by Kelly Lane
CHAPTER 26
I knew better. I was kidding myself. It hadn’t been a dream at all. It’d been memories. Bad memories of what had really happened with Dex all those years ago. I’d remembered the real reason I’d run off and left him.
If I hadn’t, he surely would’ve killed me.
Remembering what I’d somehow managed to suppress for all those years made me feel sick. I threw off my bedsheet—it felt damp from perspiration—and I slid out of bed, still trying to hold it together as I caught my breath. I ran to the bathroom and stood over the toilet, gagging.
I heard Dolly woof quietly from her cushion, as if to ask, Are you alright?
I managed to regain my composure, and after a minute or so, I rinsed my face in the sink, before I went back out to Dolly. I sat down on the floor next to her bed and cradled her in my arms, hugging her close to me. Dolly’s warm, soft body felt soothing. She licked me on the face.
“I’m alright, Dolly. I’m alright,” I whispered.
A few minutes later, I set Dolly down and stood up. Opening my nightstand drawer, I grabbed a doggie biscuit and gave it to her.
“Just another bad dream, Dolly. I’m fine.”
My nightie was drenched. I tried slowing my breathing. The air was muggy. As always, the useless cottage ceiling fan whooshed quietly overhead, barely moving the humid air. The black Victorian clock on the mantel across from the foot of my bed tick-tocked. It was thirty minutes after midnight. I’d probably only slept thirty minutes. Maybe fifty. In the yard outside, the leaves rustled in the balmy breeze as peepers sang their raucous songs in the trees.
Dolly chomped down the biscuit and waddled to the screen door. She put her paw on the edge of the door and pulled it open a crack. Wedging her body through, she wagged her tail on her way to the yard.
“Don’t go far,” I warned.
Keeping Dolly inside the cottage was a futile effort. Besides, she always returned. Although, I did worry about some of the wild animals in the forest.
I realized that I was crying again. Really sobbing. I just couldn’t stop myself. Next to the door, I snapped on the switch that lit the antique cranberry glass lantern hanging over the dining table in the center of my cottage. The light gave the room a warm, rosy glow. I crossed to the center of the room, went behind the counter into the kitchenette beside the dining area, and poured myself a glass of water. Then I walked to the back of the cottage, into the bathroom a second time, where I soaked a washcloth with cold water and pressed it to my face.
A minute or two later, I plopped into my favorite armchair in the back of the room—it was the same chair that’d been in my bedroom as a girl, only Daphne’d re-covered it in a pretty floral chintz fabric. I picked up a cozy mystery from the shelf on the back wall and started flipping through the pages . . . trying to distract myself.
No use.
I kept seeing Dex and the angry look on his contorted face. The storm in his steely blue eyes. His fists . . . I took a deep breath.
“It’s over. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.”
It’s not my fault.
It’d taken me years to realize Dex’s abusive behavior toward me was all about him. Not me.
When I’d first left Dex, I’d felt embarrassed and ashamed. I’d been sure that his anger had been my fault. After all, I was the country bumpkin from Abundance, Georgia. He was the worldly and wise Brahmin from Beacon Hill. Then later, when I’d realized that I should’ve reached out for help, I’d remained too embarrassed to tell anyone about what had happened. After all, I was an intelligent, college-educated, professional woman living in one of the world’s greatest cities. How could I have let this happen to me?
Of course, I should’ve left him the first time he’d hurt me. Still, when it’d first happened, Dex had been so apologetic afterward, promising never to hurt me again, I’d believed him. He’d promised to love me even more.
Then the next time, he’d apologized again . . . He’d even cried. He’d told me that our arguing and making up actually brought us closer together, that it was natural for couples to argue. He’d brought home expensive gifts. He’d touched me tenderly, given me back rubs, run my bath for me . . . Dex was the makeup king.
A classic abuser.
And I’d let him get away with it. Then afterward, after I’d finally found the guts to leave him, I’d just tried to forget it all.
I let out a big sigh.
“It’s water over the dam now.”
Suddenly, I saw Dex floating in the pond. Bloated, eerily off-color with black eyes, he looked like he was grinning at me.
I shuddered.
And I had the sickening realization—the realization that I’d tried to hide from myself right up until my dream came along and smacked me in the face with it—that if anyone knew my history with Dex, surely it would look damning for me that he’d died just hours after I’d threatened him in front of a roomful of people. And already, Detective Gibbit had concluded that Dex had been murdered.
Lucky I never told anyone about the abuse, I thought. Hopefully, they’ll figure out what happened to Dex in the pond before I ever have to say anything.
Maybe the detective was just on another one of his wild-goose chases when he’d asked for the search warrant. Maybe Tilly Beekerspat had gotten it all wrong. Most likely, Dex was drunk and just drowned, I reasoned. Everyone will find out that it was just a terrible accident.
That’s it. I’m sure. A terrible accident. Eli Gibbit is wrong. Eli is always wrong.
I took a deep, slow breath. Trying to relax, I rested my feet up on the ottoman that matched the armchair. Then I just sat there. Lost.
Surely, there are hospital emergency room records. What if someone finds out what Dex did to me . . .
I jumped as I heard the terrible screeching of a night heron from somewhere in the woods. Then I heard Dolly barking. Already, it sounded like she was far, far away . . . maybe as far as the olive grove. Much farther than she normally went, especially at night. Usually, she stayed in the yard and came back inside pretty quick.
I got up and headed toward the front of the room, tossing the book on the dining table. Then I shuffled past the trunk at the end of the bed and pushed open the screen door. Stepping down the stoop, I walked into the yard, trying to breathe as I listened for Dolly.
The tree frogs and night critters were screeching in the yard. But there was no sound from Dolly. I called out quietly. I didn’t want to awaken anyone across the lawn in the big house. It looked like all the guest cars were parked alongside the big house; the Bostoners must have returned from the Roadhouse.
“Dolly?”
Nothing.
She probably was near Daddy’s olive orchard, I thought. She liked it there. From the cottage, the quickest way to get to the olive trees would be to go down the hill and through the field around the pond, into some woods behind the pond, past Daddy’s old hunting cabin, then down a path through the wire grass and longleaf pine forest for another five or six minutes. Eventually, that path would dump me out on the near side of the olive grove. If Dolly was way over there, I doubted she’d respond to my calling her from the cottage.
“She’ll come back,” I said to myself aloud. “She always does.”
I was tired. I wanted to sleep. Forget all the mess about Dex. Quell my rising panic. I’ll deal with it in the morning, I thought. I sat on the stoop and waited.
Five minutes went by. I stood up and went into the yard.
“Dolly!” I called out. I listened again.
Nothing.
I wandered toward the knoll and looked out over the moonlit pond below. The still water in the pond looked inky black.
Had it looked like this when Dex was down there?
My knees felt weak.
“Dolly?”
Eerie silence.
What if
it hadn’t been a night heron calling in the woods? Maybe it’d been a coyote?
I went inside and quickly changed into a black racerback yoga top and pulled on my stretchy black skort—my favorite one from Dick’s. I shoved my bare feet into my cheapo sneakers and headed outside, quietly closing the screen door behind me. Then, remembering, I turned back, went inside, and rummaged through my sock drawer until I found my smartphone. The battery was at about twenty percent. Still, I grabbed the phone and flicked on the flashlight app as I started out again, headed toward the olive orchard.
CHAPTER 27
I felt pretty comfortable on our plantation trails, even at night. During the weeks I’d been back home, I ran for exercise every day, and my insomnia had driven me to take many nighttime treks on the trails with Dolly. I felt sure I could find her pretty quickly, even in the dead of night.
Deep in the forest on the other side of the pond, one hundred feet above me, the wind hummed through the tall, straight longleaf pine trees. Crickets and frogs chattered noisily in the brush and trees around me. Most of the trees were three hundred years old, or more. Alongside the worn woodsy path, the moon lit up multicolored little wildflowers that were scattered through the tall wire grass under the canopy of ancient trees. Every so often, I’d stop to listen for Dolly.
Nothing.
I heard an owl hoot-hoot a couple of times, but other than the blustery wind in the trees and the squealing and trilling of bugs and amphibians, that was all I was able to discern.
“Dolly!”
Still no bark.
Several minutes later, I stepped out from the noisy, dark forest path onto open sandy soil. A breeze blew, and the narrow sage green leaves on Daddy’s young olive trees shimmered in the clear moonlight. Except for the shisshing of the olive leaves in the wind, the open one-hundred-acre grove seemed quiet, especially compared to the raucous forest behind me. I snapped off the light on my cell phone and looked around as my eyes adjusted to the moonlit darkness.
In an area that had been cut out of old forest, still surrounded by pine trees, Daddy’s orchard was filled with young Arbequina trees—a Spanish olive variety known for producing a mild, buttery-tasting oil. The olive trees were planted in compact, super-high-density rows—nearly seven hundred trees per acre. It was a vineyard-style planting system, as opposed to the way traditional European-style olive groves are managed with large trees, more like the stand-alone olive tree near the pond. In addition to the Arbequina trees in Daddy’s grove, every twelfth tree in a row was a super-pollinator Arbosana or Koroneiki variety.
I picked an olive from the first Arbequina tree at the end of a row. Examining the fruit between my fingers—it was smaller than the fruit from the big olive tree near the pond—the hard, apple green olive was not even as large as the tip of my thumb. The Arbequina variety produced small olives compared to other varieties, and each olive had a lot of pit for the size of the fruit. These were not table olives. Instead, they were perfect for making smooth, mild, buttery-flavored olive oil. The flesh from each Arbequina olive produced quite a bit of oil, especially for its diminutive size. I looked at the tree in the moonlight. Most of the fruit was apple green; some blushed a rich eggplant color. A few were already ripened brown.
Starting down one of the twelve-foot-wide swaths of soil between the rows of young trees, I stopped, listening for Dolly. That’s when I caught a whiff of something unusual. I couldn’t quite place it.
Smoke?
Spinning in a circle, I didn’t see anything strange. And the scent disappeared.
Must’ve been my imagination.
Around me, the young trees—about six years old—were positioned on land that sloped slightly north to south, allowing a maximum amount of sunlight to reach each tree canopy. Drip irrigation hoses ran down each row, under the trees, a line secured to each side of the slender tree trunks. Grown in a series of hedgerows, the slender-trunked trees—not much bigger than large bushes, really—were staked with bamboo and trellised with twisted wire, grown much like grapes in a vineyard. Young trees were pruned each year to increase the fruit yield, regulate flowering, and shape the plants in order to maintain good air circulation around each tree, reducing fungal disease. Also, keeping the trees to no more than ten feet tall allowed Daddy’s over-the-row harvester to fit above the plants.
During harvesttime—which was only a few weeks away—beginning in the wee hours before daybreak, the huge harvesting machine would roll through the hedgerows, straddling each row of trees with giant, man-height tires. Slowly, the harvester would pass over each row of plants while “fingers” inside the machine beat the fruit off the trees and into a large bin. Much of the fruit would still be green at harvest. For oil products, the fruit doesn’t need to be fully ripened. Then at the end of each row, the fruit would be collected in plastic bins before the huge harvester would turn and the process would begin again with the next row.
Because olive fruit perishes quickly, the olives would be processed into oil on the very day of harvest. In our case, the fruit would be driven to the nearest processing plant, all the way in Texas. Daddy was working on building our own processing plant on the plantation . . .
Wait! What’s that?
I smelled smoke.
CHAPTER 28
I inhaled deeply. Yes, it surely was smoke that I’d smelled earlier, when I’d first stepped into the olive grove. However, the smoke had a sweet, fruity scent to it that reminded me of my grandfather’s pipe.
Cherries.
Then the wind changed, and I heard voices. They came from just two, maybe three rows away from me in the olive grove.
I froze, realizing at once that the cherry smoke was from a pipe. Of course, it wasn’t from my grandfather’s pipe. Instead, it came from the pipe that belonged to someone else.
Wiggy.
I stood stock-still, listening.
“Well, you should be happy, Coop, after what he did to you and Heather.” It was easy to recognize Spencer’s whiny, high-pitched voice.
“Yeah, payback’s a bitch,” said a pleasant-sounding voice. It was Coop, the lawyer. “Still, even though I still hate Dex’s guts for that, I’ll miss the guy.”
“Not having to deal with Dex and his continuing crises with women definitely makes things easier,” Wiggy said. “I mean, we really don’t need him at this point. He was a liability to the operation.”
“Damn. Last night at the tasting I thought he was going to blow this whole deal sky-high,” said Coop.
“Well, we don’t have to worry about it anymore now,” growled Wiggy. “Dex’s role was negligible at this point, anyway. And we’ll all be stinking rich before you know it. Spencer, you got all the offshore accounts set up?”
“Geez, Wig, who do you take me for?” whined Spencer. “A friggin’ neophyte? I took care of all that a month ago. We’re good to go. All we need is for Coop to close the deal.”
“Yeah, well, about that. Apparently, the same person who scooped the Twiggs property is bidding on the other one we’re looking at,” said Coop.
“Who?” asked Wiggy.
“I haven’t been able to find out yet. I’m working on it. Just stay cool.”
“We’ve come this far; we can’t let this thing fall apart now,” said Wiggy.
“I’m on it,” said Coop. “I won’t let this happen a second time. But you gotta remain cool, Wiggy. Got it? We can’t afford to have people talking about us, especially when you make a big scene downtown yelling at the local Realtor.”
“That guy pisses me off,” growled Wiggy. “He lost us that place. And we’re in it so deep now there’s no turning back. And I’m not about to go to jail, dammit. Are we sure there’s not another real estate agent in town?”
“I’m sure. Besides, we don’t want to rock the boat now,” said Coop.
“Do you think Eva suspects something?” asked Spencer. “Or w
orse, do ya think Dex clued her in before . . . you know . . .”
“I don’t know. She certainly didn’t seem convinced that we were here on holiday. She’s not nearly as stupid as most of the people in this backwater place,” said Coop.
You got that right, I thought. But then, none of us are “stupid” here in Abundance. I’d like to see you operate a combine . . .
“She’s a woman,” chortled Wiggy. “If she keeps up her attitude and acts up, leave her to me. She’ll never say a word.”
“And if she does?” asked Spencer.
“We’ll just have to shut her up. Permanently,” said Wiggy.
“What about Claudia?” asked Coop.
“I dunno. She’s awfully wound up about Dex,” said Wiggy.
“Think she can keep it together?” Spencer asked.
“I sure hope so. We need her. At least for now. She’s the only one with all of Dex’s codes and passwords. If we’re going to pull this off, we’ll need to access his accounts,” Coop said.
“What if she cracks?” asked Wiggy.
“Yeah, she’s kinda unstable, don’t you think?” added Spencer.
“I don’t know. She didn’t used to be this way. At least not when we first knew her. Remember? Something happened,” said Coop.
“It was after she and Dex came back from that trip they took to Zermatt,” said Wiggy.
“Zermatt?” said Spencer.
“Sure, don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“Sure you do. A long time ago. Remember, she had some sort of ski accident in the powder,” Wiggy said.
“I remember,” said Coop. “She was in a cast for months. Dex used to complain because he had to make his own copies.”
“And he had to fetch his own coffee. Still, right after that, Dex gave her a big raise,” said Spencer.
“And she’s been up to her eyeballs in his business and overpaid ever since. She screwed up something a few years ago, big-time. I told him to fire her. He wouldn’t hear it. Said he couldn’t function without her and that was that,” said Wiggy.