Deadly Row to Hoe

by Cricket McRae

  Shrugging off her hand, I stepped away. “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “Sophie Mae, I wouldn’t do that.”

  Right.

  “I know it’s over,” she said. “I’ve always known someone would figure it out, even if Nate didn’t recover. I’m glad it was you.”

  Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder.

  “Will you take me to the police station now?”

  My lips parted in surprise. “Um, sure.”

  “Hang on. Let me get the beans we picked.”

  I watched with numb wonder as she walked back, placed the baskets into the yard cart, and pulled it to where I stood waiting. Together we walked to the farm stand and stepped inside.

  Thirty-one

  Tom hefted a crate of freshly picked melons and turned toward us in surprise.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else to take over for us,” Bette said.

  Irritation warred with the worry that had pinched his features ever since Meghan had stumbled on the Timberland boot in his compost pile. “What’s going on?”

  “I killed Darla Klick and hit Nate over the head.”

  He froze, darting a look at me.

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded.

  “I’m really sorry for all the trouble I caused you and your family. You don’t have to worry about your little girl anymore—you never did. Sophie Mae is going to take me to the police station now.” She turned to me. “It’s a relief, really. Let’s go.”

  In a daze, I walked to the Rover and retrieved my phone from the tote in the back seat. “I’m just going to call Barr and let him know we’re coming.”

  She took a deep breath. “Yes. Okay.”

  “Barr? Are you at the station? … Well, you’re going to have to put off that interview … I know, I know. But believe me, this is more important. I’m bringing Bette Anders in so she can officially confess to murder.”

  Sergeant Zahn and Detective Ambrose met us halfway to the station and escorted us through town. There were no lights, no sirens, and we didn’t exceed the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit once.

  Beside me, Bette asked, “Do you think they’ll let me have Leigh’s mask in prison?”

  Sudden pity surged over me, almost taking my breath away. “I don’t see why not.”

  A few moments later she said, “I have a favor to ask.”

  I swallowed. “What’s that?”

  “I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few days. I’d like you to take Alexander. Will you do that for me?”

  I thought of the big, gorgeous, loyal beast waiting for the woman beside me to come home. I thought of Bette, so alone except for the past and her dog and nearly burst into tears.

  “Yes. We’ll take good care of him. I promise,” I finally managed to croak out.

  “And Sophie Mae? I finished Barr’s mask. It’s in my studio. The front door’s unlocked.”

  I turned into the parking lot of the small, square building on Maple Avenue that housed the Cadyville Police Department. “You knew you weren’t going back home, didn’t you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Barr opened her door then, ratcheted a pair of handcuffs onto her wrists, and Zahn took her elbow. She twisted her head to look over her shoulder. Our eyes met.

  “Thank you, Sophie Mae.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but then closed it again. There weren’t any words to express what I felt. Nonetheless, she nodded her understanding before facing forward and marching into the building.

  I watched her go inside. Barr put his arm around me, and I leaned my head against his shoulder. I wanted to cry, but no tears came. So I stared at the silver dollar holding his string tie together and blinked dry eyes.

  “Sophie Mae?” His tone was gentle.

  I took a deep breath and pushed away. “I’m fine.”

  He looked down at me with deep brown eyes full of a sweetness not many people got to see. “No, you’re not.”

  And he was right. A friend of mine had just confessed to killing a young woman out of misplaced rage and grief and then trying to kill a nice young man because he could identify her.

  A friend.

  I liked putting together the pieces of a puzzle, figuring out human motivations and uncovering secrets. Some of those secrets had been disturbing or made me sad, but I’d thought that was the price of justice. And I’d helped to catch other killers. Some were acquaintances, some were essentially strangers, but none of them had been people I’d known for a long time, socialized with, respected, and enjoyed spending time with.

  This was different.

  This time was going to take some thoughtful processing. That didn’t need to start in the parking lot of the police station, though. So I said, “At least you can let Hallie go now.”

  Barr frowned, but allowed me to change the subject. After all, he could follow up later, and would, probably ad nauseum, until he knew for sure I was all right.

  “Yeah, about that,” he said. “While you were harvesting vegetables and getting a murder confession, we found out a few interesting things about the evil twin.”

  Raising one eyebrow, I said, “Do tell.”

  “After you told me about Hallie texting Clarissa, Zahn got a warrant for her cell phone. Sure enough, there was a record of their exchange last night.” He paused.

  I made a get-on-with-it gesture.

  “Apparently Clarissa had taken something that Hallie wanted. She wanted it very much.”

  Holy cow. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Is that why she was being so weird?”

  He looked stunned. “Are you telling me you knew?”

  “Are you talking about the diamond drop earrings?”

  Nodding, he asked, “But how …?”

  “Clarissa was wearing them yesterday. She said she’d borrowed them from Hallie, but I got the feeling she didn’t exactly have explicit permission to take them. She said Hallie let her borrow nice stuff all the time.”

  Better to ask forgiveness later than permission first.

  Shrugging, I said, “I figured it was one more way dear auntie indulged her niece.”

  “Not exactly. See, those earrings weren’t hers to loan.”

  Now I was confused. “Whose were they?” Surely not Allie’s.

  “Brother’s Jewelers.”

  “In Monroe? But how did she … ohhh. Really? She stole them?”

  He nodded again. “We didn’t find anything suspicious when we searched the Turners’ house, but boy, we hit the mother lode in the trunk of her car.”

  “So it wasn’t just the earrings?”

  “You know all those shopping trips she took Clarissa on? More like shoplifting trips.”

  I took a step back, catching myself on the hood of the Rover. The metal was hot from the sun. “She didn’t. Oh, Barr, you’re not saying she involved a thirteen-year-old girl, her own niece, are you?”

  He looked grim. “Hallie said Clarissa would distract a clerk so she could slip something in her purse. They’d become very good at it.”

  That explained a lot. Her focus on Clarissa, the way she manipulated her emotions, the look of terror I’d seen in her eyes the night before. She’d been afraid Clarissa would give her away.

  “What a bitch,” I said.

  My husband barked a laugh, then caught himself.

  “Poor Allie.” I could only imagine what Meghan would feel like

  in the same situation. Or how I’d feel. That parenting thing wasn’t for wimps.

  Barr nodded. “You realize, of course, that if you hadn’t joined the CSA and insisted on discovering Darla Klick’s identity, we wouldn’t know about Hallie’s little enterprise.”

  Was he trying to make me feel better about Bette turning out to be a murderer?

  “She would have been caught eventually,” I said.

  “I’m sure you’re right. But not for a while. She’d still be taking Clarissa on ‘shopping trips’ and living the high life.”<
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  “And here I thought she had all that money to burn because she’d made out well in her divorce.”

  “We haven’t had a chance to look into her finances yet, but I doubt that’s the case.”

  “At least that explains her crazy stunts at the house.” Utterly enervated, I turned toward the car door. All I wanted to do was go home and sleep until I had to help the girls get set up for the farmers market.

  Wait a second. I whirled around. “But what about her obsession with Nate? Did that have anything to do with the shoplifting scheme? Could he be involved somehow?”

  Barr shrugged. “It doesn’t look like it. She’s still asking about him, constantly. Maybe she really is in love with him and wanted him to think she was rich?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “That’s one messed-up woman you have in there.” My hand dropped, and so did my stomach. “Actually, two messed-up women. Oh, Barr.” And finally tears stung my eyelids.

  Thirty-two

  “If you weren’t in such a hurry, you could have a double wedding with Nate and Daphne,” Ruth said over her shoulder. She was slicing Lazy Wife green beans into uniform lengths that would fit into wide-mouthed pint jars.

  Next to her, three dozen of those sterilized jars lined our kitchen counter. Meghan dropped a sprig of dill, a small cayenne pepper, and a clove of peeled garlic into each one. I stirred a steaming pot of water, vinegar, and salt on the stovetop, its sour scent adding to the mix of flavors in the air. On another burner, water in the big, black canning pot roiled, ready to seal the first batch of dilly beans. A fan in the corner moved the humid air around the room, and I pushed a damp strand of hair off my forehead with the back of my wrist.

  Erin sat at one end of the butcher block table, the tip of her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth in concentration as she bent over her new cell phone. It was metallic yellow, and she hadn’t been more than three feet away from it since Meghan had given it to her the day before.

  Kelly and Barr hunched at the other end of the table, flipping through catalogs of surveillance equipment and discussing the pros and cons of subscribing to proprietary information databases. Meghan looked at me and rolled her eyes. Some of the items sounded like they’d originated in Q’s laboratory.

  Alexander and Brodie snoozed side-by-side in the kitchen doorway. Our new addition seemed fine during the day, but at night, sprawled on the carpet by my side of the bed, he sometimes whined in his sleep. I hoped that he’d adjust to his new living situation in time.

  We’d all spent the afternoon at Turner Farm, helping Tom and Allie catch up with the backlog of work. Meghan had suggested the idea, and I’d started contacting CSA members. As soon as Jake Beagle heard our plan, he took over the phone calls. He’d talked every volunteer into showing up, plus most of the CSA members who had never worked in a garden in their lives. He’d even managed to bring in a few nonmembers to help, some of whom had bought prorated shares until the end of the year.

  Bins and bags and piles of vegetables now filled the distribution shed and farm stand. We’d beaten back the worst of the weeds in most of the fields and beds, and Allie had directed a team who planted fall crops of greens, brassicas, and peas. Hallie had been released on bond, but Tom refused to allow her on the farm. With the help of Sergeant Zahn and Barr, he hadn’t had any trouble taking out a restraining order to make sure his edict stuck. Clarissa, wearing overalls like her dad, had worked side-by-side with her mother. She was still snippy and whiny, but without her aunt around to confuse things she seemed more settled. I thought she’d be okay.

  Allie had pulled me aside to tell me she’d convinced Hallie to get professional help. “I have to try and help her, Sophie Mae. She’s my twin sister. I know deep down she’s not the person you’ve had to deal with.”

  How could I judge her loyalty? I could only wish them luck.

  But at the end of the day the community of Cadyville had indeed supported the Turner Farm in the spirit of CSA, and now, sunburned and tired, we settled in to preserve some of the harvest with Ruth Black’s help.

  “The flights are all booked to Las Vegas,” Meghan said, peeling more garlic. “Tootie and Felix are coming along, too.”

  The two ninety-somethings had returned from Alaska full of enthusiasm for more travel, despite Tootie’s constant arthritis pain.

  “How about you, Ruth?” Meghan asked. “I can get a flight for you tomorrow.”

  The older woman frowned. “Maybe I should. I’ve always wanted to know what kind of trouble you can get into that needs to stay in Vegas when you leave.”

  I laughed.

  “Bug, remember what I said about texting at the table?” Meghan asked.

  Erin looked up at her mother. “We’re not eating.”

  “We have a guest, though.”

  Ruth flipped her hand. “Poo. I’m not a guest.”

  “Sure you are.” Erin put her phone in her pocket. “I’m sorry if I was rude. Can I help?”

  Meghan and I exchanged glances, grateful that she’d returned to her usual sweet self.

  “You could wash up the rest of those.” Ruth indicated the final batch of beans in the sink with her chin.

  Erin leaped up and got to work.

  “When are Nate and Daphne tying the knot?” Barr tipped back in his chair and took a sip of Earl Grey tea.

  “Not for a while,” Ruth said. “Nate’s still recovering, and they have to figure out someplace to live. He wants to be closer to the farm than Daphne’s apartment, but they can’t live in that little trailer.”

  “Is his mom still in town?” I moved to the counter and began stuffing raw beans into the jars Meghan had prepared.

  “She went home a few days ago,” Ruth said. “Didn’t she call you?”

  I nodded. “She thanked me for finding his attacker.”

  Ruth turned to face me, her multi-hued caftan swirling. Her cheeks glowed pink in the kitchen heat. “You know if Bette hadn’t confessed to you, she could have gotten away with everything.”

  “Because Nate never saw who hit him?”

  His memory had returned in full, but it turned out he’d never actually seen Bette sneak up behind him in the dark.

  She waved her knife in the air. “Exactly.”

  I put another handful of beans in a jar. “I don’t know about that, Ruth. For one thing, Nate confirmed he’d suspected her of killing Darla, so that would have turned Barr’s attention to her eventually. And she never got rid of the shovel. They found it in her garden shed. Darla’s wallet, too.”

  Ruth frowned and returned to her cutting board. “Bette always seemed smarter than that.”

  “I don’t think it was about being smart or dumb,” I said. “It was about feeling bad. She wanted to confess.” And she wanted to pay for what she’d done. Hadn’t even tried to make bail.

  When I’d gone to Bette’s to pick up Alexander and bring him home, I’d found the mask of Barr’s face. Even though she’d said she couldn’t sculpt it from a photo, Bette had created a very realistic representation of his face from the picture his mother had taken at our wedding ceremony. It was pure genius, truly a gorgeous piece.

  I’d wrapped it in several layers of paper and put it in the back of the closet in our sitting room. No one knew it was there except me, and I had no idea what to do with it. It would be too weird to give it to Barr for his birthday now, and I definitely didn’t want a constant reminder of Bette and her sad madness hanging on my wall.

  But I couldn’t get rid of it, either. At least not yet.

  Meghan had grown quiet. “I feel almost sorry for her,” she said now.

  “I know—” I began.

  Barr cut in. “Don’t. Bette Anders had some bad things happen to her. Everyone does. That’s life. It’s no excuse for killing someone.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Ruth said. “But not everyone sees the world in such black and white terms.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Are you going to get one o
f those lighters with a camera in it?” I interrupted, leaving my post to look over Kelly’s shoulder. Enough talk about death.

  “Nah,” he said. “Private investigators don’t really need most of this stuff, at least not doing the kind of work I do. But since giving up my apartment, I’ve rented a small office space to work out of, and I need office equipment.” He smiled. “And maybe a new digital video camera.”

  “You don’t already use one?” I asked.

  “Of course. But sometimes you need a couple of them at the same time.” He sat back, tapping his fingers on the table. “You know, there’s plenty of work for me in this area, especially now that I got that insurance company contract. There will be times when I’ll have to bring someone in to help. Think you might be interested in moonlighting, Sophie Mae?”

  “Kelly!” Meghan said.

  “You can help, too,” he teased.

  Barr said. “Are you trying to get my wife into even more trouble than she usually manages?” But he was smiling. Sort of.

  I pushed him playfully on the shoulder, and he slid his arm around my waist.

  “Well, if I’m going to help you—and I’m not saying I will—then I want the lighter with the camera in it,” I said. “It would make me feel like James Bond.”

  “You’d have to learn how to smoke,” Barr teased.

  “Hrm. Never mind, then.” I pushed away from him and went back to the stove.

  Was Kelly serious? I thought he might be. Sophie Mae Ambrose: Private Eye. On assignment, snooping into the lives of strangers—instead of investigating people she knew.

  I liked it.

  Erin’s phone clucked like a chicken.

  “That’s your ring tone?” I asked.

  “My text tone.” She looked at Meghan. “Please, Mom? Zoe was going to let me know when she got home from riding.”

  My friend gave a rueful grin. “Go ahead.”

  I looked around at everyone. My family, I thought. A made family, but close and happy. With the addition of Kelly and Alexander, the house was filled to bursting. There was still room for a baby if that was in the cards, but Barr and I were no longer trying to force the issue.

  We hadn’t given up, though. After all, if you don’t succeed, try, try again.