Come and Get Me

by August Norman

“Greenhouses,” Mary said, then handed the binoculars over.

  Caitlin saw five brick-based hothouses behind the house. “I only see one car.”

  “Could have parked in the barn. You said twenty acres?”

  Caitlin nodded. “According to the map, that row of trees at the end of the lane is the edge of their property. Past that, there’s a stream, then someone else’s farmland.”

  “What’s that to the right?”

  Caitlin swung the glasses west of the farmhouse. “Spinach or kale.” She put the binoculars away and lowered the windows. “Cue up that Dead shit, Lubbers. We’re going in like your Aunt Tanya.”

  Mary’s Aunt Tanya had spent the last two years of the sixties in a free love camp in western Indiana, and her stories lived on in legend.

  “Got it.” Mary cranked the stereo. “A couple of Tanyas looking for the perfect tomato.”

  They drove down the driveway blasting “Casey Jones.” Caitlin stopped next to the first greenhouse.

  Mary got out speaking at full volume. “This is better than Sonoma.”

  Caitlin followed her to the greenhouse door. “But, Mary, Sonoma had wine.”

  Mary peered through the translucent glass. “Looks like cucumbers or zucchini.”

  Down a service road, the land took a gradual descent toward the trees. A clearing beyond the corn hosted a flock of thirty-foot, three-bladed windmills.

  Caitlin turned back to Mary. “Anyone in there?”

  “Not a man in sight, but with that many cucumbers, who needs one?”

  She reached for the handle. “Unlocked.”

  They peeked in. Tall, large-leafed plants ran along both walls. The scent of cucumber filled the humid air.

  Mary tapped Caitlin, jumped back into character. “My mother used to have the best tomatoes, or at least, that’s what Dad said. He left her when they went bad.”

  A male voice yelled from behind them. “What the hell are you doing?”

  They turned toward a six-foot twenty-something in overalls with a T-shirt underneath, fresh sweat circles under the pits, a scraggly beard, and a pair of plastic carpenter’s goggles pushed back onto his bandana-covered forehead.

  Caitlin offered her hand. “Hi, we’re here for the tour.”

  He stared at her hand like he’d never seen one. “The what?”

  Mary got in the game. “We’re organnies.”

  “What the hell’s an organny?”

  Caitlin looked to Mary. “I told you it wasn’t a word.”

  Mary didn’t miss a beat. “Organnies are organic farm lovers, and that’s what we are. I write a blog.”

  His sweaty brow bunched up like it hurt. “Sounds like you steal people’s organs, lady.”

  Caitlin laughed. “That’s why I call us green girls. Either way”—she held her hand out again—“we’d love to look around the place.”

  His hand met hers for a clammy squeeze. “We don’t do tours.”

  “But we drove all the way from the Colony,” Mary said, way too loud. “What’s your name?”

  “Gooch,” he said. “What’s a colony?”

  “Mary, he doesn’t want to hear about the Colony.”

  Mary snaked her hand through Gooch’s arm, got real close. “The Colony’s a hippie enclave in West Baden, where clothes are a choice and people live off the land.”

  “How old are you ladies?”

  “Not that old,” Mary said. “But I grew up there. Learned about the earth—and my natural body. You’ve got a great beard. Can I touch it?”

  Gooch blushed. “I guess.”

  She rubbed his whiskers, looked into his eyes. “A beard like this? You’d be attacked day and night in the Colony.”

  He looked toward the road. “I can’t give you a tour. I’m the only one here.”

  Mary let go of his beard, took his arm again. “Then who would know? Please, we’ll make it worth your while.”

  His eyes raised four stories. “What do you mean, worth my while?”

  Caitlin flashed a few Andrew Jacksons.

  “Sixty bucks. You show us around, give us ten dollars worth of fresh greens, and I’ll give you three green twenties. Just half an hour, and no one but us three will ever know.”

  He looked at the cash, then Mary. “But she has a blog.”

  Mary smiled. “I care more about getting a nice firm cucumber than telling the story of where I got it.”

  Gooch scratched the back of his head. “Screw it, let’s do the tour.”

  They started at the barn, saw various implements in John Deere colors and the two delivery trucks, no markings other than the word “BRO-DUCE” stenciled on the back doors.

  “You guys deliver all across the Big Ten?” Caitlin said.

  Gooch kept it tight. “Yep. Let’s look at the corn.”

  He walked them along the edge of the field, mumbling something about an autumn harvest.

  Mary looked between each row. “Just checking if you guys farm like we did at the Colony. My dad used to plant weed between the rows.”

  That got Gooch’s attention. “Your dad grew weed?”

  “Yeah, until some weird beetle got into everything.”

  Caitlin pointed toward the end of the field and changed the subject. “Hey, windmills.”

  “For the power bills,” Gooch said. “We gotta keep the greenhouses warm in the winter. Speaking of which.”

  He took them back to the land of cucumbers, let them pick a few. They moved on to the second greenhouse, a forest of Roma tomatoes. Mary plucked one from the vine and took a bite.

  “Good God, these are fresh,” she said, wiping juice from her chin. “Who’s the farmer around here?”

  “This guy Dave. He can grow anything. I just do this for money.”

  Gooch led them on to eggplant, sprouts, and green beans. In the last greenhouse, he grabbed a cardboard produce box and packaged their haul.

  Caitlin read the side. “Nassau, Bahamas? You guys ship outside the country?”

  “That’s from a supplier,” he said. “We reuse the boxes.”

  “What do you guys import from the Bahamas, rum?”

  He shrugged. “Seeds. Let’s go.”

  The house was the only place they hadn’t looked. Caitlin noticed the cameras when they got back to the rental car. One near the farmhouse roof facing the road, another near the front porch.

  “Can we use your bathroom?”

  “Well—”

  Caitlin walked toward the house. “Thanks, Gooch.”

  He followed. “I’d better come with you.”

  Mary got in line. “I should try too.”

  Caitlin opened the door to a large kitchen last updated in the eighties. A trash can overflowed near the door, and a case of beer bottles filled a recycling bin. The room smelled like a truck-stop restroom two days past cleaning.

  Gooch pointed to a hallway. “Bathroom’s right there.”

  Caitlin saw the so-called bathroom, the padded toilet seat up, a smear of poorly aimed bodily fluids visible from feet away. She went in, shut the door, ran the water, and thanked God she didn’t really have to pee.

  “Gooch,” Mary said in the kitchen, honey in her voice. “Caitie takes forever. There’s got to be another bathroom in this giant house.”

  He gave in. “Oh, yeah, follow me.”

  Caitlin waited until their footsteps faded, then opened the door.

  No better place for a growhouse than a basement. No windows and only one door, usually through a kitchen. She tried a knob and found a dark wooden-slat stairway. She pulled out her phone, turned on the flashlight, and went down.

  The unfinished root cellar had a cracked concrete floor, a giant old boiler, a washer and dryer, and a shop sink. Nothing special.

  The floor above came to life. She took two steps up at a time, shoved her phone in her pocket, and shut the door behind her, seconds before the return of Mary and Gooch.

  “All better,” Mary said. “You?”

  Caitlin tsked.
“You boys wash your hands before you touch the vegetables, right Gooch?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know about the other guys, but I do.”

  He showed them out, then watched from the driveway until they pulled back onto the road.

  “Shit,” Caitlin said. “I thought it’d be in the basement.”

  Mary bit into a cucumber. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. The second bathroom was right next to a stairway. Gooch stood in front of the stairs the whole time I was in there.”

  “You think it’s upstairs?”

  She smiled through her crunching. “Yeah, cause he made a big deal about me not being seen on the security camera, said he’d get in trouble if they found out he gave us a tour.”

  “Mary, you’re the best.”

  “That’s nothing, Caitie. Wait until you eat the dinner I’m gonna make with these vegetables. One thing, though—”

  “What?”

  “We gotta stop somewhere. No way I was gonna pee in that house.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  MARY HAD MEETINGS, so Caitlin dropped her off on campus and met Lakshmi in Dunn Meadow for a debriefing. The exposed roots of a tree created natural seats overlooking a creek.

  Lakshmi looked up from her tablet. “Wait, what do the windmills do again?”

  “Shield power consumption,” Caitlin said. “Utility companies monitor for unusual usage, which is why the typical growhouse steals power. Since the greenhouses get their juice from the sun, the rest is getting used by the house. What about you? Find anything else online, or were you bored all morning?”

  Lakshmi rolled her eyes. “Oh, I was bored, but you were right. I got pretty into it.”

  “Was it better than sex?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” She pulled up a document on the tablet, energized. “So the Bro-duce Corporation didn’t purchase the farm until six months after Angela’s disappearance, but they were working the land before that. The previous owners were Jack and Linda Fodor.”

  “Frodo’s parents?”

  “Correct. Jack and Linda now live in a two-bedroom condo in Fort Lauderdale. I found a retirement newsletter that says they’ve been there for ten years, so they’d given their two sons, Nate, and his older brother, Adam, control of the farm before the purchase. Adam’s six years older than Nate and three years older than Dave and Kieran.”

  “Which means he’s twenty-seven now?”

  “Yes.”

  Caitlin smiled. “And Adam not only went to IU, but he was also in the same fraternity?”

  Lakshmi pulled up a picture of young men in matching blue blazers, the entire fraternity from Kieran Michelson’s freshman year. She tapped on a clean-cut blond.

  “Adam Fodor was Kieran Michelson’s big brother, in the fraternity sense. Now he lives in the Bahamas and runs a tourist catamaran.”

  She opened a browser, showed Caitlin bahamaspartycruise.com. The same man, five years older and tanner, his crew-cut hair now in foot-long, natty dreads, smiled next to two women in barely there bikinis.

  Caitlin noticed the sign above him. “Doctor Greenthumb?”

  “This means they were growing weed before Kieran and Dave started Bro-duce, right?”

  Caitlin nodded. “Probably, but Kieran and Dave saw the chance to make it a legitimate business.”

  “While Adam went to the Bahamas to grow those awful dreads.”

  Caitlin remembered the box Gooch gave Lubbers. “Maybe more. The farm’s getting something from the Bahamas. Gooch said seeds.”

  Lakshmi looked confused. “Can’t they find seeds in America?”

  Caitlin reached for her phone. “Only one way to find out.”

  Mike Roman answered before the second ring. “Don’t make me hang out with that scumbag again, Caitlin.”

  “Settle down, tough guy. You’ve earned a vacation. Ever been to the Bahamas?”

  He hadn’t, but his passport was current. He’d leave on the red eye, touch down in the land of rum the next afternoon, be mission functional by Sunday morning. Caitlin would have to dip into her pile of film-rights money for this one, but that cash had come with a list of producers who might be interested in her next big story. College kids running an international drug syndicate checked more than a few of Hollywood’s boxes. She hung up, noticed Lakshmi watching her.

  “What?”

  “Mike jumps at your command. You two never dated?”

  “Me and Roman? You read the book. I put the man in jail.”

  “Right, but eight years later you teamed up and saved all of those women. Now you work together.”

  “We don’t work together. He works for me.”

  “You never—”

  “Our bond is hard to explain. It’s not quite friendship, more like I grew up on a farm hunting a wolf, but then the two of us rolled off a cliff and had to work together to survive, only to find out a mega-corporation threatened both my farm and his hunting land.”

  “I’m not sure I follow. Is that a film or something?”

  “He’s like a brother. We don’t always agree; sometimes we don’t even like each other, but he’s there when I need him.”

  “What about the FBI agent?”

  Caitlin felt a blush coming on. “That’s more fun than serious.”

  “Have you ever had anything serious, Caitlin?”

  “Sure.”

  “Were you ever married?”

  “God no.”

  “Engaged?”

  Caitlin tried to gauge Lakshmi’s direction. “You’re getting good at this, Lakshmi, but I’m on to you.”

  The girl’s reaction read innocent enough. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re establishing the pattern. Caitlin Bergman, successful career woman, uses sex as a casual tool, gorgeous—”

  Lakshmi laughed. “I don’t remember saying ‘gorgeous.’ ”

  Caitlin gave her a wink. “It’s implied.”

  “So the pattern I’m trying to establish is what, exactly?”

  “Did the rape make me who I am? Did that one horrible moment change how I looked at men, at sex, at personal relationships? Did that inability to let anyone get close prevent me from finding what everyone else calls true love?”

  Lakshmi’s smile dropped. “Caitlin, I didn’t mean anything like that.”

  The girl’s eyes took Caitlin back twenty years. The deputy, Lyle Sugar, had looked at her the same way from the end of a hospital bed.

  “Don’t pity me,” she said, the words coming out faster than she could control. “I have loved; I’ve been serious with a man—a brilliant photojournalist with a perfect smile and a better ass. We got engaged before he left for an assignment in Iraq, but he never came back. Well, not all of him.” Caitlin felt a line of tears worming their way into the conversation but stopped them at the door. “I’ve got a healthy sexual appetite, and my schedule means I really need to be into someone to do it on a regular basis, let alone share meals. But it has happened before. I assume it will happen again.”

  Lakshmi looked embarrassed. “I really wasn’t asking about any of that.”

  One tear got past the bouncer. Caitlin tapped her finger to the corner of her eye. “Guess it was me then.”

  Lakshmi stared at her nails, or at least made a show of it. “Do you think,” she started, delicate, “that Angela, if she’s still alive, and if we find her, do you think she’ll ever be the same as she was?”

  What could Caitlin tell the girl that wouldn’t destroy her? If Angela Chapman was still alive—and two years was a whole lot of if—she’d have survived unimaginable hell. She’d remember the man’s hands, the helplessness, the vivid image of Troy Woods’s smile seconds before he knocked her head against a chuck of rock—

  Caitlin shook her head. Not Troy Woods—Angela’s attacker.

  Caitlin reached for her bag and got to her feet. “Let’s stop for today. It’s too nice out.”

  Lakshmi rushed to pack up as well. “I’m off all weekend. What’s the
next step?”

  Caitlin started walking toward the Ernie Pyle Building. “Before we go to Greenwood, we need to show a correlation between the produce deliveries and the sale of pot.”

  Lakshmi trailed a few feet behind. “How do we do that?”

  Caitlin’s chest felt heavy. She kept moving. “We find the weak link, the corner boys. Two years ago, Frodo had to drive Kieran and Dave to parties. Who’s driving Frodo around?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t get close. That whole frat hates me.”

  Caitlin stopped. A version of the questions she’d accused Lakshmi of asking earlier remained unanswered in her own mind. She squeezed her eyes shut, pressed on her temples. “Then we wait for a bit. I need to take care of some things.”

  When she opened her eyes, Lakshmi looked terrified. “Are you okay, Caitlin? You seem—”

  Caitlin grabbed her by both shoulders. “You’re a strong, intelligent woman, Lakshmi Anjale. Handle your business.”

  She left her on the sidewalk and let the tears have their party all the way back to the cottage.

  CHAPTER

  29

  CAITLIN DIDN’T WAIT for the tub to fill. She leaned back against the basin, forced her naked skin to accept the still frigid surface, watched her arms turn to goose flesh.

  You must control it.

  The steady stream warmed the cold enamel under her bottom.

  You must.

  She splashed her face.

  Control.

  When the water reached a foot, she went under, let her hair drift around her face. She opened her eyes and stared up at the white ceiling, lost herself in a wash of color. Warm amber from the light over the sink gave way to the cool blue from the last bits of afternoon diffused by the window.

  Same colors as a hospital ceiling.

  Twenty years earlier, Deputy Sugar stood at her bedside with the stocky build of a bulldog, a face lined by years of Indiana winters, and a clipboard in his hand.

  “Miss, I’m Deputy Lyle Sugar with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department. You’re in the hospital.” The bass in his voice rumbled like tires over snow. “Can you tell me your name?”

  The ring of Caitlin’s phone brought her back. She sat up, pulled her wet hair away from her face, answered the phone. “Caitlin Bergman.”