More Than Magic (7 page)

The whole thing just felt off kilter somehow. His gut told him he was sitting right on top of it, but it also told him it wasn’t her. She certainly didn’t need the money, unless he had missed something. He pinched the bridge of his nose. Hopefully he could follow her around today to see if this place really was a drug operation masquerading as something benign. Because if it wasn’t, he had just wasted valuable time—time they didn’t have now that the drug cartels in Atlanta were looking for the source as well.

But nothing fit. She didn’t look or act like any meth cooker he ever met, and with that skin and hair she certainly wasn’t a user herself. And now here she was up at an ungodly hour to start her day—the woman literally radiated good health. It wasn’t unheard of for distributors to lay off the stuff they sold, but his scum radar wasn’t pinging.
 

It was possible he was just letting a leggy redhead throw him off. Or maybe it was because Grace Woodruff had awakened parts of him that he thought had been chemically cauterized.

Perhaps the surprise of feeling halfway alive again had muddled his instincts. He generally didn’t like surprises. In his experience, they usually involved mortal danger in some form or another.

For the first time in months, the feeling of impending doom that had shadowed Grace’s waking and sleeping hours seemed to ease a bit. The results in the greenhouse had been good. Not perfect, but good. The Goldenseal rhizomes were barely developed enough to test, which was, although not what she had hoped for, still far better than it had been. And this afternoon she could fit in some quality tests to see if her success extended to the active compounds as well.

Hopefully, they could restart the herb business sooner than she had expected. That would put Eddie’s heart at ease, she knew. Although Grace would be the one to deal with the actual logistics, she was relieved to think that Woodruff Herbs would be available again and their poor marketing folks wouldn’t have to handle all the emails and phone calls. After the whole fiasco of shutting down, the work required to start back up was going to be excruciating. Getting back to full production would take a while, as well as some money, if she invested in the genetic analyses she’d been considering. But it would be worth it.

Pooka kept running off the path into the woods that surrounded the cabins, chasing some scent only he could detect, and loping back to her. Back and forth, the leaves crackling beneath his paws.

“Sssshhh boy,” she whispered. “Hopefully we can be well on our way before Mr. City Man is awake.”

She had decided to deliver the fresh produce and eggs to her guest’s cabin door, rather than make him drag his tired self down to the house. There was plenty to share. More than enough to give him a half dozen eggs, a head of that new lettuce they were trying out, plus three fat ripe tomatoes, a few scallions, and a sampling of the herbs. In addition, she had thrown in a jar of Daniel’s honey. And she would still have plenty to share with Old Annie Taggart.

A hint of dawn brushed the cloud edges with pink, and she could barely hear their rooster expressing his opinion about anyone fool enough to stay in bed. She went up the steps to the Jewelweed cabin as quietly as she could, setting the basket beside the door and retreating back to the house in the same fashion.

It was about time she went to see the Taggarts. She hadn’t been over there since Pops’s funeral.

Grace thought she might manage a quick visit tomorrow—especially since the forecaster had said something about a cold front with rain and possibly snow at the higher elevations for Friday and the weekend. She could spare a dozen eggs easily, plus some of the tomatoes and herbs. Old Annie always fussed that their autumn tomatoes were “hothouse-growed” and didn’t taste right compared to those that had baked in the summer sun. Nonetheless, she accepted them greedily to make tomato dumplings for her “boys”—her grandsons—two grown men who couldn’t seem to keep a job between them.

Hoisting the backpack which she had left sitting on the top porch step, Grace reviewed the morning chores to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

“Greenhouses tended, eggs gathered, goats and chickens fed and watered.” She ticked off the list as she fastened the backpack. “And Jamie can do the bees and the birdfeeders after school. Is that it?”

Pooka wagged his tail in agreement.

“Then we’re off.” She headed down to the parking lot and then east into the trees, the dog questing ahead of her, knowing exactly where they were going.

This was her idea of heaven: walking through these woods just as the morning sun gleamed through the trees, her breath fogging the air and the last few stubborn leaves drifting down around her. Autumn had escaped her notice this year, but she might still catch a glimpse of it today. The ginseng bed often seemed suspended in time, even outside of it, which might also explain the potency of the plants. And sometimes her favorite season lingered there.

Nick certainly looked like he could benefit from some of their prized Woodruff Mountain Ginseng Extract. And she should also take some with her tomorrow in case Old Annie needed it, along with the tonic that Pops had formulated for her.

Of course, she had to consider the downside of visiting the Taggarts. First, she would have to deal with Boyd and his mouth, although carrying her 12-gauge over the ridge whenever she visited seemed to shut him up. Second, she would have to give Annie a quick check-up. It was a tradition Pops had started when she first voiced her intention to go to medical school, and he had dragged her over to the Taggarts to “practice” on Old Annie. Practice mostly consisted of taking the old woman’s vital signs, which had always been good. It was about all Annie would tolerate, having the traditional mountainfolk’s distrust of doctors. But dealing with an openly skeptical and argumentative patient had helped Grace hone her bedside manner.

It was good timing, and Annie was the perfect subject. At nearly ninety she had been pretty much confined to the house for years because of the arthritis that had robbed her of her mobility. Since Grace
had
managed to wrap a badly sprained ankle this summer without a twitch and arthritis was a chronic, debilitating condition and not a life-threatening one, surely she could manage to check Annie’s pulse and take her blood pressure without having some kind of waking nightmare or passing out. Couldn’t she?

Operating on no sleep and too much caffeine made Nick a bit jumpy. Watching Grace Woodruff stuff that glorious hair of hers up into a wool cap notched it up to edgy. Only the fact that it was the most ridiculous looking rainbow-hued atrocity he had ever seen—including ear flaps and a tassel—took the edge off like a knitted cold shower.

Whatever her taste in headgear, she certainly had a serious work ethic. From what Nick could tell, as he followed her progress from a distance, she had finished a day’s work before most folks were awake. And so far, no one on that skeleton staff of hers had shown up to help out.

The amazing sight of the first greenhouse, glowing on the dark hillside, was enough to make him blink and lower his binoculars. Constructed of some opaque plastic over steel ribs, it looked as if one of the stars had set down quietly in the night. At some point he would have to get a better look inside, but from what he could tell it wasn’t cannabis growing in there. With three greenhouses lined up in a row, plus another shed-like structure with huge stacks of wood behind it, it looked like quite an operation.

In addition, there was a huge area full of raised beds, mostly empty with winter approaching. There were other areas with lattice-work screens shading them, which seemed odd since he thought most plants required a lot of sun. And there was an orchard, and apparently berry bushes as well, plus a path that meandered from the cabins all the way around the main house, which had been designed to look like a natural mountain trail.

Nick had explored the garage and the storage buildings further south of the house, half-underground and oriented to soak up as much sun as possible on the above ground side, with a high-pitched roof covered with solar panels. Besides storing farm equipment, the buildings contained a huge boiler and some complicated electrical set up with batteries and control equipment probably relating to the solar panels, and not one, but two generators. A literal garden of solar panels was planted on steel posts on the hillside below the buildings as well. And there was a diesel filling station. Quite an operation. And, as Matt had said, way off the grid. But no sign of a meth lab.

Then there was the chicken house. The unusual variety of well-tended birdfeeders scattered around the property should’ve prepared him, but the chicken house was more like a chicken castle. There were composting bins strategically located below it on the hill. As far as he could tell from watching Grace work, the place was almost self-cleaning. There was still the usual pungent odor, generated by both the birds and the compost. That was probably why her little hidden lab was situated under a hill just beyond it.

Backed into the hillside and covered with flowers and shrubs, the lab was completely underground and well-camouflaged, although if you were willing to negotiate past the chicken yard and all the way around the hill behind it, you could see the entrance via a pretty well-worn path. So it wasn’t completely hidden.

He would have to take a look inside, but his explorations, once he’d spotted it and had checked to find it securely locked, had revealed how large it was. He’d found the vents, and there was nothing but a pretty normal organic lab smell coming up through them—solvents probably. Certainly not the distinctive smell of a meth lab.

Even as well-camouflaged as it was, he wouldn’t have thought she would have set up an operation this close to the house, not with guests and staff and who knows who else wandering around. Perhaps your average herb farm needed a lab for analysis of their products, but he would have thought that an operation of this size would use some kind of outside lab for testing. Then again, your average herb farm didn’t have a scientist running it either.

He could ask for a tour, or find out some way to stumble in there. Or, if he had to, come back tonight and pick the lock. Even if there was an innocent explanation for this lab, she could have her meth lab just as well camouflaged further out in the woods. But the environmental devastation caused by meth production—the poisoned soil, plants, and waterways resulting from dumping the toxic byproducts, five or six pounds per pound of drug produced—stood in stark contrast to the absolute reverence for nature evidenced by this farm, and its owner. If this was a cover it was a hell of an elaborate one.

Watching her head off into the woods with that long stride of hers, he decided that if he tailed her this morning and once again found nothing, he would go back to the cabin and sift through all the evidence until he knew why his so-called infallible instincts had finally failed him.

But as he set off after her, at a safe enough distance and downwind so that even that hound of hers couldn’t sniff him out, something told him that everything he knew about this case—hell, everything he knew about anything—was about to change.

Change, when it came to Woodruff Mountain, arrived with much care and deliberation. Pristine and proud, the mountain had stood since its creation, barely impacted by the ebb and flow of world events. And while Pops had seen to it that the footprint of man on this mountain would always be as small and controlled as possible, all around them mountain ridges were being ruined by developers and, not too far north, corporations were removing entire mountaintops for coal.

The lofty and substantial ceiling of bare branches softened and scattered the mid-morning sunshine into elegant patterns on the plants filling the vast sanctuary below. Grace wondered at the hubris of anyone who would raise a hand to destroy this.

“Happy birthday, Pops.” She raised her thermos full of hot sweet tea in salute and took a long drink. Pooka lifted his head, sniffed the air, then lay back down.

Spread out before her in the forest clearing that Pops had called the mountain’s cathedral was the vast ginseng bed Zachariah Woodruff had stumbled into over a century ago. At this time of year, when there were thousands of pale yellow leaves shivering above the rich mulch of the forest floor, it looked like a vast bowlful of gold. Acres of wild ginseng that had been growing and reseeding itself here since ancient times—these days with a little help from the Woodruffs. It was probably worth a fortune if you sold it all.

But, with ginseng, you never harvested it all at once because only the mature roots provided a real benefit—like the relief of nausea and chemo-related fatigue in cancer patients. And the roots that had to struggle for years to survive in the rocks and shallower ground were often the most potent, chemically. No, ginseng wasn’t a crop or a product that you could grow in a green house or under artificial shade, although she had tried. It was a creation of the mountain. You harvested judiciously and replanted where you dug up the roots, thus aerating the soil and assisting with self-seeding. Pops had loved it when, as a high school student, Grace had labeled their relationship with the ginseng as “symbiotic mutualism”. He had laughed and told her she would fall over with all those heavy words weighing down her head. She gulped down more of the hot tea to ease the sudden tightness in her throat. All those years and only a handful of Woodruffs had tended to this bed. Certainly her great-great-grandfather Jeb, and she was sure that his mother, Granny Lily, had as well.