Rhubarb Pie Before You Die

by Gin Jones

  “You don’t have to worry about the cat any longer,” Mabel said. “She’s at my place now. I was wondering if you knew what time of day Graham usually fed her. I’m trying to keep her routine as normal as possible.”

  “I didn’t even know he had a cat,” Lena said. “But he was always an early riser, up by five o’clock most days, working in the greenhouse until he left for the office. At least he was quiet about it, since I’m definitely not a morning person. I’d see him finishing up in the greenhouse so he could get ready for work when I got up at eight o’clock. I assume he fed the cat before then, when I wouldn’t see it happening.”

  If the cat was usually fed by eight, but hadn’t eaten the morning of the murder, then it did seem mostly likely that Graham had been dead for several hours before Mabel had found him. That was good news, since once the police figured out the time of death with their own investigation, it should rule her out as a suspect. Anyone could tell them that she didn’t leave her bed, let alone the farm, before nine o’clock in the morning.

  “What’s the big deal about the cat anyway? It should be glad it was fed at all.”

  “Cats tend not to express gratitude as well as they express their demands for food,” Mabel said. “I’m not a morning person either, so I have to hope Graham’s cat will adjust to my time schedule, at least until she can join the ones in the barn after she’s had her kittens and they’re weaned.”

  “Kittens?” Lena shuddered. “If I’d known Graham was breeding invasive wildlife along with his rhubarb, I’d have killed him myself.”

  Mabel was shocked into silence.

  “Too soon for jokes, I suppose,” Lena said, adjusting her grip on the rake and stabbing at a single leaf near her foot. “But I’m not going to pretend I cared about the man. Everyone knows I hated him. The only person who hated him more than I did was his brother-in-law. And really, if there’d been kittens running all over Graham’s property, it would have been the last straw. I’d have had to call animal control to trap them, and everyone would hate me, when they should have blamed Graham for making it necessary. I know people already think I’m heartless, because I have to enforce the rules, but someone has to do it.”

  “At least now you don’t have to worry about the kittens,” Mabel said. “The animal shelter will find homes for them.”

  “I’m grateful for that, and for your taking responsibility for them. No one ever takes responsibility for anything these days.”

  “I do,” Mabel said. “In fact, I’m planning to come over and take care of the rhubarb plants until things get sorted out. O’Connor said I should let you know, in case you see me and wonder why I’m here.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Lena said. “Everything will be bulldozed flat in a few months.”

  “I hope not,” Mabel said. “Graham put a lot of work into his plants. I might even be interested in buying them, once the heirs are identified. For now, I just want to keep them alive. You wouldn’t know anything about who might inherit the house, do you?”

  “Probably his brother-in-law, Rob Robinson.” Lena said.

  “I thought you said Graham hated him.”

  “Oh, he did.” Lena stopped raking. “But from what I’ve heard, his wife, Carolina, adored her brother. She inherited the land from her parents before she married Graham, and since they didn’t have children, I expect that she would have wanted to keep the land, or at least the profits from it, in her family. Her grandparents started the farm that used to be here, and passed it down to her parents and then to Carolina, since she’d worked the farm for a while, and her brother had never been interested in it.”

  “Did you tell the police about the brother-in-law? I was talking to Detective O’Connor earlier today, and he didn’t seem to have any idea about who the possible heirs were.”

  “He didn’t ask, and I didn’t think it was my place,” Lena said. “I always have to get involved with the police to enforce the homeowners’ association rules, but as Graham was so fond of saying, his property is outside the subdivision, so it’s not my responsibility. Besides, I can only share what I’ve heard, not what I witnessed personally, and I’ve learned that the police won’t do anything without a firsthand account. I never met Carolina Robinson-Winthrop. She died before the subdivision was built and I moved to town. In fact, her death was why the bulk of the land had to be sold. To pay off her medical bills. Only the main farmhouse was left.”

  Mabel didn’t have any direct attachment to her aunt’s farm, but she was still determined not to let it be destroyed. It would have been far worse for Carolina to know her family’s farm was going to be erased. Had her brother blamed the sale of the land on Graham somehow? Even if he hadn’t wanted to work the farm, he might still have been upset by the prospect of his family’s legacy being lost to development. “Did the sale of the land have anything to do with why Robinson hated Graham?”

  “I doubt it,” Lena said. “When I first moved here, they seemed okay, with Rob visiting once a year around the anniversary of his sister’s death. But this last year or so, Rob must have been here half a dozen times, and there were always loud arguments. I couldn’t hear what they said, but it got bad enough once that I had to call the cops when I thought the shouting might turn into a brawl in the greenhouse.”

  Lena was willing to call the cops on cats and parked cars, so Mabel wasn’t sure how big a deal the argument was. “Did they ever actually get physical?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Lena said. “The time I called the cops was the worst, and they calmed down before the cops arrived.”

  “Do you have Rob’s contact information?”

  Lena narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “What do you want it for?”

  Because Mabel wanted to ask him where he’d been on Monday between five and eight or nine in the morning. But given Lena’s tendency to go running to the cops about every little thing, it would be better not to mention Mabel’s plan to do a little snooping or she might end up under arrest instead of simply being advised not to leave town.

  Mabel scrambled for a more acceptable reason, one that Lena would accept but not consider worth passing along to the police. “If you’re right and Rob’s the heir, I’d like to find out if he’d be willing to sell me the rhubarb before I waste a lot of time caring for it.”

  “I’ve got a call in to him myself already,” Lena said. “If you give me your number, I’ll ask him to call you.”

  Lena’s reluctance to share the information with either the police or anyone else seemed out of character, considering how few qualms she had about gossiping in other circumstances. Perhaps she just wanted to be the first to make an offer to buy the land and finalize the deal before a competitor even figured out who would inherit it. If that was the reason, Mabel didn’t care who talked to him first.

  “Thanks.” Mabel rattled off her number while Lena keyed it into her phone.

  It was only as Mabel was heading back to Graham’s yard that she thought of another reason for Lena to want to talk to Rob first. What if she had seen something on Monday morning that she hadn’t told the police about, something that would implicate Rob in the death of his brother-in-law, and she was blackmailing him in order to get the property? If Lena helped Rob get away with murder, Mabel might never be able to clear herself of suspicion.

  Now she was even more determined to talk to Rob than when Lena had first mentioned him. There were other ways to find him than to get the information from Lena. The internet was a rich source of information, and she was far more at home in the digital world than the agricultural one.

  Chapter 10

  Mabel propped the greenhouse door open the way she’d seen it before. The heavy bucket was still nearby, along with the broken pots and discarded sidewall supports. Inside, the rich scent of earth and growing things enveloped her as it had done before. This time, she wasn’t worried about running into Graham,
alive or dead, but the sheer number of plants she’d agreed to oversee was daunting. How could she tell if it was too hot in there or whether the plants needed more water? She looked up to see a few sections of the roof were tilted open, providing ventilation in the late-afternoon sunshine, and they seemed to be mechanized. That just left watering and feeding for her to take care of, much like she was doing with the pregnant cat. Unfortunately, she knew even less about the care of rhubarb than about cats.

  Then she remembered the neatly labeled card catalogue drawers she’d seen the last time she’d been there, just inside the second greenhouse. Perhaps Graham had some records in there that would tell her what she needed to know. She made her way past the farmhouse’s back door and the no-longer-needed cat supplies, but then hesitated in the opening. She wasn’t supposed to get too near the crime scene, and the police might consider the entire second greenhouse to fall under that label, even though Graham’s body had been at the far end from where she stood. The only crime scene tape was over there. It didn’t create a barrier, consisting as it did of just a few yellow and black scraps that hadn’t come away when the bulk of the tape was removed.

  In the absence of a clear signal to stay away, Mabel’s need to know what was in the card catalogue overcame her natural caution. She tiptoed across the short distance into the smaller greenhouse and peered at the drawers, hoping they were as organized on the inside as outside. Most of the labels had neatly handwritten alphanumeric codes, starting with AA01001 to AZ01100 in the upper-left corner, and then continuing through the alphabet, ending with a row of blank drawers along the floor. She peeked inside one at waist height to find packets labeled consecutively within the range marked on the drawer. Somewhere, there had to be a spreadsheet that would translate those codes into more information about the seeds, presumably identifying the parent plants that had produced each packet of seeds and possibly when they’d been collected. All fascinating, but not helpful in deciding what the already germinated seeds needed to thrive.

  Mabel gave up on the card catalogue and returned to the main greenhouse, looking for where else Graham might have kept his growing records. To her right was the back door of the farmhouse. He might have an office inside, like her aunt did, but she wasn’t ready to see if she could get to it. The detective had said she could go into the greenhouse, but he’d also made it clear that the house itself was off-limits, even assuming she could pick the lock. If O’Connor was already considering her a murder suspect, catching her trespassing would only make him more suspicious.

  To her left, a two-drawer metal file cabinet supported the end of a growing bench that was covered with seedling trays. She crouched to pull out the top drawer and found a stack of quad-ruled notebooks instead of file folders. She pulled the top one out and flipped it open. The first page had Graham’s name and address on it, with a listing of his initial purchase of stock plants on the next few pages and then, finally, page after page of spreadsheets with the alphanumeric codes on the card catalogue drawers matched up with the parent stock, year the seed had been collected, a new code for any seeds he’d germinated from crossing the original plants, and a few brief comments about anything else he’d found noteworthy. Nothing, however, about how he’d grown the plants or how much water, light, or fertilizer they needed.

  Mabel put it back and pulled out the second notebook. It was dated January of the current year, and it contained a mix of prose and charts, much like her aunt’s journals. She assumed he’d written about his breeding efforts, but she couldn’t actually read it, because everything was encrypted. She might be able to crack it, but it had been years since she’d done that kind of puzzle, so it would take some time, and she needed to get the plants taken care of first. She stuck it in one of the oversized pockets of her barn coat to look at later and resumed her search.

  The rest of the notebooks in the top drawer were blank, and the bottom drawer contained more of the quad-ruled books filled with journal entries, and all battered from use and age. She dug through them, looking for any basic information Graham might have recorded without encryption. They were stored in reverse chronological order, and about halfway down the stack, going back three years, the information was a little more accessible, with only a few sections encrypted. By the time she reached the very bottom, the very oldest journal contained no encryption.

  Mabel’s excitement quickly turned to disappointment, since a quick skim proved that there was no useful information in it for maintaining the plants in the greenhouse. The contents seemed to be more of a therapeutic exercise, before he’d fully immersed himself in breeding. The first pages focused on his grief over his wife’s death and how he’d turned to rhubarb, a plant she’d been particularly fond of, to work through his depression. Mabel flipped to the end, and it was still all about how much he missed his wife and how much she would have loved having the many varieties of rhubarb that were growing in the yard after he’d taken a trip to the USDA repository of rhubarb varieties in Washington state to get plant stock.

  Reading the early portions of the journal, even just skimming the pages filled with Graham’s grief, felt like too much of an invasion of his privacy to keep going, so Mabel put it back on the bottom of the stack of journals. She was still bent over the drawer when she heard a vehicle door slam nearby. It sounded like it was at the end of Graham’s driveway where it was going to cause Lena to have a conniption and probably blame it on Mabel if she didn’t get it moved right away.

  Mabel hurried out of the greenhouse. The corner of a black sedan was visible just beyond Graham’s hedges. Coming up the driveway was a petite woman in a black pantsuit with a white blouse. Even in three-inch heels, she was barely above five feet tall. She was talking on her phone as she squeezed between Graham’s truck and tractor that were parked so close together Mabel hadn’t even considered trying to fit between them and had always gone around.

  “I’ll let you know when I have it.” The woman looked in Mabel’s direction as she cleared the confines of the two vehicles, apparently only then noticing there was someone else nearby, and added, “I’ve got to go now.” She disconnected the call but kept the phone in her hand as she crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Hello,” Mabel said. “If you’re parked on the street near the driveway, you might want to move your car before the local homeowners’ association president has it towed. She lives next door, and she’s a bit of a stickler for the rules.”

  “Who are you?” The woman’s voice was confident and radiated authority much larger than her physical size. She sounded like she at least thought she had a right to be on Graham’s property, and maybe she did. For all Mabel knew, this could be the state police detective consulting on the case.

  “I’m Mabel Skinner. Detective O’Connor said it would be okay if I watered the rhubarb plants in the greenhouse so they wouldn’t die before the heirs could see to them. And you are…”

  “Sandy Faitakis,” she said. “I’m here for the same reason. I didn’t expect anyone to have the forethought to hire someone to take care of the plants.”

  “I’m more of a volunteer than an employee.”

  “A friend of Graham’s?”

  “I only met him recently,” Mabel said. “What about you?”

  “More of a colleague,” Sandy said. “We were in a race to breed a new standard in rhubarb.”

  She didn’t look like a farmer, any more than the developer trying to buy Stinkin’ Stuff Farm had. Thomas Porter at least had the size and strength associated with agricultural work, even if he hadn’t had the hands of a physical laborer. Sandy looked too small to drive a tractor or lug heavy supplies, and her wardrobe and neatly manicured hands were more suited to an office than the outdoors. After the experience with the lying Porter, Mabel wasn’t about to accept another person’s word on their love of farming.

  “I don’t mind doing the watering today.” Mabel nodded at the other woman’s outfit. “Wo
rking in the greenhouse will make a mess of your clothes, and the paths aren’t really designed for supporting high heels.”

  “I only found out about Graham’s death after I got to my office, and I didn’t have a spare set of clothes at my office to change into there. My breeding project is a personal interest, not my day job. I work in the agriculture and life sciences department over at the university, which, unlike the outdoors, is conducive to suits and high heels.”

  “Do you know my field hand, Terry Earley?” Mabel asked. “He’s majoring in agricultural sciences there.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Sandy said. “I specialize in the business of agriculture, which, sadly, too many farmers don’t pay enough attention to. I’ve chosen rhubarb to test my theories about the economics of farming.”

  “Is rhubarb that valuable a crop?”

  “It could be,” Sandy said. “Unfortunately, it’s not one of the miracle crops that can save small farms, so it’s hard to get funding for research. There’s never enough grant money for all the work that needs to be done, and the less popular plants often suffer from that scarcity. I still believe in rhubarb, and I’m fortunate not to need to make a profit from my breeding program, so I do the research on my own time, with my own funds. It’s slower that way, without any of the shortcuts or hired help that grant money could facilitate, but I’m making progress. It’s really a pity that I couldn’t get more funding, though. Farmers could really benefit from growing rhubarb. It’s easy, with few pests or viruses, and it’s a great source of calcium for people who don’t eat dairy foods, as well as several important vitamins.”

  “I think my aunt knew about the nutritional benefits. She served it in stewed form as a side dish with lunch most days when I visited her. Claimed it was good for regularity, as well as being nutritious. I was a bratty teen at the time and refused to even try it. I know it’s foolish to judge it on appearance, but I couldn’t get past how disgusting it looked.”