Love Thy Neighbor

by Mark Gilleo

“This gotta do with the body up at Price’s farm?”

  Sheriff Laskey’s eyebrows jumped slightly. “News travels fast. Particularly to someone who is reading last week’s paper.”

  “Small county. Don’t need a paper for most of the happenings round here. Which one of them boys did you find up there?”

  “Jackson.”

  “Figured as much. I was betting it was J.P.”

  “Betting with whom?” Mrs. Dalton chimed in.

  “You seen him around?” the sheriff asked.

  “Time to time. Haven’t seen him for a few weeks. Haven’t seen his brother in over a year.”

  “You ever see him with another guy? Someone who wasn’t local?”

  “Sure.” Mr. Dalton paused to look at his wife who was listening intently. He looked out across the store at the Michelin girl who was still contemplating the soda cooler. Then he continued. “There was another guy who came in here with him a few times. Blond guy. Looked kind of like a surfer, though I can’t say that I’ve ever seen one in real life.”

  “Anything else?”

  Mr. Dalton looked over his shoulder at his wife for confirmation. Mrs. Dalton nodded her head slightly. “No. The guy was blond and had a few tattoos. But heck, everyone has a tattoo these days, so I don’t reckon that narrows down your options much.”

  “Not much.”

  The girl in the thick red jacket at the back of the store walked forward and put her Coke Classic on the counter.

  “You Ted Sherman’s kid?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said from the depths of the coat with its huge rolls of contained goose down.

  “You seen anything strange around here recently? People you don’t know?”

  “No, sir. No stranger than the usual.”

  Sheriff Laskey smiled.

  Mrs. Dalton spoke. “There was a young man in here about an hour ago. Grabbed a sandwich, got gas, and asked for directions to Charlottesville.”

  “Charlottesville?”

  “Seemed lost.”

  “You get many people in here asking for directions?”

  “Sure, we get plenty. But most of them are looking for a fishing hole or a hiking trail or the ski runs. City folk and people from Charlottesville mostly. But we don’t get many down here looking for Charlottesville. Not many people are traveling from the South. I got the impression he was from the city.”

  “What was he driving?”

  “A little blue import. Toyota or Honda. I don’t know much about cars. I think it had a Virginia Tech sticker in the window, but my eyesight is failing me. But it was a sticker with Virginia Tech colors anyway.”

  Mr. Dalton looked over his shoulder at his wife, surprised at the sudden sharing of observation skills he didn’t know she possessed. “Probably nothing. A rich kid down at Wintergreen for the weekend who took a wrong turn.”

  “Probably.”

  “So, Sheriff, how did he die?”

  “It looks like he hung himself. Tied off to one of the old trees in the apple orchard.” Laskey looked down at the counter and away from Mr. Dalton. “The critters got at him a bit. Wasn’t real nice.”

  “Jesus. Good thing his parents weren’t around to see that.”

  “God rest all their souls.”

  Officer Wallace fumbled for the cell phone in the passenger seat of his unmarked D.C. police cruiser. He was in the middle of DuPont Circle, heading towards Georgetown, and he answered on the second ring.

  “Detective Wallace.”

  “Good evening, Detective. This is Sheriff Laskey of the Nelson County Sheriff’s office.”

  “Good evening, Sheriff.”

  “I have some good news and some bad news on the person you asked me to find.”

  Detective Wallace knew what those words meant. But if the good sheriff was willing to pitch a slow ball right across the plate, it would have been unprofessional not to at least take a swing at it. “Let me guess. The good news is that you found him. The bad news is that he’s dead.”

  “Hung himself in an old apple orchard.”

  “Well, I certainly couldn’t have guessed that ending. How long has he been dead?”

  “A while.”

  “You sure it’s him?”

  “I don’t have DNA proof, if that is what you mean. Won’t have that for a while. But I know it was him. Had on a big J.P. belt buckle. Known that kid his whole life. It was him.”

  “Let me know when you have confirmation, if you don’t mind. Not that I don’t believe you.”

  “Sure thing, Detective. There was something else. Two things actually. First, it seems as if the deceased had been growing something on his farm.”

  “Sounds like his hobby. That’s what sent him to Petersburg.”

  “It wasn’t marijuana this time. I’m not sure what it is exactly. Big tall plants that look like weeds. But they were grown in rows, real orderly. Most of them are dead of course, being that it’s winter. There were some seeds on the ground that I’m going to have someone take a look at. See if they can tell me what they are.”

  “What was the second thing?”

  “There was an open Koran on the dining room table of the house.”

  “A Koran?”

  “Yep. Don’t think I have ever seen one before. Fancy book. Gold writing on the cover. Arabic on one side of the page and an English translation on the other. At least I think it was Arabic.”

  “You have a Muslim community there in Nelson?”

  “Detective, this is King James Bible country. But I don’t think Jackson Price had been going to church.”

  “Sounds like he was praying for something.”

  Laskey was leaning over his desk looking at a stack of notes when Debbie Ingle entered and added another to the pile. Debbie, the sheriff office’s lone secretary and unarmed employee, exited the room quietly. The sheriff was thinking and she knew that meant to leave him alone. Debbie was in her forties but looked younger with her blonde hair in a short earlobe-length cut. She was married to a local math teacher who was a sort of a renaissance man among Nelson County circles. He taught math, but was also known for his poetry and plumbing prowess.

  Debbie sat behind her large wood desk, dressed in her usual work attire — black slacks and a white button up blouse. She occasionally mixed in a skirt when she was feeling sexy, but the color scheme never changed. It was like working with a waitress. But what she lacked in fashion sense, she made up for in organization. She took phone calls, kept records, and made copies of everything that passed through her hands. Her husband had taught her how to use a computer and half of the office’s files were now scanned and saved electronically.

  “Did they get J.P.’s body to the medical examiner’s yet?” Laskey asked from the next room in a loud but professional voice.

  “I haven’t heard anything, but I will make a call and check,” Debbie answered as the sheriff came from his office in the back room.

  “I need to check on something. I’ll be back in an hour or so. Going over to the Seed and Feed.”

  “You walking?” Debbie asked as the sheriff headed towards the front door, the opposite direction from his car parked in the lot behind the building.

  “Yep. Let’s call it a foot patrol,” the sheriff said pulling open the door.

  “Ok, Sheriff. I’ll radio you if I hear anything.”

  “And see if anyone knows where we can reach Jackson’s two-bit brother. I need to notify next of kin, if I can find him.”

  Lovington Seed and Feed was a half-mile from the sheriff’s office, past the gas station and just beyond a large field that had once been a horse stable but was now overrun with waist-high weeds. The field offered a nice backdrop for the Seed and Feed, the large red barn and slightly leaning silo providing a picturesque scene for any artist who was able to envision the field of weeds as a swath of winter wheat.

  The sheriff threw in another chew of Red Man and stood on the sidewalk for a minute, staring up and down the “main drag,” a street that wa
s less of the first and more of the latter.

  Kenny Buckner, dressed in jeans, work boots, and a green flannel shirt, grabbed the last bale of hay and threw it in the back of the red Ford 150 pickup. He tossed the rope from one side of the truck bed to the other and proceeded to hogtie the half-dozen blocks of hay.

  “Good morning, Kenny.”

  “Good morning, Sheriff.”

  “How’s business?”

  “Still afloat. Been a cold winter, which hurts us a bit, but we’ll make it.”

  “Sometimes making it is enough.”

  Kenny finished tying the load in the truck and tugged at the taut ropes one last time.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee, Sheriff?”

  “As long as it’s inside.”

  Kenny Buckner put two Styrofoam cups of coffee on the table in the small Seed and Feed office. Sheriff Laskey reached into the pocket of his jacket and removed an evidence bag. “Ever seen these before?” he asked, putting the bag on the table.

  “Is that evidence? Isn’t it against protocol to walk around with evidence?”

  “What have you been watching, CSI?”

  “Yeah. The wife loves it. Thought she was a forensic specialist after the first season.”

  Sheriff nodded towards the bag. “Got those off the Price’s farm. Seems they were growing them. But I’m not sure what they are.”

  “Sorry to hear about J.P. He and my son were friends until J.P got the devil in him. They say he killed himself.”

  “That’s what it looks like. The body is on the way over to the medical examiner’s for confirmation. Been a long day.”

  Kenny Buckner took a sip of coffee and opened the bag. He reached in and held one of the seeds to the light. “Looks a bit like a coffee bean.”

  “Thought the same thing myself.”

  Kenny rolled the bean in his finger and then pulled out his buck knife from the sheath on his waist. “Do you mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Kenny pushed down hard on the seed and it cracked under the pressure of the sharp blade. Kenny wiped the small residue of oil off the blade onto his dirty jeans. Each man picked up half of the seed.

  “Looks like a seed to me. Nothing strange.”

  “I agree. Except for the fact that Jackson Price was growing them on the family farm. And there ain’t been nothing legal growing on that farm since the death of J.P.’s father.”

  Chapter 37

  Clark had stopped to look at his discovery twenty minutes north of Charlottesville. The multi-colored gravel he had found all over the yard he had now re-classified as a seed or a bean. His precious cargo in need of an explanation was currently riding shotgun in the cup holder of his Honda Civic. The drive back to D.C. took just over three hours, half as long as it took him to find the Price family farm on his journey down the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  His jaunt to Nelson County generated more questions. Who the hell was calling both his neighbor and a farm in Virginia? Why? Right now the only clues he had were the three large beans vibrating in the cup holder near the parking brake. The objects made him nervous, curious. As the lines in the road zoomed passed, Clark imagined himself getting in an accident, losing his beans in a sea of broken glass and twisted metal, mumbling to ambulance personal to locate his magic beans because he had questions he wanted answers to.

  As his mind raced, he did his best to keep his foot light. He felt relief at the first sign for the Beltway. There was something about coming home, even when home was measured at five miles per hour, bumper-to-bumper.

  The small print on the sign outside the Merrifield Garden Center on Lee Highway read, “If you can’t find it here, we’ll get it for you. If we can’t get it for you, it can’t be found.”

  Clark pulled in at the far end of the parking lot near the edge of the white one-story building. Three large greenhouses in the back of the lot stared down at the shorter white building. Beyond the greenhouses, acres of bushes, plants, trees, and sod stretched in three directions.

  The Merrifield Garden Center was holding onto some of the most prime real estate in the region. A quarter mile from the Dunn Loring Metro station, development surrounded the nursery on three sides. But Merrifield Garden Center wasn’t in the selling-out business. They were in the growing business. And with most of the other garden centers and nurseries pushed into the far limits of the suburbs, Merrifield Garden Center had, through attrition, become a monopoly of sorts.

  The automatic doors in the front of the store opened and Clark smiled at the middle-aged woman working as the greeter and director of traffic. “Can I help you find something today?”

  “Yes, I’m looking for your seed section.”

  “Seeds are in the far back right of the store, just before the door to the fertilizers.”

  “So just follow my nose?”

  “I guess you could,” the woman answered with a smile.

  Clark meandered through the store, checking out the selection of potted flowers with his mother in mind. Then his mind moved on to Lisa and he knew he would end up with two different arrangements. He passed a small display of garden pools, complete with fish, and turned left at the large palm tree which was as out of place in the D.C. winter as he was with a handful of beans.

  The wall of seeds stretched forty feet and Clark whistled quietly as he took in the view. There were hundreds of bags hanging on shiny silver metal hooks. Clark walked down the wall, looking over the heads and shoulders of other patrons who were more certain about their horticultural needs. The seeds were listed in alphabetical order which did Clark no good as he had no idea what he had. A handwritten sign hung on the hook where marigolds were previously sold. The sign read “Due to a recent surge in the purposeful ingestion of marigold seeds for recreational use, we will no longer be carrying them.”

  Clark spent twenty minutes pulling bags from the display on the wall and comparing them to the bean in his hand. After reaching the midway point in the wall, he gave up and looked for help. In the hanging plant section he found the same middle-aged woman who had greeted him at the front door and cornered her as she finished doling out advice to a yuppie with a cartful of his wife’s marching orders.

  “Did you find the seeds you were looking for?” she asked.

  “No, I sure didn’t. Maybe you would know what kind of seed this is,” Clark said as he pulled one from his pocket.

  The woman picked up the almost dime-sized seed and held it towards the light. She ran her fingers across the unusually textured skin and she admired the chocolate swirl appearance. “I don’t know what this is. But it sure looks more like a bean than a seed.”

  “Maybe it is a bean. I’m not even sure what the difference is, really. I don’t know much about gardening.”

  “I know someone who does. Follow me,” she said. She marched through a set of double doors and past a long stretch of cacti that lined a single shelf on the wall. Head up, apron flapping, she continued walking, her eyes focused forward on the bean firmly pinched between her forefinger and thumb.

  Without stopping she turned the corner through an “Employees Only” doorway and Clark followed closely behind. She passed through a sparsely decorated break-room with a round white table and a vending machine, and headed straight towards an office on the other side of the room. She stopped at the doorway and rapped slightly on the frame.

  “Jerry, there is someone here who has a question maybe you can answer for him.”

  “Send him in.”

  “You’re in good hands now. Jerry will take care of you.” The woman pressed the bean into Clark’s hand. Her job finished, she disappeared.

  Clark stepped into the office and found himself staring at the top of Jerry’s head as the man looked through a magnifying glass. Jerry paused and looked up at Clark, whose head snapped back a little in reaction to the thickest set of eyeglasses he had ever seen. Jerry had a chiseled face and dirty muscular hands. The kind of hands you would expect from a man who spent a lifetime in a
garden center. His well-kept black curly hair wrapped around the top of his ears. The man needed a new pair of glasses.

  “Hi, Jerry. Nice to meet you. I’m Clark.”

  “Clark, grab a seat,” Jerry said, now looking back through the magnifying glass. “I will be with you in just one second.”

  “What are you looking at?” Clark asked after a minute of silence.

  “Not exactly sure yet. I’m trying to figure out what kind of herbivorous insect has been nibbling on my ferns like a salad. Never seen this character before.”

  “Are you a bug specialist?”

  Jerry smiled. “Nope, not a bug specialist. I own this place. And as its owner I am trying to determine just what’s eating my inventory.”

  Clark smiled back and Jerry pushed the magnifying glass to the corner of his cluttered desk. Jerry looked up again and Clark fought the urge to tell him his glasses made him look like the bug he was trying to identify. Clark took in the room. A bookcase on the wall sagged under the weight of a hodgepodge of topics from lumberjacking to flowering perennials to insecticides.

  “What can I help you with Clark?”

  “I was wondering if you knew what kind of bean or seed this is?”

  Clark put the seed on the table and Jerry picked it up with his thick fingers. Dirt was encrusted under the edge of his nails, the skin on his hands was rough and cracked. “Where did you get this?”

  “Found it on a farm in Virginia.”

  “And you have no idea what it is?”

  “None.”

  Jerry got up from his seat and headed for the bookcase. He ran his fingers along the spine of his books as he read, whispering to himself as he went along. Not this one. Not that one. There might be something in here.

  He grabbed a black covered book from the middle of the shelf and placed it on a pile of papers on his desk. He turned the pages deliberately, scanning every picture. “If that is what I think it is, you may want to keep it quiet.”

  “Why’s that?” Clark asked.

  Before he could answer, Jerry poked his finger down on one of the pages. “Right here. I think this is what we’re talking about.”