Rotten to the Core

by Sheila Connolly

  Murder? Meg wasn’t ready to think about that. “You going to turn him over?” she asked.

  Art studied the scene. “Don’t think so. I’ll let the pros handle that. I don’t want to mess up any evidence, if there is any. Ground’s still pretty much frozen. But I think I can get to his pocket, see if he’s got any ID on him.” He matched his actions to his words, hunkering down next to the body and reaching into a back pocket of the dead man’s jeans. He managed to pull out a wallet, molded by long use to the shape of the man’s body and worn at the edges. “Got it.”

  He walked back to Meg’s side before opening it and reaching into it to pull out a driver’s license. He squinted at it. “Looks like . . . Jason Miller, age 27. Comes from the eastern part of the state, outside Boston. He’s got a UMass ID here, too—probably a student.”

  “A grad student, given his age,” Meg said absently.

  “You know him?” Art asked.

  Meg shook her head vigorously. “I do not, thank goodness! Well, maybe if I see his face—I’ve been auditing a class at UMass, but I haven’t really talked to anyone there. And there’s Christopher’s class—they’re over here maybe every other week. But I’m not sure I’d recognize anybody from that group.” She was swamped with relief: Jason Miller had nothing to do with her, save that his mortal remains had ended up in her orchard.

  Art scanned the road. “I called the state police before I set out, and Marcus said he’d contact the medical examiner. So I guess we just wait for them to show up. You want to wait in the house? I can handle things here.”

  Meg shrugged. She wasn’t cold, and she didn’t want the detective from the state police team back in her house again if she could help it. “I’m okay. He’s going to want to talk to me, so I might as well wait.” She fumbled for a neutral topic, keeping her eyes away from the body. “So, looks like the development project’s moving along well. They’ve already cleared the trees and torn down the buildings along the highway toward town.”

  “Yeah, it’s looking good. Course, they can’t pour foot ings until the ground thaws, but they’re going to be ready to go. I hear Seth Chapin’s moving his plumbing shop into your barn?”

  “He’s renting space from me. Heck, I’m not using it. Well, I will need some place to hold the apples when we harvest, but Seth said he’d help me put that together—there’s plenty of space in the barn. It’s handy having a plumber around.”

  “Nice to see the place being used. I hate to see the old barns just fall down. Or worse, these builders who think that old barn boards are just great for their new McMan sions and buy ’em up for the lumber. So, you said you’ve hired a manager?”

  “I did. Christopher found her for me, and he recommended her. She’s only part-time right now, because she’s finishing up her course work, but she’ll be full-time when she graduates.”

  They carried on a perfunctory conversation for the twenty minutes it took for Detective Lieutenant William Marcus and his crew to arrive from Northampton. He pulled into the driveway behind Art’s car, and then the group made its way up the hill to where they waited. Art stayed by her side, and Meg guessed he wasn’t any more eager than she was to greet the detective.

  Marcus was a big man, inflated further by his own self-importance. “Ms. Corey, Preston. What’ve we got this time?”

  Art pointed toward the feet sticking out. “Young guy named Jason Miller, or at least that’s what his ID says.”

  Marcus eyed Meg with distaste. “When did you notice you had another body?”

  Meg straightened her shoulders. “Less than an hour ago. I smelled him first, then I saw him. I haven’t been up to the orchard for a couple of days.”

  “You know him?” The detective’s voice was cold.

  “No.” Meg took great satisfaction in being able to say that.

  “Uh-huh.” Marcus appeared skeptical. “You get a look at his face?”

  Meg shook her head. “I didn’t touch him. That’s the way I found him.”

  “I pulled his wallet out,” Art volunteered. “Seems to be a student.”

  “The ME’ll be here soon enough, and we can get a look at him. Who else has been through here lately?” The detective cast an eye around the orchard, its grass winter dry.

  “Me, Christopher Ramsdell from the university, some of his students, and my new orchard manager, Briona Stewart,” Meg answered.

  “I’ll want to talk to them all, find out if they saw anything,” Detective Marcus said. “You can give me a list of names and contact info, right?”

  “Of course,” Meg said, squashing the urge to add something sarcastic. “Well, I can for Christopher and Briona, but not for the students. Christopher can give you that.” She watched as what she recognized as the medical examiner’s van pulled into the already crowded driveway. They stood silently until the ME made his way up the hill, an assistant trailing behind him.

  “Well, well,” he puffed when he arrived, stopping ten feet short of the springhouse. “Didn’t expect to come back here again. What, or should I say, who have you got this time?”

  Marcus pointed silently. The ME nodded, then approached the body. “Dead, all right. Partially submerged, which might throw off the timeline a bit. I’ll get his temp when we get him out. Been dead at least twenty-four hours, maybe more. It’s been above freezing for a couple of days now. Any ID?”

  “In his pocket. Looks like a university student.”

  “Ah. Too bad. Any idea how he got here?”

  Meg thought it was time to step in. “None. I don’t know him, and I don’t know what he was doing here. Can you tell how he died?”

  “Give me a few minutes and I’ll have a better idea.” The ME gestured to his companion, who pulled out a camera and snapped a number of pictures. Then he looked at Marcus. “You guys want to do your thing?”

  “You mean, process the scene?” Marcus replied stiffly. Meg wondered if he and the ME had butted heads in the past. “Yes, before your crew tramples the place. Dillon, you want to get pictures now?”

  Meg stepped back and watched as Marcus’s team shifted gears and started snapping pictures and pulling out evidence bags.

  Marcus, apparently too senior to get his hands dirty with such mundane tasks, turned back to Meg. “So, as far as you know, a dozen or more people have tramped through here in the last few days, including you, and you didn’t notice anybody leaving a body behind.”

  Why did he always sound as though he expected her to lie? “That’s right.”

  “And they all could have dumped God knows what while they were strolling around.” He looked disgusted.

  “Not exactly. One of the class’s tasks is to clean up the dead plant litter and any other debris up here—that’s good orchard management, or so I’m told. So it should all be pretty clean.”

  “Huh,” Marcus replied, keeping his eye on his team.

  It took under an hour to make a full sweep of the area, with little to show for it. The man named Dillon said, “Not much to see. Ground’s frozen, didn’t take any prints. No trash. Can’t exactly fingerprint the old wood there.” He nodded at the springhouse. “Did find evidence that somebody vomited recently, so we collected that.”

  “Get that to the lab, ASAP. Eastman, you can take over now.”

  The medical examiner gestured toward his assistant, and between them they managed to lift the body and pull it out, before turning the man over and laying him on his back on a large piece of plastic.

  Meg was torn between fear at what she might see—would his face have been damaged?—and an unexpected need to be sure she didn’t recognize him. Curiosity won, and she forced her eyes to the man’s face. No blood, no obvious damage. He definitely looked dead, but intact. His face was dusky blue, and his eyes were slightly open, as was his mouth. Meg tried to visualize the face in life. He looked younger than his twenty-seven years: dark curly hair, badly cut; dark brows; nondescript clothes, wet but not particularly dirty, not new. Just an ordinary man, except h
e was too young to be dead.

  As the ME and his assistant bundled up the body into a zippered body bag and began transporting him down the hill to the waiting vehicle, Meg stopped him. “Can you tell me now how he died?”

  Eastman glanced briefly at Marcus. “Sorry, no, not yet. You’ll have to wait for the autopsy.”

  Meg, Art, and the detective watched the procession and waited until the van had departed. Meg broke the silence. “What now? Do you have all you need here?”

  Marcus looked at her for several seconds before he answered. “We’re done with the site—not much here. I’ll need your statement, but I guess that can wait. Stop by my office.”

  Dismissing Meg, he turned to Art. “I’m going to check the guy out, see if he’s who his ID says he is. I’ll want to talk to you then, Preston.” He nodded to Art, then left without further niceties.

  “Well, I suppose that could have been worse,” Meg said dubiously, watching him go.

  “He can’t pin this one on you, Meg. That must be some small comfort,” Art said sympathetically.

  “I guess. But why leave a body here? Someone has a grudge against me?”

  Art shrugged. “Too early to guess. I’ll ask around town, see if anyone noticed anything. You haven’t seen a car sitting anywhere it shouldn’t be for a couple of days?”

  Meg shook her head. “Not that I remember. Maybe he came alone, on foot?”

  “Could be, but it’s a good hike from Amherst. Doesn’t help much.”

  “I know what you mean. I wonder how he died? I don’t see how someone could just wander into my orchard and drown in the springhouse. I mean, the water’s not very deep. But I didn’t see any blood or anything.”

  “Nope. So no gunshot or knife wounds, and his head wasn’t bashed in.”

  “Suicide, maybe? Although why pick here? There have to be better, more private places around. And he’s not even all the way in the springhouse. Did he want to be found sooner rather than later?”

  “Meg, I just don’t know. We’ll know more once we find out more about him. But don’t you worry—you’re in the clear.”

  “Gee, thanks. I’m so glad you’re on the job.” When Art’s face fell, she added, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just don’t like my place being used as a dumping ground for bodies. Especially not my orchard. I’m getting rather fond of it.”

  “No offense taken. I’ll be on my way, then. Can I walk you down the hill?”

  “Sure.” The wind had picked up, the sun was sinking, and Meg didn’t feel like being alone in the orchard now, even though the body had been taken away. She shivered. “Let’s go.”

  3

  Meg hadn’t even had time to close her front door after Art’s departure when Seth Chapin’s van pulled into the driveway. The van had begun life as a mobile supply unit for Chapin Brothers plumbing business, but now that Seth’s brother Stephen was no longer involved in the family business, Seth had seized the opportunity to move in a different direction, to take on more of the renovation and preservation work that he loved. Seth had asked to rent space in Meg’s tumbledown barn because the previous site of his plumbing business, once part of the Chapin family farm north of Meg’s property, was destined to become parking for Granford Grange, the new commercial strip along the highway. Meg had happily agreed. She hoped that Seth could keep the barn standing at least. In fact, he had much bigger plans for it: he intended to combine his business office with storage for the architectural salvage he collected, which involved upgrading the barn’s electrical supply and adding minimal plumbing facilities. And there was an added bonus: as part of the rental agreement he was going to help Meg install a temperature-controlled storage area to hold her apples. All in all, Meg was thrilled that the old barn and attached buildings would see new life.

  Seth jumped down from the van and came over. “Hey, Meg—was that Art’s car?”

  Meg nodded. “Yup. And guess what?”

  Seth studied her face, searching for a clue. “Do I want to hear this?”

  “Probably not. I found another body. In the orchard.” It sounded ridiculous when she said it like that, but it was true. Another body. Last time around Seth had been the lucky one to find the corpse, shoved into her septic tank.

  “You’re not kidding, are you? Oh, Meg, I’m sorry.”

  Meg shrugged. “At least I didn’t know him this time.”

  Seth showed a comforting lack of curiosity about the dead man. “Are you all right? Listen, you look cold. Why don’t we go inside? How about some tea?”

  Meg smiled. “I’m not a fragile flower, you know.” But when he looked disappointed, she relented. “Tea sounds lovely, Seth, and thank you for suggesting it. Come on in.”

  She led the way through the back door into the kitchen. Filling the teakettle from the tap, she looked out the window and studied the van. “I see you got the van painted. It looks good. I like your new logo.”

  Seth came up behind her and followed her gaze. “If I can’t afford a new van, I can at least handle a new paint job. It does look good, doesn’t it?”

  He looked inordinately proud of himself. Meg knew that he had been thinking about branching into old-house renovation for a while, but it had taken the events of the previous months to push him to make the change. Maybe, Meg thought, it was a classic example of a silver lining. Or of Seth’s ability to make lemonade out of the sourest of circumstances.

  “Excuse me.” She slipped past him to put the kettle on the stove. “We might get that tea faster if I actually boil the water. Why don’t you sit down?”

  Seth didn’t move. “Meg, you really are something, you know? You stumble over a body and you just keep right on going.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t really sunk in yet. Although I do dearly wish that people would find someplace else to die. Or to leave the remains.” Meg clamped down on her sudden anger. Maybe she was more upset than she’d realized. She should be, shouldn’t she? A man was dead. A young man, cut down in his prime. She felt tears sting her eyes.

  Seth was quick to notice. “Sit. I’ll make the tea.”

  He knew the kitchen well and had things assembled by the time the water boiled. Meg sat obediently, thinking of nothing. Seth set the teapot, cups, spoons, sugar, and milk on the table, then sat across from her. “You want to talk about it?”

  Meg shrugged. “Not really.”

  He gave her one more searching look before he changed the subject. “You want me to bring you up to speed on what I’m planning for the barn?”

  “Sure. Have you changed things around again?” Seth had been acting like a kid in a toy shop, making and discarding plans almost daily. Meg had to admit his enthusiasm was infectious.

  “Sort of. Here, let me sketch it out for you.” He pulled a paper napkin from the holder on the table and fished a pencil out of his pocket. “Okay, here’s the basic ground plan, right?”

  Meg looked on as he produced a rough sketch. It had never occurred to her to take a bird’s-eye view of the place. Her mother had inherited the property decades earlier from their distant aunts Lula and Nettie Warren, and had ignored it ever since, content to collect rent. Meg had been living here for only a few months—after she’d lost her banking job in Boston, her mother had decided that Meg could use her “spare time” to renovate the house. But the brutal New England winter hadn’t inspired Meg to do much exploring—and she had had more than enough to do to make the house livable, and so much to learn about the orchard, that she hadn’t had time to consider the broader layout of the buildings. Of which there were a surprising number, or at least their remnants. As Seth sketched, her house appeared, with the driveway running alongside. Then the roughly framed addition where she parked occasionally, which was connected to the kitchen. Beyond that, at an odd angle, lay what Seth had informed her was the nineteenth-century carpenter’s shop, then finally, perpendicular to that, the old barn facing the house. To her eye, the barn was no more than two stories of splintered wood and patches,
but apparently Seth saw a lot of potential in it.

  As he warmed to the subject, Meg zoned out, studying him, bent over his diagrams. She had to admit he was pleasant to look at: real New England stock, sandy haired, gray eyed, with a sturdy body and capable hands. And she could tell that he really enjoyed his work: give him a problem to solve, and he’d come up with six ways to do it, then find the people who could make it happen. The people of Granford had acknowledged that when they elected him selectman in his relatively young thirties, and he hadn’t let them down. That infectious enthusiasm made him a great business partner—and friend. She wasn’t sure how she would have made it through the last couple of months without him, and she probably wouldn’t be sitting here figuring out what to do with tons of apples without his help. He was warm and strong and sweet, just like her cup of tea.

  Oh, ick. The aftermath of the shock of finding the body, plus the warmth of the kitchen, were rapidly putting her to sleep, and she was getting mushy. Not that Seth wasn’t an entirely suitable candidate, if she were in the market. But she had too much on her plate at the moment, between the house and the orchard, to think about romance.

  “Seth,” she broke in, “could we maybe wait until tomorrow to talk about all this? Briona’s going to be here then, and you’d just have to repeat it all. And you need her input about the apple storage part. For that matter, she may have some good ideas herself. So why don’t we just save it for then?”

  Seth tore himself away from his increasingly elaborate drawing, now bristling with lines and arrows. “Oh, right, Briona’s your new orchard manager. You want me to swing by tomorrow sometime?”

  “I told her to come over in the afternoon—I’ve got a class in the morning. She’s going to stay in the room over the kitchen—I’ve moved into the front bedroom—and she said she had some stuff to move in. Why don’t you plan to stay for supper tomorrow? That’ll give us plenty of time.”

  “Sounds good. So, what’s she like?”

  Meg considered, choosing her words with care. “She’s young, around twenty-one. Smart. Very focused. Seems a little prickly. I told you she was Jamaican, didn’t I?”