The Hen of the Baskervilles

by Andrews, Donna

  “You mean every single turkey we see in the grocery store is a test-tube turkey?” one visitor was asking. “There must be millions of them!”

  “Over two hundred and fifty million last year alone,” the heirloom turkey breeder replied. “And every single one of them a turkey-baster turkey, so to speak.”

  “That seems like a lot of work for something so … so…”

  “So easy for my birds to do without any help whatsoever from me,” the farmer said.

  The women held out her hand for a flyer on how to order an heirloom turkey for Thanksgiving.

  I didn’t need a flyer. I had all the turkey breeders’ names and addresses in my Un-fair files.

  “But how do they do it?” the woman asked.

  I decided this wasn’t something I wanted to hear about, so I moved on to the chicken tent.

  As soon as I stepped inside, I realized that the chicken tent was still seething with tension and anxiety. Maybe it was understandable, since they were the ones who’d actually been hit by the thieves. But I was hoping that seeing the police hard at work on the investigation, together with the news of our patrols, would help.

  Alas, no. As I looked around, I could see people walking around with their shoulders hunched tensely. People starting when someone came up behind them. People frowning or snapping at each other. Even the chickens were not cackling and clucking and crowing with the same carefree abandon they’d displayed yesterday, during the setting up, before the cruel abduction of two of their number.

  I looked around to find the volunteer in charge of the tent. The new volunteer, now that Mr. Dauber had been exiled to the far end of the parking lot.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “You have no idea,” she said.

  “Actually, looking around, maybe I do,” I said. “Seems even gloomier than it was this morning. I’d have thought everyone would have calmed down by now.”

  “I think they would have if not for the Bellinghams,” she said.

  “The Bellinghams?” Probably yet another heritage breed whose owners would be mortally insulted if I didn’t pretend I’d heard of it. I was fishing in my pocket for the list of breeds I’d printed from the American Livestock Breed Conservancy’s Web site. “What’s wrong with—oh! You mean the people whose Russian Orloff bantams were stolen? They’re the Bonnevilles.”

  “Whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “If they’d just go home already, I think the mood would pick up.”

  “Home? I thought they were down at the hospital.”

  “They insisted on coming back to the fair,” she said. “Against your father’s orders. He’s still trying to talk them into going back to the hospital for more tests. But they have one chicken left, and they don’t trust anyone else to guard it. I gather it was sick with something last night, and Mrs. Bell—Mrs. Bonneville was nursing it back to health in their trailer, or it probably would have been stolen with the others. So unfortunately they’re back, at least until after their chicken competes.”

  “Unfortunately?” Was it just my imagination, or did I detect a distinct note of hostility in her voice. What was going on here? A severe case of “blame the victim” or something else?

  “Sorry,” she said. “I know I don’t sound very sympathetic. It’s just that—well, see for yourself.”

  She led me down the aisles and then stopped, looked around rather furtively, and then indicated something to our right.

  In the middle of the bank of wire cages were two cages decorated with giant black bows at least a yard wide, with trailing ends that drooped onto the sawdust floor. Between the two decorated cages, and almost hidden by the bows, was a third cage, in which a small black-and-brown hen was sitting. I recognized the bird Mrs. Bonneville had been holding so tightly this morning.

  “Good grief,” I muttered.

  “Excessive grief if you ask me,” the volunteer said. “I know they love their chickens—I love mine. But if I went around the bend every time a fox got one—that’d be crazy.”

  “Besides, we don’t know that they’re dead,” I said. “Or gone for good. I think the police are seriously pursuing the theory that someone stole them to build up his own flock of Orloffs. Which means the thief would take good care of them, and there’s a good chance the chief will catch him and the Bell—the Bonnevilles will get their Orloffs back.”

  “Yeah, but in the meantime they’re determined to make everyone else feel their pain,” she said. “If you think the cages are over the top, get a load of that—”

  I turned to see what she was pointing at, and saw the diminutive figures of the Bonnevilles walking slowly down the aisle. He was wearing a dark gray suit with a black armband on his right sleeve and was leaning heavily on a cane. She was dressed all in black, complete with a veiled black hat, and was leaning on his arm in a way that seemed ill-advised unless the cane was purely for effect.

  “Did they bring those funeral outfits with them, I wonder?”

  “Apparently they stopped off to pick up a few things in town,” she said. “If you talk to them—”

  “I don’t plan to if I can help it,” I said.

  “Don’t ask them whether their birds were microchipped.” She rolled her eyes again. “No idea why, but the question totally freaks them.”

  “I saw what happened when Vern Shiffley asked them about that,” I said. “I have no intention of causing an encore.”

  “Did he really have a heart attack?”

  “Not according to Dad. Possible cardiac arrhythmia. Or maybe just a panic attack.”

  “Not the way he tells it.” She shook her head. “And before you ask, I have no idea why the idea of microchipping would bring on a coronary. Or a panic attack. Heck, I’ve been wondering if you’re allowed to do it to children. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “I’m waiting till they get a GPS feature, so you can always tell where they are,” I said. “Maybe the Bonnevilles decided not to microchip the birds and are mad at themselves.”

  “Could be,” the volunteer said. “Or maybe if their birds are microchipped, they’re afraid the thief will find out and destroy them if he thinks he’s about to get caught with them. Either way, if you value your sanity, don’t bring up microchipping.”

  “Got it,” I said. “I need to run.”

  “Wish I could,” the volunteer grumbled.

  I wasn’t actually fleeing the tent to avoid the Bonne-villes. An idea had struck me. I hurried over to the fair office, made sure it was empty, and pulled out my cell phone.

  Chapter 14

  I called Stanley Denton, a private investigator who’d recently relocated to Caerphilly.

  “I know, I know,” he said, as he answered his phone.

  “You know what?” I asked.

  “I assume you’re nagging me because I haven’t shown up yet to support the fair. I promise, I’ll be there with bells on soon. Maybe tomorrow, certainly by Saturday. I’ve been stuck up in Culpeper on a case, but it’s all over now but the paperwork.”

  That’s good,” I said. “Because Saturday is the pie competition. You need to be here to cheer Muriel on to victory.”

  Muriel Slattery, who ran the local diner, was a frequent medalist in the pie competition. I wasn’t sure if it was only Muriel’s pies that had inspired Denton to relocate to Caerphilly or if he also had designs on Muriel herself, but either way, mentioning her and her pies would ensure his attendance.

  “So you just called to remind me to come to the fair?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Actually I wanted to see if something is doable before I try to talk Randall into hiring you to do it.” I explained about the chicken thefts, and the winemakers’ theory that Genette was hiding the stolen animals on some property other than her vineyard.

  “It’s doable,” he said. “Assuming there’s anything to find, how long it takes depends on how smart she’s been about hiding her ownership. Let me do a little poking around pro bono. If she’s stupid, I could find it with
a couple of hours of checking online. If she’s smart, or has smart lawyers, it could be more trouble than it’s worth. Or at least more than I want to do pro bono and more than the county would want to pay for. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said. “And so will Randall when I tell him.”

  After I hung up I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. Just for a second. Would it really hurt if I took just a small nap? Or stole away to the llama booth to see what Michael and the boys were up to? Maybe I could collect the boys and we could all have a nap. Nothing like a nap to improve a person’s mood, regardless of age.

  My cell phone rang. The front gate needed more change.

  Another call. The portapotties were getting low on toilet paper. A reporter from Richmond wanted a press pass. A farmer from Jetersville wanted to know if he was too late to enter his cattle in the competition. Another farmer from Vesuvius wanted directions to the fairgrounds. One of the pickle judges had indigestion and needed an antacid. Someone’s prize sow had gone missing from the pig barn, which caused quite a bit of alarm until she turned up in the rodeo ring, where the high school kid who had raised her was about to compete in the teen calf-roping contest.

  “Thank goodness we found her,” I said, as I watched the pig being led to safety.

  “I wasn’t too worried,” the pig barn volunteer said. “She’s only a Chester White. A prize-winning Chester White, of course, but it’s a common breed, so I didn’t think it could be part of the rash of thefts of heritage breeds.”

  “It’s not a rash. Not here at the fair. Two bantams does not make a rash.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” He had started backing away.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that we’re a little sensitive about people thinking this is a fair problem. I’ve heard of several other people who have lost heritage animals from their own farms, long before we even thought of holding our fair.”

  “True,” he said. “Been happening a lot over the last couple of years.”

  “So it’s a problem that followed the heritage breeds to the fair,” I said. “I wish we’d known in advance they were such big theft risks, but now that we do know, we’ve tightened security. We’re determined that we won’t lose any more animals, and we’ll do our best to solve the theft of those two bantams.”

  The volunteer nodded, but he was frowning, and visibly thinking hard about something.

  “You know,” he said finally. “You say you wish you’d known they were a theft risk? I don’t think most of us knew that until we got here and began comparing notes. I’ve been raising Tamworths for ten years now, and not long ago I started running a few Mulefoots. Most of us—heritage pig breeders, I mean—we’re not trying to keep them to ourselves. We want the breeds to come back strong. We get excited if someone we know is a solid pig man—or woman—wants to buy some piglets and start raising our breed. Bigger gene pool’s gonna benefit all of us. Someone wants to get started, we do our best to help them. Theft wasn’t the big problem. Getting people to take us seriously was. But since I’ve been here I’ve been talking to people. Not just Tamworth and Mulefoot people or even Red Wattles and Gloucestershire Old Spot people, but cow and sheep and goat and poultry people. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to so many heritage breed people at one time, and we’re all realizing that theft’s getting to be a much bigger problem for all of us.”

  “And here we come along and create the biggest concentration of heritage breed animals the state has ever seen,” I said. “Talk about a target for whoever’s doing the stealing.”

  “Yeah, but you also created the biggest concentration of heritage breed owners we’ve ever had in the state,” he said. “Got us talking, and talking made us realize we have a problem. And isn’t that the first step in dealing with it?”

  With that he nodded, and strode off to help a ten- or twelve-year-old girl in a FFV t-shirt who was trying to steer a pig taller than she was into one of the pens in the barn.

  Should I report what he’d said to the chief? As I headed back toward the llama booth, hoping to see the boys before they went down for their nap, I kept trying to decide. Then I spotted something: the morose man in the windbreaker—the one Mother had found so suspicious. He was once more standing by the bank of trash cans, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, staring.

  I strolled up and confronted him.

  “Is there a reason you’re always standing there, staring at the wine pavilion?” I asked.

  He blinked and took a step back.

  “Just wishing I was in there, showing my wines,” he said.

  “You didn’t register in time to get a booth?”

  “Didn’t try to get a booth.” He was looking down, apparently focused on his attempt to use the toe of one boot to knock dirt off the side of the other. “Lost my vineyard last year.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Of course, in a way, my vineyard’s in the pavilion, even if I’m not,” he said. “Genette Sedgewick bought it after I went bust.”

  Oh, dear.

  “Another member of the Genette fan club,” I said aloud.

  “Ha, ha.” It wasn’t really a laugh. “I wouldn’t have minded so much if it hadn’t been her who sent me over the edge in the first place. We had a bad harvest last year, and a lot of us were scrambling to buy grapes so we could keep our production up.”

  “You can do that?” I asked. “Sell wine made from grapes you didn’t grow?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Lots of vineyards do. As long as you don’t claim you grew them, you could have a winery without owning a single vine. Anyway, Genette was buying, too. She drove up the price for Virginia grapes so high that a lot of us couldn’t afford them. Some people found a way to absorb the hit. Or maybe they’re dying, too, just more slowly. I couldn’t make enough wine to pay the mortgage.”

  “Couldn’t you buy grapes from someplace else?” I asked. “I hate to sound disloyal, but Virginia’s not the only state that grows grapes.”

  “State law says you can’t have more than twenty-five percent out-of-state grapes and still call it a Virginia wine,” he said. “I bought as much out-of-state fruit as I could, made as much wine as I could, and sold it all for good prices. I have—had—a good reputation. But it wasn’t enough.”

  I nodded. He went back to kicking mud off his boots.

  “So if you don’t have a winery, why did you come to the fair?” I asked.

  He looked up, frowning.

  “I mean, why torture yourself?” I added.

  He grimaced.

  “I didn’t realize it would be this bad.” He shook his head. “I thought it would be a good chance to see people, maybe find out if anyone’s hiring. I’ve been mucking out cow barns at my brother-in-law’s dairy farm up in Pennsylvania for six months now. Be nice to come back home. Work with grapes, even if they’re not my grapes. But every time I try to work up my nerve to walk into that tent…”

  He shook his head.

  “I think I could do it if I didn’t know she was in there,” he muttered.

  “She isn’t always,” I said. “Stay here and keep your eye on that door.” I pointed to the tent door farthest from Genette’s booth. “My mother’s in charge of the tent. I’ll have her step outside and flutter a scarf the next time Genette takes off. Would that help?”

  He looked up, a hopeful expression on his face.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That would help a lot. Thanks.”

  “By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Paul Morot. My vineyard was called Fickle Wind Winery.”

  I nodded as if I recognized the name. Actually, it did sound familiar. If his winery had had a good reputation, odds were Mother had found his wine and served it. Even before we’d put her in charge of the wine pavilion, Mother had become an avid partisan of the Virginia wine industry—possibly because Dad had begun planting grapes and trying to make his own
wine. So far Dad hadn’t produced any truly spectacular wine—in fact, these days Rose Noire did a rather brisk business turning his failures into exotic herbal vinegars and selling them. But Mother was already looking forward to the day when she could serve Langslow Reserve to dinner guests and remark, with studied casualness, “Oh, yes—James won a medal with this one at the fair.”

  So if Mother remembered Morot’s vineyard, she’d be even more willing to help him infiltrate the tent in Ge-nette’s absence.

  Although to be honest, I hadn’t asked his name so I could help him. Ever since meeting Genette, I’d had the uneasy feeling that something bad was going to happen. I’d have called it a premonition if I believed in them. In spite of all Rose Noire’s arguments to the contrary, I remained convinced that a premonition was actually your subconscious adding up facts your conscious hadn’t yet noticed, and coming to a conclusion that would turn out to be perfectly rational if you analyzed everything properly.

  And if my subconscious thought that bad things were going to happen, I wasn’t going to argue with it, because even my conscious self had seen enough to be worried. What if last night’s mishaps were only the prelude?

  I strode over to the wine pavilion and found Mother.

  Chapter 15

  “I checked out your lurker,” I said. “He’s probably harmless.” I explained why Morot had been lurking, and as I suspected, Mother was eager to help.

  “The poor man,” she said. “And yes, you have had his wine. He makes—made—a lovely Chardonnay, very buttery with a hint of apples. I’m sure you remember.”

  Actually, I wasn’t likely to. I liked wine, but when people started describing it as “crisp” or “buttery” or “robust,” or having hints of something-or-other, I just didn’t get it. To me, wine was good, or bad, or okay, or maybe sometimes even fabulous, but buttery? Hints of apples?

  “It was the white wine we served at Josh and Jamie’s christening party,” Mother added.

  “Oh, that,” I said. “Yes, that was nice. Very nice indeed. So he made that?”

  “I shall definitely do what I can to help that poor man. Do you remember that lovely Merlot of his? The one with those ever-so-slight notes of chocolate and licorice.”