A Secret in the Pumpkin Patch

by Elizabeth Ashby

  "I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "But I can't help you."

  "You've got to." His voice rose angrily. "It's your fault I lost half of my inheritance. If you won't help me now, I'll sue you."

  Oh, yeah, blackmail is always such a great way to get someone to help you.

  Merle came up beside me just then. "Did I just hear the magic words, I'll sue you? Guess I got here in the nick of time."

  Eddie narrowed his eyes at Merle. "Who are you?"

  "I'm Maria's attorney." Merle's tone was even, not revealing any of the irritation that I suspected he was feeling. He had more important things to do today than deal with Eddie. "From now on, you'll need to talk to me, not her."

  Eddie looked Merle up and down, taking in the disreputable jeans, the shapeless pioneer shirt, and the front-zip hoodie that now had a few pieces of hay stuck to it and a new hole bitten out of one sleeve, presumably courtesy of the goats at the orchard. Even I had to admit he didn't look as much like a "gentleman" farmer as usual.

  "You're no lawyer," Eddie said. "And even if you were, you should be telling Maria to cooperate with me now so I don't drag her name through the mud. Or worse."

  Merle sighed. "I've got better things to do next week, like cleaning up after my goats, but if I have to go to court for a restraining order, I will. For now, I'll just have a word with some of the police officers patrolling the market so they'll keep an eye on you."

  Buzz swallowed the latest sample he'd been trying. "I could go talk to the police for you, if you'd like. I know Fred Fields pretty well. He comes to the homestead to pick up honey-nut fudge pretty regularly."

  "That won't be necessary," I said. "I'm sure Eddie isn't going to be a problem." I looked at him. "Right?"

  "But I came all this way from Seattle just to talk to you," Eddie whined.

  "Good thing for you it's a holiday weekend, then," I said. "There's plenty for you to enjoy in Danger Cove, so it won't be a wasted trip. But right now, I need to use the porta-potty, and then I have to go back to the grill area to make sure it's ready for the demonstrations to begin. I don't have time to talk to you this weekend."

  "I'm not leaving," Eddie said.

  "Enjoy the market, then," I said.

  "Just keep your distance from Maria," Merle said. "I'll be watching you."

  "That won't stop me from doing what has to be done," Eddie said before spinning around, causing his kilt to balloon out, and then stomping down the Memorial Walkway.

  Buzz asked, "What am I supposed to do while you're at the grill? I haven't finished checking out all the vendors here. I need more information before I can decide whether to join your market next year."

  "It's okay," Merle said. "I'll show you around while Maria's busy. I'm not in any rush now that the situation at the orchard has been resolved."

  "Thanks." I glanced behind me to see Angela lurking nearby. I leaned over to whisper in Merle's ear. "Keep an eye on the other Maria Dolores too, please. I've warned her I'll eject her if she's disruptive. I can do that, right?"

  He nodded. "As a last resort."

  "Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

  * * *

  The porta-potties were located at the far end of the market, beyond the last stall at the base of the rocky cliff where the lighthouse guarded the cove. I emerged from the facilities and caught a glimpse of Angela lingering halfway up the steps carved into the rock, which led up the lighthouse. She was looking down the Memorial Walkway and didn't seem to have noticed me emerging from the porta-potty. I didn't have time to deal with her complaints, so instead of heading in her direction, I quickly turned away, slipping out of sight around the back corner of the nearest market stall, the one belonging to WoodWell. I caught a glimpse of Etta Atwell, the granddaughter of the original owner, the late Henry Atwell, chatting comfortably with a pair of customers who were admiring a large fruit bowl on display. I couldn't tell from this distance whether it had been made by Etta or her grandfather. She'd started out selling Henry's remaining stock, but in just the past two months, she'd developed a small but growing group of fans for her own woodworking. She'd even made me a wooden nameplate for the table in the back of the first aid tent, which served as my desk on market days. Not that I ever really got a chance to sit down when the market was open.

  Reassured that Etta was doing well, I continued along the rear of the stalls, intending to go around the back of the first aid tent on my way to where the grill was set up down near the parking lot. As I trotted along, though, I had a good view of the activity to my left, down in the historical garden area nestled between the market and a rocky arm that sloped down from the outer edges of the cliff to shelter much of the garden.

  I noticed that the pumpkin patch at the front of the garden area had attracted a good number of customers. More, certainly, than had ever been interested in the historical garden's tours. Which would have been encouraging, if I hadn't noticed that no one was looking at the pumpkins. They were focused instead on something happening toward the back of the garden area, where the turkeys were making a ruckus.

  I followed their gazes. The dozen or so turkeys in the pen weren't the typical white-feathered birds sold in grocery stores but a colorful mix of heritage breeds. About half of the birds in the pen were Narragansetts, with bodies that were mostly black, gray, and white stripes, plus a tan-striped tail, and the other half were Bourbon Reds in a solid chestnut color except for the white tips of their wings and tail. They cackled as they strutted around the pen.

  The turkeys weren't the only ones making a ruckus, although their noise did make it difficult to hear the words of the two men who were shouting at each other. One was the turkey farmer, Scott Vicente, a muscular guy in his late thirties wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt printed with an image of a Bourbon Red turkey. He was of average height with short, dark hair and a beard that was barely more than stubble. The other man was Lewis Sturgeon, and his fingers furiously stabbed at his tablet in between verbal outbursts.

  I raced over to the turkeys' pen and arrived, breathless, in time to hear Scott say, "I'm not selling turkey eggs. I don't need an egg license."

  I didn't wait to finish catching my breath before interrupting. "Is there a problem, Mr. Sturgeon?"

  "It depends," he said. "Is this area part of the farmers' market?"

  "Today it is," I said. "We needed the extra room for the pumpkins and turkeys."

  "Hmph. You should have stuck to a smaller footprint, and I might not have found so many infractions to report."

  "I can't believe the pumpkin patch is dangerous."

  "Someone might trip over the vines," Sturgeon said. "But that's probably more of a concern for your liability-insurance carrier. I'm trying to concentrate on the food-safety issues."

  Scott opened his mouth to defend himself, but I held up a hand and responded for him. "Scott Vicente has over twenty years of experience with heritage turkeys, and all of his customers, without a single exception that I could find, speak highly of him. They told me they couldn't imagine a Thanksgiving without one of his birds." I'd done a good bit of research before inviting Scott to participate this weekend. I'd even gone to his farm, and I was admittedly a novice at such things, but the place had been cheerful and reasonably clean, taking into consideration the birds' free-range habits. "Still, neither of us wants to put the market's customers at risk, so if you noticed a problem we missed, I'm sure we'd both be glad to hear about it so we can fix it."

  "I don't have to tell you anything. It will all be in my report. Which isn't looking good for the market." Sturgeon resumed stabbing at his tablet's keyboard, and I felt bad for whoever had to read his reports.

  Before I could think of anything soothing to say, Sturgeon looked up from his typing and shook his head in mock despair that did nothing to hide the triumph in his eyes. "Not looking good at all. It would be a real pity if Danger Cove lost its one and only farmers' market. Again."

  "Again?" The Lighthouse Farmers' Market was brand new this y
ear, and it certainly hadn't been shut down under my watch. I'd never heard of any previous market. From what I'd been told, the town had discussed starting one for years, but there had been a number of delays, first to find someone who was willing to do the work of organizing it and getting permits, and then to deal with the opposition from the grocery store across Cliffside Drive from the lighthouse grounds. "I didn't know there was a market here before."

  "Not in this location," Sturgeon said. "Twenty years ago there was one over in Town Square Park, and it was a complete disaster. I'd only just started working as an inspector then, and I wasn't assigned to this part of the state, but I heard all the details from my colleagues at departmental meetings. No one ever wanted to be sent back here. I drew the short straw for this weekend."

  "You can't blame the new market or its vendors for what happened back then," I said, trying to believe that I could reason with Sturgeon.

  "I'm responsible for making sure that what happened then doesn't happen again," he said.

  "What did happen?"

  Sturgeon stuffed his tablet into one of his jacket's oversized pockets with a huff of irritation. "The details don't matter. The only thing that matters now is that your market presents a danger to the community. Like live turkeys wandering all over the place, with no way of knowing if they've got diseases transmissible to humans."

  "They're not going everywhere," I said. "They're penned in one spot."

  "Right next to the pumpkin patch," Sturgeon said. "They're heirloom varieties that can fly too, so what's to keep them from going over the fence? You wouldn't want the kids who came here to get pumpkins to go home with bonus intestinal parasites."

  "Hey," Scott said. "My turkeys don't have parasites."

  "How do you know?" Sturgeon said. "And, more important, how do I know? I need evidence, not just your word."

  "Actually," Scott said, "I do have evidence. The Danger Cove Board of Health was just at my farm this past week, and they didn't find a single thing wrong."

  "Of course the Danger Cove inspectors didn't find any problems." Sturgeon crossed his arms over his scrawny chest. "They didn't find anything wrong at the old market either, at least not until it was too late. They're just going through the motions. But I actually take my job seriously."

  "I appreciate that." I was determined not to push Sturgeon too hard. It wouldn't take much to set him off, given his obvious dislike of everything connected to Danger Cove. "I'm sure Scott appreciates your dedication too. But unless you've got evidence that the turkeys are a danger—an actual danger, not a theoretical danger—then I'm not going to send the turkeys home."

  "Whatever happens is on you, then," Sturgeon said.

  "It always is."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Eventually I convinced Sturgeon that I wasn't shutting down the turkey pen before the end of the weekend and he was welcome to give me a citation or whatever else he was authorized to do, which Merle would deal with later.

  Apparently, the only action Sturgeon could take was to file a report recommending future action by the state, so I left him punching more angry notes into his tablet. At least as long as he was doing that, he wasn't making trouble for Cary over at the cooking-demonstration grill. The first demonstration should have started already, so I hurried over to make sure Cary wasn't being harassed by anyone else.

  Each of the vendors had been assigned a thirty-minute session for their exclusive use of the grill between noon and four p.m. The vendors had been told to limit their demonstration time to the first twenty minutes of their slots, leaving the remainder of the time for answering questions and cleaning up in order to have a smooth transition to the next vendor. Timekeeping was Cary's responsibility, and he had a natural affinity for it.

  I would have liked the first demonstration to be by one of the better cooks to kick off the experiment with a bang. I'd been hoping it would be the chef from Gino's Pizzeria, who'd been hired by Tommy Fordham to demonstrate how to make a quick, fresh tomato sauce on the grill. Unfortunately, the random number generator had decided otherwise, and first up was the farmer who specialized in greens, ranging from lettuces to spinach, kale, and chard. He was a tall, thin man in jeans and one of WoodWell's tie-dyed T-shirts, which, complemented by his hipster ponytail, served as his hippie costume. At least, I thought it was a costume. The only significant differences from his usual attire were the width of his jeans' bell-bottoms and the addition of a peace-symbol pendant on a leather cord.

  His produce was excellent and in high demand, and everyone seemed to like him personally, but his one weakness was that he was an evangelical promoter of a raw food diet. He was constantly ambushing people with his lectures about how any cooking whatsoever destroyed all of the food's nutrients and natural enzymes that could otherwise fight disease, particularly autoimmune disorders. I hadn't expected him to sign up to use the grill, but apparently he'd decided to demonstrate the difference between cooked and raw greens. He had a lovely salad on display at the prep table next to the grill, and for comparison he had two pots of water boiling above burners turned on high.

  As I arrived, he overturned a bowl full of fresh spinach leaves into one of the pots and swiss chard into the other. While he worked, he talked about the nutrients in raw leafy greens and which vitamins were leached away by cooking.

  I tuned him out to watch the crowd's reaction. With just a handful of exceptions, the audience seemed bored. Not at all what I'd hoped for with the demonstrations. Fortunately, the high school consumer sciences class was up next, and I'd seen how well they'd engaged with their audience in the past. They would get the demonstrations back on track.

  I turned to see what else was happening in the area outside the main market. The Second Chance Animal Rescue group had attracted a considerable audience for their first "Howl-oween" parade of the day. Earlier in the morning, they'd marked off an oval path along the outer edge of the fenced-in parking lot for market-goers to parade their costumed pets—or one that was borrowed for the event—around the course. There was a new chance to show off every hour on the hour between noon and 4:00, with prizes given out by the mayor. Some of the volunteers were in costumes to match the animals, including a young woman dressed as a tuxedo cat. A man in an early 1900s-style police uniform hung out with her.

  The quilt guild now had a full complement of stitchers working on the pumpkin-colored quilt, and there was a short line at the table selling raffle tickets for the finished quilt. In the other direction, a steady stream of customers were looking at the books on display both inside the Dangerous Reads tent and out front, where the pumpkin-themed display now included a basket filled to overflowing with single-serving packets of SweeTarts. Not my favorite treat, but a safer one than chocolate while handling the pages of a book.

  In keeping with the holiday, the demand for face painting and temporary tattoos was high. Cassidi Conti, the owner of The Clip and Sip, had wisely brought not just her cousin, Gia Di Mitri, who had worked the last two holiday market events, but also a woman who looked vaguely familiar from the salon, although I'd never been formally introduced to her. Otherwise, they never would have been able to keep up with the demand. Thanks to that extra help, Gia had just finished applying a pair of dinosaur tattoos to a toddler's hands, and there was no one else waiting in her line.

  I looked over my shoulder to see how things were going at the grill. Cary was doing what he was supposed to, keeping track of the time. There wasn't anything he—or I, for that matter—could do about the dwindling size of the audience, put off by the rather unappetizing appearance of the overcooked, faded-almost-to-white spinach and chard that had just been fished out of the pots.

  On the plus side, the greens farmer had only a few minutes left for his demonstration, and the high school students up next would quickly attract a new audience. I was a little worried that the inspector might harass the teens, but at least so far, the inspector hadn't followed me over to the grill area. As long as he stayed away, Cary could hand
le the demonstrations on his own while I nipped over to see if Gia could paint a subtle little pumpkin on my cheek to match the ones on my fingernails.

  Instead of the gold throne made out of a styling chair draped with gold fabric that had served as Gia's station for face painting back in September, there were three black leather office chairs with exaggerated wings reminiscent of supervillain Dr. Blofield's chair in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. In between were black storage cabinets on casters.

  The far chair was occupied by a child holding a stuffed animal—a white, long-haired cat—while the makeup artist whose name I didn't know applied tattoos to the girl's hand. The middle chair's occupant, a muscular young man dressed in biker's leathers, was cradling a matching stuffed animal in his tattooed arms as if it were an infant while Cassidi turned his pleasant face into that of a scarred and bloody zombie's. Cassidi's costume consisted of a burnt orange miniskirt with a white vest-like top with burnt orange trim, and there was a cheerleading pompon dangling from her left wrist. I recognized it as the official uniform of the University of Texas at Austin. While the pompom might be a bit awkward for her work, at least she had the benefit of being able to wear comfortable white sneakers.

  Not so her cousin, Gia, who was working in stiletto heels. I couldn't imagine trying to walk on the grass in them myself, but she didn't seem to be having any trouble. And her dress was stunning. It was deep purple and form-fitting with a halter-top and falling to midcalf, all drenched in rhinestones. The purple of her smokey-eye makeup was a perfect match to the dress and even featured silvery glitter that mimicked the rhinestones.

  "Have a seat," Gia said, picking up the white plush cat the previous occupant had left on the chair.

  I would have preferred to be worked on by her cousin. Gia always meant well, of course, but her personal style was far more flamboyant than mine, as evidenced by our respective costumes, and she was a big believer in getting people to try something different, while I was a creature of habit. Unfortunately, I didn't have a ready excuse to delay my face painting. No one else was waiting for a turn in her chair, and a quick glance at the grill confirmed I still wasn't needed there. The greens farmer was wrapping up his presentation, the high school students were ready and waiting patiently for their turn, and the inspector wasn't anywhere that I could see.