Til Dirt Do Us Part (A Local Foods Mystery) (21 page)

T
he other man moved in and deftly relieved him of his basket while the first cuffed Wes’s hands behind his back. He struggled for a moment and then stood quietly. The color drained out of his face as he gazed above Diane’s head.

Diane went on speaking, but Cam didn’t pay any attention. She stared at the scene. Wes Ames, growing and selling marijuana ? Diane arresting him? In her barn? The world had gone topsy-turvy.

Right before they led Wes away, his head snapped toward Cam.

“Call Anne Kennedy in Elmira, New York. Felicity’s sister. Please.”

The anguish in his eyes tore at Cam. She nodded.

Diane saw them out the door and turned back. She walked up to Cam. “I’m so sorry to do this here. We had information that led us to believe he was about to destroy his operation.”

“Who are you?” Cam stared at Diane, this normal-looking woman who said she was a consultant, this person who took pride in canning her own tomatoes.

Diane stood a little straighter. “I’m an undercover DEA agent. We’ve been following Wes for a while. He had established a rather large marijuana factory in the back basement of the Old Town Hall.” She raised her eyebrows. “It wasn’t exactly altruism for the town that made him not want Irene to buy the property.”

The flat of seedlings. The way Wes had seemed alarmed to see her and had hurried her out of the basement the day she’d stopped by. His arguments with Irene. Cam wondered if the clicking of things falling into place in her brain was audible.

“This explains a lot. Does Detective Pappas know about it?” He had to. That was why he had asked her about Diane during their walk.

“He does.”

“Did he tell you what I told him on Friday? About my run-in with Wes in the Old Town Hall basement a few days ago?”

She nodded.

“It all makes sense now, but it didn’t at the time,” Cam said. “Poor Felicity. I wonder if she knew anything?”

“As far as we know, she didn’t. We’ve done some checking around.” Diane smiled, but it was a professional smile and not a particularly cheery one.

In the distance Cam heard the four flat, slow blasts from the municipal siren, indicating a fire. And again. And again. On-call firefighters would be jumping into cars all over town and driving from every direction, flashing lights on, toward the firehouse. A minute later the faint wail of an engine’s siren started up. She sniffed. When she caught a whiff of smoke in the air, she shuddered. She’d been trapped in a fire not once but twice in her life. She never wanted to experience it again.

Diane dragged a vibrating phone out of her jacket pocket. She turned away to answer it.

“I’m on it.” Her eyes darted to Cam. “Thanks.” She stabbed a button to disconnect. “Do you mind assembling my share for me? I’ll pick it up later. I have to run. Old Town Hall is on fire. The bastard must have triggered the fire to destroy evidence.”

“How could he trigger a fire?”

Diane shook her head. “I don’t know.” She hurried out of the barn at a near run.

Lucinda moved next to Cam. “Holy manure. I always thought Wes was a little
doido.
” She made a circular motion with her finger next to her head. “You know, funny. But growing pot for a business on town property? He really is nuts.”

Cam nodded. This upped the stakes for his being a suspect in Irene’s murder, too. It was one thing to want to save a historic building for town functions. It was quite another to have a profitable business threatened. But why hadn’t he grown the pot at home? Maybe he hadn’t wanted to involve Felicity.

She glanced at his overflowing basket. She’d promised to call Felicity at her sister’s. And if Felicity was coming home, as she surely would be now, she should have the food.

“Can you watch the shop for a few minutes? I have to go look up Felicity’s sister and call her.”

“You can find the number on your phone, you know. It ain’t called smart for nothing.”

“I know. I’d rather have the privacy, though. Back in a flash.” At least Wes’s troubles seemed to have taken Lucinda’s mind off her own, Cam mused as she walked to the house. An idea hit her like a spring thunderstorm. Cam smiled, her own mind taken off Wes’s troubles for the moment.

Her step returning to the barn was much less lively. Felicity had dissolved into tears at the news. Her sister Anne had had to take over the phone. Anne assured Cam they would call a lawyer. She said they would be leaving Elmira shortly, but it was a seven-hour drive. Before Cam hung up, she volunteered to leave the basket of food at Felicity and Wes’s house, telling Anne nothing was overly perishable, especially with today’s cool temperature.

Cam had never been to their house before but had the address in her files. She could go right after the last shareholder showed up. She smacked her head as she walked. Tomorrow was market day again. The market manager had offered her a table for the rest of the season, and she had accepted. How in the world would she get everything done in time? Then she remembered her idea.

Alexandra was in the barn.

“Yo, Cam. We didn’t forget about the run.”

“No worries. Besides, I didn’t expect you to build anything in the rain.”

“DJ’s outside communing with his little girlfriends.” Alexandra tilted her head in the direction of the chicken area. “They look great.”

“I think they’re really responding to good care in their new home. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re happy, but who knows? Maybe they are.”

A subscriber Cam didn’t know well approached. “I saw you have chickens now,” he said. “Good move. When will you include eggs in the shares?”

“Uh . . .” Cam looked at Alexandra. The young woman took over the conversation, to Cam’s relief, and began to tell the man about the hens’ gradual return to health, when they could be expected to start laying, and the value of the rescue organization. Cam imagined Alexandra would have a new recruit before the afternoon was over.

Cam walked out to the hen area. DJ stood in the enclosure, next to the coop, looking like he was checking the construction. She greeted him.

“How’s it holding up?”

He turned and smiled. “Looks great. So do the ladies. They’re learning how to live like chickens again. Did you see how their feathers are already coming back?”

Cam nodded.

“We’ll build the covered run right here for now. It’ll be lightweight, just two-by-twos and chicken wire. You’ll be able to move it easily whenever you rotate the hens around the property.”

“What if they’re out when we want to move them?”

He raised his eyebrows a few times, channeling Groucho Marx. “Ve haf our vays,” he said with a big smile that produced a dimple in his left cheek.

Cam smiled back. It was hard not to around this engaging young man. “I’d better get back inside. Make sure you give me a bill for your supplies.”

He said he would and bent down to stroke Her Meekness’s tiny head.

Alexandra was finishing filling her bags when Cam reentered the barn. Alexandra left the bags by the door and headed out to work with DJ. The barn was now empty of subscribers, except for Lucinda. Cam checked the sign-in list. There were still a half dozen shareholders to go.

“Lucinda, I have a proposal for you.” Cam leaned against a thick post bisecting the main area.

Lucinda had retrieved the dropped squash and was shifting it from hand to hand, back and forth like a ball.

“I’d like to hire you. I can’t pay too much—I’ll have to check my books—but I really, really need some extra help. And you volunteer so much, you should be paid instead. I know it’s not being a librarian, but it’s also not cleaning up other people’s messes. What do you say?”

“But I volunteer because I like it. You don’t have to pay me.”

“I want to. Let me at least offer you all the produce you want and something more per hour. We can work out a schedule. If I don’t get more help around here, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown or a failed farm. Or both. And I don’t want either to happen.”

Lucinda stared at the squash in her hands. She shifted it back and forth a few more times. She raised her eyes to Cam. And nodded, breaking into a big smile.

“I’ll do it,
fazendeira.
But one thing?”

“What is it?”

“If a library job comes through, I gotta take it. Deal?”

“Deal.” Cam walked over to Lucinda and extended her hand. Lucinda took it, and they shook. Lucinda held out her arms to Cam. They exchanged a quick hug.

As Cam greeted a latecomer at the door, she reflected that Lucinda was about as opposite from her as possible in terms of being comfortable around people both physically and socially. Maybe a few of Lucinda’s habits would rub off on her.

B
y the time Cam came back from leaving Wes and Felicity’s basket at their house, it was almost five o’clock and the clouds had blown clean through. Lucinda had stayed to do some harvesting for the market, but her car was gone when Cam drove in. Alexandra’s bike and DJ’s borrowed truck were there, and Cam heard sounds of hammering coming from behind the barn.

She took a few minutes to tidy up the barn. She checked the subscriber sign-in sheet. Five households hadn’t made it over to get their shares, which put her ahead for items she could sell at market tomorrow. She’d made it clear at the start of the season: if shareholders didn’t show up or make prior arrangements, the vegetables reverted to Cam. The number of no-shows, of course, didn’t include Diane. Cam had asked Lucinda to assemble her share and leave it on the table.

Speak of the devil. Diane rushed into the barn. Her normally neat cap of dark hair was a bit flyaway, and she wore a smudge on her left cheek.

“Sorry about earlier, Cam.” Diane spread her hands out. “We should have taken Wes at his home, before he even got here. I hope we didn’t offend any of your customers.”

“It was certainly a shock. I haven’t heard any complaints, though.”

“Good.” She glanced around. “Is my—”

“Your share is in those plastic bags on the table there.” Cam pointed. Lucinda had left a slip of paper next to the bags with Diane’s name on it.

“Great. Thank you.”

“So being a subscriber was only a front for getting closer to your suspect?” Cam shoved her hands in her back pockets. She didn’t much like being a tool for anyone.

Diane stopped. She faced Cam. “I am very devoted to eating locally. I love your produce. I do have a life outside my job, Cam. Please believe me.”

“All right. I hope there won’t be any more busts in my barn.”

“I hope not, too.”

“What happened with the fire at the Old Town Hall?”

Diane let out a little breath. “It turned out to be a shorted wire, and between the fire department and the sprinkler system, the damage was pretty slight.”

“Nobody was hurt?”

Diane shook her head. “Thank goodness.”

“And so it wasn’t Wes trying to destroy evidence, after all.” Cam raised her eyebrows.

“No.” Diane had the grace to look chagrined. She looked relieved at the same time. She picked up her bags, said good-bye, and left.

A last ray of sun slanted through the clerestory window high above the door. The familiar barn smells of dust, motor oil, and bits of dried manure mixed with the pungent scents of garlic, earthy potatoes, antique apples. Cam caught a trace of freshly sawn wood, so different from the dry-timber bouquet of Albert’s antique barn before it had gone up in a terrifying conflagration. Cam gazed at the neat array of tools hanging on the back wall, next to three stacks of empty bushel baskets standing ready to hold the next harvest. It had been one more exhausting day as a farmer, and it wasn’t over yet. In this moment of grace, though, she knew she was lucky to have her health, a sturdy old house to live in, a job.

“Cam? We want to show you something,” Alexandra called from outside.

The two young people had gotten a lot done in a hurry. A structure made of two-by-twos now enclosed an area about ten feet out from the coop doors. The section closest to the doors was human height, and the rest came up to about half that high. A thick roll of chicken wire lay on its side next to a six-foot ladder.

“You’ve been busy.” Cam tested one of the upright supports. It barely moved. “So you’ll run the fencing over the top and the sides?”

“That’s it,” DJ said. “We’ll come back tomorrow and finish the job, if it’s all right with you.”

“Of course,” Cam said. “Can I offer you both something to drink? I’m sure ready.”

“I’ll feed the hens,” Alexandra offered.

When Cam came back from the house with three full glasses of beer and a bowl of tortilla chips on a tray, the hens were pecking away at their dinner. Hillary shoved Her Meekness out of the way, but DJ grabbed a handful of the feed and led the smaller hen into a corner to eat in peace.

Cam set the tray on the bench behind the barn. “Beer’s here,” she announced.

DJ dusted off his hands and joined her and Alexandra.

After they clinked glasses and Cam took a long swig, she sniffed.

“It’s getting a little smelly out here.”

DJ laughed. “Part of the deal. We have to keep up with raking the yard when you have the coop here next to the barn and with changing the straw in the coop. But every bit of it can go into the compost, and it’ll feed your next round of crops.”

“We? You mean
I
have to,” Cam said, wrinkling her nose. She was certainly no stranger to manure and didn’t mind the odor when she had a fresh load delivered. But having the smell around all the time was different.

“We’ll help, right, Allie?”

Allie?
Cam thought Alexandra was adamant about not being called by any nickname, even Alex.

Alexandra nodded, apparently not noticing. She stretched her legs out, caressing DJ’s foot with hers.

Oh. So that was why she didn’t mind being called Allie.

The three sat and chatted until the afternoon started turning into evening and the temperature cooled. Most of the chickens had already made their way into the coop to roost. DJ shooed Her Meekness up the ramp and latched the door behind her.

“Thanks again, you guys,” Cam said, collecting the glasses. “I’ll be at market in Newburyport in the morning, but you’re welcome to come and work even if I’m not here.”

“We’ll do it.” Alexandra fetched her share bags from the barn and followed DJ to the truck he’d borrowed. She hefted her bike into the back and slid into the cab with him. He gave a little honk as they drove off, and Cam waved back.

Her thoughts turning to dinner, Cam was headed toward the house when a truck drove up the drive. She peered in the dusk. Were DJ and Alexandra already back? Maybe they forgot something.

She took a closer look. It was Howard Fisher. Her heart thumped in her chest. What did he want? He’d better not have his rifle with him. She patted her pocket and was relieved to find her phone right where she wanted it. She moved closer to the house, until the motion-detector light flashed on.

Howard’s driver’s-side door complained of rust and age as it opened. Howard climbed out, carrying a flat package. He had left the lights on and the engine running.

“Hey, Howard. What brings you here?” Cam stayed in the pool of light.

“Brought you something. We butchered Buddy, our big fella, today. Here’s some chops for you.” He extended the package.

Cam didn’t know how she could refuse, so she took the packet wrapped in white butcher paper. “Thank you. But why—”

“Just wanted to show no ill will and all.” Howard looked at the ground. “And my boy told me I should bring the meat. Sometimes he’s right about stuff.”

“He’s a good kid. And he’s always very polite, you should know. Unlike some teenagers these days.”

“His ma’s doing.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be going. So’s you know, there’s more pork where that came from, if you should want any.”

Cam barely had time to call out her thanks before he drove off. She gazed at the packet in her hand. She was completely confused by the meaning of Howard’s gesture. He wanted to show no ill will? Maybe he felt bad about taking Preston.

The next question was, did she want to eat Buddy for dinner? She was hungry enough to. And he hadn’t been the one to gnaw on Irene’s body. The thought of Irene brought the thought of the killer. Who was still out there. She glanced around quickly as she unlocked the back door.

When she called Preston, he dashed toward her from around the corner of the house. She didn’t blame him for hiding from the man who had snatched him only a few days earlier. Cam flicked on the lights and locked the door behind both of them.

As she started unwrapping the chops, she reflected that it was a good thing Alexandra and DJ had already left. They surely would have accosted Howard about how he treated his animals. Maybe Cam wouldn’t tell them she was having part of the big fella for supper.