And the questions, good Lord, the questions Maggie came up with. Though Mary would not admit to it in a million years, Joe knew she resented being stymied by a child. Maggie always wanted to know more, to investigate. She was solely responsible for the success of the family garden by age ten, having cooked up some hyper organic fertilizer that grew beans till they were overflowing the pantry, carrots like railroad spikes and cabbages the size of soccer balls. She even figured out how to grow shitake mushrooms in the basement.
Maggie was a born scientist and would have nothing to do with the family faith. At first she went through the motions. She would attend church on Sunday and catechism classes, but she learned early on how to fool the nuns in Sunday school, saying all the right stuff with none of the heart behind it. Joe wasn’t a zealot, but he knew that there was more to life than the things a person could touch and see and smell. He had grown up in the Church, as had Mary, and they wished to pass along the Good Word to all their adopted progeny.
Maggie would find her own way, Joe had no doubt. She certainly was lost now.
Ben had been a wonderful guy and they would all miss him dearly. Perhaps they would breathe easier when and if the police ever found the guy from the hit-and-run. So far, they had no leads. The rusty truck had disappeared—poof—like it had never been there at all. The detective assigned to Ben’s case kept reiterating how common, unfortunately, hit-and-run accidents were and that many went unsolved. While Joe might agree that uninsured drivers were likely to flee the scene of an accident to avoid trouble, he had a hard time resting knowing that same driver was out there, that he might run into another person and leave them to die. Finding the culprit would go a long way toward giving them all a sense of peace.
Joe remembered Maggie bringing Ben home to meet the family for the first time. That night, when he had told Mary in private, “This is the one. I know it. They’re perfect for each other,” Mary had agreed. Previously, they had worried Maggie was too wrapped up in her studies to care about socializing. She ignored the suitors all through adolescence that had come panting up to the door. She seemed oblivious to her own attractiveness, never caring to polish her appearance like Bridget, Annie, Skye or Keri. The other girls were meticulous about their looks. They’d tease Maggie when she showed up to dinner with leaves in her hair. But Ben hadn’t cared about preening, had remained unturned by Maggie’s lack of shaving. He saw Maggie’s beauty from the right perspective, saw her for the rare creature she was. When Joe watched the two of them talk, they had looked into one another’s eyes like it was meant to be.
Poor Ben, Joe thought, and poor, sweet Maggie.
Joe plodded up the stairwell, his work boots thumping along the carpeted steps. He hesitated before knocking, listened for signs of life from within. Hearing none, he rapped twice on the door.
Maggie said nothing, but opened the door for him. Joe tried not to respond to the sight of his daughter. She looked like the walking dead, deep circles under her bloodshot eyes and clothes hanging limply. She stood aside for Joe to pass and he caught a whiff of her. Clearly, she had not showered in days.
Joe stepped inside and noted, with even greater shock, that all of Maggie’s plants were dying. Once, the living room wall had been a lush green mural of life. Now the grow lights were off, the curtains drawn, and Maggie’s plants were remnants of their former selves.
This from the girl who grew Creeping Charlie on her windowsill because she liked the way it smelled, thought Joe.
No one loved her plants as much as Maggie. And she was letting them all die.
“Hi,” Maggie croaked.
Is she hoarse from crying or from not talking much? Joe wondered.
“Mom is worried,” he said. “And so is your boss.”
“I just wanted to keep working, Dad.” She sounded reasonable, but Joe wasn’t buying it. “They told me to go home.”
“I know. Your boss called up to the house this morning. Found our number in your emergency contacts. Why don’t you come stay with Mom and me for a while?” he tried, knowing better.
“No.”
“What’s the plan, then? Stay here till you dry up like your plants?”
Maggie gazed vacantly at her wilting flora. “What?”
“Listen, Maggie. I don’t know if your boss did the right thing by having you stay home from work, but something needs to give.”
Maggie stared at the floor. “Namasté called me.”
Joe was taken aback by the change of subject. He decided to go along for the ride, see where she was headed. “Oh?”
“Yes. She wants me to go out and stay at Original Farm.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. Joe kept his mouth shut and waited to see which way Maggie was leaning.
“She’s still talking about Fennel, about something feeling off.”
“Have they heard anything?” Watch it, Joe, he thought to himself. This is dangerous territory. Don’t get her thinking more about death.
“No, any day now. The Sheriff was going to contact Fennel’s mom about the autopsy. Both Loki and Namasté want me to come out. They say I could help with baking this winter, maybe. I think Namasté wants me to do some kind of spiritual investigation.” She breathed a dry, humorless laugh. “It’s so stupid, really. She says I’m good at problem solving, that I’ll have a new view of things. I have no idea what she expects me to do—a séance maybe?”
Joe flinched. “Still, you could help out with the baking. Something to keep occupied.” And work out your feelings among friends, he didn’t say.
Maggie looked thoughtful. “I’ll bet they are getting behind. Fennel had a lot of customers.”
“Mmmm, yeah. I know I need my weekly bagel fix.” Joe smiled, pushed onward a little. “I think you should go. Help out with the baking. If nothing else, prove Namasté wrong, prove she’s nothing but a big, touchy-feely flake.”
Maggie frowned, looking her adopted father in the eye for the first time since he had walked in the door. “I don’t think she’s a flake. She’s a good person, just a little misguided.”
“Aren’t we all?” Joe asked.
Without directly answering his question, Maggie kept on staring at Joe. “I think I will go,” she said. “I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“Good,” Joe was grateful this had been so easy. “Want me to drive you out there?” He got up, ready to start moving his daughter in the right direction.
“No, I’ll go tomorrow morning.”
Joe paused briefly, “I’ll call you then. Tomorrow morning.” He gave Maggie a meaningful look, knew he had no authority to back it up. He folded thick arms across a broad chest.
“I said I’d go, Dad. I just want to rest tonight, pack some things.”
Joe softened a little. “You okay for money?”
“We have—” Maggie swallowed hard and stared at the opposite wall. “I mean I have eight thousand dollars in the bank,” she closed her eyes and fingered something on a string around her neck. The ring. It was Joe’s turn to stare hard at the wall.
“Eight grand? That’ll keep you going for a while.” Joe cleared his throat and wiped a hand briskly over his cheeks. “You know your mother and I love you?”
“Yes Dad,” Maggie said woodenly, her eyes now fixed on the door. “I love you, too.”
Chapter 6
Sunflower planted her feet for the first blow. She raised the axe high, twisting her torso in preparation for the downward stroke. Her oblique abdominal muscles contracted and her laterals flexed. Sunflower was flushed with satisfaction as she chopped neatly through a piece of firewood.
Old lady’s still got it, she thought. Best shape of my life.
Today was Sunflower’s fortieth birthday and nobody knew about it. The people she cared for most in the world were gone. No one else remembered her birthday or ever asked about such things. She did her work, sometimes other people’s work too, and kept quiet. Being alive was celebration enough for Sun—being alive and being free.
; Back when she’d been Susan from Pasadena and later, Susan from Sonoma, there had been plenty of people who’d have taken her out for a beer or treated her to a basket of hot wings, something to show that she was one of them, that another year had not gone by without their noticing, especially a big year like 40. But that had been before they started blaming her, before she had to leave California. She fell into this new life the same way she fell into everything: ranching, riding her Hog, Jeremy’s arms. And her name—Sunflower—if only Jeremy could hear that name. He’d throw his head back and laugh like a donkey.
Stupid jerk, she thought. I still miss him.
Sun continued chopping wood, pausing only to wipe the sweat out of her eyes with the sleeve of her flannel shirt. It was times like these, in the middle of doing something purely physical, that thoughts of the past came creeping up to tap her on the shoulder. By now she knew it was no good to try and forget. She was always working and, therefore, always remembering.
At least Fennel had been a friend, right up till she cracked her head open like a walnut on the stairs. Sunflower wasn’t sure why it happened, but everyone she loved ending up dying: her parents and her brother, Jeremy and Fennel. She liked to picture them all the way they looked when she last saw them. Seeing their bodies somehow made death seem smaller. It became less mysterious, less powerful. She flipped through the gruesome picture album in her head, starting with her mom, dad and little brother Chris. They were burned down to leathery-looking bone piles after the fire, two adult-sized bone piles in her parents’ bedroom, one small pile of blackened bones in her brother’s. Dad had been going to get the wiring in the house up to code. Funny how he was an electrician. Mom used to joke that it was the job you did at work that never got done at home. She was on the housekeeping staff at a local motel so, of course, their own house was always a mess.
Next Sunflower pictured Jeremy, bloated as a sponge when they pulled him from the ocean. Fish had eaten away part of his foot. His head swung loose as a ripe, red apple on a branch, since his neck had been broken by the thirty-foot drop off a cliff. Sunflower had perfected seeing him that way in her head without reacting emotionally. She had also learned to fill the scared place inside her with activity—the harder the work, the better.
Last, she pictured Fennel lying at the bottom of the stairs. Sunflower was the one who found her. She had come in to see if Fennel got the cup of tea she’d made just before scooting out the door to the fields that morning. The spilled tea in the living room made Sun start searching for Fennel. It didn’t take long to find her. Lying on the second floor landing, Fennel’s face was slightly blue and her glasses were broken. From a distance she looked like a pile of laundry.
Sunflower set down the axe and began stacking logs between two ancient crabapple trees. Everyone would use wood from the pile but Loki. He liked to chop his own firewood, like it needed to be cut fresh every time he started a fire. He was weird in his own particular way, but then so was everyone else on the farm. “Funny farm,” Sunflower muttered to herself. She built a wall of chopped wood between the two gnarled tree trunk pillars, ducking to miss the low-hanging branches.
Sunflower often found herself ducking. She’d reached six feet by the time she was fourteen. Her mom had been a tall woman, too. Mom always told her, “Never you mind. God made you big so you could reach the stars.” If only Mom could see her now, just scraping by, nothing to her name but a rusty old Harley and a cold basement room. She couldn’t even use her given name for fear of being discovered.
The basement, really more of a cellar, was where Tor found her, roughly fifteen years ago. Sunflower, still Susan at that point, had been on the run for days. She was maxed out on riding. Her lower body was numb and her hands still vibrated when she turned off her bike and let go of the grips. She’d knocked on the front door of the old farm house, hoping no one was around. There was no answer, so she poked around till she found a way in, just wanting to lie down for a while and rest. The door to the cellar was unlocked. She fell asleep before her head even hit the dirt floor. When she awoke, Tor was shaking her awake.
“Hey,” he had said, squatting next to her. “Where’d you come from?”
“Sorry. I’ll go. Just needed to rest.” She struggled to sit up. Her back ached and there was a crick in her neck.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
“I’m on a cross-country trip,” she said, which was close enough to true.
“Do you need some breakfast?”
“Yes. I’m willing to work for it.” She had stood up then, wanting to show her height and strength to full advantage, should he choose to try anything funny. Tor was a tall guy, but wiry. At the time she felt sure she could take him, if the necessity arose.
They walked up the cellar stairs, ducking under a foundation beam, out into the bright morning sunshine.
“You look pretty fit. Have you ever done farm work?” He appraised her the way she’d seen men look at horses before buying. Next, he’d be asking to see her teeth, putting her through her paces.
“I’ve worked as a ranch hand.”
They went inside, where Tor introduced himself, and started one pan for eggs and another for hashbrowns.
“So,” he asked. “What did you say your name was again?”
“I didn’t,” she answered, her leg muscles itching to run. She was sure she could make it to her bike before he could. It was hidden behind the old metal shed near the driveway. Maybe he had seen her picture on the nightly news or in the paper.
Tor laughed, surprising her. “I never met anyone so jumpy. If you’re in trouble, I’m not judging. There’s enough judgment in the world already. Sit down.”
She remained standing. “Where am I?” she asked. By way of explanation she hastily added, “I was pretty tired when I stopped last night.”
“You are a few miles from the quaint little town of River City, Iowa. You are also currently on a farm that has been in my family for five generations.”
“What day is it?”
One of Tor’s bushy eyebrows inched up his forehead, looking incongruous on his egg-shaped, bald head. “Wednesday, I think. It’s 1983, in case that’s your next question.”
He set a plate of food in front of her, which she picked up and ate from while standing.
“I’ll sit if you don’t mind,” he said, fixing himself a plate and switching off the burner on the gas stove. Then, without any prompting from her, he launched into the story of how he and some friends of his were repurposing his family’s land into an organic vegetable farm.
“It’s my land, but everyone brings something to the project. We’re going to share this house and the profits and the work. When my dad and granddad were alive, they grew beans and corn as animal feed. It’s sat fallow for some years now, and I’ve had the soil tested, to see if the chemicals Dad used are still in the ground. It turned up clean, so we’re ready to get started with our vegetables. I think that the land will be better used this way, don’t you?”
Sunflower shrugged. “Got any coffee?”
“Yeah, sure.” He pulled a cup down from the cupboard. “Cream or sugar?”
“Black. Thanks.”
Tor dug a hand-cranked grinder from under the sink, poured in some coffee beans and ground them. The handle squeaked as Tor cycled it round and round. He filled the coffee decanter with water.
“Normally, I don’t drink this stuff, but a cup sounds good this morning.” Tor explained, “I’ve been detoxifying. Normally I drink a cup of Chinese sugar balance tea and eat organic berries for breakfast. Being back on the old homestead must have brought out the farm boy in me.”
“Detox? Like a twelve step? Are you in AA?”
“No,” he laughed. “Just trying to balance my Chi. Out with the bad, in with the good, that sort of thing.”
Funny, Sunflower thought to herself. Being from California—I came all the way to Iowa before I ever met a granola head.
Remembering her first moments on the
farm brought a smile to Sunflower in the present. Feeling the grin stuck on her face kept her from getting mad that she wasn’t going to move into Fennel’s room. She had been a part of the group for so long, never complaining about the conditions, never asking for more. Things had worked out mostly okay. No one pried. She had become anonymous to the rest of the world, which made Original Farm the perfect place to hide. But was it too much to ask to move out of the basement? Wouldn’t Fennel have wanted it that way?
It also made Sunflower nervous to have Maggie coming to live here, for who knew how long. Sure, she had boarded with them in the past, but cold weather made for a tight-knit time. Namasté had some wild idea that Maggie would help them sort out Fennel’s death. Sunflower didn’t see what needed sorted out—Fennel fell down the stairs and broke, plain and simple.
It had been bad enough, trying to avoid the cops that came by asking questions after Fennel died. A few undies on the floor and some spilled tea and everyone got crazy ideas. Now Maggie was going to live with them. She’d be an imbedded set of outside eyes. Sun knew that eventually it would be time to move on, but she didn’t really want to go. Not yet, not till she could fix up the bike and had a destination in mind.
Sunflower shook off her worry and moved on to tilling the broccoli field.
Shallow Roots: An Iowa Girl Mystery (Iowa Girl Mysteries Book 1) Page 4
