by Hillary Avis
They stood there, frozen, staring at me with open mouths. I stamped my foot and pointed at the highway. “I mean it. Go!”
“But I’m not done,” Rusty protested, gesturing to the remaining dirt pile behind him. “I’ve barely even started.”
“I’ll finish the rest on my own,” I said stiffly. “It’s dirt, not impossible.”
“I can help with the work,” Eli began, but I silenced him with a cutting look.
“I don’t need your help. In case I wasn’t clear before, I’m not interested in your opinions, either. Don’t you have a case to solve? Go talk to people who might actually know who killed Walt, because I don’t.” Then to Rusty, I added, “Hang on, I’ll get you your money.”
I let the front door bang shut behind me, my brain buzzing angrily as I rummaged through my purse and all the pockets in the jackets hanging by the door. How dare Rusty say Eli had a crush on me—that was humiliating to us both! And how dare Eli speak for me about what I wanted for my own farm like he was my dad or something. He needed to mind his own business. I located a few crumpled bills—not enough to pay Rusty fairly for resurrecting the tractor and getting a third of the dirt put back where it belonged.
I went to raid the emergency fund I kept in the cookie jar on the deep windowsill above the kitchen sink. It was shaped like a Barred Rock hen and made me smile every time I looked at it.
As I lifted the head off the chicken and reached for the bills inside the jar, out the window I noticed Rusty and Eli were exchanging some choice words in the middle of the driveway. My driveway, I wanted to remind them. If they were still arguing about what I should do or shouldn’t do, they could save their breath. And if they got so hot that they came to blows—at this rate, it didn’t look unlikely—I was going to turn the hose on them.
Eli seemed to hear my thoughts. He turned his back on Rusty and stormed over to the porch steps. Apparently, his strategy to win the argument was to be the first to intercept me on my way out. Rusty took a different tack. He returned to the dirt pile and, rather than firing up the tractor, channeled his anger into shoveling as much dirt as possible, as quickly as possible back into the hole. I froze, my hand still inside the chicken-shaped cookie jar.
Maybe Eli was right. Maybe Walt told me the truth about seeing a man burying the body early that morning, twenty years ago. I’d assumed it was a story he’d invented to cast suspicion on Amos and away from himself. I thought his story was thin—everyone knew Amos had a bad back and couldn’t have buried a body himself. But maybe both things could be true. Maybe Walt wasn’t the killer and Amos didn’t bury the body.
Because one other person would have seemed perfectly at home shoveling dirt on the Chapman farm in the wee hours of the morning—Rusty. Tambra had seen Rusty and Joe arguing that night at the bonfire, I remembered. Did their argument continue after Walt chased Joe back to the Chapman farm?
Out the window, Rusty planted his shovel in the dirt to catch his breath, and the chill sunk deeper into my bones. A shovel just like that was the weapon that had killed Joe. I stuffed the bills from the cookie jar into my pocket and rubbed my upper arms to get rid of the goosebumps that had prickled to the surface. The more I thought about it, the more probable it seemed.
There was no way around it—I had to ask him about it. And lucky me, the cops were already here. Stalkerish or not, never had I been more thankful to have gun-toting Eli hanging around in front of my house.
“Rusty!” I called as soon as I stepped out the front door. I thudded down the porch stairs two at a time, jerking my head at Eli to let him know that he should follow me. “I’m just curious—when was the last time you saw Hobo Joe alive?”
The blood drained from Rusty’s cheeks and he stood there stiffly, one arm balanced on the shovel’s short handle like a scarecrow in a field. It took a few moments for his mouth to form the words. “I—I—why do you ask?”
Beside me, Eli put his hands on his hips. “The question is, why aren’t you answering her? When was it, Rusty?”
Suddenly Rusty became very interested in shoveling dirt again. Then, seeming to realize that shoveling dirt could look incriminating, he put down the shovel and headed toward the tractor. But before he took a seat on it, he stopped short and turned back toward us. “You already know when it was. It was at the bonfire,” he said. “That’s why I paused. I wondered why you were asking.”
I realized he wasn’t going to admit anything in front of Eli—not if I made it seem like I suspected him of any wrongdoing. I softened my approach. “I’ve done a little more digging since we talked about it last time,” I explained. “Anne told me that Walt chased Joe off their property that night. I thought you might have seen Joe when he came back here to the farm. It would have been late, maybe midnight.”
Rusty shook his head, his eyes trained stubbornly on the ground. “I never saw him alive again.”
Something about his wording caught my attention. He didn’t say that he never saw Joe again—he said he never saw him alive. Was he just echoing my original question? Or did he mean something more sinister?
“You didn’t see him alive,” I said slowly, gauging his expression as I spoke. His face turned toward me, his eyes widening. “Does that mean you saw him—”
“Dead?” Eli finished, taking a step toward Rusty and slightly in front of me, partially blocking him from my view.
I swatted Eli on the arm with the back of my hand and stepped back in front of him. “Was it you Walt saw filling in the duck pond at five o’clock in the morning? Did you bury Joe?”
Rusty’s chin wobbled and he squeezed his eyes shut.
“It’s OK, you can tell us,” Eli said reassuringly from behind me. “Let it out, man. You’ve been holding this in too long.”
“Yeah,” Rusty finally choked out. “It was me. I drove out early in the morning to clean up all the cans and bottles from the bonfire so Granddad wouldn’t be ticked off about the trash in his yard. But when I got here, I found Joe lying on the ground with his head bashed in. It was horrible...” He leaned forward and put his hands on his knees, his back wracked with silent sobs as he tried to hold in his tears.
“Why didn’t you call the sheriff when you found Joe’s body?” Eli asked, his voice almost a whisper like Rusty was a deer he didn’t want to spook.
Rusty stood and rubbed his forehead and then squeezed the bridge of his nose. His voice cracked as he answered. “I felt responsible, I guess. Guilty.”
I frowned as I tried to understand. “Why would you feel guilty if you didn’t kill him?”
He sighed heavily. “After the bonfire, I went to the house and told Granddad that Joe was a thief, that he was the one who stole Walt’s telescope. The next morning, when I saw Joe there in the half-dug pond, I knew Granddad had killed him because of what I’d said. I should have kept it to myself and none of this would have ha—ha—” He broke down in sobs again, sinking to his knees in the dirt.
In an instant I was next to him, my arm around his shoulders. “It’s OK. It’s not your fault. You panicked,” I murmured. Eli looked at me, wide-eyed with alarm, and motioned for me to move away from Rusty, but I just patted Rusty’s back comfortingly. “You were protecting your grandfather.”
Rusty hung his head. “I was trying to. I got Joe’s clothes and guitar case from the barn and buried them with him at the bottom of the duck pond. It was a stupid place—it was just the quickest and easiest because of all the loose dirt. And of course Granddad didn’t argue about filling in the pond.”
“And you told everyone Joe hitched a train back to Canada,” Eli added.
Rusty nodded. “I was surprised at how easy they believed it. Nobody even questioned it. Nobody wondered why he didn’t say goodbye.”
Tambra did, I thought. But she was the only one. It seemed everyone else went on with their lives like Joe had never been there. Eli reached out and put his hand on my upper arm, gently urging me to stand. I could tell he wanted me to move away from Rusty, so
I ignored him. I knew Rusty wasn’t dangerous—he was devastated. I leaned my head toward his. “I’m so sorry you were put in such a bad position.”
Rusty shifted so he could look me in the eye, his brows knit worriedly together. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I put you in a tough position. I knew Joe was buried here and I didn’t warn you.”
“That’s why you didn’t want to keep the farm yourself, though,” Eli said thoughtfully. “I’ve been wondering—everyone’s been wondering—why you’d let this place go. I guess I know why now: cowardice.”
Abruptly, Rusty stood, his eyes blazing. “Who are you calling a coward?!”
“You. You were afraid to live here because you knew Joe was there, under the ground. You pawned off the dead guy on Leona rather than face what you did.”
I took Rusty’s arm protectively, shielding him from Eli’s insults with my body like I knew Ruth would want me to. “Don’t be mean! He made a poor choice twenty years ago, but he shouldn’t be punished for it forever. He was just trying to do the right thing for his family.”
“Well, it was the wrong thing, not the right thing.” Eli set his jaw stubbornly and pulled a set of handcuffs from his belt pouch. “I’m afraid I have to take you in, Rusty. Improper burial is against the law. So is obstructing an investigation by withholding information. You’re accountable for those crimes. You need to pay your debt to society, even twenty years later.”
“Isn’t it enough that he sacrificed this farm? How much more do you want him to give up?” I clutched Rusty’s arm protectively, but Eli just started reading Rusty his Miranda rights as he moved around behind us and clapped the handcuff on Rusty’s free wrist. To Rusty’s credit, he didn’t even try to struggle. He pulled his arm away from my grasp with a regretful look and held it out for Eli to shackle.
I watched helplessly as Eli loaded Rusty into the back of his SUV and drove off toward Honeytree, where I assumed he’d book Rusty into the town’s single holding cell—usually only used as an overnight drunk tank—until Rusty could be transported to the jail in Roseburg.
“Rusty just got arrested,” I texted Ruth. “I thought you’d want to know. I have some cash I owe him if you need it to help with bail.”
I put my phone away, feeling sick about how Ruth would react when she found out her grandfather was a killer. But oddly, once I settled my stomach with a few deep breaths, the overwhelming sensation I felt was one of relief. I wasn’t scared anymore. Because if Amos Chapman killed Joe, that meant Walt’s murder probably wasn’t related to my investigation of Joe’s death. It was related to something else in Walt’s life—something that didn’t have anything to do with me. Rusty had probably scratched the message in the side of my car when he arrived this morning, before he woke me up. And ironically, now I could follow his instructions and mind my own business. And my business was my chickens.
With a jolt, I remembered that the two Polish hens were still stuck in their buckets—without air holes! I hightailed it into the barn and was relieved when I could hear indignant clucking coming from inside the buckets. I quickly nailed some chicken wire over the frame of one of the stall doors, spread some hay on the floor, and filled some old dog dishes I found on a shelf with food and water. Then I gently moved the buckets into the stall, careful not to jostle the birds inside, and cracked open the lids.
The two Polish hens, sensing freedom at last, flapped out of the buckets straight into my face. I ducked to avoid their flying feathers and surprisingly sharp toenails. “You ungrateful, feather-headed, bony-breasted, freeloading—”
I broke off and fell onto my butt right there in the straw, laughing my sass off, when I saw what was at the bottom of the buckets. Both of those mothercluckers had laid eggs.
Chapter 30
I gave the two hens—who I named Cher and Phyllis in honor of their extravagant hairdos—a quick once-over for parasites. Thankfully, they didn’t have any little bugs crawling around on them. Their main problem, besides the feathers obstructing their vision, seemed to be simple malnutrition. Maybe it was worms, maybe it was lack of good feed. Some people around here felt that livestock should forage for their feed, otherwise what was the point.
“I’ll shoot ’em when I want to eat ’em” was the general sentiment.
I was glad Cher and Phyllis were going to escape that fate. Whoever had dumped them on my doorstep had picked the right farm after all. “I’ll find you a home where you’ll be spoiled rotten,” I promised them. “But first we’ve gotta fatten you up and grow some of those feathers back.”
I nabbed the still-warm eggs from the bottom of the buckets and carefully latched the stall door behind me, marveling as the perfect, smooth feel of the eggs in my palm. My farm’s first eggs. I’d imagined this moment for months now, since the day I submitted the paperwork for my legal separation from Peterson and moved into the guest suite of our sprawling mansion. The day I let myself dream.
Of course, I’d imagined it differently, with orderly rows of laying hens obediently laying identical large, brown eggs in cozy nest boxes. I didn’t think it’d be two crazy-headed Polish birds with half their feathers missing popping out eggs in the bottom of a bucket. But I also didn’t imagine how good it would feel to make breakfast—two over-easy eggs on a bed of steamed spinach with a sprinkle of parmesan and a squeeze of lemon—with eggs from my own flock. Heaven on earth. And just what I needed to power the rest of the day.
I spent the next eight hours mastering the art of tractor-driving—it wasn’t as easy as Rusty made it look—and I managed to get the hole most of the way filled in before the tractor ran out of gas. I figured that was a sign from the universe that it was time call it a day, although the yard was as bumpy as the potholed driveway.
The next morning, after finishing breakfast and chicken chores that involved changing out all the straw in the brooder tank because the chicks had tipped their water over during the night, I decided to go to town to pick up some protein supplements and dewormer for the adult chickens and some gas for the tractor. I started for the Suburban, but then remembered the terrible message carved into the paint. I didn’t really want to flash that all over town and draw attention—attention that might remind people that I didn’t belong in Honeytree. Someone clearly didn’t want me here.
Had Rusty been the one who scratched GO HOME on my car? He had been there early in the morning, before I was awake. He could have written the message before he knocked on the door to wake me. Maybe his jealousy and resentment over me buying the farm had finally spilled over. Just a stupid, impulsive move, not a real threat. That made me feel a little better, but it didn’t change the fact that my car was messed up.
The only other option was my little red convertible. Of course, that would draw attention, too. People would say I was still a city girl. That I wasn’t fit for farming. But that kind of attention would at least avoid the question of who hated me enough to vandalize my car—or in Rusty’s case, who’d been dumb enough to make such a desperate move. He didn’t need any more negative attention, either.
The Porsche it was.
I GOT MY GAS CAN FILLED at the station and then headed to the feed store. Sherman wasn’t at the counter when I walked in. I guessed he was out back, smoking—good intentions only got you so far when it came to kicking a cigarette habit. The morning sun illuminated golden dust motes floating among the rafters as I made my way to the poultry aisle and began reading labels on the assortment of bottles that lined the shelves. I found antiseptic, antibiotics, electrolytes, vitamin crumbles, insecticide, and an assortment of other pills and potions before I located the protein booster I was looking for, a so-called “feather fixer” designed for molting show birds.
I held the five-pound sack on my hip like a baby while I searched for a good poultry dewormer, but there were none on the shelf. I glanced toward the counter to see if Sherman had returned from his smoke break, but he was still missing. I plunked the sack of feather fixer on the counter and headed for the rear ent
rance, where I could see the back door was cracked open. As I drew closer, I could hear the sound of voices outside.
“The colony’s full,” I heard Sherman insist, as he had when I tried to drop off Alarm Clock. “Full up to overflowing—and even if I had room, I don’t take hens. Put them on Craigslist.”
“I don’t know Craig,” a woman’s voice with a thick Russian accent protested. I poked my head outside and saw Yelena in a green wool coat with her arms crossed as tightly as the braids on her head, glaring up at Sherman. “You have coop, I have chickens—what’s the problem?”
“If I put a coupla hens in with these cockerels, the poor girls will get torn apart,” Sherman drawled. He shifted a toothpick—perhaps the smoking-cessation trick of the day—to the other side of his mouth.
“Never in my days did I see a rooster kill a hen,” Yelena said stubbornly. She caught sight of me and tried to recruit me to her team. “Leona, you have a chicken farm. Have you ever seen a rooster kill a hen?”
Sherman looked at me expectantly, clearly believing my answer would come down on his side, whether because he was right or because he knew his was the only feed store in town and I depended on him for my livelihood, I couldn’t tell. “My chicken farming career is about three days old, so I doubt I’m the expert here,” I said, hoping to wriggle out from under the question.
Yelena wasn’t letting me off so easy. “Really, Leona. Even in books, this doesn’t happen.”
Sherman shifted his toothpick again, shaking his shoulders like a bug was crawling up his back rather than simple impatience. “Here’s how it will go. My boys have things all worked out, see? Because they don’t have hens to argue over. But the second I put your birds in there, half of those roosters will be fighting and half of them will be mating. Your hens will get beat all to heck. And when blood is drawn, the flock gets ruthless. Doesn’t matter whether the roosters do it or their sisters, see? The point is, your hens will be over-mated and then pecked to death. I’m not putting them in there.”