A Slaying in the Orchard

by Gin Jones

  Besides, how would Sweetwater have known that Henry had left for a time out when even I hadn't known in advance that I would impose the discipline? And how would he have known where to find Henry? The two spaces were on opposite sides of the market, and Henry hadn't used the central walkway but had left through the back on the way to what turned out to be his rendezvous with the killer. Henry's path had taken him behind setups that would have made it difficult for Sweetwater to see him, and considering the out-of-the-way spot where Henry's body was found, it wasn't likely they'd have run into each other inadvertently. Sweetwater would have had to go all the way down the Memorial Walkway and then around the Dangerous Reads tent and Keith Nettles' toy display before continuing along the back of the first aid tent, in order to get anywhere close to where Henry had been killed.

  I couldn't think of any reason why Sweetwater would have gone behind the first aid tent. It wasn't on the way to anywhere, except perhaps the port-a-potties past WoodWell. If that was where he'd been going, it would have been a much shorter route to simply go up the Memorial Walkway rather than going so far out of his way to walk behind the far row of stalls. Even cutting through Tommy's space or the Pear Stirpes Orchard one—assuming either of the owners would have let Sweetwater traipse through them—would have made for a longer trip to the porta-potties than the direct route.

  Unfortunately, seeing Sweetwater dragged out of the market in handcuffs was more of a wish than a plan. Still, if I could have made it happen, it might have been worth the stain it would have left on the market's reputation.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tommy Fordham interrupted my dark thoughts. "Could I have a minute of your time?"

  "I've always got time for you." It wasn't entirely true. I had to do my end-of-day rounds and talk to the last few people I hadn't yet asked what they knew about Henry's death. There wasn't much time left to do it, but I couldn't afford to alienate one of my very best vendors, and Tommy wouldn't ask for help if he didn't actually need it.

  I left the center of the Memorial Walkway to stand in front of his stall, which for once had no customers, probably because it was almost closing time. "Do you need some assistance with packing up? I promised Denise that Cary would help her, but that shouldn't take too long. When he's done there, I can send him over here."

  "I'll be fine on my own," Tommy said. "The inventory pretty much sold out, so there isn't much to pack."

  "Then what can I do for you?"

  "I just wanted to let you know you're doing a great job as the market manager." He nodded in Sweetwater's direction. "Don't let the haters get you down."

  "Thanks. I hope that means you're going to stick with the market despite what happened yesterday."

  "Definitely," he said with a watered-down version of his usual infectious grin. "I wouldn't want to deprive my neighbors in Danger Cove of the best tomatoes they'll ever eat."

  "That's a relief," I said. "I'm already dealing with people complaining they can't get good-quality honey. I don't suppose you know of any beekeepers who might be similarly committed to supplying your neighbors with honey, do you?"

  "I've been thinking about it since you mentioned it a few weeks ago, and I even made a call to one guy, but he didn't answer, and he doesn't have voicemail. He was probably out with his bees when I called. He forgets that he's not actually part of the colony. I'll keep trying him, and I'll let you know what he says."

  "I appreciate your looking into it for me," I said. "Meanwhile, how's Ginger doing? Have you talked to her this afternoon?"

  "She's already bouncing back, I think. She told me she'd meet me here at the end of the day so we can watch the lighting of the bonfires. And apparently I owe her dinner at the Smugglers' Tavern later in the week as an apology for the trauma yesterday."

  "Send me the receipt, and I'll reimburse you," I said. "I was going to send her flowers, but I thought sending plants to a farmer might be a coals-to-Newcastle thing. Paying for a get-well dinner seems like a better plan."

  "Thanks." Tommy hesitated, making me wonder what bad news he might be reluctant to share with me.

  I quashed my impatience to get on with the end-of-day rounds and the last-minute interrogations, waiting for him to tell me what was on his mind.

  Finally he said, "I was watching you and Merle outside the first aid tent earlier. He's got it bad for you."

  That wasn't at all what I'd been expecting from the tough, military-veteran Tommy, but I was too relieved that he didn't have any serious complaints that I decided to humor him. "Merle and I have been seeing each other, but it's early days."

  "Not for him, it isn't," Tommy said. "I've known him since he moved here, and he's never shown any interest in women in all that time. Said he wasn't ready after his wife's death. But the minute you showed up, that changed."

  "Still, I'm not the impetuous type," I said. "And there's no rush. We've got plenty of time to get to know each other better."

  "Maybe, maybe not," Tommy said. "I had my eye on Ginger for a year before I asked her out. Now I wish I hadn't wasted all that time. Who knows what could have happened to one of us before I acted? I'm not making that mistake again. We're talking about her moving in with me."

  I couldn't imagine taking that big a step that quickly. Tommy and Ginger couldn't have been dating for more than two months.

  Tommy continued, "That was why she came to the market with me yesterday. It was supposed to be an experiment in being a farmer's wife. She's a bit miffed that I didn't warn her that it might involve stumbling across a dead body."

  "You can be fairly sure that things will only get better from here on out."

  "But even if they don't," Tommy insisted, "we'll be together, and we can help each other through the bad times. You and Merle could do that for each other too."

  "I'm considering it."

  I was going to tell him about Merle's offer of the caretaker's cabin, but a middle-aged woman in a baggy T-shirt and jeans came running up to ask Tommy in a desperate tone, "Please tell me you're not sold out. I need some fresh tomatoes. As many as you've got left. Now that my kids have tasted the real thing, they won't eat the ones from the grocery store any longer. They're threatening to go on a hunger strike."

  "Don't worry, I won't let your kids starve," Tommy told her before flashing me a knowing look. "Forming close relationships with each other is what farmers' markets are all about. And it doesn't stop when the market closes for the day."

  He was right: the people of the market had begun to form a real community. I hadn't noticed it until Tommy mentioned it, and it was still early, with some challenges that could undo everything, but the bonding was happening. The teens in the consumer sciences class had collaborated with the Police Foundation volunteers, and Denise Casey had rushed to defend Jazz when she'd been upset by Henry. I'd seen most of the vendors trading their products with each other—everyone except Jim Sweetwater—and referring customers to each other for products that would complement their own. Best of all for the farmers' bottom line, the buyers, like the woman desperate for "real" tomatoes, were becoming attached to the vendors and wouldn't settle for getting their fruits and vegetables from nameless, faceless sellers.

  Maybe Tommy was right about more than just the professional relationships. I had probably been overthinking Merle's offer of the caretaker's cabin. I was prone to analyzing things to death, which was fine when it came to investments, but not as good when it came to personal connections.

  Friends didn't count the cost when they helped each other out. I thought Tommy would have made me a similar offer of assistance if he'd had a spare cabin on his farm. There was an extra complication to Merle's offer, since we were attracted to each other beyond friendship, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. And if the constant proximity did cause problems, I could always move again. It wasn't like I'd be a prisoner there.

  Now that I'd decided to accept Merle's offer, I didn't want to wait until we met up at the bonfires this evening to give him my
answer. I had to find him now.

  * * *

  Merle wasn't in his space at the far end of the market. JT told me he'd gone over to the Dangerous Reads tent to pick up a book he'd special-ordered.

  I didn't have time to keep chasing Merle, so talking to him would have to wait until this evening. I headed down the walkway a bit more slowly than I'd come up it, checking in briefly with each vendor as they began their end-of-day procedures. None of the vendors had seen or heard anything useful to the investigation into Henry's death, and none of them had given me any reason to suspect them of having a role in the murder. As a result, it felt like I'd fulfilled all my duties for the weekend as the market manager, but I'd failed completely in my role as detective. Probably because I'd been able to plan ahead for one activity and not the other.

  Cary was already busy helping Denise pack up the dairy farm's stall, but I didn't think she'd need him for long, since all of the eggs and the vast majority of her cheeses had sold out.

  As far as I could tell, most of the other vendors had had a similarly successful weekend despite the tragedy on Saturday. Even Sweetwater had sold more than usual, judging by what remained of his inventory. Perhaps he wouldn't be as much of a persistent drag on the market as I'd feared. He did offer potatoes of higher quality and greater variety than anywhere else within a reasonable driving distance, and there were apparently a solid number of customers who cared enough about the produce itself that they were willing to look past the farmer's annoying personality.

  I was almost back to the first aid tent when I noticed the gamemaster, Leo Ricci, standing still in the middle of the Memorial Walkway again. His arms were crossed over his chest as he stared pensively at another example of the engraved stones that seemed to fascinate him so. I hadn't seen him until I was practically right next to him, since without his voluminous blue robe to cover his jeans and black wizard-print T-shirt, he blended in with the rest of the last-minute marketers.

  While the robe had made him visible from a mile away, it struck me that it could also have covered up a lot of secrets. Like blood stains on the clothes underneath it.

  I hadn't heard of any reason why Leo might have wanted Henry dead, but given Henry's personality, I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that he'd antagonized Leo. The gamemaster was an easy target for a bully, with his pride in his role as leader of the Dangerous Duelers. Assuming Leo had a motive, his robe would have come in useful for getting away with the murder. All Leo would have had to do was stash the robe somewhere temporarily so he could fade into the background and not be so easily identified by any witnesses, then stab Henry, wait a few minutes for the blood on his clothes to dry in the hot sun, and then cover up again. Once back in his blue choir robe, Leo's other clothes could have been coated with blood from his collarbones to his ankles, and no one would have noticed.

  It was all just speculation, and for the moment I was more concerned that Leo might damage the Memorial Walkway than that he might have killed someone. He just couldn't seem to stay away from the memorial markers. I'd been meaning to see if I could find out what he'd told the detective earlier and what he'd been doing in the historical garden at the time of Henry's death. This might be just the opportunity I needed.

  "What's so fascinating about the stones?" I asked in a neutral tone.

  Leo started so intensely he almost fell backward before he caught his balance. If he'd been wearing his robe, he probably would have tripped over the hem.

  "Everything." He planted his feet more firmly, signaling that he was prepared to stand his ground. "It's like a giant puzzle, figuring out who these people were, how they were connected to each other, and what got them killed. Besides the wars, I mean."

  "Have you checked at the historical museum? They might have some information about the people who were commemorated in the walkway."

  "If they do, it's not online. I already checked. I thought it might come in useful for our game." Leo hurried to add, "That was before we suspended the game. We're not playing it anymore until you give us permission."

  "Maybe you could help the museum get the information digitized." I assumed that his role as gamemaster meant that he had good organizing skills, which Gil Torres, the museum's director, could put to good use. "You can use me as a reference if you want."

  "You'd do that?" Leo said. "I thought you hated me. You kept acting like you didn't want me anywhere near your precious market."

  "It's my job to keep the market running smoothly, and your gamers had the potential for upsetting people. It wasn't personal."

  "What about when you threatened to ban me if I didn't go talk to Officer Fields?"

  "What else was I supposed to do? You said you had useful information," I reminded him. "And Fields is a good guy. Talking to him wasn't that bad, was it?"

  "I suppose not," Leo said. "He got me an appointment with the detective, and it turns out, I hadn't seen what I thought I'd seen. I mean, I saw it, but it wasn't what I thought it was."

  "What did you think it was?"

  "I thought one of my players was involved somehow. Right before the body was found, I'd seen someone behind the stalls on the garden side heading up to the port-a-potties. It looked like one of my players, a particularly brawny pioneer dressed all in beige, and I was afraid that if a gamer had killed Henry, we'd all be blamed. Not legally, but as long as the suspicion was hanging over our heads, we wouldn't ever be able to play in public again."

  "You didn't have to worry about being blamed unfairly. The detective on the case is a good guy."

  "That's what I've heard." Leo added pointedly, "Still, I've seen how people like to blame us gamers for everything we do, no matter how innocuous. Like studying the memorial stones."

  I didn't rise to the bait. "But you told Ohlsen about the gamer near the crime scene anyway, right?"

  "Yeah," he said. "Turns out it wasn't the gamer I thought it was. I gave Ohlsen the guy's name, and they'd already talked to him, and he hadn't been anywhere near there, even had a bunch of witnesses to prove it. Apparently it was some other athletic guy in beige. Probably khakis and a T-shirt, not a pioneer shirt at all. Especially since someone noticed something I'd missed—he'd been wearing a backpack. Not something that would go with a pioneer costume."

  Except for the beige shirt, that sounded like Keith Nettles. Noticeably muscular even from a distance, wearing khaki pants and keeping his backpack in place for much of the weekend, despite the heat and the sticky sweat that was bound to accumulate underneath it. No one would mistake his purple and white sport shirt for a settler's dingy beige homespun, but he could have changed shirts, switching from something highly recognizable to something innocuous in order to be harder to identify if anyone saw him sneak along the back of the stalls on the way to kill Henry.

  I couldn't help asking, "Did they say what color the backpack was?"

  "Just that it was something dark," Leo said. "You think you know the guy?"

  "I might." But why would Keith have killed Henry? As far as I knew, the two of them hadn't even talked to each other.

  Unless…

  Keith was in his thirties. That put him at around the right age to be one of Louise Palmer's children. If he was one of the missing kids and he'd been responsible for his stepfather's death, he might have come to the market looking for Henry to find out if the old man knew anything that might incriminate Keith. That would certainly explain his last-minute application and why he'd been so determined to claim the less-than-ideally-located space at the far end of the market, since it was directly across from the WoodWell space. Keith could have been one of the people who'd tried to talk to Henry at his studio, and when he'd been rebuffed there, he'd applied for a market slot, so he could stalk Henry at work.

  The only thing I couldn't explain, assuming Keith was Louise Palmer's son, was why Sweetwater hadn't recognized him and told the police who he was. Sweetwater loved showing off his knowledge of the local residents, and he couldn't have missed hearing that the pol
ice were looking for Louise Palmer's children.

  What if I was right that Keith was Ryan Palmer's stepson and he had killed both Ryan and Henry? I needed to share my suspicions with Detective Ohlsen so he could question Keith before the market ended and he disappeared again.

  * * *

  I left Leo to his study of the memorial stone and hurried over to ask the Baxter twins if they knew where Detective Ohlsen was. They said he'd gone back to Merle's orchard to check on the progress there.

  I considered calling Ohlsen—I had his direct number in my contacts—but by the time he could get back here, Keith could already be gone. I also considered trying to keep Keith from leaving myself, but his athletic build meant that I couldn't physically restrain him even if I wanted to, and it would probably take someone with more authority than I had in order to rely on words alone to keep him at the market until the detective could arrive.

  "Have you seen Officer Fields or any of his colleagues here on patrol?"

  "He's the only one still here as far as I know," one of the Baxter twins said. "The department is stretched a bit thin this weekend with all the holiday activities plus two active murder investigations."

  "Fred was headed to the parking lot the last I knew," the other twin said. "He wanted to check in with whoever was on traffic duty to make sure the end-of-day traffic was under control."

  "Thanks."

  I tried calling Officer Fields, but it went to voicemail, so I left a brief message to call me about some new information on Henry Atwell's death. Then I jogged in the direction of the parking lot in the hope of intercepting him there.

  As I went, I glanced over my left shoulder, trying to seem casual about it, to confirm that Keith was still in his stall. He wasn't, and there wasn't much left under his canopy. I couldn't tell if what was there was just trash that he was leaving behind—one more rule violation—or supplies he was planning to come back for in a final trip to load his vehicle. Either way, I needed to do something, or he'd be gone before Ohlsen could get back here to question him.