Town in a Strawberry Swirl (Candy Holliday Mystery)

by Haywood, B. B.

  On the way out to Crawford’s Berry Farm, Neil told them why he’d asked them to accompany him. “I’d like you to help me assess the fields,” he explained. “Your microclimate is different than ours over in Vermont. I heard at the police station that Dad suspended picking for a couple of days to let the berries ripen, but I’d like to open the fields again as soon as they’re ready. I’d hate to let all those berries rot out in the fields. Dad would’ve hated it. Those fields were his life—and I’d like to make sure they’re harvested, as he would have wanted.”

  “I think that’s a great idea,” Doc said with a bit of emotion in his voice.

  “I think so too,” Candy said with an approving smile. “Everyone in town will be happy if the fields are opened again—especially the league ladies. They told me they’re desperately in need of berries for their event tomorrow.”

  Neil nodded. “We can take care of that, if you’ll help me put it together.”

  “I’d be glad to,” Candy said. “And they’ll be thrilled. They wanted to see if they can get out here later today or tomorrow to do some picking.”

  Neil considered that for a moment. “I don’t know about today,” he said thoughtfully, “since I want to spend some time at the place myself before I open it up to the public again—just to make sure everything’s in order. But tomorrow morning would work.”

  “Great. I’ll let them know. They’ll be very happy to hear that.”

  “And if you and Doc have time in your schedules, I’d welcome your help with the you-pick-it operation over the next couple of weeks,” Neil continued, looking back over his shoulder at Doc in the backseat. “I know you’re busy with your own farm, and I have my own place over in Vermont to look after, so I’ll be going back and forth a little. But I’m a newbie around here. I don’t have the local connections and resources you do—and that Dad did. I’ll try to pick up some of his deliveries and outlets, and keep things going as much as possible, so I can make it through the berry season.”

  “We’d be glad to help you out any way we can,” Doc said.

  “I’m sure lots of folks around town would be willing to pitch in as well,” Candy added. “We just need to put out the word.”

  “I’d really appreciate that,” Neil said sincerely.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re going to do with the place when the season’s over?” Doc asked curiously, and Candy perked up her ears at Neil’s response.

  “I honestly don’t know yet,” he said. “My brother’s in Singapore on business, and until he gets back, there won’t be any decisions.”

  “When will that be?” Candy asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure he’s going to make it back for the funeral. He said it could be a few days or it could be a month or two. He’s still trying to work things out. So we won’t make any immediate decisions. That’s why I just want to get through berry season first, and then figure out our next move.”

  “Any chance you’ll take over the place yourself?” Doc asked.

  Neil let out a breath and ran a hand through his hair, shuffling it around a bit. “I don’t know, Doc. I haven’t really thought much about it. At this point anything’s possible, I suppose.”

  “Why was your dad selling the place?” Candy asked.

  That stopped the conversation. Silence reigned in the cabin for a few moments. Neil turned toward her as if she’d spoken in a different language. “Say that again.”

  Candy hesitated, wondering if she’d misspoken. “Your dad was selling the place, right? The berry farm?”

  Neil looked mystified. “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Know what?” He shook his head. “About him selling the farm? No, nothing. Where’d you hear this?”

  Softly, contemplatively, Candy said, “From Lydia St. Graves, last night. She snuck out to Blueberry Acres after dark and told me her side of the story. She said your father hired her to find a buyer for the place.” And Candy recounted her meeting with Lydia, as Doc listened with great interest from the backseat. She explained how Miles had contacted Lydia weeks earlier and surprised her by saying he’d decided to sell the farm. “She’d been pursuing him for years, trying to get him to sell, but he constantly refused,” Candy explained. “Then one day out of the blue he changed his mind.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Neil said. “Dad loved this place. Did Lydia say why he decided to sell?”

  Candy shook her head. “No, but she said she thought there was something else going on in the background with him—that’s how she put it. Something she couldn’t identify. She said she thought she wasn’t the only one pursuing him.”

  “You mean someone else wanted to buy the place?”

  “That’s what it sounded like—but keep in mind, this was just Lydia’s speculation.”

  Again, Neil was silent for a few moments as he looked out the windshield at the road ahead. “I guess I’m not really surprised,” he said finally, looking back at Candy. “I felt like something was going on with him for a while. He hadn’t talked much about the farm over the past year or so. And when we did talk, he was . . . well, kind of vague. Secretive.”

  “In what way?” Doc asked.

  Neil shrugged. “Nothing I can say for certain. Just a feeling, really. I put it up to the fact that he was living alone and getting older. Normal changes, I thought. These long New England winters have a tendency to harden people a little—physically and emotionally. I figured when he was ready to tell me more, he would. It was always like that with him. He moved at his own pace, and nothing could change him.”

  “Well, this time something did,” Candy pointed out. “Something happened over the past few months that made him decide to sell, and he asked Lydia for her help. She said your father wanted her to find a nice family to take over the place and continue what he’d been doing.”

  Neil nodded but said nothing. So Doc spoke up from the backseat. “Wouldn’t Miles have offered the farm to you if he was thinking of selling it?”

  Neil turned toward him. “Not necessarily. Over the years we talked about it. But I always told him I had my own place. I guess he figured I didn’t want it.”

  “But I still don’t understand all the secrecy,” Candy said. “No advertising, no MLS listing. Lydia was looking around for viable candidates and running them past your father. Apparently he wanted to keep everything off the record.”

  “Well, he certainly succeeded. He kept it from me,” Neil said, and he was silent for the rest of the way out to the farm.

  The place was deserted, as before, and eerily silent. Candy pulled to a stop near the barn, shut off the engine, and climbed out of the cabin. The wind had hushed, and high clouds filtered out some of the sunlight. She couldn’t help but feel a chill.

  The place seems like a graveyard, she thought.

  But that changed once they let Random out. His nose went instantly to the ground, and he started roaming through the barn and across the fields, adding at least some sense of life to the place.

  Following the dog, they walked together out through the strawberry fields, making frequent stops to check the berries. Doc liked what he saw. “They’re ready for picking,” he pronounced at the top of one of the fields, and Candy and Neil agreed.

  “Especially this lower section here,” Doc said as he indicated a swath of land with a wave of his arm. “These berries are close to peak. We need to get them picked within the next few days.”

  “We’ll start there tomorrow morning, then,” Neil said, his gaze roaming the fields. He looked over at Candy. “Eight A.M. okay?”

  She nodded. “I’ll make some calls.”

  “You might want to check the barn,” Doc suggested. “See what kind of supplies you can find,” and he headed off across the slope to inspect another field.

  Candy thought Neil might follow, but instead he stood for the longest time without moving, surveying a nearby hoophouse with a blank expression on his
face. Yellow police tape still cordoned off the building’s entrances, and some of the plastic siding had been lifted out of place, giving them a peek into the shaded interior.

  “You okay?” Candy asked him after a few moments.

  He seemed to come suddenly awake, as if he’d been deep in a dream. He looked over at her, blinked several times, and finally nodded. “We’ll have to make a few changes out here,” he said quietly. “I’m not sure what to do with that hoophouse. I might have to just tear it down.”

  Candy took him by the arm and led him down toward the barn. “That’s a decision for another day. Come on, let’s get set up for picking.”

  Miles had been an incredibly organized man, and it wasn’t difficult to find all the supplies they needed, including baskets, tables, a scale, and a metal money box sitting on the spotless workbench. Not a tool, nail, bin, brush, or container was out of place. “When I was a kid, he used to pick up my clothes off the floor in the morning,” Neil said as they gathered what they needed. “He was the one who cleaned and vacuumed the house—not my mom. He didn’t cook but he kept all the food organized. He had schedules for everything.”

  They moved the folded tables near the barn entrance, so they’d be easy to set up in the morning, and lined up all the baskets. As they were finishing up, Neil said, “I’m going to check the house.”

  The way he said it let her know he preferred to do it alone. Without another word, he headed off across the dirt driveway, pulling a ring of keys from his pocket. He stepped up onto the porch and disappeared inside the farmhouse.

  Once alone, Candy pulled out her cell phone and called Wanda. The red-haired woman answered almost immediately. “What’s up, Chief?”

  “I need to get hold of Cotton Colby and the league ladies. Do you have their numbers? And I need you to post a message on the community blog.”

  She told Wanda what was going on, and ten minutes later she’d talked to four other people, including Cotton and Mason Flint, the town council chairman, and asked them to pass along the word. “We’d like to get at least a few dozen people out here in the morning,” she told those she talked to. “We have a lot of picking to do.”

  She’d just ended a call to Maggie, pushing back their meeting to five, when Neil reappeared, a mystified look on his face.

  “I found something inside,” he said. “I’d like you to take a look. It seems like Lydia was right.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Inside, the house was like a museum, though there was evidence that a forensics team had swept the place. Some of the drawers in the kitchen were still opened, their contents looking as if they’d been riffled through, and in the living room the cushions on the sofa and chair had not been properly replaced.

  “They took his computer,” Neil said, leading Candy into a small office in the back corner of the first floor, “and some of his papers and documents, but nothing really critical, as far as I can tell.”

  The room was simply furnished, with an old oak desk in one corner, a wood-slatted office chair that looked like an antique, two wooden filing cabinets, and a bookcase with a few faded volumes that looked decades old. It was all dimly lit, since the shades on the two office windows were pulled down. Candy peeked out first one window, then the other. They offered magnificent views of the ocean to one side and the strawberry fields to the other. In the far distance, at the top of one of the fields, Candy could see her father standing still and straight, peering into the woods beyond.

  Neil tugged at her arm. “But that’s not what I wanted to show you. This way.”

  He led her out of the room, into a wood-floored hallway, and up the stairs to the second floor.

  “Did they take your father’s cell phone as well?” Candy asked as she climbed the stairs behind Neil.

  “Good question,” he said. “I haven’t noticed his phone anywhere, so it’s possible they did.”

  “Did he use a smart phone?”

  Neil stopped at the upper landing and looked back at her. “No, why?”

  “Lydia said he e-mailed her yesterday morning—early, asking her to meet him out here at the farm. But at the time he supposedly sent that e-mail message to her, someone else saw him making deliveries of strawberries. I’m wondering if he could have e-mailed her using a smart phone.”

  Neil shook his head. “Dad was low-tech. It took me years just to get him to buy the computer downstairs, and he had that same one for eight or nine years. It still works, so he saw no need to replace it. I showed him how to set up his e-mail account and contact list, so he could send around messages about the farm.”

  “I noticed a landline in the kitchen,” Candy said as she reached the top. “A wall phone.”

  “That was his primary phone,” Neil said, and he started off toward a bedroom at the back of the house. “He had a cell, but it was one of my old ones. It wasn’t a smart phone, but I wanted to make sure he had something for emergencies.”

  “So he couldn’t have e-mailed Lydia on the run?”

  “His phone didn’t have the capability to do that, as far as I know. The only way he could send e-mails was using the computer downstairs in his office.” He pointed with a finger. “What I wanted to show you is in here.”

  The bedroom they entered was somewhat stark, like the office below, but comfortable-looking. It, too, was at the back of the house, looking out over the strawberry fields. The bed was still made, though again it had been ruffled, probably by someone who’d checked underneath it during the house search. The drawers in two bureaus looked as if they’d been opened and their contents examined as well. A few photos in frames, showing the Crawford family during happier times, sat on one of the dark bureaus. But the walls were devoid of decoration, painted an unexciting light green. The wood floor was polished, with a small patterned area rug near the bed. Candy imagined the shirts in the closet were all hung in neat rows, and the socks and underwear smartly folded in the drawers.

  “Dad’s office was downstairs,” Neil said, “and that’s where he did all his daily paperwork. But he didn’t keep his important papers down there. He kept them up here, hidden away.”

  Neil pointed to a gray metal security box sitting on the seat of a high-backed cane chair beside the bed. The box, which looked fairly new, was perhaps fifteen inches long, eight inches deep, and six or seven inches high. It had an electronic keypad on the front. The top was open, revealing papers and bundles of cash inside, along with other valuables.

  Neil pointed at the keypad. “He used his wedding anniversary as the combination, so we’d all remember it. He told us all years ago that if anything happened to him, we should check the box first. And that’s what I did.”

  Neil lifted it carefully and placed it on the bed. “This is where he kept his emergency money—I think there’s probably close to five thousand dollars in here—and all his legal documents, like birth certificates, car titles, the divorce agreement, legal papers, that sort of thing.”

  Neil picked up a faded, crinkled blue ribbon, lying near the top. “He won this from 4-H when he was about eight years old. He was pretty proud of it.”

  There were also a few small, monochromatic photographs of people who looked like ancestors, and several pieces of jewelry, including a school ring and a thin gold wedding band.

  “And then there’s this,” Neil said, picking up a sheaf of envelopes that looked fairly new, held together by a rubber band. They’d all been slit neatly along the top, revealing the edges of folded documents inside.

  “What are those?” Candy asked curiously.

  “Letters. From some firm in New York City.” He looked over at Candy. “They’re offers on the farm. Someone wanted to buy the place. And they must have wanted it really bad, because they were offering him lots of money for it.”

  He let that hang in the air a moment as he set the envelopes down and picked up something else in the box. It was round, shiny, and yellow. “And maybe this is why,” Neil said, holding up the object between his thumb and
forefinger. “It’s something I’ve never seen before—at least not in my father’s possession. And I have no idea where he got it.”

  “What is it?” Candy asked, her gaze zeroing in on it.

  “It is,” Neil said, “an old gold coin.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Doc stood at the far end of the strawberry fields and gazed into the thick, shadowy woods. He thought he’d heard a muffled sound—a series of sounds, deep thuds that echoed through the trees and underbrush from some indeterminate direction. He looked back and forth along the edge of the woods, seeing nothing, and turned his good ear to the trees.

  Low ruffs, growls, the faint sounds of digging.

  Doc looked back around him, at the fields that stretched across the slope toward the hoophouses, farmhouse, and barn in the distance.

  Where was the dog?

  Had he gone inside the house? The barn? One of the hoophouses?

  Doc heard the sounds again, from deep in the woods.

  It was the dog, he knew.

  Probably just found an old bone or something he’s digging out, Doc mused.

  But that thought suddenly worried him. With all the murders they’d had around town lately, maybe he should investigate, just to make sure.

  He noticed a faint trail to his left, with a few shallow footprints locked into the drying earth, leading away from the field and into the woods.

  Doc glanced back a final time before following the distant sounds into the shadows of the trees.

  They had thinned where they met the field but quickly closed around him as he made his way along the trail. He always carried a compass with him, on his key chain, and he was used to walking in the Maine woods, so he wasn’t too worried about getting lost. He only wished he’d brought some insect repellant with him. The bugs were buzzing in the warm air, and there was still some spring pollen hanging suspended in the thin rays of sunshine between the trees, tiny glowing motes that danced around him in slow motion. He sneezed and moved on.