants were tucked into his plastic boots. He wore an empty holster on his hip, because—pacifist that I am—I threw away the tiny plastic gun during assembly, before it was spotted.

Eurocop reminded me of something Luke had done a while back: a couple of times I'd found abandoned figurines like these lying in compromising positions on the bathroom sink top.

I blinked back tears. The deep quiet and my sour stomach made even the stupid memory of Playmobil hanky-panky tear at me. I missed my husband terribly.

Eurocop just stared.

“We should hang out,” I whispered to him. “Neither of us was meant to be left here alone.”

I heaved myself out of bed and into our tiny bathroom. It took a long time for the creaky plumbing to agree to pour hot water all over me. But when it finally did, I stood for a long time under the spray, piecing together the previous night's disasters.

It had not been my finest hour. I had called Luke in tears, blubbering with suspicions and defeat. But he'd been irritated with me for flying off to Vermont.

“What now?” he'd asked, exasperated. “I thought you were supposed to meet with GPG tomorrow—and
accept their offer
.”

His anger had startled me, although it was hard to blame him. I'd been out on the ledge over Julia's Child for too long now. He wanted the drama to end.

I pled my case as well as I could to Luke. Eventually, he calmed down and tried to help me sort it all out.

Then I'd started drinking. I now felt the weight of the caloric imbalance. Through it all, I could not stop thinking about revenge.

Calling the police had been my first inclination.

“But, honey,” Luke had pointed out, “I doubt the penal code carries a statute against rogue fertilization.”

That had sent my mind spinning through all the cop dramas I'd ever seen on TV. What could I peg him with? Trespassing? Vandalism? Those charges sounded more fitting for preteens with peashooters than for a builder with a vengeance. Conspiracy! That was more like it. But how? I wondered if fingerprints could be retrieved from moldering fertilizer boxes.

I toweled off, letting loose another groan of misery. Pulling on the spare pair of jeans that I kept in Vermont, my mind was swamped with “if only's.” If only I hadn't gotten myself in debt. If only Kevin Dunham had just signed off on my farm in July. But then what? Then I wouldn't
know
that the farmland was spoiled. Would that have been better?

Yes. Yes, it would be better. Because then GPG would have already cut me a check.

My hangover clouded my ability to reason. So it took longer than it should have for the time line of the alleged farming fiasco to really sink in. I was brushing my hair when it hit me. The greedy developer could not have dumped Miracle-Gro on my land until
after
harvest time. The boxes were a recent appearance. In fact, Kate and I had been standing on the very spot where they now lay scattered when she'd admired the hummingbird in September.

That meant that I hadn't polluted any muffets with industrial fertilizer. It was only
next
year's crop that could not be organic.

As I hastily pulled on my socks, I also realized that there was somebody who could help me prove the purity of last year's veggies.

This hopeful notion propelled me down the narrow stairway into my kitchen. I paused only long enough to grab a half-eaten box of stale whole wheat crackers. I was out in the car a few minutes later, wet hair and all, heading for South Hill, where I rarely ventured. But I remembered Kate telling me once where Kevin Dunham lived.

The place was easy enough to find. The rusty VW van was parked outside a double-wide trailer. The van and the trailer looked like hell, but the farm plot next to it was as tidy as can be, especially for November, when many farming tracts sported the Vermont version of a bad hair day. Kevin Dunham's plots were mounded into neatly mulched rows, awaiting spring. I remembered that Kate said he was one heck of a farmer.

I got out of the car and banged on the trailer's metal door. There was no answer. For a stoop, the trailer had an inverted extra-large plastic milk carton. I checked my watch, discovering that it was only eight in the morning. I banged again. “Open up, Kevin. You have something I need!”

“Lady, come back at noon,” a voice finally whimpered. “I don't have anything bagged.”

“Kevin Dunham, open up. It's Julia Bailey. You took my FDA application and my soil samples, and I need them back!”

A minute later, the door opened a crack. A sliver of face, pale as moonlight, peered out at me. Dunham had several days' growth of beard. “I remember you,” he said. “The place on North Hill. With the goats.”

It wasn't poetry, but it was progress. “Of course you do,” I said. “Because I paid you six hundred dollars.”

The bloodshot eyes opened a little wider. “I don't have that money right now.”

“I'm sure you don't. But I just need my soil samples back. Even if you didn't test them.
Especially
if you didn't test them. I need them back.”

He frowned. “Just a minute.” He disappeared into the dim recesses of the trailer. I waited, tapping my finger on the flimsy doorjamb. Just when I imagined he'd done a face plant onto the bed and was sleeping again, he reappeared, with papers and test tubes. “I don't know if all the pages are here,” he hedged. “But the soil—I didn't test it.”

“Fine,” I said stiffly, my eyes locking onto the precious test tubes. He pushed open his screen door, and I grabbed for them. “But we're not quite done here,” I said, holding his door open. “I need you to write something for me. Something like: ‘To who it may concern, I certify that these samples were taken at the farm on North Hill in July, and since I was stoned out of my mind I didn't test them.'” I stared him down. “And sign it.”

He winced, either because of my demand or because the daylight pained his bloodshot eyes.

I held out the back page of my organic-certification application and a pen. After a beat, he took them. “Look, I'm sorry,” he said. He pressed the page against his flimsy door and scribbled for a minute. Then he handed it over to me.

Grasping the page, I considered him for a minute. On top of every other way of being disheveled, he needed a haircut. He peered at me from behind a shaggy curtain of bangs.

On the one hand, it would be easy for me to add him to the arrest list that I dreamed of handing over to the police. He took six hundred of my dollars, for nothing. Forget about the drugs.

On the other hand, that wouldn't solve any of my problems.

“Take care of yourself,” I said instead.

“Yeah,” he said noncommittally.

“No, I mean it. Because you don't look like you're having so much fun here. Kate Barker says you're talented.” I didn't know where all this empathy was coming from. I really needed to get off the sagging plastic stoop and back on the road.

“Thanks,” he said. “I'll think about it.”

I backed myself down onto terra firma. But just before his door closed, I had one more thought. “Hey—do you know Randy Biden at all? The developer?”

The door opened again. “Sure,” Dunham said gruffly. “He plays cards with us sometimes. Usually wins all my money. Why?”

I felt another flash of anger. Of course he won at cards. That cheater. He won at everything. I brought my rage under control for long enough to ask one more question. “I just wondered if Randy Biden ever mentioned my land.”

Dunham shrugged. “One time he asked me whether you're going organic. That's all. Probably because he knows I . . .” He came to a halt, embarrassed.

“Deal with that?” I volunteered.

“Yeah.”

I sighed. That rat. “Thanks, Kevin.” Thanks for nothing. I stumbled into my car and pointed it toward Massachusetts. With any luck, I could get to Organiquest in the next hour and a half. If I could prove, at the bare minimum, that last year's crop had been pure, then maybe—just maybe—I could put the whole sorry twenty-four hours behind me.