by Misty Simon
“Uh, nice to meet you, Mr. Branson.”
Good for Ben. I would have gone for the easier name, too, and the less snickery one. Plus, Bran made me think of cereal, and I couldn’t stand the stuff. Though maybe that would have been fitting.
I brought out the flyer from my purse and prepared to be very nice and inquisitive.
“We received this in our mailbox. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your, um, Pickle Fest.” I almost said Pickle Dreams. That would have been wrong on a whole lot of levels.
“Well, of course, thanks for asking. It’s an Extravaganza, though, not just an ordinary festival.” There was that smarmy, too-white smile again that made me flinch.
I wasn’t wrong to have flinched. Ten minutes later, I wished I had never asked. We got the history of the pickle, the different flavors and names and brands and ways of making pickles. He gave us pickle samples and then stood there looking expectant as I tried really hard to eat at least one of the pickle chips. I was not a pickle eater, and this was torture. Not to mention that the man reminded me of those oily salesman types. I really didn’t want to eat anything he’d touched.
“Well, thank you for the information,” I squeezed out through gritted teeth. He probably should have put more cucumber in with all the vinegar. Holy Camoley.
“Can I count on your support?” he asked eagerly.
I left that one to Ben as I took a tissue out of my purse, coughed into it and spit out the pickle, then God help me, shoved it back into my purse. First chance, I was getting rid of this thing. Like pronto.
“We’ll have to talk it over,” Ben answered. I heard his footsteps down the stairs right before the shouting started.
“Why did you stupid people come out here anyway, if you weren’t serious about the pickles? If you wanted to heckle me and my unfulfilled dream, you could have just left me a message on my damn answering machine like everyone else.” He slammed the door, and I was almost too afraid to make sure he was back inside the house. Or would I look up only to find him coming after us with more samples to shove down our throats to asphyxiate us with additional fermented cucumbers?
But he’d gone into the house, and we hit the car running.
Ben was laughing when we got there, but I hadn’t yet unpuckered my mouth enough to find the humor or express it.
****
I littered. I felt terrible about it, but I totally littered as soon as we turned the corner out of the driveway. I comforted myself by remembering that the tissue was recycled and biodegradable, and if the pickle wasn’t, then that wasn’t my fault.
The drive back was faster than the drive there, fortunately, and then I begged Ben to stop at Mad Martha’s Milk and Munchies (see, she had the naming thing down to a science) for some pie to wash the yuck out of my mouth.
Of course he obliged, and we found ourselves in the middle of the mid-afternoon old-guy consortium. They liked to come in for coffee and pie in the early afternoon, before the dinner rush but after the lunch crowd.
They were a good group of guys and certainly less judgmental than the old biddies, so I liked them. I waved, and they waved back as Ben and I chose a booth. He sat across from me, while I wished we had a tablecloth so I could take my sneaker off and mess with his legs.
But without that tablecloth, I wouldn’t do it because the guys would laugh at me. Not to mention Martha would not be pleased with sexual shenanigans in her restaurant in the middle of the day.
I liked Martha a lot and wouldn’t do that to her. My mom had passed when I was ten, and Martha didn’t marry my father until I was twenty-four. But she had more than made up for those in-between years by being a wonderful person to go to and talk about anything—well, nearly anything. I didn’t tell her about my sex life like I did with Bella, but that was in hopes she’d never tell me about hers with my dad. Yuck.
“So, impressions.” I opened up my napkin and placed my fork on it, waiting for someone to bring me some pie. I felt slightly puckered after that pickle, and I was not happy about it.
“Well, first off, that pickle was horrible. Even if there was a Pickle Palooza or something equally ridiculous, he would never win.”
Disdain for a food contest from a guy who had lived and breathed the Tasty Tomato Tournament for the last few months was snicker worthy, but you’ll be proud to know I held back.
“Yeah, it was gross.”
Sally came over, and I ordered the biggest piece of cherry pie they could fit on the plate. Who am I kidding? I ordered two pieces and hoped that would at least start to get rid of this disgusting tang of vinegar.
Ben ordered a piece of Chocolate Silk. I might have to dig my fork into that one, too.
After Sally walked away with my sugar fix firmly written on her notepad, I dove in with the investigation talk. “I saw what looked like a wasps’ nest on one corner of the trailer.”
“Good observation.” Ben smiled, dimples and all.
I beamed across the table at him and seriously reconsidered the fact that just because there wasn’t a tablecloth didn’t mean anyone would be looking under the table.
But Ben was all business. “Although a nest doesn’t necessarily mean anything. How the heck would he get wasps from the nest there out to Myrt’s? You would have an angry swarm on your hands, and he didn’t look like he had any stings.”
“True.”
“I’ll tell you what I didn’t see. I didn’t see a crop, or a cow, or even an alpaca on that whole farm.”
“Well, he did call himself a gentleman farmer. Doesn’t that mean he doesn’t actually farm anything?”
“A gentleman farmer was someone who had other people farm his land, and I saw no farm of any kind at all.”
I heard one of the old guys laugh and looked up to see him turned around on his stool at the lunch counter.
“You talking about that batshit crazy idiot Wellington?”
“Yes,” I said, but wondered if it was wise to involve other people when we weren’t even supposed to be investigating anyway. But this was just fact-gathering. It wasn’t like I was going to ask him to help me find out more info.
I felt better having settled that in my own head.
“That guy grows grass.” A second man swiveled on his chair, then a third and a fourth and a fifth. They looked synchronized, like it was some kind of dance move or a chorus line.
I wisely held my snicker in again. I was getting good at this stifling stuff. Came from raising two girls who did things they shouldn’t that I wanted to laugh at even when I had to scold instead.
“I did see a lot of grass there, acres and acres of it. Why have so much land if you don’t do anything with it?” I asked.
The third guy shook his head. “You misunderstand. He actually grows grass, that fancy stuff for all those development houses they’re putting up to house all the out-of-towners wanting to escape the city. They don’t want to wait for real grass to grow, so he grows it for them. I swear they cut it up like carpet squares and then lay it down in the same way.”
I had seen that in Southern California during our housing boom, but I had no idea they did that out here. I didn’t have a problem with it, but obviously they did, and I didn’t want to make them stop talking to me because I was technically still an out-of-towner, though my grass was very real.
“Thanks, Jeff,” Ben said. “We appreciate the info. Just trying to get a fix on what exactly he wants. He keeps bugging Ivy.”
The first guy’s big bushy white eyebrows drew down hard over his brown eyes. “You tell me, little lady, if he does it again, and I’ll go after him with a real pitchfork.”
Holy cow, a compliment on my stature and an invitation to be one of their own all in one sentence. Maybe I had been trying to get the attention of the wrong sex of people in this town the whole time.
I smiled at him and thanked him, then dug into my pie with relish (pun intended). Despite the yucky pickle, today was turning out to be quite the good da
y, and I was not going to sniff at that.
After pie, Ben and I went home to work some of those calories off and also to talk about what we’d found. Not much, but it still bore talking about.
“So no one respects him for either his farming abilities or his pickles. Do you think Mac promised him something he couldn’t deliver and pissed off Bran enough to send a swarm of wasps after Mac?”
It sounded ludicrous when I put it that way, and it still really bothered me that a swarm of wasps had killed Mac. Who could control them all and where had they gone afterward? Especially with no evidence at all of a nest at Myrt’s.
It was confounding and irritating and not at all to my liking. Not that murder ever was, but you know what I mean.
At that moment, though, we had nothing, and no one to even seriously look at unless it was this pickle guy. I didn’t hold out much hope for this to be wrapped up before the Tasty Tomato Tournament, and that meant one more strike against me with the old biddies. Damn.
Chapter Twelve
Ben came running into the house that night. I’d sent him out for pizza, since I didn’t want to cook, and my mind was still trying to figure out who could have wanted to kill Mac. He had no enemies that I knew of, other than Dixie (maybe? but doubtful), had never done anything wrong that I could tell, and everyone seemed to love him. Maybe it really had just been a rogue set of wasps, and I was trying too hard to get the approval of the old biddies.
Who knew, but all that left my mind when Ben came trucking in and bypassed even saying hello to me to immediately check on his precious plants.
“What on earth are you doing?”
He’d squatted in front of one particular plant and was stroking the green leaves and fondling the tomatoes hanging under a leaf. Now, I might have been a tad bit jealous at the attention, and I hadn’t smelled pizza when he came hauling in the door, so I might have been a little irritated, but what on earth had caused him to kneel before his tomato plant as if praying to some produce god?
“Another crop has been sabotaged.” He looked at me with near tears in his eyes. “They broke into a barn and ripped every single tomato out and then made a huge vat of salsa with it and left it on a table with a bag of chips. Maurice is devastated.”
While my heart twinged for Maurice, a little at least, I carefully told him we had more important things to worry about than a handful of fruits, or vegetables, or whatever those things are classified as. He looked at me in horror, and I explained, in case he’d forgotten, “Mac is dead. We have a killer in town again for the first time in six years. While I’m sorry about what is going on with some vicious asshole ruining tomatoes, maybe it’s the same person who killed Mac, and we can find them both at the same time. Let’s get some freaking evidence to get this thing solved. Maybe then it will all stop.”
He took a deep breath, which seemed to help him compose himself. “I’m still putting a chain across the door, but you’re right, I think we need to go back to Mac’s. We must have missed something. I’ll go get the pizza, we’ll make a plan, and then we’ll get back on track. I want this person, whoever they are, to pay for what they’re doing, and what they’ve done.”
There was my fierce warrior. I jumped on him, because honestly pizza could wait just a few more minutes.
****
Dressed all in black, Ben and I headed out to Mac’s house again. I had not given back the key. I wasn’t going to until we figured out what had happened. I guess we could have asked Chloe to come with us, but something about her made me cringe as I did with most of Harlow’s girlfriends. I really did not want her involved.
I didn’t even involve Bella, despite the fact that years ago she and I were like partners in crime solving. But she was married to Jared and had kids of her own at home. I was not going to rock her boat just to get to the bottom of this. She’d probably yell at me later, like my dad used to when I solved something without him, but that was the way it was going to have to be at this point.
We parked at the back again, and I motioned for Ben to follow me to the doors of the carriage house. We had never looked there, in our haste to avoid getting caught by Debbie.
That was a mistake I was about to rectify.
I really hoped we didn’t need a key to get in, though.
We did have a moment of panic when we saw the padlock on the door, but when Ben tugged on it, it released instantly. Not the best of security. Then again, maybe he didn’t have anything to secure in here, and we’d come up empty-handed again. We wouldn’t know until we ventured in with our penlights.
At first the place felt cavernous, far bigger than it looked from outside. Once I shone my light around a few times, though, I was able to see that there were things against the walls that made it not so big. Our footsteps echoed on the concrete floor, yet the echoes didn’t get far before they were muffled by the sheer amount of stuff in the space.
“How on earth will we find anything in here?” I whispered to Ben.
He gestured to a corner with a desk and a bookshelf. Without another word, I followed.
It was a makeshift office of sorts. I had seen his actual office inside, so what was this one for?
Ben sat down and turned on the gooseneck lamp.
“Are you sure that’s safe?’ I asked quietly. “What if someone sees us?”
“The Eckhardts next door are gone to Europe for the summer, and Mrs. Franklin beyond them goes to bed every night at eight, right after Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. No one is going to see us. Debbie is off tonight, and Rukey had to go out of town for the day for some kind of training. I have this all taken care of, my love. Don’t fret.”
I kissed him because I could, then started pawing through things.
I didn’t know what half of the things I was looking at were. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the way they were arranged, but they were definitely all arranged.
I was as likely to find a barrette in with a handkerchief and a screwdriver as I was to find a cheap nylon wallet with a man’s tie tack and a toothbrush. They were all placed in baskets. The bottom of each basket was lined with newspapers with the date of the periodical showing in the bottom right corner of the basket. It was the only pattern I’d found so far.
What was all this stuff?
“Are you finding anything useful?” Ben asked. “I have boxes of papers, old check registers, and a few papers that look printed off the Internet, but there doesn’t seem to be any real through-line on any of the stuff. It’s all so random.”
I was half listening to him because I’d found a key chain that looked a lot like one Ben had lost months ago. I flipped the thing over and found two tiny feet engraved with a V and an E in the center of each tiny foot, for Veronica and Elizabeth. I was pretty sure no one else had anything like this. And I knew that I had bought it, because I had paid a pretty penny after the jeweler had looked at me like I was crazy for wanting something so intricate placed on the back of a key chain. But it had been Ben’s first Father’s Day. He’d carried the thing around with pride for years until it became tarnished. He’d taken it off because it hit his steering column. It had been in the key bowl at the front door for months, and then one day it wasn’t. We figured one of the girls had maybe taken it to school for Show and Tell. I hadn’t worried too much about it, figuring we’d find it at some point, but now I’d found it in Mac’s garage. The man who everyone thought never did any wrong.
I looked at the date on the newspaper. If I remembered right, it coincided with the time the girls had a dance recital and Mac had come over to make sure Ben was going to participate in the upcoming tomato tournament after Irma had passed on.
“That’s mine,” Ben said from over my shoulder.
“How the hell did it get here, though, and why is it in a basket?”
A pattern started emerging, and I wondered if I was being stupid or extremely brilliant.
“What if he was a kleptomaniac, and these are all the things he’s taken every day? Maybe
he placed them in baskets with the day’s newspaper to remind him when he took them?”
Now I started looking with intent, and so did Ben. The baskets went back almost twenty years. And there was a lot of crap that people had probably never realized they were missing. I found a bracelet that Bella had been pissed about misplacing and almost put it into my pocket. But Ben stilled my hand.
“We can’t take anything, Ivy. We have to leave it all here and come up with a way to get the police to look in this place themselves.”
Well, dammit. “Can we at least take pictures in case something goes missing, or we have to figure out a way to force them to look? This might not be why he was killed, since most of it looks like junk, but it certainly does put him in a slightly different light than the always-perfect Mac.”
Ben sighed a great heaving sigh. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
I rubbed his back. “We’ll figure it out, and you are going to have the most fabulous tomatoes three days from now. I promise. No worries.” I turned him around and pointed him in the direction of one wall, while I took the one we were standing in front of. “Take as many pictures as that little camera can handle. Try to make sure you get the dates in the shot, and then let’s head back home. I don’t think we’re going to find much else here.”
However, when I was taking pictures, there was something reflective behind one of the baskets. I pulled it out, and it was a Polaroid of a naked man and a naked woman. I turned it around and around, not sure how that pose was even anatomically correct, then put it back. It could have been from someone’s private collection. I didn’t need that on top of all the other evidence we already had of his taking things. And if he’d taken stuff for all these years, was it possible he had done worse things?
Like promise people their own tournament in exchange for money?
****
Heading down the lane, we were two houses from the end when a car turned in. Thank goodness we’d gotten out of there when we did. At first I was absolutely certain it would be a patrol car. But I was wrong, and for once that made me extremely happy. It wasn’t even Rukey’s civilian car, which was the next fear my mind conjured, because I didn’t see Rukey’s face in the window. In fact, it wasn’t anyone I knew, and that was weird. Weird enough for me to look back in the rearview mirror before I turned right to go back to our house, and so I saw the car turn into Mac’s driveway.
