Til Dirt Do Us Part (A Local Foods Mystery) (10 page)

C
am and Sim were almost back to the auto repair shop when Cam glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Her eyes widened as she swore.

“What is it?” Sim asked.

“I have a dinner date. I forgot all about it.”

“When are you getting picked up?”

“I have to meet him in Newburyport. At six.” Cam pointed to the clock, which read 5:50. “And I have to get home and change.” She gestured down at her work clothes from the day, old jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt decorated with dried mud and plant stains. She groaned, pulling into the parking area of Sim’s shop.

“Sorry to make you late.” Sim opened her door and climbed down. “And thanks for driving.”

“No worries,” Cam said, shoving the gearshift into reverse. “Stay away from Bobby’s place, okay?” she called out the window.

Sim held a hand up as she walked away. Cam noticed the mechanic didn’t agree. But she didn’t have time to worry about that. She drove home as fast as was safe in the gloaming. When she arrived, she left Jake a quick message that she was running late, and tore through a high-speed shower, wondering as she washed why he hadn’t picked up his phone. He was probably in the middle of some complicated sauce. She threw on clean black jeans and a soft pale blue sweater, since the evening threatened to cool down even more before she returned home. She ran a comb through her hair, pulled on her cowboy boots, and was about to dash back out when Preston looked longingly at his dish.

“Gotcha, my man.” Cam scooped dry food into his dish and ran him some fresh water.

After she’d rung the doorbell to Jake’s flat for the third time, Cam checked her phone.
Uh-oh.
It was 6:45. She was really late. And Jake wasn’t coming to the door. She stepped back and checked the second-story windows. They were closed, but light from his apartment pushed out into the night like a bloom of welcome.

He lived above his restaurant. Since it was Monday, The Market was dark and the big exhaust fan on the side of the building was quiet. Cam shook her head. In the short months she’d known Jake and fallen partway in love, she’d also experienced his volatile moods and occasionally incendiary temper. Maybe this was one of those times when Cam’s being late had sent him into a minor rage. Wait’ll he found out why she was late. Anything involving a threat, in Jake’s mind, of Cam becoming interested in another man had sent him through the roof in the past. She made up her mind not to mention Bobby and her little field trip to his house with Sim. If Jake ever opened the door.

She rang once more. She heard the peal from within and was rewarded by the sound of heavy footsteps clattering down the stairs.

Jake pulled open the door. He wore a big grin, a silky black shirt, and jeans, with enormous bare feet poking out.

Cam let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. He wasn’t angry with her.
Good.

He pulled her into an embrace and nibbled on her ear. “How’s my farmer?” His voice was husky and sensual.

Cam hugged him and delivered a quick kiss. She pushed him away gently, trying to ignore the parts of her body he had just lit on fire. “Hungry, that’s how she is.” She smiled up at him.

“All business, all the time.” He shook his head, tsk-tsking her.

“I rang the doorbell a bunch of times.” She hoped that didn’t sound like whining, but wondered why he hadn’t responded to the bell until now.

“Mmm.” He ushered her up the stairs ahead of him.

He followed so closely, she could feel his heat. When she paused in the living room to drop her bag, he gracefully passed around her, letting his hand linger on her waist.

“Come and taste.” He stood over a large pot on the stove, where a divine aroma surrounded him. He held a full spoon over the pot and gestured her closer. “Bouillabaisse. What do you think?”

Cam tasted the stew. She closed her eyes to savor it on her tongue and opened them again.

“You’ve done it again. Fabulous, Jake. It’s rich and subtle and light all at once.” She shook her head. “I’m amazed. If I tried that, it would never come out so good.”

“Hey, I’ve been saving seafood shells—you know, lobster, shrimp, mussel. I boil them in court bouillon to make a seafood stock. And with the fishes, I put your leeks and herbs. Your red pepper and garlic go into the rouille. So it’s a collaborative meal.”

“I can’t remember what rouille is,” Cam said.

“Think of it as a spicy cream sauce, but without the cream. I blend olive oil with bread crumbs, garlic, saffron, and hot peppers.”

Cam murmured her approval. She was getting weak in the knees. Could a person swoon over the mere description of food?

Jake pulled a loaf of crusty bread out of the oven and asked Cam to slice it while he ladled the stew into two wide bowls. He spooned the rouille over the top and placed one bowl on each red place mat. A simple green salad in a wooden bowl and an open bottle of Côtes du Rhône Blanc already graced the table, along with two slender green tapers in glass candlesticks.

“Sit, Cameron.” He held her chair for her. “Now, what did I forget? Ah, yes, candles.” He headed for the coffee table to fetch a lighter and returned to bring flame to wick.

Cam waited, wondering again why he hadn’t answered her first several tries at the doorbell. She was glad he wasn’t in an angry mood. And further wondered what she was even doing with a man whose moods she had to worry about.

Jake poured them each a glass of wine and dimmed the lights in the kitchen area. The candlelight softened the crags on his face. He sat and reached for Cam’s hand. “We should do this more often.” He squeezed and let go.

Cam raised her glass. “To bouillabaisse.”

Jake frowned. He arrested the movement of his glass. “I didn’t mean more French fish stew. I meant more intimate meals together with you, Cam.” He took a sip without clinking his glass with Cam’s or meeting her eyes.

“Which sounds good, too.” Cam hoped that would be enough to smooth his Swedish feathers. Or maybe they were his dysfunctional-background feathers. Feathers reminded her of the hens.

“Guess what? I have chickens at the farm now.”

Jake’s face switched from whatever mood he had been in to instant delight. “How so?”

Between bites of the savory stew, Cam explained Project Rescue Chicken, how Alexandra had found birds in need, and how her friends had chipped in to build the coop. “When you saw me at the market Sunday? Alexandra and her crew were all at the farm, setting up a new home for the girls.”

“Where did you get the birds?”

“There’s the unfortunate part. They were Bev Montgomery’s. She wasn’t feeding them or taking care of them. The board of health was about to exterminate the lot. Alexandra’s friend DJ helped get them out. He seems to understand chickens and can kind of talk to them.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Are there any guys out there you aren’t attracted to?”

“I didn’t say anything about being attracted to him.” Was Jake jealous of DJ? “He’s young, like Alexandra, and he knows what he’s doing. I appreciate his talents. That’s all.”

“Hmm,” Jake said with a toss of his head.

“Anyway, Bev isn’t too happy about the rescue mission. She claims we stole them from her. She’s deluded about that, since the board of health was going to take them, anyway, and those pea-brained ladies would have been dispatched to the big coop in the sky. Uncle Albert said he is going to try to get Bev to sell her farm and move into his assisted-living place. I think it’s a wise move.”

“Will you have eggs to sell?” Jake tore off a piece of bread and dunked it in the stew.

“I will after they recover from . . . oh, crud.” Cam smacked her forehead.

“What?”

“Great chicken farmer I am. I forgot to get them into the coop before I came over here.”

“What? Is a fox going to get them?” Jake laughed.

“One might, actually. Or a coyote.” Cam couldn’t believe she’d forgotten to make sure the girls were safe for the night.

“You were late getting here. What was up that you forgot about the hens, too?” Jake’s face turned serious again.

Cam sipped her wine. “You probably haven’t been following Irene’s murder investigation, but her stepson, Bobby, has been missing.”

“Was he killed, too?”

Cam could swear he looked almost hopeful. She shook her head. “When I was at Sim’s, picking up my truck—”

“Who’s Sim? Somebody else I have to worry about?”

“Hey, you must have seen Sim. She’s the mechanic who came with Bobby to the dinner.”

“Maybe. I can’t remember.” He waved a hand and nearly knocked over his glass.

“Jake, stop it. Listen to me.” Cam covered his hand with her own. “I like you. A lot. I’m not looking to be involved with anyone else. I run into a lot of people in my work. You can’t keep imagining reasons to be jealous of every single man who is remotely in my age bracket.”

Jake pulled his white-blond brows together. He didn’t look convinced.

Cam retrieved her hand and sat back. “As I was saying, when I was picking up my truck at Sim’s auto repair shop—at
her
shop—Bobby showed up. He had started to tell us why he had been staying out of sight when the police swooped in and took him in for questioning about Irene’s murder.”
Oops.
She’d planned not to mention Bobby. Why couldn’t she think before she talked for once?

“I never liked that guy. Glad they have him behind bars. Why’d he kill her? For her money?”

“Who said he killed her? I don’t think he did, and Sim certainly doesn’t.”

“You can’t deny he was flirting with you all summer. Then he shows up at the dinner in a goddamn skirt.” Jake looked like he’d tasted a piece of rotten halibut.

“The skirt was his choice.” Cam had liked the way it looked on him. And she had to admit she had enjoyed the months of flirting with the handsome carpenter, but she wasn’t about to mention that to Jake. “Anyway, Sim wanted to check out his house. She had a key and wanted me to go with her, so I did. That’s why I was late.”

“So you chose Bobby over me.”

Cam stared at him. “I’m done.” She laid down her spoon and took a last sip of wine. She stood.

“Where are you going?” His voice was almost plaintive.

“I’m going home. My affection doesn’t seem to be enough for you. If you want to spend time with me, I can’t be stuffed into a box or kept on a leash. I’m an adult woman with a life outside yours. You have a choice.” Cam grabbed her bag and started for the door. “Get used to it, or go find yourself somebody else, somebody meek and retiring.”

“Don’t go.” Jake stood and followed her, arms outstretched. “I’m sorry, Cam.”

Cam paused. He did sound sorry. But they’d been through this before.

“Please?” He grabbed her left arm, his huge hand encircling it completely. He closed it tighter, squeezing her bicep.

“Let go of me.” Cam unfolded his fingers with her right hand. “Think about what I said.”

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she glanced back up. The sad look on his face had turned to stone.

She let herself out and stood for a moment outside the door. She shuddered. She’d playfully called him Lurch earlier in the year. The more she got to know him, the more often she glimpsed a monstrous side to him. She didn’t like it. Not at all.

At home, Cam drove behind the barn and angled the truck so the headlights shone at the chicken yard. She let herself into the fencing and shooed the hens up the ramp and into the coop.

“Come on, ladies. Time for bed.”

She couldn’t tell if they were all there or not. She glanced around the yard and didn’t spy any bedraggled creature lurking in the shadows. She’d have to count them in the morning. When she picked up the water receptacle and the feeder, she thought she felt a feather caress her hand, and her heart sank. She hoped a fox hadn’t invaded their space and made off with one of them. She placed the receptacles inside and secured the door, checking it twice.

Tomorrow she’d rig an outdoor light on the barn wall. For tonight she’d just earned an F in Hen Management.

T
he next morning dawned foggy and cool. After Cam pulled herself out of bed at six, she donned work clothes and an old sweater.

As she let the chickens out of the coop, coffee mug in hand, Cam tried to count them while they tumbled and staggered out. The one with the topknot flew out the door, startling her. Except for that one, they all looked pretty similar, and she thought she’d counted forty as she brought out their food and drink and replenished both. Preston stood outside the fencing with his ears perked up, but he didn’t try to get into the enclosure.

“You leave the girls alone, Mr. P. They aren’t your girlfriends or your lunch, you hear?”

She could have sworn he shrugged as he turned away. She yawned as she trudged out to an empty bed she’d raked smooth the afternoon before and carefully dropped hardy spinach seeds into three shallow furrows. It was too late for the plants to mature this fall, but she’d read the crop overwintered easily.

Over the bed she started to erect a knee-high mini hoop house. She set out heavy wire arcs spaced a foot apart. She fetched some floating row cover from the barn and laid it over the half hoops, anchoring it on the ground with lengths of lumber and pinning the ends to the wires with clothespins so they wouldn’t flap in the wind.

Later in the season, after the ground froze, she would mulch the bed with salt marsh hay, much like she did with the garlic, and would replace the floating row cover with thick plastic, stretched tight to keep the snow from collapsing the hoops. The plastic would raise the temperature enough to keep the crop from dying off completely, and when spring came, it could resume growth. At least, that was the plan she’d read about in a book on growing in all four seasons.

On her way back to the barn, a breeze brought the flutter of a feather from the direction of her neighbor’s property. Cam glanced to her right.

“Oh, no.” She strode to a sad little heap on the ground. It was the remains of one of the hens. So she hadn’t counted an even forty, after all. A mostly stripped skeleton lay abandoned near the boundary between her farm and Tully’s meadow. The beak and claws, if that was what chicken feet were called, were intact, as were the bones. Most of the flesh had been eaten away.

Who or what had done the hen in? Cam guessed it could have been any predator, from a hawk to a fox to a coyote. Through her own negligence Cam hadn’t been able to protect all the ladies, after all. She knew it was only a tiny-brained animal destined to become stew one day, but she felt sad for it and a failure for not being able to keep it safe. Plus, what would Alexandra and DJ think of her?

She drew her phone out of her back pocket to check the time.
Crud.
Now she was negligent in another direction. She was almost late if she wanted to get to the Middleford Fair on time. She blew the carcass a kiss and loped to the house, promising to give the dead girl a burial later in the day.

Cam quickly washed her hands and face and dumped her work clothes in a pile on the floor. She threw on her vegetable-print vest over a black shirt and the same black jeans she’d worn to Jake’s. She tied her black sneakers and checked the clock. Nine twenty. It was a thirty-minute drive south to Middleford. She had to submit her entry at the county fair by ten o’clock at the latest. She had barely enough time. She clattered downstairs and grabbed the completed entry forms from the desk. She winced at her farm’s name, which was increasingly striking her as ridiculous. She’d change it back this winter. Albert had certainly expressed his approval for the move.

In the short walk from the house to the truck, Cam could feel the fog dampening every strand of her hair. Yet another reason to wear it short. It dried quickly, and humidity didn’t really affect it. Hurrying, she loaded her three most perfect, most uniform garlic braids and four baskets of her sweetest, roundest gold cherry tomatoes into the cab of the truck, glad she’d harvested them in the sun the day before. They were so small, the temperature at harvest time made a big difference in their flavor. A warm, sunny day really brought out the sugars, while cooler or cloudy days made them taste more acidic.

She climbed into the truck and maneuvered into the navy-blue rain jacket she kept ready for days like these. As she drove, cutting across back roads to pick up Route 1, she rehashed last night’s conversation with Jake. Why did the two of them seem to light up fireworks every time they were together? The romantic kind along with the conflicted kind. Her life was difficult enough. She didn’t think she needed a contentious love relationship on top of it, no matter how weak in the knees Jake made her.

Her thoughts turned to Bobby, sitting in a jail cell. She hadn’t heard from Sim this morning or from Susan Lee. Poor Bobby. Finally, when he’d been willing to come out of hiding and talk to the police, he’d been abruptly taken away instead. And tased, too. Cam had heard about the stun guns, but she’d never seen one used. Bobby had cried out as he fell like a giant rag doll. She had at first thought the police had shot with a bullet, and was immensely relieved when Frost looked at her and said, “Taser.”

She drove through the Great Marsh of Newbury. The fog cloaked the salt marsh haystacks. These weren’t modern hay bundles shrink-wrapped in white plastic. Instead, they evoked earlier times with their traditional mushroom-like mounds elevated on wooden racks. She made it through the traffic from the Rowley strip mall shoppers, and up and down the wooded hills through Middleford. She hoped this weather would keep the crowds down at her destination. Even on a Tuesday morning the county fair had the potential to snarl traffic and clog the pop-up parking lots that bordered the fairgrounds.

She would never consider going near the fair on a weekend. People flocked to it for all kinds of reasons. 4-H teenagers hoped to win a blue ribbon for a prize goat or steer, even in these modern times. Other teenagers wanted to neck on the carnival rides. Adults came for the music venues, to watch the tractor-pull event, or to browse the blue-ribbon quilts and best-of-show family farm exhibits. And children everywhere clamored for sugary fried dough, a chance to play a shooting game, a spin on the most thrill-inducing ride. But flock there they did. Cam, on the other hand, didn’t enjoy crowds one bit.

She stopped behind two other cars at a red traffic light. The light turned green, and the first car accelerated. A truck running the red light zoomed out from the crossroad. It swerved around the first car and sped away. The first car slammed on its brakes. The car behind it crashed into it. Cam jammed on her own brakes. She thanked her lucky stars she always left a large space between her and the vehicle in front. Her heart beat so hard, she could barely breathe.

She rolled her window down as both drivers exited their cars. Neither looked seriously hurt. They conferred about insurance and excoriated the red-light scofflaw, now long gone. Should she get out and leave her name as a witness? Another car pulled over, and Cam heard the driver call out that she’d seen the whole thing. She dug a farm business card out of her bag and handed it out the window to one of the drivers, apologizing for not staying but asking them to call if they needed her testimony.

Cam drove around the cars and continued to the fairgrounds. She had to make the deadline to submit her vegetables, and she could easily get stuck in traffic up ahead. Her heart rate gradually returned to normal, and her resolve to proceed very cautiously at intersections was reinforced.

She snagged what seemed to be the very last parking space in a grassy lot across from the fairgrounds, a spot at the back bordering a band of brush. She backed the truck into a tight space between an SUV and a beat-up Civic that must have been two decades old. She slung the bag of garlic braids over her shoulder with care and lifted out the flat box holding her tomatoes. She slammed the door with one heel. No need to lock the old rust bucket.

She stood in a group of fairgoers waiting for the police officer on duty to signal them to cross the busy two-lane highway. Howard Fisher walked through the parking lot, toward her, with his head down. He glanced up and saw her. He abruptly changed direction.

“Howard! Hey, Howard!”

His reluctance was obvious, but he turned back and shuffled up to her side. “Morning.”

“How are you?”

He grunted, hands in pockets. “I’m all right.” He gazed across the road at the acres of bustling fair.

“Do you have an entry here?” she asked.

“Yup. Bacon.”

“That makes sense.” As long as no one judging the bacon knew Howard’s current pigs had been gnawing human flesh. A little shudder ran through her. And he couldn’t very well enter one of his emaciated swine in the judging, so maybe bacon was his only option. Winning could provide him with good publicity, the same reason Cam was entering.

The police officer in his electric-yellow vest motioned the group across the highway. Howard split off from Cam, barely saying good-bye, as soon as he was on the other side. Cam asked a volunteer in a green vest where the produce barn was and followed his directions. She glanced at her watch. Could have stopped at the accident, after all. She was ten minutes early.

The fog hung even more heavily here in the flat valley between the hills. It didn’t dampen the fairgoers’ spirits, from what Cam could see. The aroma of fried dough beckoned to her, as did sausages frying at a different booth. She stopped. Wes Ames and another man stood right beyond the Sausage Gal booth, each digging deep into a messy sub with oily peppers and onions trailing out of the roll every which way. Wes’s friend was short, a bit thick through the middle, and wore a gray ponytail tied at the nape of his neck.

“Hey, Wes,” Cam called.

He looked up and waved.

Cam approached the two as Wes turned back to the booth, grabbed a handful of paper napkins, and wiped his chin.

“Cam, how are ya?” Wes grinned. “Want a bite of sausage?”

She declined and greeted the other man.

“Billy’s an old college buddy. Lives in Idaho. I thought I’d show him some local color. Homegrown, you might say.” The men looked at each other and began to laugh.

Cam didn’t get the joke but wished them a good time and moved on. If she didn’t know better, she’d say they were acting like stoned college students. Maybe they were stoned. She didn’t care.

A few moments later, she stood at the entrance to the warehouse-size produce barn with butterflies in her stomach. The end of her first year of farming. What had she been thinking, entering a competition ? She was certain more experienced growers would be the blue ribbon winners, not her. But, as Albert had said, it would give her experience in the process. Plus, her gold tomatoes were exceedingly tasty and organic, too.

She squared her shoulders and marched in.