Kernel of Doubt: A Neela Durante Mystery

by Hillary Avis

  The land line rang, but Neela didn’t answer it. It rang again a few minutes later, and then again an hour after that. By that time it was late enough that the caller was unlikely to be someone from work or even a telemarketer, so Neela answered. At first she couldn’t make sense of what the person was saying, and she almost hung up the phone, but then she looked at the caller ID and realized it was the farm. The keening sound on the line was her name, over and over: “Neela, Neela, Neela.” Mama’s voice.

  “What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”

  “Why weren’t you here? If you had been home, this never would have happened.” Mama’s wails grew louder.

  “What, Mama? You’re scaring me! Is Papa all right?”

  When her mother started wailing again, Neela knew what had happened. “I love you. Put Wendy on the phone.”

  “Where have you been? We’ve been calling you all afternoon.” Wendy’s voice was a heartbreaking blend of angry and sad and disappointed.

  “Wendy, I—it doesn’t matter. I didn’t get your messages. Is everything okay?” Please let it be okay. Please let it be.

  “Papa is gone, Neela. This morning.” Wendy sounded tired, out of tears.

  “No,” said Neela, her voice almost a whisper. “Please tell me it isn’t true.”

  “We’ve been expecting it. I’m sorry you weren’t here to say goodbye with us. Mama has it in her head that you could have saved him if you were here; I’m sorry about that too. She’ll come around, she’s just devastated right now. We all are.”

  “We all are,” Neela echoed.

  Wendy told her about the coroner coming and taking him away, everyone coming home, even Robin and Rick. “The neighbors on both sides brought over casseroles, and everyone is eating now.” The concrete details somehow made it all seem less real, as if those bits of information couldn’t apply to something so enormous.

  “You should eat,” said Neela. “What should I do? I don’t know what to do.”

  “Come home,” said Wendy. “It’s all I can think of right now.”

  NEELA AND WENDY WENT to pick out the casket alone. The funeral director had so many questions. What kind of burial? What kind of flowers? What sort of hobbies did Papa have? Would he like the Lord’s Prayer included in the eulogy?

  “No,” answered Neela and Wendy together, though they shared a guilty look because Mama would miss it.

  They wandered the casket showroom, touching the smooth finish of each one. The funeral director followed behind with a microfiber cloth, wiping away the fingerprints and pointing out the merits of different styles. At the front were the expensive models, copper ones, stainless steel ones, solid mahogany ones with brass fittings and ornate carving.

  “This casket has areas that can be personalized with family photos, to honor your loved one,” said the funeral director, smiling but sad-eyed. He must practice that look.

  “Where are your cheap ones?” asked Neela, tired of the compassionate sales pitch. Wendy elbowed her.

  “Our value caskets are in the back,” said the director primly.

  “It’s just going to get buried in the dirt, anyway,” Neela said to Wendy.

  Wendy’s chin was trembling and her eyes welled up. “I don’t want to get him the worst just because it’s practical.”

  Neela walked faster to put distance between them. She felt that if she didn’t keep moving forward, she might drown in it—all of it. The least expensive box was more than her whole budget for the funeral. She pressed the funeral director. “Don’t you have other options? It’s ridiculous to bury a thousand dollars.”

  The director winced and murmured, “We do offer a cardboard option for those who are budget-minded.”

  “Budget-minded,” echoed Wendy thickly, her eyes red. “Are we that?”

  “I am,” said Neela, feeling ruthless and hopeless at once. “The cardboard, please. And we won’t be having the service here after all.”

  Wendy’s jaw agape, they left after Neela hastily scribbled a check, crossing her fingers that it wouldn’t bounce. Her bank account wasn’t empty yet, but after the funeral costs, it would be close to it.

  “Why’d you cancel it? Where are we going to have the service?” Wendy’s voice rose sharply, panicked. Neela pulled over and slammed on the brakes.

  “I love Papa as much as you do, but he would want us to save our money to pay the mortgage.”

  Wendy leaned her head against the window, her eyes vacant.

  “We’ll have it at the house, Wen, in the garden. Dot can speak, the rest of us can cry, and we can remember Papa how he was. That funeral director was horrible."

  “He seemed nice,” Wendy said. “He was just doing his job.”

  “Totally incompetent idiot loser,” said Neela, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, eyes trained on the highway.

  “Do you have to talk that way?”

  “Yep.” She pulled the truck back out onto the road.

  WHEN EVERYONE WENT inside to eat—the neighbors, a half-dozen people from Mama’s Bible study group, some people who came to gawk, Papa’s best friend Ricardo, a few friends of her sisters from school—Neela went to milk the goats. They had been bleating by the end of the memorial service, nearly drowning out Mama’s recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. It was the high point of the ceremony for Neela, because Papa would have appreciated their goaty chorus.

  The nannies desperately needed milking. Their kids were gone, eaten or sold off, so there had been no one to empty their udders since the morning. Neela started with the biggest goat, on her seventh year milking, her huge bag swollen and heavy with milk. She put grain in a bucket for the goat to keep her still while she milked, and then sat on the low milking stool and began. She squeezed rhythmically, working the milk down meditatively, her forehead just touching the goat’s back.

  Neela couldn’t see her hands but this was a chore she knew by heart. Most farm chores were beyond her, any expertise she learned in childhood long gone. It was a source of great amusement to her sisters when she had trouble starting the tractor, or when she couldn’t get the hens in at night. But milking was something she loved and never forgot, like the names of every plant in the garden.

  It was Robin who taught her to milk, took her out to the barn (then more like a shed, with only one milking doe and a wether in it), put her hands on an udder and taught her how to press the milk out without hurting the animal. Robin had a knack for these goats, knew how to keep them busy enough that they didn’t jump the fences, how to tend the does when they gave birth, how to cauterize the kids’ heads so they didn’t grow horns. She grew the little herd to ten does and a couple of wethers, and single-handedly kept the family in milk, meat, and cheese.

  “Amazing, Daisy,” Neela said to the goat.

  “That one is Buttercup,” said Orinda, leaned up against a post watching her.

  “I was just thinking about Robin and wondering how she does it all,” said Neela.

  Orinda rolled her eyes and kicked some dirt for good measure. “I do the milking now since Robin’s shacked up with Rick.”

  “He’s her husband, Rindy.”

  “He ruined everything when he burnt down the stand.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean it. Accidents happen.”

  Orinda glared at her. “You don’t even know the story, Neels, so shut up.”

  Neela stopped milking and glared back. “Where did you learn to talk like that?”

  “You,” said Orinda, her chin defiant.

  “You want to tell me the story, then? The way I heard it, Rick accidentally burnt down the farm stand. Why didn’t he rebuild it? He can fix anything.”

  “The county said not until it’s decontaminated.”

  “What’s contaminating it?”

  “I don’t know, some crazy stuff. Ask Rick.”

  “He’s not here. I’m asking you.” Neela, trying to be patient with her teenage sister, moved on to the next goat.

  “Rick was cooking meth in the r
oot cellar under the farm stand, OK? He was dealing out of there too. That’s why Dot always complained it smelled like cat pee. And that’s why it burnt down.” Orinda crossed her arms and moved to the other side of the post, so her back was to Neela.

  “What?! Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

  “What good would it have done?”

  Finally, she asks the real question, Neela thought. “Well, why didn’t Robin leave him after she found out?”

  Orinda slid around again so Neela could see her face while she answered, her eyes narrow and her jaw set. “Robin’s his best customer.”

  “Robin?” Neela was disbelieving. Not Robin, the milker of goats, the braider of hair, the teacher of multiplication tables.

  “She went off the deep end when she lost the baby last year,” said Orinda. “She was drunk half the time, and then she figured out that Rick had the good stuff.”

  “Oh no,” said Neela. “I’m so sorry, Rindy. I wish I had known, I would have—”

  “What? You would have what? Lectured me on the phone about it? Sent an email with links to rehab programs that we can’t afford?”

  “Probably. I wish I could take you away from all of it.”

  “How about you do?” Orinda leveled her gaze at Neela. “Please Neels, I won’t be trouble. I’ll do chores without asking, I can help around the house, I’ll get an after-school job to pay my share of the rent. Please take me back to Sunflower Springs with you. I can’t stand it here anymore.”

  “I don’t know if I’m going back. I just got suspended from my job. I’ve got no money and my place is tiny.” Neela sighed. “And you know Mama needs the extra pair of hands. If you leave, someone will have to do your chores.”

  Orinda made a face. “Guess we all have the same bushel of problems,” she said. One of Papa’s favorite sayings.

  They finished milking the goats together, weighed the buckets after each one, poured the fresh milk into gallon-size glass jars, and carried them to the enclosed milk porch. An extra fridge and a deep freezer were there, and both were full to the brim with milk. In the fridge, jars of milk lined up like soldiers. In the freezer, plastic zipper bags were stacked flat, the date written on them so they could be used during the winter when the does were milked down in anticipation of springtime kidding.

  “That’s a ton of milk,” said Orinda. “It’s going to spoil.”

  Neela nodded. “We need to get that farm stand open again. If we can’t fix the old one, we have to build a new one.”

  “And you should see all the eggs in the fridge inside. There’s no room for the leftovers from the funeral because of all the eggs.”

  “We have to figure some way to use this stuff before it goes bad.”

  Orinda nodded. “I’ll see if anyone wants to take some home.”

  Neela didn’t want to go back inside and face a gauntlet of grief. She waited in the milk porch until it was quiet in the living room and then tried to make a break for the steep stairs to the bedroom. No luck, Wendy spotted her from the kitchen.

  “Neels, come in here with us,” she called, her eyes so swollen Neela could tell from the living room. “We were just talking about how great it was to have the memorial here at home.”

  Dottie was nodding, holding Mama’s hand and patting it in agreement. “There are no flowers prettier than the ones from Mama’s garden. The whole thing was nice.”

  “Where’s Robin?” asked Neela.

  “Took off with Rick again,” Orinda said flatly.

  Mama moaned, rocked her head.

  “Hush now,” said Dottie.

  They all hushed for a few minutes, which turned into ten, the kitchen clock getting louder and louder, until Neela couldn’t stand it.

  “I wish I knew what to do,” she blurted out. “I’m just so impatient for answers. How can we get Robin to come back? How can we keep this farm afloat? How can I get my job back?” How can I find out who killed Miles? she added silently.

  Mama lifted her head, her eyes still distant and sad. “Have patience. Doesn’t matter what you do. Answers come whether you go looking for them or not—usually not the ones you want.”

  “This farm is a good place to practice patience,” Dottie said. “Maybe you should stick around.”

  Neela knew that Dottie, for all her impetuous spirit and thoughtless comments, was maybe the most patient of them all. All she did was wait: for the bread to rise, for plants to grow, for one sister or another to come into the kitchen and chat. She waited while her crochet hook transformed a piece of string into yards of lace for Mama’s sheets, and she waited for her needle to stitch out letters, leaves, and petals on the pillowcases.

  “You’re the queen of patience,” Neela said.

  “Isn’t that the truth?” Dottie said. “I’ve been waiting forty years for a man.”

  “Doesn’t seem worth it,” said Orinda.

  Wendy snorted. “I guess it depends on the person. I don’t mind waiting for a good one.”

  “I don’t know if there’s a difference between a good man and a bad one,” said Neela. “Teo was a good one, and then he wasn’t anymore.”

  Dottie nodded. “Same with Rick.”

  “Rick was never a good one.”

  “He wasn’t terrible. Anyway, beggars can’t be choosers. Robin wanted a baby, Rick wanted to give her one.”

  “She should have waited for some sweeter fruit is all I’m saying.” Neela saw Wendy nodding in agreement.

  “When you’re childless and almost forty, you might feel different,” said Dottie. “It’s not an easy row to hoe. When I was twenty-five, I got catcalls when I wore jeans, and now I don’t even get a look when I put on heels. Wendy, get one now while you still can!”

  “Who said I don’t have one?” Wendy looked annoyed.

  “Me,” said Orinda. “You never go anyplace, and I haven’t seen any men around here, so I don’t believe it.”

  Wendy shrugged. “Believe what you want.”

  “What about you, little one?” Neela nudged Orinda.

  Orinda turned red and kicked Neela under the table. “Shut up. What about you?”

  “I’m not even divorced yet,” said Neela, putting on a prudish voice.

  “Like that ever stopped anybody.” Orinda grinned at her. “I’d date someone who was still married.”

  Dottie gasped. “You would not.”

  “You really shouldn’t,” Neela said. “We married people are a mess.”

  “That’s why I’m never getting married,” Orinda said smugly. “I’m just going to live alone and paint. Why bother with a husband when I can just borrow someone else’s if I feel like it?”

  Dottie put her hands over Mama’s ears. “Stop!”

  Neela chuckled. “I had no idea you were an artist.”

  “You haven’t seen her art?” Dottie asked, dropping her hands from Mama’s head in surprise. “I have to show you!”

  Behind a curtain in the attic bedroom, a stack of canvas boards and a small suitcase bursting with paints and brushes leaned against the wall. Orinda stood behind her sisters, fidgeting, while they looked at the paintings. The paintings were mostly scenes from around the farm: Papa on the tractor, goats in the field, baskets of vegetables in the farm stand, everything bathed in the golden California sunshine.

  “How did you afford all these materials?” Neela asked.

  Orinda choked and then burst into tears and disappeared down the stairs.

  “What did I say?”

  Dottie gave her a look. “You see her work, and the first thing you ask is how she bought the paint? No, ‘how long have you been using oils?’ or ‘what was your inspiration?’ or ‘these are amazing, little sister’?”

  “Sorry, I just wasn’t thinking.” Neela shook her head.

  “Don’t apologize to me, it’s Rindy who needs it.”

  “I’m a jerk. These really are incredible. How did she afford the paints, anyway?”

  Dottie shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t wa
nt to tell you. You’re not going to like it.”

  “Spit it out.”

  “Teo gave them to her.”

  The room got smaller and darker, closing in on Neela’s vision. “Before we moved?”

  Dottie shook her head and spoke slowly, choosing her words. “He—hm—visits us. Sometimes. To check up on Papa. And he was here. You know. When Papa...passed.”

  “Teo was here when Papa died?” Neela put up her hand to steady herself on the slanted ceiling.

  “He wanted to stay for the memorial, but he was afraid it would upset you.”

  The room snapped back to the right size, and the sun blared through the window, blinding her. “He was right, it would upset me. I’m upset! What business does he have, being here when my father dies?”

  “I don’t know, Neels. He was part of our family for five years. It doesn’t just end.”

  “It does,” said Neela flatly. “Believe me, Dot, sometimes things just end.”

  Neela went down to soothe Orinda’s ego and found her in the living room with her head in Mama’s lap. She hid her face in Mama’s housecoat when she saw Neela come in.

  “All you care about is money.” The words were muffled. Orinda was choking with sadness or anger; it was impossible to tell which.

  “It’s complicated,” said Neela. “Your paintings are wonderful. I should have said that first.”

  “You just wanted to make sure I wasn’t spending your money on something so stupid and pointless, right?”

  “I said I’m sorry,” Neela said.

  “Like you care. Go back to Sunflower Springs and send a check when you start to feel bad. At least it’s honest.”

  “I told you, I don’t have a job right now,” Neela said. “No job means no paycheck. That’s how these things work.”

  “See? All you care about is being right. ‘Let’s get the facts straight. Let’s look at this logically.’ How about not pretending you give a crap about what does or doesn’t happen to me?”

  “You’re mad that I won’t take you home with me?”

  “Ten points for deductive reasoning, Dr. Quiñones.”

  “Durante,” Neela corrected automatically.