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

by Anomie Hatcher

  The pharmacy was on the edge of town opposite the grain elevator and gas station. Maggie walked in and bought a pregnancy test, antacid tablets and a bag of chocolate covered caramels. The clerk raised penciled eyebrows, but said nothing as she rang up the purchases. Maggie grabbed her plastic sack and headed out the door.

  Chapter 17

  Maggie avoided taking the pregnancy test for several days. So many other things seemed to need doing: solving a murder, sorting her laundry…

  Curiosity about the farm’s money situation and the desire to procrastinate led her back into the office. She started digging through file boxes, searching for financial information regarding Original Farm. She found an archive of bank account statements that went back several years. The names on the account were Louise Carpenter and David Falstaff.

  Of course—the bank would probably allow one or two names on the account, as per traditional household.

  That Tor and Fennel happened to be the only two Originals with signing power felt significant, considering Maggie’s suspicions.

  Maggie became engrossed, watching the account dwindle month by month since mid-year 1995. There were many fifty and seventy-five dollar cash withdrawals. When she checked the location, many of the withdrawals were made at ATMs in either Altoona or Tama. Unfortunately, several same-sized withdrawals were made in Des Moines as well—they could have been for just about any household expense.

  Strangely, almost no withdrawals occurred in River City.

  One morning, after getting up early to bake with Sunflower and TomTom, Maggie heard a car pull up outside. This wasn’t unusual, since many customers drove out to pick up their baked goods. But it was earlier than when customers were usually expected. Most of the bagels and muffins were still cooling on wire racks and were not yet ready to be bagged.

  When Maggie walked over to the front window to take a quick peek at the driveway, she saw a van with “MacGilloway Plumbing” printed in large green letters on the side. Joe’s stocky form was heading up the front porch steps.

  “Dad!” Maggie called, knocking on the window.

  Joe heard the knock and gave her a wave.

  She met him at the front door.

  When Joe entered, his daughter gave him a tight squeeze.

  He looked tremendously relieved to find her so lively. “You look a lot better,” he said. “Wow. I can hardly believe the difference.”

  TomTom hopped over to get in on the affection. “Joe. It’s been a while. Good to see you.”

  Joe beamed as though he had won some sort of lottery, having so many unexpected female hugs. He looked over at Sunflower, who was cleaning pans in the kitchen and gave her a hopeful sort of grin.

  “Hey,” she said curtly, then turned her back to him.

  Joe shrugged and reached inside his coat. “Thought you might be needing these,” he said. He handed Maggie some envelopes.

  “I’ve been checking your mail with the apartment key you left us. I just recycle the ads and junk, but these bills will come due pretty soon. Heck, I’ve even been watering your plants whenever I stop by.”

  Maggie felt certain her plants were beyond watering, but had the good grace to keep quiet. “Dad, how sweet of you. I really appreciate the help.”

  “Mm. Smells good in here, like when we used to drive by Colonial bakery. Remember, Maggie?”

  She nodded.

  TomTom dragged Joe into the kitchen and tried to seat him in a chair.

  Maggie went to the cupboard to grab a coffee cup.

  Joe held up his hands in protest.

  “Thanks anyhow, girls. I just wanted to stop out before the work day got started, see how things are going.” Joe smiled at his daughter. “You’re just looking so much better.”

  “Isn’t she, though?” TomTom gushed. “It’s like she’s glowing from the inside out. Of course, we don’t know for sure, but—”

  Sunflower pushed some muffin tins roughly and several fell from the pile of dirty dishes on the counter, clattering to the floor. It sounded like someone had dropped an armload of hi-hat cymbals. It was just enough warning for both Maggie and TomTom to realize that information of a delicate nature was about to be to be revealed prematurely and most assuredly by the wrong person.

  TomTom figured out her mistake and hastily stuffed some bagels into a bag.

  “Here!” she almost shouted. “Take these bagels with you! Free of charge!”

  Tor was making his way downstairs for the first time that morning and walked into the kitchen.

  “What’s the ruckus?”

  Sunflower pointed to the pile of bakeware on the floor.

  Tor noticed TomTom handing out free merchandise. He frowned at this exchange.

  “We’re running a business, TomTom. No offense, Joe.”

  “None taken,” Joe said. “I completely understand. I’ve got a business of my own. I’m happy to pay for the bagels. In fact, give me two or three bags if they aren’t already spoken for.” He reached into his coat again, this time for his wallet.

  Maggie was sweating bullets and glad for the bagel distraction. She swallowed hard, fighting back any emotional response that might give her away. She wasn’t sure how her dad would handle the news that she might be pregnant. When Joe had paid for his bagels, she walked him out to the front porch.

  “What was that all about?” he asked.

  “TomTom gets a little carried away. She’s just happy I’m feeling better,” Maggie lied.

  “So am I,” said Joe, buying her lie without hesitation. Maggie felt terrible.

  “How’s Mom?” she asked.

  “About the same,” he said. “She’ll be wanting a full report when I go home for lunch. I’ll be glad to give her good news. You know she’s going to ask me when you’re planning to go back to work.”

  “Della’s already sent me an email, with that same question,” said Maggie. She paused and thought for a moment. “You know, it’s funny, but I don’t really miss it. Work, that is. I like this quieter place. Country life isn’t so bad. I might just go back to PhyllaSlide part time and live out here for a while longer.”

  “That seems wise,” Joe responded. He turned to trot down the stairs, on the way to his van. Halfway there, he turned around and called back, “How about the other stuff?”

  “What other stuff?” Maggie asked.

  Joe backtracked and came close enough so he could speak quietly to Maggie. “Solving the mysteries of the beyond?” He smirked a little as he said it, and winked.

  “Actually, Dad, I’ve found some information that leads me to believe Fennel was killed, that it wasn’t an accident.”

  Joe’s smirk faded. “What kind of information?”

  Maggie moved closer yet and spoke in a near whisper. “Just bits and pieces. Fennel had a fatal allergen added to her tea and her medicine was nowhere to be found. She died of anylphalactic shock, according to the autopsy, and I happen to know that the plant she was allergic to was in her system at the time of her death.”

  Joe’s mouth fell open. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Who would do that? She was such a great lady—gentle, never a bad word for anybody. I feel like Fennel saved my life. Don’t you think so, Maggie?”

  Maggie nodded, awed by her father’s sudden intensity. “I have some ideas as to who it could’ve been. It was definitely a person who had easy access to Fennel’s room and to her things.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you telling me you think it was someone here?” Joe hissed the last word through clenched teeth.

  His eyes held a look of animal panic as he glanced up at the house.

  “That’s a definite possibility.”

  “Are you in danger? Should you stay here? I can make it look like I’m insisting that you come with me. I can help you get your things together.”

  “I’m fine, Dad. Don’t worry. I—” Maggie hesitated before committing herself to a second lie that morning. “I have a contact in the
local sheriff’s department. So far, he knows everything I know.”

  Not exactly the truth, but close enough.

  “But he’s not your dad, is he?” Joe said, putting his hands on Maggie’s shoulders and looking hard into her eyes. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Maggie. You’re oblivious to trouble, you always have been. Your mom and I lost so much sleep over you—you’ve got no idea. I can’t help worrying. You’ll always be my child, no matter how old you get.”

  Maggie touched her abdomen. She understood what Joe was saying.

  Protect the child, regardless of the danger.

  But there was another pull, too. It was the desire to find the truth and move on with her life, baby or no baby.

  “I know. You’re right, Dad. Parents have to look out for their kids. We also have to trust them. Do you trust me? I’m not in any more danger than I was back at the apartment where I was becoming a zombie and forgetting to eat.”

  Slowly, Joe nodded and let go of her shoulders. He cocked his head to the side, as if he had also just noticed something different about Maggie, something he couldn’t quite place.

  “You call me if you need anything, do you hear?”

  He stood rooted to the spot, as if unwilling to abandon his daughter at Original Farm.

  “It’s okay, Dad. This is something I have to do.”

  Joe sighed, giving in.

  “After all,” he said. “You could be wrong. Maybe Fennel’s death really was an accident. You could be wrong.”

  Maggie disagreed, but she didn’t want him to fret. “My being wrong is a definite possibility,” she said. “A good scientist shouldn’t become too attached to an unproven hypothesis.”

  “Yes,” Joe responded, in a foggy sort of way. “Yes. What you said.”

  He got in his van and drove away, lingering for a moment at the end of the driveway, watching Maggie as though wanting to commit her image to memory.

  Then Joe began the return drive to Des Moines.

  When Maggie walked back into the house, all five Originals were seated at the table, staring at her. All except TomTom, who had a sheepish expression on her face. Everyone else had their eyes focused squarely on Maggie’s midsection.

  “TomTom stayed quiet as long as she could,” Namasté said gently.

  “For all of about ten seconds,” Sunflower muttered.

  “So everybody knows?” Maggie asked and was answered by five nodding heads.

  “Take the test already,” Loki insisted. He clapped his hands like a child anticipating a bowl full of ice cream. “This is so exciting!”

  Maggie walked up to her bedroom. She found the drugstore sack, dug out the pregnancy test and read the instructions on the back of the box. Trudging back down to the second floor bathroom, she noted that everyone had quietly relocated to the upstairs common room.

  “Don’t listen to me,” she said. “I won’t be able to pee.”

  “Go, go, go!” TomTom squeaked, clearly no longer feeling guilty for spilling the beans to Tor and Loki. TomTom held her hands parallel to one another, pointing the way to the bathroom like an air traffic controller.

  Maggie used the test, then waited. She set the plastic stick on the edge of the bathtub and counted in her head, willing herself not to look at the indicator until the recommended time had elapsed. After a minute or so, Maggie realized that she had gotten stuck in a loop and had unintentionally counted from forty-three to forty-nine several times in a row.

  She stopped counting and read the box again. A dash would mean no human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, hormones were in her urine, an asterisk would mean the pregnancy hormones were present.

  A pretty blue star for making a baby.

  Maggie distracted herself by thinking about the simple, clever technology that went into the design of the little test kit. She imagined discussing it with Ben. She tried not to become too hung up on how differently this day would have played out were Ben still alive.

  Able to wait no longer, Maggie looked down and saw a clearly formed asterisk.

  A sob that she hadn’t known was there welled up and burst out of her chest of its own volition. The sustained wail that came from Maggie spoke of both grief and fear. She slumped on the floor next to the bathtub. Her friends rushed to crowd the bathroom, Tor and Sunflower lingering near the door.

  Namasté held Maggie while she cried.

  TomTom, who could never witness the expression of a feeling and not join in, began to cry, too.

  “We’re going to have a baby!” Loki shouted, too loud for the small room.

  “We love you, Maggie,” TomTom said.

  Everyone murmured their agreement with this statement.

  Maggie did feel loved. She wondered where her suspicions fit into this strange picture. Amidst the chaos, a thought came floating to the surface. Could a killer honestly be capable of love? She looked each Original squarely in the face and saw what looked like true amity. And yet, Maggie was just as certain that one of them had killed Fennel.

  What a crazy world in which to raise a child, she thought.

  Chapter 18

  Maggie woke to an unquenchable thirst. Sitting upright in bed, blankets pushed down below her knees, she had a ceramic cereal bowl in her hands and was lapping water from it like a dog.

  Face dripping, in a daze, Maggie gradually became aware of her surroundings.

  What on Earth?

  The space heater glowed red and mingled with the early morning light filtering through the gingham curtains. Maggie noticed she was dressed in nothing but socks. She carefully set down the bowl on the bedside table, wiping her face with the back of a hand as she did so. She looked around at the room. The hook-and-eye lock was latched. The little door was closed and the flower cart in its place.

  The only thing out of place was Maggie’s eccentric behavior.

  She pulled a t-shirt over her head and put on underwear which had been hastily thrown to the floor next to her bed. Warily, Maggie checked the crawl space to the secret room to be sure she was alone.

  All that Maggie could remember was dreaming she was thirsty. In fact, she had never been so parched in her life. Somehow she had gotten a bowl of water from the kitchen downstairs.

  I don’t remember leaving the room, but I must have—there’s no one else here and the door is locked.

  Maggie dropped to all fours and looked under the bed. It was unoccupied, excluding her sneakers and laptop bag. She sat down.

  Once before Maggie had experienced sleepwalking. It happened when she was ten and having her first period. Maggie remembered feeling betrayed by her body, like a strange woman had come in the night to replace the perfectly content little girl. No one had asked Maggie if she wanted the dubious capability of child bearing.

  Her dreams were troubled that night, coupled with the fact that she had terrible cramps. Her mother Mary found Maggie stringing beads in the dining room, staring at the wall, unseeing. When Mary asked her daughter to get back in bed, Maggie wordlessly obeyed, carefully closing the beads in a zipper baggie and heading up the stairs. In the morning, Maggie remembered nothing of the night’s events and knew of it only because she heard the story from Mary. The incident did little to abate Maggie’s feelings of betrayal in regard to puberty.

  The adult Maggie shrugged off her current sleepwalk.

  I’ll have to ask anyone if they saw me last night. Loki will have a blast imagining me naked, carrying a bowl of water upstairs in my sleep.

  It was nearly time for the alarm to go off, so Maggie stayed up. She turned on the light and pulled out Fennel’s journals. Thumbing toward the end, Maggie came across an unfinished entry followed by another entry that looked as though Fennel had leaned rather heavily on the pen.

  July 13, 1997

  Everyone is complaining about how hot it is, but I feel wonderful. I’m always cold. July and August are my favorite months of the year. I can wear one layer of clothing—it feels like I’m walking around nude. Even baking bread in this
weather doesn’t bother me, but Sun and TomTom both said that when we get our own place it will have to be air-conditioned. We’ll see about that. Loki keeps trying to talk me out of it, but I’m ready for a change. He’s trying to make me feel guilty for leaving—

  July 13, 1997 (again)

  My privacy has been violated! I feel unsafe in my own home. That untamed brat from next door has been in my room, and not just my bedroom—he went through the crawlspace into my writing room. He was sitting there reading my journal!

  I am so angry! Toby wandered upstairs looking for Loki (or so he said) and my door was open. The little door was open, too, because I had crawled out in the middle of writing to use the bathroom downstairs.

  He has no sense of right and wrong. I cannot believe how much Candy has babied that child—and that’s what he is—just a child in a man’s body. He told me if I didn’t want people walking into my room I should lock the door. I asked who had let him into the house and he said that door was unlocked, too. He was sweating profusely and just stood there, stinking up my room, leering at me. He was close enough that I could read the tattoo on his shoulder. It said “Mad Dog” which is appropriate, considering. Stupid, anti-social mongrel!

  I let him know that the next time he came strolling into our house looking for Loki or drugs or any other sort of trouble, I would call the police. I threatened to tell his mother, but he just laughed at me, so I said I’d make a point to tell his dad. That shut him up.

  I’m going to have to find a way to hide my journals or lock them up. I can’t trust that he won’t be back. There is very private information in these journals.

  Maggie heard a noise and paused. Then she read the last line.

  I’m starting to wonder if Toby’s been in my room before.

  Maggie turned her head toward the hidden door, wondering just as Fennel had.