“Here you go. Thank you.”
Eyes wide with excitement, she skipped forward and grabbed the money. With a cry of victory, she and her companions danced out of the alley to rejoin their gang. Matt leaned his back against the brick wall of I-FEED Mexico headquarters, shut his eyes and tried to think.
He should find a phone and call his dad. Cole Strong had to be pretty upset by now. He probably believed Matt had murdered Mr. Banyon, even though the last e-mail said different. Matt’s dad had never understood one thing about his son. Didn’t even much like him. Every time they tried to do something together, it was a bust. Except church. They did that pretty well. Drove together, side by side, sat through the service, and then went out to eat, because Sunday was Josefina’s day off. But they didn’t talk—not about anything interesting.
How’s school? How’s Billy?
Fine, fine.
How’s the farm? How’s Penny?
Fine, fine.
What did Penny Ames even see in his dad? Matt wondered. Though Matt thought of her as kind of stuck-up, she was young and pretty. Cole was old and sunburned and boring. His hands were callused, and all he ever thought about was plowing or the price his hay might bring. He would make Matt turn over the key. Then he’d get a lawyer—one of Penny’s colleagues, no doubt—and try to get his son’s name cleared. He would never understand the importance of doing God’s will. Of feeding the hungry. Of exposing a company that controlled the world’s food supply and refused to save millions of dying children. Children like those little street rats who had fed Matt.
He glanced toward the street and wondered how any well-spring of kindness remained inside their worn-out, dirty little bodies. What made them reach out to a sick, stupid Americano and bring him a hunk of bread? And how could he fail to do everything in his power to save kids like that? Jesus had promised that whatever Matt did to the least of his brothers, he was doing that same thing to Jesus himself. And those street kids were surely the least of all.
Even as he thought this, the little ragamuffin girl came tearing around the alley corner, followed by her band of ruffians. With a laugh of triumph, she dropped a large brown paper bag into Matt’s lap.
“Open it, señor!” she cried as her friends gathered around.
Matt obeyed, and he found himself gazing down at a large loaf of fresh bread, five oranges, a bunch of bananas, two cans of Coke and a string of fat, greasy sausages just like Josefina’s.
“Give us,” the girl ordered. She and the others squatted in a semicircle around Matt, their hands outstretched.
He reached into the bag and drew out the bread they had bought with his money and returned to share with him. But before he began dividing it among his newfound friends, he held up a hand.
“First, let’s thank God for this. Gracias a Dios.”
“Dios, señor?” the girl asked. “Who is God?”
SIX
Jill gratefully wrapped her hands around a mug of hot tea and studied the man across the table. The fine lines that weather and sun had etched around Cole’s eyes had deepened in the past hours. His large hands, obviously accustomed to hard labor, lay unmoving yet curled with tension.
He lifted one and rubbed it across his unshaven chin. “Well,” he said, exhaling a deep breath, “I’m stumped.”
“I think Billy’s right.”
He looked up at her, his eyes flashing blue in the late-morning light. “Agrimax? You really think they’d send two goons to Amarillo to harass my mother?”
“Whoever came here is after Matt. That’s all we know for sure.”
“It could be the law.”
“They’d have shown badges, followed protocol.”
“Maybe.” He ran a blunt-nailed finger along the thick rim of his own mug. “I wish I knew where that boy went.”
Despite her initial dislike of the man, Jill was warmed by his concern for his son. Maybe Cole did love Matt, but he just wasn’t good at showing it. Or maybe he hadn’t realized how much he cared until he lost Matt.
“Why don’t you call Agrimax?” she asked. “Just confront them.”
His eyes caught hers again, and he frowned. “You don’t get this, do you?”
“Get what?”
“I work for Agrimax. I might as well be an employee.”
“I thought you owned all that land. You run a family farm, don’t you?”
“Yeah, and I need to sell what I grow in order to keep it profitable.” He took another swig of tea. His face was rigid as he swallowed. “Look, you have a little farm of your own—that garden you babbled about half the night.”
She scowled. “Babbled? I never babble.”
“Okay, you didn’t babble.”
“You were interested.”
His blue eyes focused on her. “The point is, you ought to understand what I’m saying here. If you want the money to go on mission trips to Pakistan, you have to sell your produce, right?”
“Of course. That’s partly why I helped found the farmers market in town.”
“Right. Well, I grow a little too much hay and beef for the local farmers market. This is no hobby for me. My livelihood depends on somebody buying my produce. The company that gives me the best deal—the only deal worth the time and effort I put into my land—is Agrimax.”
“They buy all your beef? And your hay, too?”
“And my cotton and chile. They tell me what to grow, how much to plant, what kinds of fertilizers and pesticides to use—all based on how much they’ll be willing to buy from me at harvesttime. They pay me a fraction of what they’ll charge on the other end. Just enough to keep me from going under.”
“That’s sickening.”
“It’s business. My crops and beef go through processing plants owned by subsidiaries of Agrimax. Agrimax’s ships, trucks, and railcars transport the processed food all around the world. And where does it wind up? Right back at the local grocery store—part of a national superchain—where I spend thirty or forty percent more to buy it than I got paid to grow it.”
Stunned, Jill sat in silence for a moment. “You know, this is exactly the sort of thing Matt was saying he had discovered in his research.” She looked across at Cole. “Why didn’t you tell your son about your work? You could have influenced him so much. You could have explained this all to him firsthand.”
“He didn’t ask.”
“Did you? Did you ever inquire what Matt was studying? What his interests are? His fascination with food companies actually may have been prompted by you and your farm—but you never even knew, because you didn’t bother to talk to your son about his life.”
He slapped his hand down on the table. “Maybe I didn’t want to talk to the boy about what I do. First of all, he’s never shown one iota of interest in the farm. And second, the details of the way it runs is not exactly something I like to brag about. Farming and ranching are full of government red tape and restrictions. The food companies have farmers in a stranglehold. We can barely move. Barely hire employees. Barely make ends meet. I do it because I love the work, and I love the land. I’m proud of the farm and everything I’ve accomplished with it. But I’ll be just as happy to see my son find another line of business.”
“I don’t believe that!”
“You think I want him to have the life of a farmer—a bad back from lifting heavy equipment, hearing loss from loud machinery, skin that looks like leather, and every day the chance of getting a finger or an arm cut off? You think I want him to become a slave to government regulations and the dictates of a company like Agrimax?”
“I think you’d love for Matt to inherit your land. And I think he’d be proud to have the responsibility of carrying on your work.”
“Is that what you think, Miss Pruitt?”
Cole might as well have called her Miss Know-It-All. She shifted in her chair. Maybe she didn’t know everything there was to know about farming. But surely a man who had worked so hard to build up his enterprise would want his son to inherit it
.
“You know that genetically modified, bioengineered seed you find so repulsive?” he was asking now, leaning toward Jill. “I grow that seed for Agrimax. I’ve sold them tons of it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not—someone has to do it. Why not me?”
“Because it’s not right! That seed hasn’t been fully tested. We don’t know the ramifications for our children and grandchildren. The pure genetic stock may be compromised, and then—”
“That’s farming, lady. Agrimax tells me what they’ll buy and how much they want, and I grow it. No matter what. It’s the system, if you want to succeed as a farmer. And I do.”
Jill was breathing hard, trying to comprehend the web that bound this man and other farmers so tightly they could barely move. It was complex and disheartening, so very different from her mental image of the old-fashioned family farm where the farmer planted crops of his choice, harvested them, and sold the produce to nearby retailers.
“So now do you understand,” Cole asked, “why I’m not going to call Agrimax and accuse them of chasing off my son and threatening my mother? Who wants to do business with a nutcase? Not Agrimax, I guarantee. They can buy hay, beef and seed from growers all over the world. I’m just one tiny cog in their wheel, and they can easily do without me.”
“But you can’t do without them.”
“Absolutely not. As I said before, I can’t sell my hay at your little farmers market. I can’t sell my beef to the local grocery store. It doesn’t work that way anymore.”
“Well, it should. I’ve set it up so that my church uses its parking lot for a farmers market. We use the huge basement kitchen to can and process all the leftover produce. Any vegetables that don’t sell—or are less than perfect—go into jars we can sell at the next market or give away through the church food pantry.”
She recalled with satisfaction how well it had worked. Kids from local Christian youth groups had been invited to help with the cooking. Eager to learn from women who had been canning all their lives, young wives and teens crowded into the kitchen each Thursday after the farmers market ended.
“It ought to work that way even with large farms.” She looked at Cole. “Then we’d know what we were eating and where it came from.”
“Dream away, Miss Pruitt. Large farms need large corporations to back them.”
Jill lifted her focus to the small window over Geneva Strong’s kitchen sink. Ruffled white curtains trimmed in red rickrack framed the bright blue sky. What had the world come to in the last hundred years since Amarillo was a bustling cow town and farmers sold their produce locally? Was there any hope for a return to those days?
“Well, I got our boy Billy into the shower,” Geneva said, stepping into the kitchen and setting her hands on her hips. “My goodness, he’s big. And what an eater! I don’t know when I’ve ever made so many pancakes. Even you never downed that many, Cole, and you used to eat like a horse. I hope you realize this is Friday. That boy ought to be in school, not traipsing around the countryside. Did you know he calls me Granny Strong, just like Matthew? Isn’t that sweet?”
“I got hold of the hospital,” Cole told her. “Irene’s in surgery.”
“Surgery! Oh, good night, that must mean she broke her hip. Those FBI devils…we ought to sue them, barging in here like that and scaring two old ladies half out of our wits.”
Geneva crossed to the sink and began drying the breakfast dishes she’d insisted on washing by hand herself. Offers to help had fallen on deaf ears, so Jill had taken the opportunity to make the promised trip to the drugstore. She brought back deodorant, toothpaste and other grooming supplies for the Incredible Hulk who had shared the seat in Cole’s truck. After Billy showered, they ought to set off for home. But what about Matt?
“Maybe you should try calling Josefina again,” she suggested to Cole. “Matt has to be hungry. What if he showed up this morning, and she started feeding him breakfast—”
“It’s been less than an hour since my last call, and she has my number. She knows how worried we are.”
He tipped his mug for a last swallow of tea. Then he set it on the table and leaned across, his face intense. “Look, Miss Pruitt…Jill…you read my son’s research paper. Do you really think Matt’s disappearance might have something to do with this food thing?”
“Yes, I do,” she said softly.
He looked away, obviously in pain. “I want to believe it was Banyon’s suicide that spooked him into taking off, but there’s been too much other stuff. Those threatening e-mails. The two men showing up at the high school and taking him out of class. And now those goons coming here asking questions and making threats.”
“It was the FBI,” Geneva said from the sink. “They think Matthew killed that farmer in Hope. I saw a show on TV where the FBI just came busting through the door and went to shoving people around and asking all kinds of questions the same way they did to me and Irene. Rude. Just plain rude.”
Jill stood and carried the two empty mugs across to the sink. “The local police know about Mr. Banyon’s death and Matt’s disappearance. But I doubt the federal government is involved, Mrs. Strong. Not unless Matt had stumbled onto something that would affect them.” She gazed at the stack of gleaming plates. “Anyway, I’m going to check my e-mail one more time.”
Frustrated, she walked into the tidy living room and stared at the bloodstained carpet. Earlier, Cole had called the hospital emergency room to ask whether anyone had been admitted for a gunshot wound, but a voice informed him that such information could not be released. The police had arrived shortly after the ambulance. They simply took down the report—confused as it was, with Irene and Geneva each giving a different version of the story—and went on their way.
This whole situation was crazy, Jill thought as she took a seat on Geneva’s pale pink sofa. Teenagers like Matt Strong didn’t disappear without a good reason. Something terrible must have happened to him. Even if he was guilty of hacking into Agrimax’s mainframe or sending someone a flood of e-mails, the most he could be charged with was harassment. Fear of that shouldn’t have made him run. No, Jill had an awful certainty there was something more.
Not long after the ambulance sped away with Irene Williams, Jill had set up Matt’s computer on the coffee table. So far, she had read through about half of the boy’s research for his famine-relief term paper, and she had seen nothing that might cause him to flee. The information he had gathered was fascinating—the underhanded practices of Agrimax and a couple of other major food companies—but all of it was readily accessible by the public. Nothing she had found on the computer would have caused anyone to come after Matt. The term paper itself was even rather pedantic, the sort of essay a sophomore with high ideals and a lot of enthusiasm would write. Nothing groundbreaking or terribly controversial.
Jill logged on to the Internet. She had sent Matt two messages in the past hours—telling him where they were and urging him to do the same. As the hard drive hummed, she prayed again. Not one of her mission trips around the world had brought her this much distress or led to such intensity of prayer. Please, dear God, please help us find Matt. And keep him safe until we do!
As a message appeared on the screen, her adrenaline shot up. “Hey, he wrote!” she called out.
Cole was at her side in a heartbeat. “What does he say?”
She read the message:
im ok keep granny safe from them theyre desperate you stay safe too dont come after me but im on the paper trail get it
“Get it?” Cole exploded. “Get what? What does he mean? What’s the paper trail? Give me that thing!”
He dropped down onto the sofa, practically sitting on Jill as he grabbed the keyboard and began typing:
Now listen here, boy—
Jill laid her hand over his. “Stop, Cole. Just stop a minute and cool down. We have a message from Matt here, and we need to think it through.”
“I’ve thought it through already. He�
��s playing some kind of computer game with us. It’s like that stuff we talked about yesterday. Armies of trolls and goblins moving back and forth across the screen like some kind of demented chess game.”
“What’s going on?” Billy emerged from the bathroom, a pink towel cinched around his waist. He was rubbing his mop of thick brown hair with another towel. “Did you hear from Matt? Lemme see!”
He plopped down on the other side of Jill and jammed the two adults into the back of the sofa as he leaned across to see the screen. “Get what?” he asked. “What’s the paper trail?”
“You tell us.” Jill brushed water droplets from her arms. “You know the Mattman. What’s he saying?”
“Well, he’s okay, so that’s good.”
“What do you mean, he’s okay?” Cole demanded. “How can he be okay if we don’t even know where he is?”
“You’re not making sense,” Jill said.
“Okay means he’s safe at home on the ranch,” Cole retorted. “Roaming around scared is not okay.”
“Okay means he’s alive, he’s not hurt…and scoot over, Billy. I can barely breathe.”
“He knows we’re in Amarillo, so that means he’s been getting your messages, Miss Pruitt.” Billy didn’t budge. “But he’s still freaked out. See, he says they’re desperate. He saw what they did to Mr. Banyon, and he’s afraid they’re going to kill him. Or us.”
“I still think Banyon killed himself,” Cole said.
“You are so stubborn, Cole Strong!” Jill glared at him before giving Billy a mighty push that did nothing to dislodge his damp bulk. “The sheriff said the blood spatters led him to believe it wasn’t a suicide. So quit hanging on to that. Somebody shot the poor man, and since it couldn’t have been Matt, it must be the people he thinks are chasing him.”
“Agrimax?” Cole glared back. “Why would they kill Banyon?”
“He worked for them,” Billy said. “Maybe he did something they didn’t like.”
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