“Murphy,” she whispered.
“Oh, yeah.”
“But he can’t do that, Ryan—”
“Oh, yes, he can. He has. That’s what I’m telling you, Becca, what I’ve been trying to tell you. Things don’t work here like they do in the big, bad city. Things happen to you here if you don’t get along with your neighbors.”
“But can’t you prove—”
“I can’t. No. I’ve torn this house upside down, inside out trying to find proof of payment for that tax bill and I can’t. I know Gramps paid it—I know he did—but sometimes, when he got into a tight, he’d pay half of it and then pay the rest later. You could do that before everything was computerized. He probably paid the rest in cash.”
“Can’t you pay the tax bill? Borrow the money and—”
Ryan snorted in disbelief. “Bank’s not going to loan me that money. Murphy’s on the board of directors. Besides, it’s their policy not to loan money to pay past-due debt.”
He shook his head in disgust, his tall frame rigid with anger and frustration. “Neat, isn’t it? Nice trap Murphy’s got me in. I understand you’re just doing your job and all, but it’s putting me in a bad spot. So, Becca, you got a cool eleven grand I can borrow? ’Cause it’s either that, or you need to hit the road.”
With that, he turned and headed back to the fields.
CHAPTER TWENTY
YOUR LAST DAY. This is your last day.
The thought circled in Becca’s brain like a hungry piranha, gobbling up all rational thought. This was her last day—her last day of solo investigation and her last day with Ryan.
One thing that had to be done, with Ryan or without: she had to search out Antonio, the “mayor” of Murphy’s Little Mexico, as Ryan called it. She had to know what Antonio knew. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that whatever he’d discovered about the dodder vine was what had launched Murphy into action.
In lieu of lunch, she wrapped a piece of bread around a slice of cheese and headed for her car. Yes, by going off without a bodyguard and planning to cut across the back way to where Murphy housed his workers, she was practically double-dog daring Murphy to jump her.
But she couldn’t take a chance on him conveniently running off anyone with any answers. Migrant workers would not stick around if moving down the road would behoove them.
She parked the Mini Cooper in Jake Wilkes’s yard and scouted the horizon for the hog farmer. His hogs were happily rooting in the mud of the pigpen, but Jake wasn’t anywhere to be found.
Maybe that was good. Maybe he would find it easier to forgive her than to give her permission to tackle Murphy head-on.
Squaring her shoulders, she headed for the back fence. Today was as good as any to declare open war on Murphy.
A yell behind her halted Becca in her progress across Jake’s field. She turned to see the old man waving her down.
They met halfway, near an old tobacco barn that looked as shabby and as run-down as the rest of Jake’s farm. Her heart wrenched at the prospect of Mee-Maw and Ryan’s place looking this run-down.
“Missy, you got your mind set on something, that’s for sure,” Jake told her between pants. “Didn’t hear me until I hollered loud enough to wake up the dead.”
“Sorry, I was just using your field as a cut-through to talk to Antonio—”
He nodded. “I figured. But you don’t have to. Antonio sent one of them young’uns up here with a note for you. Said not to go back there, make it too hard on the lot of ’em.”
The last little bit of hope within Becca shriveled, guilt swamping her. “Oh. I take it Murphy wasn’t pleased about my last foray?”
“Nope, not a whit. Antonio said Murphy nearly turned ’em all out, but he settled on just upping their rent.”
Becca compressed her lips. What a jerk.
“I don’t suppose Antonio included anything in the message besides a warning?”
Jake shrugged his bony shoulders. “Wouldn’t know. Don’t read a word of Spanish ’sides adios, amigo, but it was a pretty long note. I just got it this morning—figured I’d call you when I went in to get me a bite to eat. Had to look after the hogs. Geraldine is feeling a mite poorly today, bless ’er heart.”
Becca’s hope soared again. “A long note, you say? Can I get it?”
“Sure. I got it put in the house. I’ll just go get it.”
A few minutes later, Becca smoothed out the yellow-and-blue-lined paper. It was filled with cramped hand-writing, all in Spanish with spotty grammar. She made a quick scan of it, translating it in her head as she went.
Senorita Reynolds, don’t come back again. It is not safe, not for you, not for us. The boss has made it difficult for us after the conversation we had and after a few of my idiots decided not to listen to an old man’s counsel.
Here he’d written something she couldn’t quite make out—possibly some idiomatic expression about young people. She read on.
The man you want is not here anymore. A gringo brought the vines. We had nothing to do with bringing it here. But a couple of good-for-nothings of mine did the planting. They are not here anymore. Naturally such lazy men wouldn’t want to do an honest day’s labor. The gringo did not work for my boss, so I do not know him, but I think he is gone, as well. This is not so helpful, I know. If the two men who planted this vine were here, I would…
Here again Antonio’s cramped handwriting, combined with his idiomatic Spanish, made it impossible to be certain what his promise was to those men. But Becca assumed that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pleasant, not from his emphatic “and then they would surely tell you what you needed to know.”
He ended with another plea for her to leave them alone, unless and until, Murphy could no longer coerce them, but at that point, she knew the whole bunch of Antonio’s people would have moved on.
Would Murphy really turn out the migrant workers right before the last of the farm’s big push to harvest?
Of course he would. He never meant to harvest that crop anyway. For a million bucks in insurance money, he was the type to turn out his own mother. To him, what was a few migrant workers who live in substandard housing? The bulk of the migrants had already moved on, anyway.
“Any help?” Jake asked.
“Some. It confirms a few things for me. I just wish…”
“Aw, now. I can see it. You want to go talk to Antonio. Let me tell you, you won’t find a peep of a living creature down there if they don’t want you to. ’T’ain’t no good in it. ’Sides, you’re just askin’ to meet up with the wrong end of a shotgun—Murphy’s shotgun. He done warned me not to be letting people onto his land. Now, I don’t take orders from no man, but some things, they’re just flat foolish. If Antonio can help you some more, he will. You can count on it.”
Becca bit her lip, considering. Her instinct was to agree with Jake. If she didn’t push Antonio, depending on his immigration status, the old man might be a really good witness if this thing ever went to trial—civil or criminal.
But she had to take Murphy down first.
That meant finding J.T.
And whatever else Ryan might be hiding from her.
She glanced at her watch. Half past one. She had a good half day left…with no good leads that her dad hadn’t already started pursuing.
She’d spend the remaining part of the day trying to convince Ryan to trust her.
Or if he couldn’t find it in his heart to trust her…
Then saying goodbye.
* * *
“THAT’S RIGHT, that’s right…salt and pepper. You dip that chicken into them eggs. Then the buttermilk. Right, right…now you dredge it in the flour.”
Mee-Maw supervised from a spot at the kitchen table while Becca tried to
follow her directions.
“Mee-Maw, this is a lot of work for fried chicken,” Becca complained.
She was elbow-deep in flour, a platter of raw chicken still waiting to be double-dipped and dredged in the stuff. A huge cast-iron frying pan filled with shortening was heating on the stove.
“This ain’t any chicken, honey. This here is my say-I-love-you chicken. This is what got me out of every bit of hot water I ever got into with Mac. He had a mighty stubborn way of holding on to grudges, my Mac did.”
Say-I-love-you chicken. Do I love Ryan? It’s not like I’ve just met him. I know him—the parts of him he’ll let me know. So I love the parts I know—and I’ll take a chance on the rest…if he’ll take a chance on me.
Focusing on the project at hand, Becca started the complicated and onerous battering process with a short thigh. “So…your husband was stubborn? Like Ryan?”
“I see a lot of my Mac in Ryan. Course, Ryan’s more progressive-thinking. Mac was a good man, but he’d never trouble himself to wash a dish or change a single solitary one of my babies’ diapers. Still, I’ll eat my best gardening hat if Ryan won’t soften up with this chicken.”
“Guess it must have hurt to lose him, huh? Mr. Mac, I mean?”
The light in Mee-Maw’s face faded. “Nobody’s got a clue how much. I thought I was prepared—you don’t get to be my age and not think about how you might be in tomorrow’s obits. But when J.T. came up that afternoon with Mac in the back of the truck…I knew. I knew when I saw that truck coming up before sundown. But I wasn’t…prepared, you might say.”
The old woman sagged in her chair at the kitchen table and rubbed at an imaginary speck on the vinyl tablecloth. “I wake up every morning and it’s always this awful jolt of surprise that Mac’s not there beside me. No, you don’t ever…” She shook her head. “Jack tried to get me to sell this place after J.T. left. Wanted me to move into town. Town! Maybe I would get a ton of money for this place if I sold it to the likes of Murphy, but I’d never be happy anywhere but here. Mac worked this place out for me, gave me anything I ever wanted—he was a good man, a good husband. No, that’s my one comfort. I can look at everything here, and everything I see…it’s something that Mac loved.”
How would it be, Becca wondered, to be with the love of your life all your life?
Was the love of her life out in the very fields that Mee-Maw’s love had tended and wrestled into productivity for the first time over sixty years ago?
* * *
MEE-MAW HELPED her pack up a big picnic basket of the fried chicken, potato salad, butter beans and the biscuits they’d baked. After she’d tucked in a jug of tea and a stack of paper plates and plastic forks, Becca hefted the basket up in one hand.
“I never thought I’d be toting a picnic to a guy,” Becca said.
“And what’s wrong with it? ’Tain’t nothing. It’s not like you’re gonna turn into a meek little doormat who’ll be fetching his tea and taking off his shoes. Pshaw! I can’t see you doing that for no man. Now, go on. Sun’s setting and that man had not two bites of lunch today. He’s probably hungry.”
So Becca left Mee-Maw munching on her own chicken and headed for the barn. The tractor, though, was tucked into its usual spot.
Underneath it, jean-clad legs stuck out—along with a hand fumbling for a socket wrench. Wilbur looked up from where he was curled up nearby and thumped his tail.
“Ryan?”
Ryan froze, then slipped out from under the tractor. His icy-blue eyes regarded her in silence.
Becca swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Hey. I cooked you some supper.”
She indicated the basket.
Ryan didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Becca…look, maybe I could have said things differently today—”
She held up her hand. “Wait. Let’s…let’s call a truce, okay? Let’s not talk about Murphy. Or that dodder vine. Or the investigation. Let’s just find a spot to eat this…and talk.”
“Talk, huh?” Some of the wariness faded from his expression. “I was just finishing up here. The tractor broke down on me. It’s been awhile since I’ve had a picnic, but I could do with a break. What’s in there?”
Becca felt herself blush. “Mee-Maw’s fried chicken.”
Ryan raised his brows. “Mee-Maw makes two kinds of fried chicken. So, which recipe did you use?”
Her face heated up even more. “Um, she didn’t…it was the one with the eggs and all.”
“And you don’t remember what she called it?” The corners of his eyes crinkled.
“Hey, you want this chicken or not?”
“Sure. But I want to hear you say it. The name.”
“I don’t recall,” she mumbled, still blushing furiously. “Happy now?”
“I’d be happy with KFC…but I’ve died and gone to heaven with Mee-Maw’s chicken.”
Wilbur, too, looked interested in the chicken. He snuffled at the basket, ignoring Becca’s attempts to keep it out of sniffing range.
As Ryan washed up in the barn’s rough sink, Becca said, “I thought we’d go down by the pond, spread out a blanket.”
“What do you say to pulling up a nice bale of hay, instead?” he asked, drying his hands.
“Here?”
He pointed to the dim recesses of the barn’s rafters and grinned. “Unless I put Wilbur in the house, he’s going to drive us crazy with begging. Besides, where else is a good old boy going to take his date down on the farm? Won’t you step into my hayloft, ma’am?”
Becca chuckled. “Looks mighty full of hay.”
“The hay’s just a cover. Living here with Mee-Maw took some getting used to. This is my thinking place. When I need to worry over something or think something through, I just climb up there and wait until the answer comes.”
“I’m in need of a few answers.” That lump in her throat had come back. “Will your thinking place work for me?”
“Only one way to find out. Here. Let me take that.” Ryan relieved her of the picnic basket, then negotiated his way up the hayloft’s ladder with the basket. Becca followed him.
“Well? What do you think?”
She looked around the hayloft before answering. A big tattered blanket covered a thick layer of hay on the loft’s floor. A stack of books and an old pillow were by a bale of hay.
Becca shook a mock-stern finger at Ryan. “So this is where you’ve been hiding out when we’ve been thinking you were hard at work,” she teased.
“Nope, scout’s honor. So…that chicken? You about ready to eat?”
“Possessed with a one-track mind, aren’t you?” She grinned.
“More like a one-track stomach. I can’t believe you fried me chicken.”
“Well, I don’t know how good it’s going to be. Save any compliments until you taste it.”
They settled down on the blanket, the basket between them. Ryan dug out the containers of food. “Wish I could offer better than a hayloft—”
“No, no…it fits. Really. This is your special thinking place, after all, not just any hayloft.”
Ryan paused in spooning vegetables on Becca’s plate, his expression full of amazement. “You really don’t mind, do you? That’s what I like about you. You understand my way of thinking.”
“I know you love this place. This farm.”
“I do.” Ryan finished up with Becca’s plate, topping it off with a biscuit. He handed it to her. Their fingers brushed and Becca felt her face heat again.
He picked up his plate and frowned. “I never knew,” he said, “how stifled I was until I came back here. A suit and a tie—even a button-down shirt, are just too restrictive. But here I’m free. I’m not lying, now. It’s hard work, and I worry a lot, but I love what I do. I don’
t mind getting up in the morning. It’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was six years old. I never want to work anywhere else again.”
They ate in silence, except for Ryan’s appreciative mumbles over the chicken and the potato salad and the beans.
“So, did you want to grow up to be an investigator?” Ryan asked.
The question caught her off guard. “What?”
“It’s your turn, remember? This—” he indicated the supper and the hayloft with a sweep of his hand “—was supposed to be like a date, right? So I want to know about you. All about you.”
Becca’s supper suddenly transformed itself into a heavy brick in her stomach. What if she said something to Ryan that would reveal he knew her alter ego?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“DID YOU HAVE the magnifying glass and the little-kid detective kit when you were six? Back when I was tooling around on a toy tractor?” Ryan didn’t seem to realize that she had tensed at his questions.
“Uh, no. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. An astronaut, I remember that. And, um, let’s see…a doctor who discovered the cure for cancer.”
“Aimed high, didn’t you?”
“I guess. I wound up going to college and majoring in journalism. So I guess I wanted to be the next Woodward or Bernstein. But…it didn’t happen.”
“No?” Ryan took another bite of chicken.
“I worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a while, and then with the Associated Press for a bit longer—loved the travel—but then I started my own magazine. I’d been at it for maybe two years and was making some real headway in my initial loan when—” She broke off. The memory of the lawsuit and the misery it had brought down on her still stung.
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