Rotten to the Core

by Sheila Connolly

  They spent a pleasant half hour examining the barn and discussing what kind of chamber Meg would need. Bree was well informed about concepts and technical details, but less so about costs.

  “So, Bree, tell me, what size crop should I expect?”

  Bree puffed her cheeks and blew out a breath. “That’s not an easy one. You should ask Christopher.”

  “I will, but I just wanted a ballpark number. I’ve got fifteen acres, right? So what kind of yield per acre am I looking at?”

  “Depends on a lot of things, like weather and pests. And then some apples vary a lot from year to year—like Baldwins. They tend to bear in alternate years.”

  “Bree! Just give me some idea, will you?”

  “Okay, okay. In an average year, with decent weather and no disasters, maybe five-fifty to six hundred bushels an acre.”

  “Wow!” Meg did some quick math. “So that means maybe nine thousand bushels for the season?”

  “More or less. And you’re going to need more than one unit.”

  “What?” Seth hadn’t said anything about that.

  “Yup. Different varieties of apple like different conditions. We can juggle a little, but I still think we’re gonna need two.”

  “Great,” Meg said glumly. More materials, more costs. Meg had a business degree and a few years of hands-on experience in municipal finance, and all her training told her that she should take the easiest route and just ship the apples off to somebody and not worry about optimizing her profits by holding them. So far she was seeing a whole lot of investment and not much return—not good business.

  Bree must have sensed her dismay. “Hey, it’s not that big a deal.”

  “Easy for you to say—you’re not writing the checks.” Maybe she could get a home equity loan. But first she’d have to convince someone that there would be an income.

  “What’re you doing about a truck?” Bree’s voice interrupted her dip into self-pity. Unfortunately the question didn’t improve her mood.

  “Shoot, I hadn’t even thought about that. And what about boxes or crates or whatever I’m supposed to be putting the apples in?” Meg was embarrassed by the hint of hysteria in her tone.

  “Hey, Meg, chill. Let me work up a list of what you’re going to need and where we can get the stuff. Too bad your relatives here didn’t hang on to some of that. Sure looks like they hung onto everything else, doesn’t it?”

  A half hour later she watched Bree pull out of the driveway. As far as she could tell, Bree and Seth were on the same page about this storage thing she needed, and it sounded as though it would be relatively simple to assemble, although the equipment would no doubt be expensive. Just like everything else on the property.

  14

  Monday morning Meg found a mailed flyer in her mailbox announcing a public meeting of GreenGrow, to be held at a senior citizens center on the fringes of Amherst. It must have been sent before her lunch with Michael, yet it had her name on it, rather than “Occupant.” She felt vaguely troubled, although there was nothing menacing about the folded sheet itself. And she hadn’t exactly been invisible in the Granford area over the past couple of months, so her presence was common knowledge. Still, Jason had known about her orchard; had he sent this to her before he died?

  She looked again at the flyer, apparently run off quickly at a local copy shop on cheap paper, with labels slapped on askew—clearly an amateur production. But if she wanted information about GreenGrow’s position, what they offered, what they fought against, the best way to find out would be to attend the meeting. Maybe even ask questions, if she could figure out what she needed to know. She checked the date: tomorrow night at seven.

  Meg was still standing at the mailbox, her mail in her hand, when a regrettably familiar car pulled in, one with the Massachusetts State Police seal emblazoned on the door. It came to a stop, and Detective Marcus climbed out of the driver’s seat, while another officer emerged from the passenger side. Marcus’s face offered no warmth, but Meg didn’t expect any from him.

  “Detective, what can I do for you today?” Might as well be polite.

  “Ms. Corey, I’m going to have to search your outbuildings.”

  “Do you have a warrant?”

  “I do. This isn’t a request. Are the buildings locked?”

  “Yes, I keep them locked. The keys are in the house. I’ll get them for you.”

  Meg turned and went back into the house by the kitchen door. So Marcus was taking Seth’s information seriously, although that horse was already out of the barn, so to speak. She deposited the mail on the kitchen table, then snagged the cluster of keys from its hook on the way and went back outside. “Let me unlock them for you.”

  The detective held out his hand. “I’ll do that.”

  Meg wondered briefly if she should protest, and if she should tag along after him in case he wanted to ask her anything. She decided against both. She wasn’t hiding anything, and she knew so little about the barn that she would have trouble answering any questions, which would make her look either stupid or evasive, neither of which would help. “I’ll wait inside until you’re done.”

  “Fine,” he replied, then turned away and led the officer toward the barn door. Meg watched as they unlocked the padlock and slid the door back, then disappeared into the dark interior. Meg went back to her kitchen and busied herself with tidying up the few dishes she had left. Lolly strolled in, cleaned off the last few crumbs of food on her plate, then leapt up onto a counter and began washing her face. Meg watched, wondering if she was supposed to object. Did she want a cat on her counter? But the house was perennially filthy, with plaster dust and who knew what dirt of the ages kicked up by the wheezing furnace, so the presence of a cat could hardly add much. She’d have to see if Lolly was smart enough to stay away from the stove.

  It was close to an hour later when the detective completed his tour of the barn. He knocked at the back door, and Meg let him in. “You’re finished?”

  “I have a few questions for you.”

  “Sit down, please. What do you want to know?”

  Detective Marcus sat heavily in a kitchen chair. “You keep the barn locked at all times?”

  “Yes. Well, at least the big door in the front. I know there are some smaller doors on the other sides, and I’m not even sure I have keys for those. Nobody’s used the barn for quite a while.” Meg, stop babbling.

  “What do you keep in the barn?”

  Meg suppressed a stab of annoyance. “I don’t keep anything in the barn. If you recall, I’ve been here only a couple of months, and it’s been too cold to do much poking around, so I really don’t know what’s there. Anything in there predates my arrival.”

  “Have you been inside the barn?”

  “Yes, a few times. Most recently this past weekend, on Saturday with Seth Chapin, and my orchard manager, Briona Stewart, yesterday.”

  “What were you doing in there?”

  “We were looking at what improvements I need to make in order to store my apple crop in the fall.”

  “Hmm.” The detective made a note in a small notebook, then pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “The university’s been overseeing the orchard for quite a while now?”

  “About twenty years, I understand. I’ve agreed to let them continue their research here.”

  Marcus flipped through the notebook and peered at his notes. “Christopher Ramsdell heads up that project at the university, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know if he uses pesticides here?”

  “You’ll have to ask Professor Ramsdell about that.”

  “I intend to.” The detective blew his nose again.

  Meg turned over several questions in her mind, then decided it was time to stop tiptoeing around. “Detective Marcus, was Jason poisoned?”

  “We haven’t ruled it out.”

  Finally the man had given her a piece of information. “Do you know which poison?”

  Detective
Marcus shook his head. “Lab work takes time. We’ll know in a couple of days.”

  “Do you think the pesticide that was in my barn is what killed Jason?”

  “Could be.”

  Frustrated, Meg pressed on. “Can you tell me if he died here? Or somewhere else?”

  “Vomit we found suggests he died here. It was definitely his.”

  This was not the news Meg had hoped to hear. The detective was looking around the kitchen. “You have a cat?” His eyes lit on Lolly, still sitting on the counter.

  “I just found her. She’s a stray, I think. Are you allergic?”

  The detective nodded briefly, then stood up abruptly. “I think I have all I need for now.”

  Meg let him out the back door, and Marcus strode quickly back to his squad car. The other officer had been leaning against the car with arms crossed, waiting, but now he scrambled to climb in as the detective slammed his door. After the car pulled out of the driveway, Meg locked the door, then turned and leaned on it.

  “Thank you for driving him away, Lolly. But what was that all about?” Lolly jumped off the counter and sauntered off toward the dining room. Meg wondered just how many other toxic substances were lurking in the dark corners of the house, especially the basement, which she had also avoided. This might be a good time to find out. Still, she really wasn’t sure what might be poisonous and what was safe; what might have been poisonous once but had now lost its potency, and what might have been harmless years ago but had by this time festered and mutated into something deadly. Seth would know, she thought.

  As if conjured up by her thoughts, Seth’s van turned into the driveway. Meg went out and waited on the stoop until he had climbed out of the vehicle. “Marcus was just here, poking around the barn.”

  Seth shrugged. “I’m not surprised. That was pretty fast.”

  “That man sets my teeth on edge. He always seems to be looking for something to pin on me. Now he’s made me feel stupid for not knowing what’s in my barn.”

  “Personal feelings aside, he’s a decent officer. And his reputation is on the line here. His boss—the DA—needs some high-profile wins, or failing that, a good roster of closed cases. It doesn’t look good to have a lot of ‘suspi cious deaths’ on the books. So he’s going to put his best efforts into it.”

  “I guess that’s good news. As long as he doesn’t think I did it.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “I guess every time Marcus shows up, I get upset, but there’s not a lot I can do about that. You want to come in?”

  “Only if you promise not to bite my head off.”

  Meg summoned up a smile. “I think I can manage that.”

  Back inside, Meg discovered that Lolly had returned to the kitchen. Seth squatted and rubbed her head. “You decided to keep her?”

  “Apparently. Or she decided to keep me. And there’s one piece of good news: Detective Marcus is allergic to cats. Maybe Lolly will keep him out of here.”

  “Lolly?”

  “Bree suggested it. Well, we kind of named her Lavinia, Emily Dickinson’s cat-loving sister, but she didn’t like Vinnie, so she’s Lolly.”

  Seth laughed. “That makes sense. Bree was here?”

  “Yes, thank goodness. You want some coffee?”

  “Sure. Why thank goodness?” Seth hung his coat over the back of a chair and sat down. Lolly jumped into his lap and settled herself.

  “I guess I was worried that she wouldn’t come back, what with Jason’s death.” As she put the kettle on to boil, Meg realized that Detective Marcus hadn’t mentioned Bree at all. Had he already discounted her as a suspect? Or did he still not know about her relationship with Jason? Meg decided to change the subject. “Oh, did Bree tell you we’d need two holding chambers, not just one? Apparently different apples have different needs.”

  “I’ll sit down with her again and get the details, when we get a little closer to building it in a couple of months. For what it’s worth, from what little I’ve seen of her, I think that she’s a good kid.”

  “I hope so. Tell me, what’s the story about the Jamaican community around here?”

  “You mean the pickers?”

  “I guess. Is that what they are, mainly?”

  “There’s a long tradition around here, and in New York and Vermont, too. It’s not exactly an itinerant group—most of these people have been coming back here for years. They’re skilled, and they’re proud of it. Some of them go home for the winter, others go for other crops, like sugar cane in Florida. The money goes a lot further in Jamaica—most of them own land, have families down there.”

  “And it’s all legal?”

  “Sure. The State Department and INS offer a handful of options: green card, if they want to stay permanently; seasonal employment card; temporary work card. The government is really very supportive of them—they find them housing, even provide rides. There are some who think the Jamaicans are taking work away from local people, but mostly the locals don’t want that kind of work. The Jamaicans work hard and don’t get into trouble, so it’s pretty much win-win.”

  Another whole area of her supposed business that she knew nothing about. “Seth . . . am I going to be able to do this? The whole orchard thing, I mean?”

  Seth searched her face. “Are you having second thoughts?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not that I expect it to be easy. I’m not afraid of hard work. But there’s so much I don’t know, and I don’t have the luxury of time to learn it, so I have to rely on other people. And I’ve never been good at making snap decisions. I’m much more the research-it-to-death school. This is all way outside my comfort zone.”

  Seth nodded. “I can see that. To be honest, I do think it could work, but there are no guarantees. There never are when it comes to agriculture. But I hope you stay—I think you’re an asset to the community.”

  And personally? “Just to the community?” she asked, trying to keep her tone light.

  Seth didn’t answer immediately, studying her face. “Meg, are you asking how I feel?”

  Yes. No. Why had she even started this? She shook her head. “No, never mind. This isn’t the time to get into this.”

  “Meg,” he said gently, “there’s never a perfect time.”

  He waited, and Meg looked down at her hands on the table, suddenly panicked at the thought of a relationship with her next-door neighbor slash business partner slash go-to guy for just about everything. She finally managed to meet his gaze. “Hold that thought, will you?”

  He smiled. “No problem.”

  She smiled back. “Well, I don’t intend to bail out on the orchard just yet. I’ve got to give it a year or two before I make any decisions, right? Oh, by the way, I found an old map of Granford in a batch of stuff Gail Selden gave me to catalog for the historical society. It shows this place, and yours, and there’s even a sketch of the orchard. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “You’ll have to show me sometime,” he said. He stopped, clearly thinking. “You know, there’s somebody you should talk to, if you’re interesting in the history of this farm. Let me see if I can set something up. In the meantime, I’m going to go take some more measurements in the barn, and then I’ve got to head out for a job. Are we good?”

  “Sure. You go ahead and measure.”

  Meg watched Seth stride across the muddy driveway toward the barn, whistling as he went. Apparently Jason’s death wasn’t getting him down. But Meg found she was restless. She didn’t want to think about whatever Marcus was or was not telling her. She definitely did not want to think about dead Jason up the hill. She didn’t want to think at all: she wanted something mindless to do, to distract herself. And then her gaze landed on the kitchen floor.

  What had Rachel said? That there was likely to be ancient and tenacious glue lurking under the ugly vinyl? There was one way to find out, and before she had time to talk herself out of it, Meg armed herself with a putty knife and attacked a corner of the kitchen where the floor w
as already buckling. The first layer—twentieth-century vinyl—came up relatively easily, revealing older linoleum tiles. Meg pried up the corner of one and found . . . another layer of linoleum, this time in sheet form with a faded yellow pattern imitating tile. But the glue or mastic or whatever was brittle, and the layers parted easily. She dug in again and finally arrived at the bottom layer, then sat back on her haunches. Wooden flooring, and it looked nice. From her vantage point, Meg surveyed the kitchen. Wood would suit this room. And if this corner was any indication, getting rid of the ugly layers lying over the original floor would not be hard. Definitely something she could do. It was a plan.

  Three hours later, as the daylight faded outside the windows, Meg finished scraping the last of three layers of crap off her kitchen floor and stood back to inspect the results. At the moment it was a patchy mess reeking of ancient food spills. The floor coverings had absorbed generations of cooking grease, and her best guess was that every half century or so someone had decided that something should be done about it and had slapped another layer on top, using rather nasty mastic. The mastic had outlived the linoleum, and it had taken a lot of determined scraping to get rid of it. Meg was convinced that it would live on under her fingernails for years to come.

  But the end product appeared to be worth it. As she had hoped, the floor was wide board pine, as old as the house. The individual boards were probably two inches thick and still solid. A few more days of scrubbing and sanding, and she could think about refinishing. It was funny that she had removed so many layers of “improvements” merely to return to the way things had been in the beginning. But she could see it as it had been—and as it could be.

  Lolly wandered in, picking her way reluctantly across the now-unfamiliar floor.

  “That’s right, lady, it’s food time, isn’t it? I’ll feed you, and then I’ll take a shower and feed me. That sound good?”

  Lolly sat by her food dish, waiting.