Elysia parked beside a white fence. “Showtime,” she murmured as the gaggle of children, dogs, and ducks headed their way.
Elysia and A.J. got out of the Land Rover. A.J. wrinkled her nose at the strong smell of alfalfa and cattle. Apparently there were side effects to the pastoral life. A tall middle-aged woman with lank blonde hair and a worried, ruddy face came toward them, a baby hanging off each arm.
“Can I help you?”
Elysia extended a hand in the same way the royal family did in one of their “walk abouts.”
“I’m Elysia Alexander. This is my daughter A.J. We saw your sign a few miles down the road and thought we would stop in.”
“Esther Baumann.” The woman shifted the toddler on the right, and shook hands. “You’re very welcome. Would you like to come inside?”
A.J. couldn’t help a surprised look her mother’s way. Elysia gave her one of those I-told-you-so expressions.
They followed Esther into the ramshackle old farmhouse. The smell of homemade bread greeted them, which was an improvement over the great outdoors. The house was comfortably shabby, the furniture battered and the drapes and carpet well worn. Esther deposited the babies in a big old-fashioned playpen, dumped some Cheerios in with them, and led the way through to the huge sunny kitchen.
A radio was playing an old Beatles song.
Inviting them to sit at the scratched and dented table, Esther poured milk into tall glasses and cut wide slabs of cheese and homemade bread at the old-fashioned breadboard. She placed the cheese and bread in front of them, seeming quiet and preoccupied as Elysia chattered easily about the farm, asking a dozen innocuous questions.
“How old must a cow be before it gives milk?”
Esther blinked pale blue, long-lashed eyes. They reminded A.J. of a doll’s eyes. “Cows are like people. They have to give birth before they can start producing milk.”
“Isn’t that interesting?” Elysia asked rhetorically of A.J.
A.J. murmured something noncommittal. She was thinking of Aunt’s Diantha’s “Death by Dairy” segment as she passed on the milk and cheese, and reached for a slice of warm bread. Apparently reading her without trouble, Elysia threw her a reproving look and drank down half a glass of milk. Fair enough; Elysia had quaffed more dangerous brews than dairy in her day.
“Alexander?” Esther said slowly. Her red-rimmed eyes studied them. She turned to A.J.
“You’re that girl, aren’t you? Her niece.”
A.J. swallowed a dry piece of bread crumb. No doubt Elysia wanted her to make up some elaborate spur of the moment story about being pursued by spies or neo-Nazis or agents for the Department of Agriculture, but A.J. felt honesty would serve her best with this tired, harassed woman. “I’m Diantha Mason’s niece. Is that who you mean?”
“The police have taken John in for questioning. They think…” Esther’s voice wobbled. She glanced quickly toward the doorway, and the sounds of children in the next room, and controlled herself. “Johnny wouldn’t hurt a fly; you’ve got to believe me.”
“We do, my dear,” Elysia assured her. She sounded perfectly sincere, which was the advantage of having trained as an actress, or a sex kitten, or possibly both.
A.J. said, “He sent my aunt a letter—”
“I told him not to mail that letter. I told him how it would look!” She shook her head. “He never meant it the way it sounded. You have to know Johnny. You have to realize how desperate we are.”
“Well,” A.J. said reasonably, “what exactly did he mean then?”
Esther said earnestly, “She—your aunt—didn’t understand how things are for us. Not just us, for all the farmers. This is a family business. We don’t…we’ve been struggling since John took over the farm. Johnny’s daddy struggled. Farming is a hard life, and it’s getting harder. We work from sun up to sun down. We don’t get days off. We don’t get holidays or weekends. We don’t get big government subsidies. It’s everything we can do to keep from getting bought out by some corporation.”
“I understand,” A.J. said. “But—”
“You don’t understand,” Esther said. “We do things the old-fashioned way here. We don’t force our cows to calve every year, and we don’t go for any genetic manipulation. We don’t stuff them full of high-energy feeds. Our cows are clean and disease free.”
“And it is well worth it,” Elysia said. “This cheese is absolutely fabulous.”
A.J. wouldn’t have blamed Esther Baumann if she’d reached over and clunked Elysia over the head with her rolling pin, but instead the woman gave a weary little smile.
“Thanks. The thing is…we’ve talked about trying some other things. We’ve had good luck with bee farming, but John promised his daddy he would never give up the Baumann Dairy Farm. It’s been in his family for seven generations. It’s not easy to quit that.”
Esther had a point. Unfortunately, as far as A.J. could see, everything the woman said merely reinforced the idea that John Baumann did have a motive for shutting Diantha up permanently.
When they finished their cheese and bread, Esther took them for a quick tour of the farm. A.J. was touched by the simple life these people seemed to live. Vegetables grew in a small garden in the back, clothes hung drying on the line, the numerous kids scampered about doing chores between their home-school lessons.
This wasn’t a simple matter of finding a new job or starting a new career path; this was a way of life, and it was under siege.
Elysia must have been equally affected. She bought several pounds of cheese as well as two quarts of ice cold buttermilk and cream in old-fashioned glass bottles. They were loading this cholesterol catastrophe into the back of the Land Rover when a police car pulled into the yard.
A large man in overalls got out of the car and waved a tired hand to the driver, who promptly turned the car around and disappeared down the dirt road.
“John!” cried Esther Baumann, and she ran across the yard to him.
A.J. felt a lump in her throat as she watched them hug. They clung to each other like lovers reunited in the last reel of a particularly grueling war movie.
“Apparently the plods don’t think they have enough to hold him,” Elysia remarked. A.J. glanced at her. But anything she might have said had to wait as Esther led her husband over to the car.
Baumann was not just tall; he was big—even bigger than Detective Oberlin. But where Oberlin was all lean muscle, Baumann was meaty bulk. His hair was sandy and thin, his eyes were the velvety brown of those Jersey Maid cows on the TV commercials; and, like Esther, he looked too old to be the parent of that passel of little kids running in the yard.
He offered a big callused paw to A.J. “I guess I owe you an apology. Essie tells me you found that letter I wrote your aunt.”
He had a surprisingly gentle grip. A.J. said, “I think I understand a little better why you might have felt…Aunt Di wasn’t being fair to you and the other dairy farmers.”
“I won’t speak ill of the dead. Your aunt did a lot of good things for this valley. Nobody could argue with that. But she saw things one way. Her way. She thought she knew best. I just want you to know I never meant her any harm. I wish I hadn’t of written that letter. I never thought how it would sound.” His eyes moved to Elysia, and he added, “I’m sorry she’s gone. That’s the truth. She was like…”
“An institution,” Esther put in.
“I suppose that describes my sister as well as anything,” Elysia said. Something in her tone caught A.J.’s attention. She glanced at her mother and realized that she was genuinely moved.
They said their good-byes then and got into the Land Rover. As the red barn and silos of the farm grew tiny in their side mirrors, A.J. realized that for the first time in a very long time she had not once thought of her failed marriage, her career, or Andy.
She glanced at her mother’s profile. Elysia was scowling at the road ahead.
A.J. heard herself say, “That was a nice gesture, buying all that chee
se and milk. You’re not really going to eat all that are you?”
“I thought we’d divvy the spoils at your place.”
“Clearly you haven’t been tuning into Organic Living.”
“I loved my sister, but she could really be a bore sometimes.” She glanced at A.J. The elegant brows arched. “What’s the Cheshire grin for?”
A.J. realized that she was smiling. “I don’t know. I…had a good time today. Thank you for coming with me.”
Elysia made a noncommittal noise, but her ivory cheeks seemed a little pink. Perhaps it was the sunset flushing the fading sky and golden fields behind them.
Still smiling, A.J. felt in her purse for her cell phone and checked for messages. To her surprise, for the first time in days, she actually had one. The number was local and unfamiliar. She played it back.
She listened. Then listened again. She flipped the phone shut.
“Oh my God,” she said quietly.
Elysia nearly swerved off the road. “What? What is it? Whatever’s wrong, pumpkin?”
“I think Detective Oberlin just asked me to dinner.”
Sixteen
“Dinner?” Elysia said it in the same tone she might have said, “Satanic sacrifice?!”
“I think so.” A.J. fished in her purse again, pulled out the phone, and played back the message, placing the phone against her mother’s ear. “What’s that sound like?”
Elysia’s eyes briefly met her own. “It sounds like a dinner invitation. Made at gunpoint.”
“He doesn’t sound very happy about it, does he?”
“He sounds out of practice.” She was silent. “Hmm. Most interesting.”
“Interesting” was hardly the word for it.
“Do you think he’s trying to trap me?”
“Well, he is male.” Elysia gnawed her lip; somehow no matter how much talking and pouting and nibbling and sipping she did, her lipstick never seemed to fade. A.J. wondered what the secret was. “And he does know you’re married.”
“I’m not married.”
Elysia made an impatient sound as though divorce were a mere technicality. “Are you thinking of going out with him?”
“I don’t know.”
The invitation would have been flattering—in an alarming way—if she didn’t suspect Oberlin’s ulterior motives.
“It’s an excellent opportunity to pump him for information,” Elysia remarked. “You just have to keep your head. He’s an attractive brute. Not your style, but still…”
A.J. considered her romantic “style.” Talk about what not to wear. She tuned back in as Elysia said, “Perhaps you can discover whether we can safely scratch Mr. Baumann off our list of suspects.”
“If the police let him go, he must have an alibi.”
“Alibis can be broken,” Elysia said knowledgably. She launched into a story about a guest appearance she had once made on The Professionals, which led her into a naughty reminiscence about the show’s leads. A.J. went back to weighing whether she should accept Detective Oberlin’s dinner invitation.
“I think I’m going to go out with him,” she said abruptly.
“Pumpkin, Martin Shaw is married. You do seem to have a wee bit of a—”
“I’m not talking about Martin Shaw. Who the heck is Martin Shaw and how did he get into this conversation? I’m talking about Detective Oberlin. I’m going to accept his dinner invitation.”
“I don’t know about that, pumpkin.”
“I thought you believed he was susceptible to my feminine wiles.” A.J. found her cell phone and checked the phone number Detective Oberlin had left. She began to dial.
“Possibly. But you mustn’t be susceptible to his.”
“His feminine wiles?”
“Be-have!” Elysia said, sounding too much like Austin Powers for comfort.
“Anyway, I’m immune to men. I just want to pick his brain.”
“That’s the way it starts,” Elysia said breezily. “One moment you’re thinking king and country, but then, before you know it, you’re doing the horizontal—”
“I don’t want to hear it!” A.J. shook her head as though to knock away that famous earwig from the Laurence Harvey episode of the Night Gallery from crawling into her brain.
In the end she was unable to reach Detective Oberlin and had to leave a message on his cell phone. As seven o’clock rolled round, A.J. tried to tell herself that her acceptance had been as casual as she had now convinced herself the invitation had been—and if Oberlin hadn’t received her message in time…no problem.
Maybe even relief.
In fact, the more she thought about it—and unfortunately she was thinking about it a lot—Oberlin had probably intended the invitation in the same spirit as the dinner invite the evening before. He probably worked so much overtime he didn’t take meal breaks, and this was likely his way of killing two birds with one stone. And that being the case, it was really silly to worry about what the heck she was going to wear tonight.
All the same A.J. spent a good twenty minutes pawing through her suitcase’s frugal contents before settling on an all-purpose DKNY gray jacquard skirt and a cute pink tank.
It really was ridiculous when she had given up on men, and besides if Oberlin let Baumann go, he must be trying to trap her into a confession of her aunt’s murder. So what was she doing stressing out over this non-date? She should cancel. Instead she was perspiring her makeup off as fast as she was applying it. And her hair! She looked like a frightened porcupine, which, frankly, wasn’t too far from how she felt.
This was where a bit of that yoga serenity would have come in useful. A.J. splashed cold water on her face, took a couple of deep breaths, and restarted applying her makeup.
Finally, powdered, mascaraed, and lipsticked, she dumped Monster’s dog food in his bowl and went into the parlor to wait for Detective Oberlin.
Two minutes after seven, she was checking her cell phone to see if he’d left a message canceling when she heard a car roll into the front yard.
She went to the window.
Oberlin was getting out of a sports car instead of the usual police SUV.
She gulped. He wore Dr. Martens boots, a snug pair of jeans that were clearly not Levi’s, and what looked like a suede jacket. Attempts had been made to control his unruly dark hair. From the momentary scowl on his face he appeared to have just received word that the governor had turned down his appeal. Then the scowl disappeared and he approached the front steps with the expressionless face of a cop who had no idea what might lie on the other side of the door.
A.J. ducked away from the window, heart pounding.
Dear God. It really was a date.
Monster shot past the parlor door, woofing a guarded greeting. A.J. grabbed her coat and ran to head him off.
“Hey, there!” she said too brightly, hanging on to Monster’s collar with one hand and the door with the other. “I wasn’t sure if you got my message.”
“Yeah, I got it.” He studied her from her punk haircut to the pointy tip of her kitten heels. He wasn’t exactly smiling, but he looked less severe than he had when he got out of the car. Maybe this was the closest he got to actual friendliness. Maybe this explained why he wasn’t married.
Nah, he probably was gay, and this was all part of a plan to lull her into that false sense of security. For some reason that thought really calmed A.J. down. She clung to it.
Not a real date. Just…part of his job. Or maybe he felt sorry for her sitting here without a TV and eating cans of salmon all by herself in the dark.
“Good night, Monster. Don’t wait up,” A.J. said, closing the door on the dog.
Oberlin laughed. It was a quiet laugh, but it relaxed her a little.
“What do you feel like?” he asked as A.J. buckled up and he started the engine.
“Huh?”
“What do you feel like eating tonight? Italian? Steaks? Chinese?”
Duh! What did she think he meant? “Italian sounds good.�
�� Andy disliked Italian food, so during their marriage she’d rarely had the opportunity to indulge her unnatural love for pasta—and post-Andy she just hadn’t been hungry.
“There’s a new Italian place in town. We could try it out.”
“Okay.”
Silence.
“My name is Jake, by the way.”
“Oh? Okay.”
Silence.
Oh God. It was going to be that kind of an evening. A.J. wracked her brains for something intelligent to say. All that came to her was to ask why he was taking her out for dinner. Wasn’t that a conflict of interest or something, since she was his main suspect?
Jake nodded toward the radio/CD console. “Do you want to find something to listen to?”
“Sure!” She fiddled with the radio, pausing when she heard the distinctive tones of Rufus Wainwright’s “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk.”
Did Jake perk up at the sound of Rufus? Andy adored Rufus. And that should have been a clue right there, shouldn’t it? A grown man “adoring” anything but his lovely wife and potential children was really not a good sign.
She glanced Jake’s way. “I love his voice. That sort of drowsy, silky way he sings.”
His eyes briefly left the road. “Who?”
She nodded toward the radio. “Rufus Wainwright.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’s the one who sang ‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?’ on that old Gap commercial.”
“I don’t watch a lot of TV.”
Of course not. He was probably too busy using the lathe in his woodshop to build a gun cabinet. She wondered if he was armed right this minute. She wondered if he’d shoot her if she became too annoying over dinner.
The restaurant was small and dark. In the gloom she could just make out wall stencils of balconies and fountains and bougainvillea. There were profusions of plastic flowers hanging from baskets, candles in wax-covered bottles, and red and white checked tableclothes. Dean Martin crooned romantic nonsense on the piped in music.
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