Scarlet Nights

by Jude Deveraux

  “Yeah,” Mike said, but he didn’t tell her about Sara’s fiancé’s interest in it. Maybe it was a coincidence, but it could be the break they needed.

  Tess said she’d arrange it, and ten minutes later she called back to say that Luke would take great delight in causing Brewster Lang enough problems that he’d have to stay away all day. Over the last few years, whenever Luke tried to repair anything at Merlin’s Farm, the old man had followed him around, complaining so much that Luke had wanted to strangle him.

  After Mike hung up, he went back inside the apartment. Sara’s light was off, and he was glad. He didn’t want to hear any more reasons of why she should go with him. On Thursday he planned to tell her he’d already seen the farm and that would be the end of the discussion.

  This morning when Mike left early to go to the gym, Luke was outside, filling the bed of a red Kawasaki Mule with tools. “I’m preparing for my day with ol’ Brewster,” he said as he threw in a posthole digger. “Are you sure you want to take on something like that old place?”

  “The last thing on earth I want is to own a farm. This is purely my sister’s idea.”

  Luke grinned. “Wants to tie you down, does she? So how many blind dates have they tried to set you up on?”

  “So far, two. There’s—”

  “Let me guess. Ariel Frazier and Kimberly Aldredge.”

  “Those are the names. Tell me, does anyone in this town have any secrets?”

  “You seem to have more than a few,” Luke said quickly.

  Mike didn’t reply, just got in his car and put down the window. “Why don’t you go to the gym with me tomorrow?”

  “I was there yesterday, remember? And I caught the last of your routine. Forty-six minutes of hell. I don’t think I could stand working out with you.”

  Mike continued to look at him. Luke was a big guy with quite a bit of muscle on him.

  “I’ll be ready at six tomorrow,” Luke said.

  As Mike drove away, he wished he didn’t have to go all the way into Williamsburg to a gym. He wondered what kind of zoning Merlin’s Farm had. Could he put in a mixed martial arts studio there? Maybe he could have a few paying clients. After he retired, he’d have his pension from the police force, and he had savings, but it would be good to have a supplemental income.

  He ran his hand over his unshaved jaw. His sister and the whole town of Edilean were poisoning his mind. He had nearly three years before he left the force and moved to … probably to Edilean, since Tess and her—he smiled—kid would be living there. But he still couldn’t see that he’d ever like living on a farm.

  As Mike pulled into the gym’s parking lot, he thought about what to do with old man Lang. He’d lived at Merlin’s Farm his entire eighty-five years, so it wasn’t going to be easy to get rid of him. Maybe they should put him into the same nursing home in Ohio where Mike and Tess’s grandmother had spent the last years of her life. The people there had dealt with cantankerous clients like her before and knew just how to keep smiling and not let her hurt their feelings. Without people to terrorize, Mike’s grandmother had deteriorated quickly, until one morning they’d found her in bed, dead, her eyes open and angry.

  An hour later, Mike left the gym and drove to Merlin’s Farm. It was northwest of Edilean, through the same deep wilderness that surrounded the little town and made it seem more isolated from the world than it actually was. He drove past McTern Road, which led into the town, and kept on. Twice, he passed trucks hauling motorboats as they went into the surrounding nature preserve for recreation.

  As he checked the directions Tess had texted him, he remembered what she’d told him. The farm had once been on a thousand acres, with a huge race track just half a mile from the house. But now all that was left was twenty-five acres, with pretty little K Creek running through the center of it.

  His first sight of the farm was a big NO TRESPASSING sign. Mike pulled his car well off the road to park it under a huge oak tree. Even though he’d been assured Lang was gone for the day, he didn’t want to drive in and leave his car to the mercy of an angry man. Mike noted that there was an old, falling-down fence hidden in the tall weeds, and beyond it he could see the top of a chimney.

  He had on a pair of Levi’s, a tan T-shirt, and a cotton jacket. He checked in his jacket pocket to make sure the plastic bag was there. He’d laced some ground beef with a common tranquilizer—one of several drugs he kept in his car—and was ready to confront Lang’s dogs. Tess had warned him about them, saying Lang trained them to alert him to anyone who stepped on the property. The dogs were yet another reason he’d not wanted Sara with him.

  Mike decided not to walk down the driveway, but to go through the weeds to the side of the house. Quietly, he made his way through a field of chest-high Queen Anne’s lace, seedy grasses, and wild daisies while doing his best not to leave a path. “I guess this is where I’m supposed to grow a crop,” he said under his breath and couldn’t help chuckling at the absurdity of the idea.

  As he walked, he listened, but he heard nothing but the birds. When the tall grasses abruptly ended, he saw that in the distance was one end of the house. For all the fanfare he’d heard about it, it looked quite ordinary, just an old two-story house that needed paint and repair. There was a brick chimney that went from the ground to above the roofline, and as he’d had some experience with carpentry, he guessed that the fireplace drew well.

  There were four windows in the end, two on each floor, and he could see a long porch jutting out from what he guessed was the back of the house. From this angle, he couldn’t see the front.

  If he hadn’t been told about the house, he would never have guessed it was extraordinary, as there looked to be nothing to distinguish it from thousands of other Virginia farmhouses. Except for one thing. Between him and the house were four buildings that looked like something out of a movie that took place in George Washington’s time. There was one to his right that was perfectly square, with a pitched roof, but no windows or even a door that he could see. To the left was a larger building, shorter but wider, with an addition on the side, and several windows. In between them was an odd wooden structure that looked to be just a roof set on the ground. He couldn’t imagine what it had ever been used for. And set back from the other three was what was unmistakably an outhouse.

  Mike stood still, staring at all of it. There were some huge trees around the house, shading the whole area. As he looked from one building to another, he began to understand what Sara was talking about. This was an untouched plantation, still the same as it had been hundreds of years ago, and he had a sense of how unusual this place was.

  Turning, Mike saw a small fence—the only wood that looked as though it had been painted in the last fifty years—around a garden that was set out in big squares, with paths laid with white gravel. For all that the garden looked like something out of a history book, it was also very much in this century. An old table standing at the side of a path was covered with balls of strings, hand tools, and plastic markers. In one corner was an old metal cabinet with a door hanging open, and he could see wooden-handled tools inside.

  As for the garden itself, it held the most magnificent vegetables he’d ever seen; they looked like an advertisement for fertility. Whatever else was said about old man Lang, he was certainly good at making plants grow.

  Cautiously, while looking around for the dogs, Mike left cover and went into the vegetable patch. Everything was in perfectly straight lines, with not a weed in sight.

  The whole place was so unusual to Mike—and so beautiful—that he couldn’t help walking along the rows. In the center was what he guessed was an herb bed, a square crisscrossed with paths, a small tree at each corner.

  It was while he was looking at the herbs that he got his first idea that something was wrong. He was startled to see that smack in the middle of each triangle was what looked to be a tall, thriving marijuana plant.

  When Mike took a step toward the closest plant, he heard a fain
t click. It was a sound that, had there been any noise of, say, dogs barking, he wouldn’t have noticed. But Mike had heard the sound once before—and seconds later a friend of his had been blown up.

  Mike stood absolutely still, not moving except to look down at what he’d stepped on. It didn’t appear to be a land mine, but he could see a circle of something hidden under the dirt.

  Keeping his foot in place, he slowly pulled his knife from his jeans pocket and used the long blade to move the dirt away. It looked to be an old iron trap with teeth on it. Had it sprung, it would have cut deeply into his ankle.

  Carefully, Mike put his hands on the two iron half circles and held them down while he lifted his foot. The nasty little trap sprang shut the second he let go. It was like a lethal Venus flytrap—and it was meant to hurt anyone who tried to get near the marijuana plant.

  Okay, so the old man was making some money through illegal drugs. In Mike’s life, that was nothing, but he wondered if more traps had been set around the other plants to protect them. Or was it the other way around and the cannabis was being used as a lure?

  As cautiously as he’d ever worked in his life, Mike began to closely inspect the vegetable garden. Each of the marijuana plants had a trap near it, and each one was concealed under the dirt.

  At the gate Mike saw four holes in the ground, and the grasses were flattened in the center. He realized a tent had been placed there, and Mike thought that made sense. If the old man was growing weed, the local boys were probably trying to steal it, so Lang had been sleeping outside to protect it.

  It was a plausible explanation, but, still, Mike didn’t believe it. Something wasn’t right. For one thing, there was no way Lang could so openly grow those plants and not have everyone in Edilean know about it. Mike had been told that Luke repaired the buildings and often cut the grass around the house. He would have seen the plants, and Mike didn’t think he’d tolerate them.

  If, by some long shot, Luke didn’t tear out the plants, Mike was sure that Sara’s mother wouldn’t allow them. He’d spent less than an hour with the woman, but it was enough to know that she’d refuse to buy vegetables from a man who was growing marijuana.

  Mike stepped over half a dozen spiny, smelly herbs to reach one of the cannabis plants. When he brushed away the dirt, he saw that it was inside a pot. It looked like Lang was growing them somewhere else, then when he went away, he put them in the ground. Mike was even more sure that the old man was using them to entice someone into the garden.

  Mike reset the trap he’d triggered, removed all trace that he’d been there, and left to continue his exploration.

  He went away from the house, toward the large lawn. There was another garden directly in front of the main house, with tall boxwood hedges encasing geometric beds.

  In the second square, he saw a net hidden in a tree branch that hung over the garden below. When Mike moved a stick on the ground, he found a trip wire. If he’d walked across it, the net would have come down on him.

  “It’s a damned Tarzan movie,” he muttered as he moved out of what he thought of as the flower garden.

  At the far end was about a half acre of mown lawn, and he didn’t want to run across it, but at the other side was another fenced area that he wanted to see. In the middle of the lawn was a gravel driveway, narrow, but it had recently been used for a car, so obviously, it was trap free. It looked like Lang just didn’t want anyone sneaking about where he couldn’t see them.

  Mike jogged down the drive to what looked to be an old orchard, and when he got there, he stood at one end and couldn’t help admiring it. The trees looked to have originally been planted in five neat, long rows, but now there were many gaps from missing trees, and half of the remainder looked too old to produce fruit.

  For the first time, Mike thought of this property as being his. He’d like to take out the dying trees and replace them. He thought it would be nice to pull an apricot or a plum off his own trees. He glanced at the big lawn and envisioned playing catch with Tess’s kid. And when she wasn’t around, he’d show the boy—or girl—a bit of kickboxing. Maybe he could put some weight machines in one of those old buildings and—

  He made himself get back to business. The fenced area near the orchard was a cemetery. He wasn’t surprised to see the name MCDOWELL on a dozen old markers, but when he got to the gate, he saw something that drew his attention away. A few yards from the cemetery was a line of small, handmade concrete stones with names and dates drawn into them. They were obviously pet graves, and they started in the 1920s. The most recent graves were for animals named King, Queen, Prince, Princess, Duke, Duchess, Marquess, Marchioness, Earl, Countess, Viscount, and Viscountess. The last two were freshly dug and dated this year.

  As Mike looked at the dates, he realized that each of the dogs seemed to have lived very long lives—except for the last two. They were no more than three years old when they died. Maybe it was Mike’s cynicism from what he’d seen in his life, but he wondered if the dogs had been murdered. Losing his dogs would explain why Lang had made traps that were lethal.

  Mike wasn’t sure yet, but he thought there was a war going on here, and it was probable that the dogs had been casualties of it. It was his guess that someone had been attacking the old man and Lang was trying to protect himself. But at the same time, like a spider and a fly, Lang had been trying to lure his enemy into a trap. When someone tried to get the marijuana, he’d have his foot nearly torn off. When the enemy sneaked through the old flower garden, he’d find a net falling on top of him.

  Of course the first thing Mike wanted to know was who was after old Brewster Lang. But if he couldn’t find that out—and he felt sure he already knew—then he was going to figure out the cause of this war.

  7

  SARA WALKED DOWN the long driveway of Merlin’s Farm and marveled that there had been so few changes since she first saw it when she was just eight years old. At dinner the night before that visit, her mother had excitedly told her family that Brewster Lang had contacted her to say that he wanted to sell some of his vegetables to Armstrong’s Organic Foods. That he grew the most succulent and beautiful produce in the county, maybe in the state, was well known.

  “And how did he contact you?” her husband, Dr. Henry Shaw, asked. “Smoke signals? Or did he use two cans and a string?” He hadn’t grown up in Edilean and often let his wife know how backward he thought the town was.

  Only Sara giggled at the joke, but then she’d always been a “daddy’s girl.” Her two older sisters were as perfectly conventional as Sara was a dreamer.

  “Telephone,” Eleanor said as she passed the bowl of carrot and raisin salad to Taylor who, at twelve, was the eldest of their three daughters. “I’m going out there to see him tomorrow, and, Sara, you’re going with me.”

  Everyone at the table paused, frozen, as they looked at Sara in surprise. Whereas the two older daughters were as organized and determined as their mother—but without the hippie undertones—Sara was content to play with her many dolls and sew endless dresses for them.

  Sara looked as though she didn’t know if she was being punished or honored. “Me?” she whispered. She’d gone to work with her father many times. Of course it was always on a Saturday, when he had more paperwork to do than patients to see, but she liked the old hospital in Williamsburg where he worked, was fascinated by his office, and most of all, she loved being with her father. But, unlike her sisters, she’d never been to work with her mother.

  “Yes, you,” Ellie said. “Merlin’s Farm is old and mysterious. It’s right up your alley. You’ll stay outside while I negotiate terms with Mr. Lang, but that shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”

  But it had taken over four hours, and during that time, Sara had wandered about in her little pink dress—given to her by her aunt Lissie—and had fallen in love with the old farm. She’d made friends with Mr. Lang’s two dogs, had mingled with a flock of geese that were nearly as big as she was, and had explored every old buil
ding on the property.

  When her mother was ready to leave, it seemed to Sara that she’d spent only minutes there. But not so her mother. She was the most angry Sara had ever seen her.

  Behind her came a short, heavy man whose back bent forward so much he reminded Sara of a storybook character: the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was trailing behind Sara’s angry mother and smiling as though he’d won a prize.

  But when he saw Sara standing by the car, he stopped and stared at the little girl, and his round face recomposed into a look of menace.

  “She looks just like her,” he said in a deep, wiggly voice that, to Sara’s mind, was funny. If he hadn’t been scowling at her so hard, she would have giggled.

  Ellie was opening the car door, and in her agitated state, she dropped the keys. As she picked them up, the old man removed the sneer from his face so that when Ellie turned, he was merely gazing at the child. “You mean my aunt Lissie. Yes, Sara looks like her and is like her.” She flung open the back door of the car and waited for Sara to get in. Ellie got in the driver’s seat and started the engine.

  In the back, Sara looked out the window at Mr. Lang, and she knew her mother didn’t see the way he glared, and certainly didn’t see the way he pointed his finger at her. Just as her mother sped away, the old man made his hand into a gun and pulled the trigger.

  Sara slid down in the seat in sheer terror and listened to her mother complain all the way home about what a “pirate” Brewster Lang was. “He might as well have held a gun to my head,” her mother said—and her words made Sara slide down farther.

  Sara never told anyone what Mr. Lang had done, with his hand firing a shot at her. Over the ensuing years, she was able to separate the beautiful old farm with its butterflies flitting about from the scary old man who seemed to hate her because she looked like her aunt Lissie. One day Sara asked her great-aunt about the old man, but all Lissie would say was that Sara should stay away from him. “Remember, dear, you must never believe anything Brewster Lang says.”