Earth Colors

by Sarah Andrews

  “No, Friday morning’s okay. I can avoid the cost of a night at a hotel, eh?”

  So here it was, my frugality coming back to bite me. “Okay then, give me some directions.”

  “It’s sort of complicated. I can guide you in Friday morning by cell phone. And we’ll talk again, okay?” She sounded cheered. “Oh, the baby’s waking up. Good-bye!”

  “’Bye!”

  I thought of phoning Mr. Carter immediately and telling him to call Faye quick while she was feeling so approachable, but Nigel interrupted me.

  “Look at this,” he said. He had his computer open on the hood of the field vehicle, and was tapping in commands, his peanut butter Whoopie Pie clenched between his teeth. The effect of brush mustache and soft chocolate cookies was almost too much to bear. He chewed the pie systematically, absorbing it into his body by millimeters. Suddenly, he whipped the remaining nub away from his lips and rested it on the hood of the Jeep next to his machine. “There,” he said. “All the lands of clan Krehbeil, cross-referenced to both geology and soils, with tax roll overlay, for your viewing pleasure.”

  Jenny and I both hurried to his side. The large farm in Elm was immediately obvious, but there was also another land parcel situated in the extreme south of the county.

  Fred leaned over and looked at the display. “That’s interesting—they have a tract in the middle of the schists,” he said. “Are you sure it’s the same Krehbeil?”

  Nigel clicked on that location and told the computer to zoom in. Sure enough, it belonged to William Krehbeil II, home address same as the main farm.

  “Why would they have a parcel there?” I asked, knowing damned well what the family history was from Mr. Hauser. William Primus had probably kept part of the tract he sold to Tyson. But I could not tell Fred, Nigel, and Jenny what I knew without undermining my assertion that on Monday, I’d only chanced upon the Krehbeil farm. And I imagined that only I knew Primus’s widow had also owned a ranch outside of Cody, Wyoming, and apparently left it to her daughter Winnie.

  I glanced at Jenny, wondering how much she knew about the Krehbeils’ financial situation. Who had inherited that ranch when Winnie died? Did she have children, or had the land devolved to her brother and his heirs? Did the ailing Mrs. Krehbeil now own it? And were her children eyeing it like hungry coyotes circling a fresh kill? “Would that database show lands held outside of the county?” I asked.

  “No,” said Nigel. “Why?”

  Jenny met my gaze. She was a quick one, all right.

  But my mental machinery was far ahead of her, because I knew things she did not. Tert’s errand to Cody suddenly was cast in a new light: Had he gone to Wyoming to appear on the Remington committee, or was his true mission to fetch that painting from his aunt’s ranch before someone else nabbed it?

  I ratcheted through the possibilities this opened up. If Grandmother Krehbeil had left the Pennsylvania farm to Secundus and the Wyoming ranch to Aunt Winnie, then Tert’s relationship to the painting would have slipped from heir to visitor. And he’d said he hadn’t seen the painting in decades. Had he perhaps had a falling-out with his aunt? Had Winnie’s death provided his opportunity to seize the painting? And if so, was it his alone, or did he owe his siblings each one-quarter of its value?

  And hadn’t Frank Barnes said that there was something suspicious about Winnie’s death? Another doorway to possibilities opened up, and I began to wonder just how many of his relatives Tert might have poisoned.

  Was he cold-bloodedly killing off his relatives to snatch his inheritance? I cleared my throat. “Jenny, why exactly did old Mr. Krehbeil apply for the easement? Was he a preservationist like you?”

  “Oh, heavens no. The farm’s falling down and he was a proud old coot. He wanted the bucks to fix the place up.”

  “And you say the Krehbeil farm is not on the best soil. How exactly does that affect the Ag easement process?”

  “The County Agricultural Preserve Board system relies on annual evaluations of each property that applies for the trust. A scoring system had been devised to set the priorities for which farms get the money. Because the budget is renewed each year, the evaluations are redone annually, and the top candidates get the money. It’s four years since Old Man Krehbeil applied for his easement, and each year the Krehbeil farm has scored too low. The limited county budget keeps going to farms with higher rankings.”

  “But you said there are two easement funds.”

  “Right. The other fund is privately administered. But it doesn’t pay as much, and in fact relies on farmers donating their easement values as much as actually getting paid, or they get paid much less than market value.”

  So Tert’s father had applied for the agricultural easement to gain cash needed to fix up the property and pay for the day-to-day cost of living. If he had succeeded, the land could not be developed. That would have seriously lessened its value as an inheritance, and the cash realized from the County Agricultural Preservation Board would soon be consumed making repairs. So why wouldn’t Tert want to hurry Papa’s descent into the grave? And why leave Mama alive? Much better to hasten their demise before the sale could go through, and lock up the sale of the development rights in probate. And what of Aunt Winnie’s assets? I had to find a way to uncover that story, too.

  As I mulled all this, we loaded ourselves back into the vehicle and headed south through the rolling farmlands. Fred entertained me by pointing out how I could know if a farm belonged to authentic Amish, fake Amish, or Other (authentic Amish had no phone or power lines leading to the house and instead relied on a windmill to raise water, and the clotheslines were bright with simple, solid-colored shirts and dresses in the saturated colors they preferred; fake Amish had a windmill but it wasn’t turning; Other had modern conveniences). We passed schoolyards in which all the children were dressed in solid colors; they stared at us as we stared at them. “True Amish,” said Fred.

  “What’s the difference between Amish and Mennonite?” I asked.

  Jenny said, “The Mennonites are the ones with all the handicapped parking spaces at the church.”

  “Huh? Is there a high rate of disability?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A great many of us can’t sing.”

  Fred thumped the steering wheel with glee. “That’s good, Jenny. I hadn’t heard that one.”

  “Thanks, Fred.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Nigel. “How’s that different from the Presbyterians?”

  “I only tell non-P.C. jokes about my own ethnic group,” Jenny said, affecting piety.

  Fred said, “How about a cowboy joke, Em?”

  “Is ‘cowboy’ an ethnic group?” Nigel asked nervously. “Really, you might have warned me.”

  I said, “Horse goes into a bar, and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’”

  Fred and Jenny laughed.

  “I don’t get it,” said Nigel acidly. “Let’s get back to the forensics of spotting true Amish. Forensics is a topic I know and love.”

  Fred said, “Then you might just be interested in a little ground truth so you can see if your eye in the sky is telling you something real or not.”

  “Ground truth?” said Jenny.

  “Direct observations of what’s out here,” Fred explained. “Nigel’s all het up about what he can do with his black boxes, but they’re really only good for extending what we discover the old-fashioned way; by getting outside and walking around over the earth, checking what rocks are where and what grows on them. Then and only then are his air photos meaningful, let alone all the layers he chunks in from God-knows-what source.”

  Nigel said, “You don’t mean to tell me we’re actually going to get out of this vehicle, do you? And … and my God, man, walk?” I could hear him tapping away at the keys. “Look here, Jenny my dear, I have the aerial photography for the entire county, strategically taken during a drought. See all these convolutions showing through from the underlying strata? And this”—he tapped another key—“is t
he current geological mapping of the area. Note how oversimplified it is by comparison with what the photography shows. That’s because the field geologist here in Pennsylvania has less than one percent actual rock outcrop from which to discern the bending and folding these rocks have been subjected to. North America and Europe pulled apart and crashed together repeatedly over the eons crenulating this territory like a Beefeater’s collar. I’ve seen bakers fold dough five times to make croissants and do less mixing.”

  “And what crop was in the fields the day that photography was grown?” asked Fred, enjoying the bantering to the utmost. “You haven’t the foggiest, have you?”

  “Egad, man, what difference does that make, as long as it was shallow-rooted and feeling the drought?” Nigel was grinning, his mustaches at full gallop. This was clearly a debate they had cultivated over a great many coffee breaks. “But since you ask, it was corn.”

  Fred swept his hand out toward the scenery we were driving past. “We just crossed from the Conestoga limestone to the Wissahickon schist. Did you even notice?”

  “Of course not. There’s nary a lump of limestone or schist showing for miles around.”

  “Not so,” said Fred. “The topography changed, as did the vegetation. We’ve not only crossed from gently rolling hills to steep ridges and narrow gullies, but we’ve left behind the lushly farmed croplands with large houses, and now we’re in here with the small plots with much less prosperous homes. Notice that we are in a mixed hardwood forest. No one is trying to farm down here. As we cross into the serpentine barrens, we’ll begin seeing stuff that looks like the lairs of rednecks. You know; mobile homes, chain-link fences, and barking dogs that chase you down the blacktop.”

  “Strike three against fieldwork,” Nigel snarled theatrically.

  We all laughed. We were traveling now over a changeable terrain, dodging about on narrow little roads that wound through tight, steep valleys. The roads ran like a spider’s web, each running only a mile or so before we’d intersect another at a stop sign, all pavements the same width and state of disrepair.

  “Is serpentine a mineral?” Jenny asked.

  Fred answered. “It’s a metamorphic rock. It starts out as basalt that flows out under seawater. The circulating seawater alters it. This serpentine has been further metamorphosed by all the compression of the events that built our continent.”

  Nigel spoke again. “Speaking of ground truth and forensic work, who’s this bloke that’s been tailing us?”

  Fred stared into the rearview mirror. “What bloke?”

  “Haven’t you noticed him? He’s driving a bland-looking dark sedan with out-of-state plates.”

  Jenny and I turned and looked out the back window. Sure enough, there was a car there, hanging back just far enough that we glimpsed it only periodically as we came out of curves and into straightaways. I said, “Pull up just before the next stop sign and wait a bit, okay?”

  Fred gave me a look of skeptical uncertainty, but half a minute later, he pulled up and cut the engine.

  The sedan came around the curve, slowed, then sped up again, slowed, and hurried off again, making a left turn. His head was turned away from us as he passed, but I knew him in a blink: It was Agent Wardlaw.

  “Why, that S.O.B.,” I muttered.

  “You know the fellow?” Fred asked.

  “Sorry to say, I do. I’ll prove it to you. He turned left. You turn right, and I’ll bet we’ll spot him behind us again within a mile.”

  Fred followed my instructions, and sure enough, along came the dark sedan. “A friend of yours?” he inquired.

  “An FBI agent,” I said. There was nothing to be gained by saying otherwise.

  “Any special reason you get an FBI escort when you do fieldwork?” he asked.

  “Well, my boyfriend’s an FBI agent, so let’s just say we’re keeping it in the family,” I said, hoping that would divert the questioning long enough for me to figure a better way to spin the situation.

  “Pretty good ground truth for an eye-in-the-sky man, eh?” chirped Nigel.

  “Yeah, how’d you spot him?” Fred asked, all pretense of bantering dropped in favor of frank admiration.

  “As a man who’s been educationally murdered four separate times and lived to tell the tale, I just know these things,” Nigel cooed.

  Fred eyed me askance. “So, what do you want to do? Pull over again and offer to give the man a lift? He’s likely to get lost out here.”

  “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he got lost,” I said. “But let me think on this. You proceed on out to our destination, and by the time we get there, I’ll know what to do with him.”

  “Is he dressed for the field?” asked Fred.

  “Not in the sense that we are. He’ll have street shoes on, and slacks rather than blue jeans.”

  “Well then, let’s take him through the greenbrier,” he said.

  “What’s that? Some sort of a bramble?” I asked. The image of Agent Wardlaw trying to extricate himself from anything involving prickers delighted me in the extreme.

  “She doesn’t know what greenbrier is,” said Jenny. “Oh my, Em, but your life has been sheltered until this very moment.”

  “Is it worse than rattlesnakes and ticks?” I asked.

  “You think there are no ticks out here?” she said. “And no snakes? Heavens, you’ve never heard of copperheads?”

  “No, and I suppose I don’t want to meet one,” I said. “Rattlers at least give you a warning.”

  “The relative kindness of vipers, what a marvelous topic of conversation,” said Nigel.

  “And I was trying to keep the topic off of Agent Wardlaw,” I muttered.

  We continued down an increasingly narrow and rustic road for several minutes, then pulled up against a chain-link fence. Sure enough, on the other side of the fence was a rather decrepit-looking mobile home complete with coon dogs barking and jumping at the fence.

  Fred turned in his seat and addressed his passengers. “I’ve pulled over here because there’s a serpentine barren quite close to the road,” he said. “Sad part is there are also dogs here. Right now they’re on the other side of the fence, but you never know. People who live up here don’t take kindly to visitors, even if you’re just parking alongside the road and taking a squint at a little bit of rock. Are we armed?”

  “Precisely what did you have in mind?” asked Nigel.

  Fred said, “Oh, anything. Ball bats, two-by-fours …” He reached behind his seat and produced a hefty length of rebar. “Essential field gear around here,” he commented. “Don’t wander too far from the vehicle,” he instructed us, as he opened the door and hopped out. “And don’t lock up. We may need to remount in a hurry.”

  We all tumbled out and followed him, each picking up a rock as we crossed the road onto the open ground that lay beyond it. I looked around, taking in the geological ambiance of the setting. What I saw was a patch of open ground with little growing on it. Twenty feet beyond, the trees filled in again. “The trees seem stunted,” I observed, as Agent Wardlaw went barreling past on the road and disappeared around the next turn. Apparently he had missed a turn a ways back and had been hurrying to catch up. I almost turned and waved to him, but was afraid I’d give him the finger instead. The dogs behind the fence had settled down, seeing that we were headed away from their homestead, but at the sight of Wardlaw’s car they had activated again, hurling themselves at the fence like clods of mud.

  “I hope he doesn’t get out of his car,” Fred said. He turned his attention to the clearing. “Yeah, the trees are stunted. That’s why they call them the barrens. See what’s growing here? Antropogon scoparius, that’s this grass. That’s all that can grow where the serpentine is really close to the surface, because of the thin soil and the chemistry. Too much manganese for most plants, but scoparius can tolerate it. That and these stunted cedars. This greenbrier here”—he bent over and grabbed at a seemingly innocuous green twig that arched out of the thin soils�
�“is only here because the mining has disturbed the ground enough to upset the balance of vegetation such that the deer have been foraging and dropping fertilizer.” He waved a hand toward the surrounding thicket. “Over there you can see the greenbrier is much healthier. It’s climbing trees, even.” He pointed to a mass of interwoven vines the size of a small house.

  I reached down and touched a stalk. The prickers on it stood straight out from the whip at regular intervals and were half an inch long. I tried to break the stalk. The thing was appallingly strong, and had a hefty spring to it.

  “You don’t want to trifle with greenbrier,” Fred informed me. “It forms a bramble you wouldn’t believe. If you were dropped in the middle of it, you’d lose a lot of blood and have your clothing in tatters before you got yourself out.”

  I grimaced.

  Fred held out his hands, presenting the setting to me. “So here it is, this is where a whole network of men busy with picks and shovels dug the chromite mines. They were small features, most of them, not much bigger than a two-car garage.”

  “Is there a pit associated with this one?” I asked.

  “No. This one has no chromite. The rocks in this area are quite old—Precambrian in age, that’s six or seven hundred million years ago, in round numbers. As I’ve mentioned, the rocks of Pennsylvania have been through a lot of compressive events.”

  “What are you two talking about?” asked Jenny.

  Fred stuck the rebar under his armpit so he could use both hands. “As the continents slammed together the land got all wrinkled up like the skin of a basset hound that’s being petted too hard. That’s what formed all the long, parallel ridges out west of here.”

  Jenny said, “But here we have just low hills.”

  Fred said, “This area is folded and faulted as well; it’s older, so it’s been undergoing erosion longer. And yes, as Nigel said, it’s been wrung out and mashed so many times that the rocks have altered. Metamorphosis requires tremendous pressure and or heat. During Cambrian time—oh, hang on, here comes our escort.” He popped the rebar into his hand with practiced speed.