by Gin Jones
She had a feeling everything she did for a while was going to remind her of Jeff and just how much she’d relied on him. He’d been one of the very few people who’d been invited to her birthday celebrations when she’d been living with her grandparents. And he’d been the person who’d encouraged her to pursue a work-from-home career as best suited to her personality, and he’d been the person who’d taken care of all the details of buying her house in Maine. She’d expected him to also be the person who took care of the sale of the garlic farm and the person who welcomed her back to her house in Maine, but that wasn’t going to happen now.
Mabel flopped down at the kitchen table and stared at the tomato soup, corn bread, and iced tea. Jeff had even been the person who, after tasting her first attempt at brewing her own iced tea had explained that its lackluster flavor wasn’t her fault, but had been due to the cheap tea bags she’d used, so he’d introduced her to better varieties.
Jeff had been like another grandfather in some ways. She’d been fortunate to have him in her life for so long, but the flip side of that was how much it hurt to lose him now. And there was nothing she could do about the pain she was experiencing now or would experience in the future when she lost other friends. She could stop caring about people, becoming even more of a hermit, she supposed, but she’d already gone and messed that up by getting close to Emily and Rory. They hadn’t let her keep a distance from them. And they would all die someday too.
She was tired of losing people she cared about. Her parents, her grandparents, her aunt, and now Jeff. She couldn’t stop any of them from dying, but there was one thing she could keep alive—the farm. It had practically been Aunt Peggy’s child, the closest thing Mabel had to a cousin. She was not going to let it die too.
Mabel abandoned her dinner and took her iced tea and her laptop with the scanned copy of Graham’s journal into the home office. The monotonous work of decoding the book had the virtue of both distracting her from her grief and also potentially enabling her to protect the farm. If she was locked up for a murder she hadn’t committed, she wouldn’t be able to manage the farm, and she’d have to sell it to the first legitimate bidder, regardless of what they wanted to do with the land.
Mabel started to feel sleepy around midnight, with only about two more months’ worth of the journal decoded and another five months to go. In the past, she’d have been wide awake at this hour, but while she’d never become the kind of person who could cheerfully—or even grouchily—get up at dawn like a real farmer to feed the chickens and plow the fields, she had managed to get in the habit of going to bed around midnight and getting up at eight o’clock since moving to West Slocum. It was going to be hard getting back into her later-night routine once she returned to her regular work.
She considered going to bed then and resuming her decoding work first thing in the morning, but as soon as she closed the journal, she remembered what she’d been using it as a distraction from: thinking about Jeff Wright’s death. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep until she was completely exhausted, so she took a quick break to feed Billie Jean, looking for—and not finding—any signs of either fasting or restlessness that might indicate the beginning of labor, and then settled back in to work on the decryption again.
A couple of hours later, her eyes felt too gritty to keep peering at Graham’s handwriting, so she gave in and went to bed. The next morning, she was awake at eight, too early to get up. When she turned over to go back to sleep, it wasn’t the noisy birds keeping her awake, but memories of Jeff bringing tears to her eyes. She might as well get out of bed, she decided. She could cry while she checked on the cats.
Billie Jean hadn’t done more than nibble a bit at the bowl of food that had been refilled at midnight. Had she stopped eating in anticipation of going into labor? She could just have finally been sated and come to understand that there would always be food available, not just at certain times as Graham must have done. Or maybe she wasn’t feeling well. Cats were known to have fussy digestive systems. Mabel decided she’d better check back in a couple of hours to see if anything had changed.
Pixie announced the arrival of a visitor, and a quick peek out the bedroom window revealed Rory’s truck outside the barn. Mabel hurried downstairs, stopping to change the water in Pixie’s bowl and top off her kibble before going outside to see what Rory was up to. She’d backed her truck up to the barn doors and was unloading some bins she’d borrowed for the CSA, but that would be needed for the garlic planting in another week or two. She stopped as Mabel reached the back of the truck.
“How are—” Rory stopped suddenly and peered at Mabel’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
Rory shook her head. “You’ve been crying. Is it about losing the buyer for the farm? It’s for the best, really.”
“It’s not that,” Mabel said. “It’s my lawyer. The one in Maine. He died.”
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.” Rory pulled her into a hug. “I know he was more than just your lawyer.”
Mabel gingerly pulled away. “He was old though. I never really noticed, but he was almost eighty.”
“And he was still working? You were lucky to have him so long then.” Rory took her hand and tugged her back toward the farmhouse. “Come on. Let’s do something about your puffy face, and you can tell me all about Jeff, since I never had a chance to meet him and see for myself what a great guy he was.”
“I’ll start crying again if I talk about him.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” Mabel dug in her heels, refusing to go any farther.
“Then what can I do to help?”
She considered asking if Rory would keep an eye on the farm while Mabel left town for Jeff’s funeral. She might have to ignore police requests to stay in town though, and that would unfairly put Rory in a difficult position, torn between loyalty to her friend and loyalty to her police-officer husband. She’d probably end up telling Joe, and he’d be obliged to keep Mabel from leaving.
“There isn’t anything you can do,” Mabel said. “They say loss gets easier with time, and it’s sort of true. In any event, I’ll feel better as soon as Graham’s killer is arrested and then I can concentrate on selling the farm so I can go back to my old life.”
Rory peered at her. “Are you really sure that’s what you want? Or is it just habit?”
“It’s what I want,” Mabel insisted, although even as she said it, she realized Rory might have a point, that it was mostly a knee-jerk reaction, not a conscious choice. With Jeff gone, the only thing she had left in Maine was her house. And the ability to work in peace without stupid birds chattering at her or people wandering onto the farm and into her kitchen. She did miss the privacy. “Maine is where I belong.”
“Just promise me you won’t make any big decision for a few days,” Rory said. “Wait until you’ve recovered a little bit from the shock of Jeff’s death.”
Mabel didn’t need to wait. She never let her emotions get in the way of her decisions. But she owed Rory for all her help since Aunt Peggy had died. “There’s nothing for you to worry about. I don’t have any offers for the farm right now, and I don’t expect to for a while. I’m going to place some ads online though. I’m done with waiting for Danny to do his job. He brought me another buyer today. She claimed to be a farmer, but she wasn’t. I’m pretty sure she was just a shill for Porter. She didn’t seem tough enough to be a developer herself.”
“And if you get an offer from someone online?”
“Then I’ll consider it,” Mabel said. “And make sure it’s a real farmer, not a developer. But don’t worry. I won’t rush into a deal. Even if I do find the right buyer, I can’t go anywhere until the police stop thinking I killed Graham.”
“Joe knows you didn’t do it.”
“Your husband might believe in me, but he’s not a homic
ide detective. O’Connor tried to hold me at the station yesterday so the state police’s detective could interrogate me without actually arresting me. I left before she arrived, but it was obvious that they both think I’m the prime—possibly the only—suspect. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll hold off on arresting me. I tried to give O’Connor some information to follow up on, but he wasn’t terribly interested. Like he thought he already knew who’d done it, and they were just gathering the last bits of evidence against that person, so it would be a waste of time to follow any other leads.”
“I’m sorry,” Rory sad. “Joe can’t intervene officially, but perhaps he could have a word with the state police detective, just to offer a character reference for you.”
“It would be better if I could figure out who killed Graham,” Mabel said. “I’ve been decoding his journals in case there are clues in it, but it’s slow work. I’ve gotten to early August, and the entries are becoming less and less coherent. Even after I decode the sentences, they don’t make much sense.”
“Did you find anything useful at all?”
“Nothing concrete,” Mabel said. “There are some references to escalating tension with someone. But most of them are in the incoherent sections, so I can’t tell if he’s describing reality or some kind of hallucination. He was convinced Sandy Faitakis—assuming she was the Professor—was trying to steal his work.”
“That’s not entirely crazy,” Rory said. “If he really had made some sort of breakthrough and she could claim it for her own or even just build on the work to make it better, it might help her to regain some of the academic reputation that she lost with her drinking binges. And with him dead, there’s no one to say she didn’t do all the work.”
“It’s risky though,” Mabel said. “If anyone found out she’d stolen her breakthrough from Graham, that would have to be the end of her academic career.”
“Sandy has a long history of risky behavior,” Rory said. “She attributed it to her drinking, and she’s supposed to be sober now, but who knows?”
“Graham’s neighbor thinks she’s still drinking heavily,” Mabel said. “And Graham did say in his journal that he was on the verge of a breakthrough in his breeding. He just needed a little more data, which he expected to have soon. Assuming that was true, and not a hallucination, it certainly gives Sandy a motive for killing him.”
“It’s worth investigating,” Rory agreed. “Preferably by the professionals.”
Mabel ignored the caveat. She couldn’t make the detectives do their job, not without some solid evidence. “Sandy invited me out to visit her test field. I could take her up on the offer, but I wouldn’t know a rhubarb breakthrough if it bit me.”
“I could go with you.”
“It’s better that you stay out of it,” Mabel said. “If Sandy realizes we’re there to gather evidence against her as a murder suspect, she won’t be happy, whether she did it or not. And she seems like the kind of person who wouldn’t let it go quietly.”
Rory shrugged. “I’m not afraid of her.”
“I know, but …” Mabel would have liked the help, but not at the price of creating problems for Rory or her husband. “The thing is, the whole reason I got dragged into this mess in the first place is because I went to Graham’s house to try to convince him not to get criminal charges filed against you like he threatened to do. I didn’t want you to get in trouble on my behalf then, and I still don’t now. You’ve got a reputation to uphold as an officer’s wife.”
“That’s so sweet,” Rory said. “But you didn’t need to protect me from Graham. Joe can handle a little teasing, and that’s all that would have come of it. No one would have taken Graham seriously.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Rory said. “And now I’m even more convinced that you should stay here in West Slocum instead of going back to Maine. You’re more like your aunt than you know. She was always going out of her way to protect her friends.”
“But I’m not like her in the way that matters, when it comes to where I live,” Mabel said. “I’m not cut out to be a farmer.”
“We’ll see,” Rory said, turning to drop the truck’s tailgate.
Rory was right about one thing: Mabel did feel the need to protect her friends, perhaps now more than ever, as she coped with her helplessness over Jeff’s death. She had to save Rory from herself.
As soon as they’d put the bins away in the barn, Mabel would follow up with Sandy on Graham’s allegations against her. Without involving Rory.
Chapter 20
Sandy Faitakis’s rhubarb field couldn’t have been more different from Graham’s tiny back yard. The professor had about five acres of land that held nothing but a single small greenhouse near the road, and then rows and rows of plants that were, like Graham’s, not looking great, since they were putting most of their energy into the roots for overwintering.
Right after Rory left, Mabel had called Sandy and arranged to meet her at the field. Mabel had tried to get Terry Earley to go with her to point out anything that might suggest Sandy’s breeding program wasn’t doing well so she’d be desperate for a breakthrough, even if she had to steal it. Unfortunately, Terry must have been in a class, and didn’t respond to her call. She could have waited, but she was afraid she was running out of time.
Mabel parked next to the professor’s black sedan. There was no sign of the professor in the field, and while she was petite, she would have been visible if she were anywhere out among the plantings that were only a couple of feet tall at most, so she had to be inside the greenhouse. As Mabel got out of the Mini Cooper, she felt a wave of foreboding deja vu. The last time she’d entered a greenhouse to meet someone, she’d found a dead body.
She tugged her barn jacket closer around her, as if it could protect her from more than the chilly afternoon breeze. She knew she was being silly, and had nothing to worry about. She couldn’t let her friends’ unnecessary worry about her safety get to her.
Mabel forced herself to walk over to the greenhouse. It was about half the size of Graham’s main building, with seedling-covered benches only on one long side. What it lacked in size and contents, it made up for in other ways. It looked newer, and it was definitely tidier on the outside, without any broken pots and discarded sidewall supports strewn out front.
Mabel stopped in the open doorway, hesitant to cross the threshold, even though she could see Sandy, vertical, alive, and free of any bloody wounds, about halfway down the center aisle. She had traded in her professorial clothes for beige camouflage-printed scrubs and a matching brown sweatshirt with rubber boots. She’d even been singing quietly, something about growing things row by row, until she’d looked up and seen Mabel.
Sandy hurried over to the doorway. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking Graham was a better breeder than I am just because his greenhouse was bigger and fuller than mine is. It’s just that I’m further along in the work, so my most promising plants are growing outdoors already and I don’t have as many in here.” She brushed her hands on her camouflage-print pants to remove some dirt. “Come, let me show you the really impressive work product outside.”
While they walked, Mabel paid only minimal attention to what Sandy was saying about the various plants, all of which looked essentially the same to an untrained eye. Maybe Terry would have appreciated the differences, but Mabel couldn’t see the supposedly vast improvement in color or size that Sandy described when comparing new plants with their parental stock.
Instead, Mabel tried to figure out how she could ask Sandy if she had killed Graham. There had to be some subtle way to bring it up, but subtlety had never been one of Mabel’s strong points. She’d never needed it for her job, since her clients understood that her sometimes-pointed questions were for their own benefit. She couldn’t develop their app if she didn’t understand exactly what they wanted. She asked, and they answered. No social
niceties, no beating around the bush. That was all she knew how to do.
When Sandy paused in her description of the fields, Mabel asked, gesturing at their surroundings, “If you’ve got all this, why do you care about getting Graham’s plants?”
“It’s mostly just intellectual curiosity. I’ve got some great hybrids, but who knows what else might be possible? Sometimes, it’s luck and a spontaneous somatic mutation, that’s responsible for a breakthrough. That seemed to be what Graham was counting on. His plan involved sprouting as many seeds as possible, aiming for quantity over quality, in the hope of stumbling across a winner. And maybe he did. In any event, it would really be a shame for that work to be lost.”
That explained her wanting the plants, but not the data that Sandy seemed to covet even more. “If he wasn’t being scientific, then why do you want his journals?”
“More curiosity,” Sandy said. “If he did come up with a good new variety, the journals will tell me which crosses created that seedling.”
It all sounded reasonable and not like the desperate person described by Graham. “Is anyone else doing the work you and he were doing? Someone who might have wanted to get the plants and data even more than you do?”
“Not really,” Sandy said. “Most varieties of rhubarb came about by accident, with plants cross-pollinating and the seeds producing a new plant that caught someone’s attention. I’m trying to be more scientific about it. And efficient, which you need to be in order to be profitable. I’ve got access to technology that would let me clone the best of Graham’s plants to produce them faster than the traditional root divisions. He never could have made them commercially viable without my help.”
Mabel wondered if Graham had ever realized that. His comments about Sandy in the journal, at least as of three months before his death, had been much more combative than collaborative. “Did you ever discuss the possibility of working together?”
