Til Dirt Do Us Part (A Local Foods Mystery) (23 page)

W
hen Cam got home, she greeted Alexandra, DJ, and Katie. They were almost done stapling the chicken wire to the run framework. In the house, she fixed a sandwich and poured a glass of milk. When she sat at the table, Preston approached her chair. She glanced down at him staring up at her. Cam was sure his face, with its luminous light green eyes lined with kohl above a full snowy-white ruff, could get him a gig as a feline supermodel. He didn’t look worried or hungry. It was the calm, patient stare he always gave her when he wanted to sit in her lap. He never jumped up, but simply waited to be lifted. If he was keeping track on his success-o-meter, he had to know he’d scored again. She hoisted him by his ruff and his midsection onto her lap and stroked him with one hand as she ate.

The note from the dinner still sat on the table. She examined it again. Why did the writing look so familiar? On a hunch, she gave Preston one more stroke before sliding him onto the floor, murmuring, “Sorry, Mr. P.”

She got up and went to her desk. The pile of her recent transactions waited next to the computer. Promptly entering which money came in and went out into her online accounting system was not one of Cam’s strong suits. She rifled through the hodgepodge of invoices, receipts, bills, and farm-to-table dinner sign-ups until she found what she wanted. She took Irene’s sign-up form to the table. She compared the writing to that on the note. Identical, as far as she could tell.

Now all she had to do was figure out why.

Cam pulled the truck all the way up the long, curving drive to Irene’s Colonial, as close to the back door as possible. Its tasteful cream clapboards and pale green trim were complemented by understated landscaping that had to have cost her a bundle. She must have hired weekly gardeners to keep the annual flowers deadheaded, the rhododendron and weeping cherry neatly pruned, the black mulch free of weeds.

Cam shut off the engine. She fingered Irene’s keys in the pocket of her jacket. Howard had written the note. To Irene, apparently. Did Cam have the nerve to enter Irene’s house to find the reason for the note? Maybe it was because she didn’t use her intellect in farming the same way she had writing computer code, but she felt a steel filament drawing her toward solving this problem of finding the connection between Howard and Irene.

She checked her phone. Two thirty. What if she was spotted? The house was situated so the neighbors on either side didn’t have a direct view of the end of the driveway and the back door, but Cam heard a smooth engine noise like a riding mower from one direction and the voices of children playing outdoors from the other. Someone could easily see her and ask what she was doing there.

She’d better come up with a story. She couldn’t very well claim to be a long-lost cousin, since people who lived in town might recognize her. She ran through possibilities. She worked with Lucinda and was here to clean and get the house ready for sale. On a Sunday? No way. She could say Irene had asked her to help with the museum plans. But why? Cam snapped her fingers. If somebody questioned her, she’d claim Irene had asked her to plant a vegetable garden behind the house and Cam had to retrieve garden design books she’d left with Irene. She swallowed. It was a long shot, a story that would have to do. With any luck nobody would see her slip in the back door, anyway.

As a dark cloud blew over the sun, she shut the truck door as quietly as she could. She tried to walk naturally to the door and exhaled a long breath once she was inside, with the door shut behind her. She whistled as she walked through the house. The decor was simple and looked expensive. Rich woven rugs sat atop gleaming hardwood floors. The kitchen could have been featured in a
Gourmet
magazine spread with its magnet-free refrigerator and empty countertops.

Cam kept walking. Her goal was an office of some kind. Irene surely had a home office. And although she knew Pete and his crew had searched the house, they hadn’t been looking for the object of her search. If she found it, she’d call Pete and go home. And if she didn’t, she’d still call him and go home.

She found herself almost tiptoeing. This lovely home was Irene’s life, her refuge from the world. Cam was intruding on it, uninvited. She was at least as private a person as Irene and would detest someone invading her personal zone of retreat and safety. Like most others, Cam hadn’t particularly liked Irene, but she’d seen the older woman’s affection for Preston, and anyway, nobody deserved to be murdered.

She ventured up a wide, graceful staircase cushioned with an Oriental rug runner. The door to the right in the upstairs hall opened onto what looked like a guest suite. The one next to it was to a bathroom. After peering into a room with twin beds, she turned to the far end of the hall.

She pulled her jacket tighter around her. The air was chilly. An open door led into a large bedroom. It must be Irene’s. It smelled faintly of perfume. The stark decor of the room took Cam aback. No fussy flounces topped the windows. No pinks decorated the bedspread or rugs. White carpeting, white comforter, plain white blinds, and light gray walls were broken only by black lacquered furniture and a large wall-mounted piece of rich red tapestry. A framed picture sat alone on the dresser.

Cam ventured close to the photograph. A younger Irene smiled up at a man who was an older version of Bobby. She bent over to take a closer look. The man had to be Bobby’s father, the late Zebulon. He was a handsome man in his later years. His hair was dark and thick like Bobby’s but cut much shorter and streaked with white at the temples. It struck Cam that she hadn’t ever seen Irene smile. Not really smile, like in this picture. Irene had been happy once.

Cam straightened. A whiff of freshly mown grass wafted by. She sniffed. She followed the scent to a door standing ajar in the corner of the bedroom. It opened onto a well-appointed office. Beyond the wide desk and tall bookcases, a six-foot-tall window filled the wall. The window looked out onto the back lawn and tall firs that lined the property. It presented a lovely view. And was wide open and missing its screen. No wonder the air was chilly in here.

Two blocky shapes stuck up from outside the sill. Cam approached and cautiously leaned out for a look. The shapes were the tops of a metal extension ladder’s vertical supports. A ladder that extended from the ground to where she stood, and was conveniently masked from view by the screen of trees. She shivered, and it wasn’t from the cold. Someone had been in here illicitly. Way more illicitly than using Lucinda’s set of Irene’s keys.

There was something smeared on the third rung down. She peered at it. It looked like dirt. She sniffed the air and thought she caught a whiff of manure. But whether it was from the smear or from a nearby farmer fertilizing his fields, she couldn’t tell.

She heard a rustling sound from behind her and whirled. Her heart raced. Maybe the intruder hadn’t left the house. She hadn’t seen another vehicle. But it could be in the garage. Or the person had walked over. Or hidden a bicycle. She fumbled in her pocket for her phone. And realized it was in her bag in the truck. All she’d brought with her were the keys. A supremely dumb move. The blood pulsed so hard in her neck, she could barely swallow.

A sheaf of papers fluttered from the desk to the floor. Cam took a deep breath and let it out. The sound was only papers in the wind. She turned back to the window and pulled it shut, turning the two locks as tightly as she could. Returning to the desk, she tried to shake off her fear.

She saw the multiline telephone on the desktop. And laughed at her nerves. Of course Irene would have a phone. Cam picked up the receiver and held it to her ear. No dial tone. And of course the service would be discontinued. That was quick. Irene wasn’t even buried yet.

She squared her shoulders. She was here to search for a piece of information. Might as well get started, open window or no open window. She sank into Irene’s luxurious office chair. Its black leather caressed her wrists. She swiveled and wheeled over to the low walnut file cabinet. After twenty minutes, rifling through paper file folders had gained her nothing. Irritation and frustration rattled her, making her skin itch and her stomach feel like she’d drunk too much black tea.

She’d much rather be using her smarts to search a hard drive, but Pete and his cronies appeared to have made off with whatever computer equipment Irene owned. Or maybe whoever propped the ladder against the window took the computer. Either way, it wasn’t here. A printer sat lonely at the end of the desk, its USB cable stretched out, as useless as a tomato stake in January.

Cam stood. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelf next to the window intrigued her, as bookshelves had her entire life. Now that the window was closed, she inhaled the familiar smell of old paper and ink. She fingered the titles filling the cherrywood shelves. The shelves included worn paperback mysteries, biographies, a history of Iran, a selection of children’s tales. What appeared to be a first-edition
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
was not in pristine condition but rather looked like a generation or two of children had enjoyed its tale over and over. Cam shook her head. She was here to find a document, not to investigate a library. She’d been inside Irene’s house too long as it was.

Curious at the lack of a title on the spine of a slim leather-bound book sitting next to the L. Frank Baum volume, Cam pulled it out. She opened the cover and exclaimed aloud. This treasure was no book. This was Irene’s late-model iPad. Cam smiled and rubbed her virtual hands in glee. A treasure, indeed, at least for a geek. She returned with it to the swivel chair and pressed the POWER button.

The device asked for a password. IPads didn’t by default, but whomever Irene bought the device from must have advised her to set one. Cam knew she couldn’t guess randomly for very long. The device’s privacy protections would make her wait longer between each try, and after a dozen failures the password would erase itself. She typed what she’d read was the most used password:
abcd1234.

No luck. Irene was on the old side for a computer user, which usually translated into an unsophisticated user. The kind of people who really were silly with their passwords. If they only knew how easy they were to crack. What else would Irene have found easy to remember? Her birthday? Cam didn’t have a clue. Surely Irene wouldn’t have gone for Bobby’s name. Maybe she had hidden a written list somewhere in the office, as many people did.

Cam swiveled in the chair, surveying the room. She didn’t have time to search the entire room for a slip of paper.

She thought of one last tactic. She tilted the tablet under the lamp on the desk and peered at the smudges on the on-screen keyboard. They were much heavier over the letters
J
and
G.
Cam thought about typing. How often did she ever have occasion to hit the
J
and
G
keys? But Irene drove a Jaguar. A 1990, Cam remembered Lucinda saying. She took a stab at it.

Jag1990.

Bingo. She was in. For transparency Irene got an F. Anybody who knew her could figure out she drove a semi-vintage Jaguar. But the password actually wasn’t bad as far as randomness went, since it at least included both uppercase and lowercase letters and some digits. If Irene had only added a punctuation mark of some kind, an asterisk or—

“Stop geeking out,” Cam told herself in a stern voice. This was not the time to be musing about the ideal password for a dead woman.

She heard a noise and froze. Outside? Inside? She swore under her breath. She had to get out of here, and fast. Whoever had left that ladder could come back any minute now. Somebody else could have a key and be heading her way. She had gained access to a portion of Irene’s life, and she needed to find the information she was sure was in there. But she could drill deep into the minimalist device at home. She hadn’t been a sought-after software engineer for nothing.

She glanced at the window and shivered. She clasped the iPad more firmly and headed for the door.

C
am sat in her idling truck by the side of the road as she ended her call to Pete. He hadn’t picked up, so she’d left him a message. She had said she’d discovered something important and ended by saying she was headed home. She’d wait to hack into Irene’s file system in Pete’s presence, if he wanted. The gunmetal clouds above blocked not only the sun’s light but also what remained of warmth in the decline of autumn. She reached out and turned the truck’s heat up another notch.

She’d go home, feed the hens, herd them in for the night. She’d wait for Pete to come and pick up the tablet and the note. She had just reached for the gearshift when her phone emitted the sound of typing followed by the bell of an old-fashioned typewriter. Somebody was texting her. She dug her phone out.

Got text from Vince, Ellie had typed. Think he’s in danger at home. Can u chk?

Cam cursed and shoved the truck into gear. She arrived at the Fisher farm five minutes later. She hoped Ellie was wrong. She didn’t know what she would do if Vince was in danger. She could call the Westbury police right now. But what if Ellie was wrong? Chief Frost wouldn’t appreciate a false alarm. She owed it to Vince and Ellie to check, and she’d call the Westbury police at the first hint of real harm. She parked at the side of the house and stuck her phone in her pocket before climbing out.

“Howard? Anybody home?” Cam called. No one emerged from the house. “Vince?”

She walked toward the barn. “Hello?” she called out.

“What do you want?” A gruff voice sounded behind her.

She twisted her head and torso. Howard stood frowning on the back steps of the house, a can of beer in his left hand.

She waved and said hello as she walked toward him, relieved he held ale instead of arms. “Is Vince here?”

“What do you want with him?”

“One of my volunteers, Ellie—she’s friends with Vince at school—and she asked me to give him a message. She said his voice mail is full or something,” Cam lied.

“He’s not here.”

As Howard said that, the text signal sounded again. She pulled the phone out of her pocket and looked down.

Vince is here. No prob. Sorry for alert.

Cam took a deep breath. Now what would she tell Howard? She looked up to see him staring at her.

“While I’m here, can I buy some more pork from you? Those chops were really delicious last night.” At least that was true.

“Glad you liked them.” His expression lightened a little, as if his face was rusty at reacting to a compliment. “Sure, you can buy some. Hey, you want a beer?” He brandished the can.

She was about to politely decline. On the other hand, this was the friendliest he’d ever been, and it was beer o’clock somewhere. Heck, it was almost beer o’clock right here in Westbury. “I’d love one.”

He disappeared into the house and a moment later clomped down the stairs, carrying two open bottles. He handed one to her.

Cam stared at the bent pinkie finger on his left hand. She forced her eyes away. She examined the label on the bottle. It was from the Newburyport microbrewery. “Nice. I’m impressed.”

“Only the good stuff for guests.” His eyes watered as he smiled. His rusty smile cracked a little farther open.

She thought this might be the third or fourth beer for Howard this afternoon. He seemed more relaxed than she’d ever seen him. But he was at home on a Sunday, and his speech wasn’t slurred. Who was she to throw stones?

“Come on back.” He lifted his bottle and chugged a good bit of it. He led the way around the right side of the barn to a shed that looked relatively new, at least compared to the listing barn and the decrepit pig areas beyond it. The door of the shed stood open. Howard stepped inside and opened a large refrigerator, revealing shelves of pink meat in vacuum-wrapped plastic.

“Look here. We got roasts,” he said. “More chops. Bacon isn’t ready yet. Has to cure, like the ham. I’ll give you a special discount on account of we’re colleagues, so to speak. Even got pig’s feet, if you’re into that kind of thing.”

“I know my Brazilian friend, Lucinda, makes her black bean stew with pig’s feet.” Cam followed him in and pointed to a fat roast. “That one looks good.”

He selected the roast, stuck it in a plastic bag, and handed it to her. “It’s the best cut. You’re going to have a fine dinner. What else do you want?”

Cam heard a noise from the sty. She stepped outside, cradling the roast next to her body, the meat chilling her fingers. At the corner of the nearest pen, a pig snuffled and pushed its head against the wire enclosure. It raised its eyes, gazing at her. Was it asking for the decency of a square meal? For freedom from maltreatment ? For forgiveness for chewing on Irene? Cam took a deep breath and let it out.

“Don’t worry. I know what you’re thinking.”

She turned to face Howard. He gazed over her shoulder at the sty.

“This meat isn’t from one of them,” he said, pointing at the pen. “It’s from good old Buddy.”

“The one that didn’t win at the fair?”

“We were cheated.” He scowled. “But, yeah, that one.”

“Vince must have been disappointed.”

“Sure. But disappointment toughens you up, you know? Boy needs to know he’s going to lose from time to time.”

Cam thought Vince would be lucky if he didn’t usually lose with a father like this one, but she kept the sentiment to herself.

“Anyway, I’m coming into some money soon. All the animals are going to start getting the five-star treatment.” Howard pulled one corner of his mouth up and gestured with his head at the pig. “Even that old sow.”

“Is the money coming from Irene’s estate? It must have been hard to lose your birth mother after you’d finally found her.” She fingered the phone in her right pocket. “And for her to die on your own property, too.”

Howard froze. He stared into the distance. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, you both have that same bent finger. It’s directly inherited on the mother’s side.”

His eyes shifted to her. Unlike in her former dealings with Howard, this time his face was like Mill Pond on a windless day. Flat, with plenty of activity underneath.

“I learned about that trait in high school biology, if you can believe it,” Cam said.

He glanced at his hand and waited a long moment before he spoke. “It’s true. I knew I was adopted. But with my farm falling on hard times, I had to find her, just in case she could help me. Irene. It took some digging. Vince helped me out with the computer.” He snorted. “And she was right here in town all along.”

“Did your adoptive family tell you anything about her?”

“No. They’re dead. All of them. And good riddance. That witch of a mother abandoned me to a family who never really wanted me.”

“So you had contact with Irene recently? I mean, besides at the dinner?”

“What are you asking all these questions for?” He started to push past her. Despite being a couple of inches shorter than Cam, Howard was a tough fireplug of a farmer. He pinched her shoulder as he passed. She had no choice but to go along. His fingers dug into her neck.

“That hurts.” Cam tried to twist out of his hold. “Let go.”

He tightened his grip. He marched her along with him. Toward the back of the sty.

Cam pulled back. The sty was the last place she wanted to be. Why had she even started this conversation? She could have just paid him for the roast and driven home.
Stupid.
Her heart raced.

Howard jerked her forward, nearly dragging her. They arrived at the far corner. Wind whistled in the treetops of the woods to their left. It rustled dry cornstalks in the field stretching out behind them. And it blew the acrid stench of the manure-soaked mud right into Cam’s eyes and nose.

Howard grabbed her other arm, making her face him. The top of the fence pressed into her waist.

“I had contact with Irene, all right.” His face, no longer a still pool, contorted with rage. “Told me she was leaving me some of her precious money. But there were conditions.”

“What conditions?” How was she going to get out of here? She clutched the bag with the roast in it. Could she clobber him with it? Not with both her arms pinned, she couldn’t.

“Impossible ones.” He gazed at the pigs that were gathering on the other side of the fence.

“Did you give her a note the night of the dinner?”

Howard shot her a strange look. “She slipped me that note. How do you know about it?”

“I found it the next day. You must have dropped it.”

“She thought she had some magic hold on me. That she’d go public with . . .” His voice trailed off. He shook himself as if he’d been asleep, and tightened his grip on her arms.

“And you killed her so you could get her money?”

Howard stared at her. And laughed. “Aren’t you the smartypants ? You think I killed my mother?”

“I hope you didn’t. But she was found right here. And if you inherit her money, you won’t have a problem feeding the pigs anymore, will you?” She was sure she was blabbering but didn’t know what else to do. Anything to forestall suffering the same fate as Irene.

“That’s right.” His face reddened.

She could smell the beer on his breath. His meaty hands pressed hard on her arms. Her stomach roiled from the combination of fear and the stench of the pigs.

“I killed Irene Burr,” he spat. “I didn’t mean to. She never let up, though. It was like she was poking me with a red-hot stake. I was so angry, I shoved her. Hard. She fell in and hit her head on the trough.”

Cam wondered how much of this was true. Had he meant to kill Irene or not? “You should tell Detective Pappas. He’d understand.”

He shook his head slowly, twice. “Not a chance.”

“What? Of you telling him or him understanding?”

“Either. But you’re the only one who knows. I can’t let you run off and tell him, now, can I?”

“I already told the detective what I know.”

“I don’t believe you. All you saw was something the same on her hand and mine.”

And on Vince’s,
Cam thought. “I don’t feel too well. Let’s go back up to the house and talk there. Okay?”

“No more talking.” His voice flamed. “You women are all alike. You’re relentless.”

Howard released her right arm. He drew back his hand and punched her hard in the nose.

She cried out. The pain shot through her face like fireworks. Her eyes filled, and she smelled blood. She brought her free hand up to cup her nose.

He grabbed her left hip. He wrenched her left arm. He hoisted her over the fence and into the sty.

“No!” Cam yelled as she fell. Her right ankle twisted. Her head hit the back of one animal. She fell facedown in the muck.