Shallow Roots: An Iowa Girl Mystery (Iowa Girl Mysteries Book 1)

by Anomie Hatcher

  Shallow Roots

  An Iowa Girl Mystery

  By

  Anomie K. Hatcher

  Copyright © 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4507-9056-7

  For Jason Corey Mueller, my favorite optimist

  Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it.

  —Proverbs 15:17

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 1

  On a chilly Monday morning, the full moon lingered, shining like a buffed nickel in the clear September sky. Mist settled between rows of harvested corn, the Iowa ground still warm enough to thwart the impending frost.

  A mile from the Raccoon River sat a century-old stone farmhouse. The house was two stories tall, three if you counted the attic, with a wide front porch. A tendril of smoke whirled its way upward, escaping the limestone chimney. Crimson mums hugged the front stairs and morning glories spangled the handrail, royal blue and magenta trumpets heralding the day.

  Inside all was quiet but the bundle of life and limb called Louise Carpenter, known to her friends as Fennel. Despite the fire, she dressed in multiple layers of clothing. Her clothes hid the eczema which covered her thin arms and legs. Fennel sat in the living room, with her back to the kitchen and dining area.

  She scanned through a bulk flour catalog, green eyes darting behind circular, wire-rimmed glasses. She licked her right index finger, then turned a page, her slender hands dressed in fingerless wool gloves. She was nestled in a burgundy armchair, preparing a shopping list for the next month’s baking. Light from the adjacent floor lamp poured into her mousy brown locks, occasionally turning her lenses into reflective white discs.

  “Hmmm…” she chatted, mostly to herself. “I’d like to try sorghum flour in the take-and-bake piecrust. That would go nicely with apples.”

  She leaned to peer around the high back of the chair in which she was sitting. Nobody was listening, because her housemates—Tor, Loki, Sunflower, TomTom and Namasté—had apparently just gone out to work in the fields. They were composting and tilling like mad now that the summer crops were finished. Fennel stayed inside most of the time baking, canning, and preserving the fruits of the harvest.

  Between the allergy toss-up of dust mites versus pollen, dust mites won hands down. She could at least attempt to clean the house. There was simply no way to rid the countryside of floating pollen particles, no cleaner suitable for that improbable task. So inside she stayed.

  Fennel sighed, then noticed the cup of tea sitting on the side table.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “For me?”

  It seemed that one of her housemates had brewed a cup of Fennel’s special decongestant tea. She thought the cup must be meant for her: no one else drank the stuff. Loki claimed it would unclog a blocked drain.

  Fennel tried a sniff test. High notes of cayenne hobnobbed with a ginger zing and grassy aromas of goldenseal, nettles and mullein: it was her tea. She had grown the leafy herbs herself, cultivating them from seeds she found in the wild. The powdered ginger and cayenne peppers came from her favorite health food market in Des Moines. Combined, the ingredients made a powerful antihistamine tea that was guaranteed to clear her sinuses for several hours.

  “Must’ve been Sunflower,” Fennel mused, inhaling more steam, completely fogging up her glasses. “What a dear.”

  She set down the cup and pulled a footstool closer. Her mukluks and long johns under quilted skirts were not enough to warm her knobby legs; she grabbed a fleece blanket from the couch, shaking to the floor a few popcorn kernels and a hairy rubber band, and settled back into her chair.

  Fennel thumbed through a few more pages, writing sums and other notes in the margins with a ballpoint pen. She reached again for the cup of tea and took a careful sip. Her forehead wrinkled slightly, a set of parallel lines appearing between her eyebrows. Something tasted different, sweeter perhaps.

  Maybe she added honey? Fennel shrugged.

  She took a longer sip, and then another. Several minutes passed in which the crackle of fire and the turning of pages were the only breaks in the early morning silence.

  Halfway down the gluten-free oatmeal page, Fennel began to get hot. She kicked the blanket from her legs, and undid the top button of her cardigan. Attributing her body’s warming reaction to the tea, Fennel took another deep, appreciative sip. She held onto the tea as she read, balancing the catalog on her knees, wrapping her hands around the mug. She pressed her exposed fingertips onto the toasty ceramic.

  Suddenly, her hands gripped tighter.

  Fennel’s throat began to constrict. She spilled some tea on the catalog as she brought her left hand toward her neck. Her breathing became labored. Trying not to panic, she bent over and set the cup on the edge of the table.

  She knew what was happening. Being aware of her dilemma wouldn’t make it any easier to walk up the two flights of stairs on a limited supply of oxygen. She had to get upstairs. Now. In haste to get moving, Fennel bumped the chair as she rose. She spilled the tea, which soaked into the chair arm and pooled colorlessly on the floor.

  She half-crawled her way up the stairs, breath coming in short, soft pants. Fennel slipped on her skirt more than once and hastily tucked the hem into her waistband. She didn’t have much time, feasibly less than a minute. Her airway was blocked. Fennel’s life was running on seconds. Her eyes were watering, her vision cloudy.

  In the attic, Fennel moved on hands and knees to her dresser. She stretched to yank open the top drawer, pulling it all the way out, sending panties and tights flying. She knelt on the wooden floor. Her hands dug over and under, searching but not finding. She wildly tossed aside socks and embroidered hankies. When the drawer had been emptied, her body was lethargic and her mind fuzzy. Though she knew it was pointless, she grasped the handle of the next drawer down.

  Fennel heard a sound downstairs and wondered if someone had come back to the house—perhaps a housemate getting a drink of water in the kitchen. Fennel crawled to her bedroom door, suffocating, lips turning purple. The stairwell swam. There was no way she could navigate a flight of stairs. Someone would have to come up to her. She pounded on the wall, hoping for a sound that would carry, but the old plaster was only good for a soft thud. Her delicate fists had no effect. Her time had run out.

  Fennel leaned against the wall and died. After a while, her seated body slumped and fell down the stairs. She did not feel her wrist breaking or the impact of her skull upon a step. Fennel met her final rest on the landing, little more to her person than a twisted heap of clothing and skinny limbs.

  Chapter 2

  Near the old stone farmhouse, a murder of crows came to consensus and flew roughly eighteen miles
southeast, stopping every few miles to rest in the topmost branches of cottonwoods trees. From a crow’s eye view, as they flew, a rolling tablecloth was spread below, adjacent brown squares dotted with salt-and-pepper shaker silos. This rural vista eventually gave way to grey ribbons of asphalt and sprawling block structures. Here, in the light industrial expanses of West Des Moines, were distribution centers, megalithic financial headquarters and uninspiring company offices whose insides had been ruthlessly sliced into cubicles. Among these concrete bunkers squatted the smaller and even less inspiring PhyllaSlide, a business specializing in biological sample slides.

  The company’s only landscaping of note was a half-hearted clump of blue fescue and a small koi pond near the front door. Autumn in Iowa being too cold for the colorful fish, there were currently no inhabitants of the basin and no water. At the dry pond’s center stood a two foot tall microscope replica which bore the words “PhyllaSlide, Inc: Enriching the study of science since 1961.”

  The interior of the building had limited decoration. Along the hallways hung enlarged photographs of prepared plant and animal tissue slides, the variety PhyllaSlide employees created for schools around the world. Beyond the lobby and administrative offices lay several production laboratories.

  Maggie MacGilloway sat on a stool in Lab 4C. She was the only day shift employee in the vicinity still working at six p.m. on a Thursday.

  She stared into a viewer, tilting her head slightly to one side, then the other, to ease a stiff neck. The long, white-blond braid down her back oscillated like a grape vine caught in a breeze. Her indigo eyes squinted for increased focus as she carefully pressed a permanent slide cover onto a slice of Foeniculum vulgare.

  “Bi-locular ovule,” she intoned. At 28, her voice still held a hint of girlish treble. Her words were a meditative work song, nonsensical and melodic at once.

  Maggie repeated the botanical mantra to the empty lab, her full lips pursed on the long ‘u’ sounds. The image from the viewer bounced reflective bits of light across her pupils.

  “Bi-locular ovule.”

  She sealed the slide, then turned to place it in the specially designed carton labeled ‘Angiosperm Reproduction’ which sat on the counter nearby. With a sigh, Maggie closed the lid on the sample kit. She eased her feet down to the floor and back into her shoes, which had fallen off sometime after lunch.

  “One more to go,” Maggie said to herself, trying to decide if she should finish the last kit now or start it in the morning. She rolled her shoulders and considered the options.

  There had been a rush on plant tissue sets. Della, the department supervisor, had said something about educational funding recently being passed during the 1998 state legislative session. Cuts were being made left and right at the state level, but Iowa placed a high priority on education and had somehow found money to channel in that direction. Therefore, schools were spending money on science materials later than the typical May or June orders.

  Whatever the reason, when Della gave her a stack of work, Maggie jumped in with both feet. Given the changing economy, Maggie felt lucky to be employed at all. Many of Ben’s colleagues were being furloughed. Each month, Maggie and her partner Ben were careful to set aside part of their paychecks for the future—for buying a house, maybe someday a wedding. They also saved for the possibility of finding themselves unexpectedly unemployed.

  Maggie placed her palms on the cold linoleum floor and shifted her hips toward the ceiling in the downward-facing-dog yoga position. Her vertebrae adjusted and blood rushed to her head, clearing Maggie’s mind. Standing slowly, reaching her arms upward to mountain pose, Maggie made the decision to finish the last Angiosperms tonight and start on the Gymnosperm sets the next day.

  “You’re my go-to girl,” Della would say when she eyed the stack of completed kits Friday morning. Maggie would nod politely and get on with her job, indifferent to Della’s pats on the head. While Maggie might wax poetic on rhizomatic reproduction or chloroplast anomalies during weekly staff meetings, she had little else to chat about with her colleagues. Business hours were for work.

  Work, work, and more work, Ben would say.

  Her jeans pocket buzzed and she fished under the white lab coat for her cell.

  “I know, late again…” she started, but it wasn’t Ben.

  Maggie heard what sounded like someone choking.

  “Hello?” she tried again.

  “Mack?”

  Only one person called her that.

  “Loki? Are you okay?”

  “No! No, I’m not okay, Mack! I’ll never be okay again!”

  Maggie suppressed a sigh. There was no fair-to-middling with Loki—he was August tornado or sunshine May with nothing like a mild June between. She eased her 5’3” frame back onto the lab stool and kicked off her shoes again.

  “Talk to me.”

  “Mack! Oh, my God! It’s my sister!”

  Sister? Does Loki even have a sister?

  “Who?” she asked out loud.

  “It’s Fennel,” Loki sputtered. “We found Fennel, Mack. She’s gone!”

  “What do you mean she’s gone? Where did she go?”

  Loki gasped out, “Dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “We don’t know, Mack. We don’t know. It looks like she fell down the stairs. We were all out in the fields. We came in for lunch and…” Loki couldn’t talk any more. He wailed directly into the phone.

  “Poor, sweet Fennel.” Maggie felt a lump rising in her throat. In her mind, she saw Fennel, bandana around her hair, little round glasses steamed over, pulling a tray of bagels from the oven. “I’m so sorry, Loki. She was like your sister, wasn’t she?”

  “Mmph,” was all Loki managed, but Maggie could tell he was vigorously nodding his shaggy brown head of hair. She gave him a few moments before speaking again.

  “Is there a—no, I don’t suppose there would be a funeral or anything yet, would there?” she asked.

  “No. The police took her away. They have to do tests on her, cut her up so they can see what answers she has… inside!” Loki practically screamed the last word. Maggie pulled the phone away from her ear.

  “They want to do an autopsy?” That didn’t make sense, but Loki was distraught. He might not have the facts straight.

  “Her room was torn up, like somebody was looking for something. He said there were suspicious circumstances.”

  “Who said?”

  “The pig. Sheriff. Whoever.”

  “Well, it would be nice to know what happened. It always helps to be informed.”

  “Maggie, we need you here. I need you. You’re extended family, like a cousin.”

  Maggie considered driving out to Original Farm for a moment, then thought about Ben. She had promised to be home by seven thirty at least once this week. Still, Ben would understand, given the circumstances. He would probably want to go with her.

  “Loki, I can’t come right this minute. Let me check in with Ben and we’ll come out together. Soon.”

  “Mackie! Mags!” Loki shouted. “I need you!” He continued sobbing.

  Maggie was quiet for a while, listening. Her own silent tears rolled down either cheek, drawing a saltwater heart that ended at her chin. Fennel was too young to die, but she had never appeared healthy to Maggie. More like allergic to everything and extremely breakable.

  “How old was she, Loki?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty-five? Thirty-six? Not old enough!”

  So true, Maggie thought. The best she could do at the moment was let her friend cry. She didn’t know how else to conduct herself, so she listened sadly as Loki filled the silence for them both. She could picture his taut, slim shoulders hunched in anguish.

  After four or five minutes she wondered how Loki could continue crying with such gusto. Granted, Maggie was also sad and shocked, but she began to feel impatient. Loki always had to push people’s tolerance a little too far. Maggie covered the receiver to stifle an involuntary yawn. She shif
ted her thoughts to Fennel.

  In a roundabout way, Fennel was Maggie’s initial connection to the farm and its occupants. When Maggie was sixteen or seventeen, her dad started having digestive problems and found out, after several painful months, that he had celiac, otherwise known as “sprue.” It was not uncommon for people of Irish descent to have trouble digesting gluten, but the diagnosis meant a complete dietary change. Joe, Maggie’s normally upbeat father, underwent months of depression. “What am I supposed to eat?” was his constant refrain. He lost weight. He missed work and his plumbing business began to falter. Joe missed wheat breads terribly; turkey and lettuce on whole grain bread were his mainstay. He could not stomach the frozen rice flour breads that Maggie’s mother, Mary, purchased for him. “Tastes like play dough,” he complained, biting his crumbly sandwiches with resentment.

  Then one day at the farmer’s market, Mary came across three of The Originals—Fennel, TomTom, and Namasté—selling organic vegetables and freshly baked muffins.

  “These are as gluten-free as I can make them,” Fennel had proclaimed. “I eat what I bake and I have celiac, too.” She sold Mary a bag of apple-cinnamon muffins, still moist from the oven, with an admonition to “eat some now and freeze the rest.”

  Joe was ecstatic. He began going with Mary every Saturday to see Fennel at the farmer’s market and to purchase her gluten-free treasures. During the off-season, he drove out to Original Farm at least once a week. With Fennel’s help, he and Mary began making their own sandwich bread at home. Fennel divulged shopping ideas and tips for dining out. She added bagels and pie crusts to her line-up. Joe was a changed man. His outlook improved and he went back to work. Joe still missed “real bread,” but he was happy to have an alternative that tasted like food.

  Later, when Maggie needed summer work between college semesters, Joe suggested she become a boarder at Original Farm. “It’s free sleeping space and meals and you get to work with plants,” he told her. Mary was not thrilled, knowing that her attractive daughter would be living co-ed unsupervised, but Maggie went anyway. And each summer she went back, the sole boarder to return multiple years, certainly the only one willing to work her ass off for a pittance. Original Farm became her home away from home.