A Secret in the Pumpkin Patch

by Elizabeth Ashby

  From what I'd read while preparing for my new job, the state's agricultural inspectors were vastly overworked and unable to cover even a fraction of the businesses they were supposed to oversee, so why waste time with a handful of small food producers that were mostly, if not completely, exempt from state regulations?

  Sturgeon was still sputtering and trying to come up with something that might be more convincing than anything else he'd said so far. Instead of waiting for him to get his thoughts together, I said, "And I don't think your supervisor will believe you either when I call him tomorrow. I'd advise you to not make the situation any worse. Write up all the reports you want, but you'd better make sure they're factual and they're not leaked to the press. And stay away from Scott Vicente."

  "You can't make me." He patted the pocket with his tablet as if to reassure himself that it was safe and then crossed his arms over his chest.

  Seriously? He sounded like a four-year-old toddler who didn't want to eat his peas. Perhaps if I knew what the scandal was that had caused him to leave Danger Cove, I'd feel more sympathetic, but for the moment, I didn't care. I'd completely run out of patience with his childishness.

  "You're right that I can't physically keep you away from the turkey pen, but I can get a police officer to accompany you on your rounds and observe any threats you make against my vendors. It really would be better if you just left."

  "No. I'm not doing anything you tell me to."

  I blinked. Sturgeon had regressed even further now, from a four-year-old to what I remembered of my half-siblings when they'd been in their terrible twos and their tantrums had consisted of shouting "no" to anything I asked them to do, even when it was something that they liked doing. There wasn't any reasoning with someone like that, and unlike my siblings when I'd been babysitting, the inspector couldn't be put into a time-out until he was ready to apologize and behave in a civilized manner.

  "Very well," I said, getting out my phone to text Fred Fields. I hadn't wanted it to come to this, but Sturgeon had gone too far with his threat of false charges of e. coli. "Looks like we'll just have to do this the hard way."

  He snorted and let his arms drop to his sides as he turned to stomp off in the direction of the haunted house. I wasn't sure what point he thought he was making, since he clearly didn't have any authority over the nonagricultural activity there. I watched to see what he would do next and to make sure he wasn't going to double back immediately to harass either the pumpkin farmer or the turkey farmer. Perhaps he was just planning to take a walk on the beach beyond the haunted house in order to calm down. In that case, it might not be necessary to create a scene by having Fred Fields escort the inspector off the premises.

  I decided not to text Fields, creating a record that couldn't be retracted, but to go find him and discuss it in person. Maybe he'd have a better idea for how to handle the situation.

  I headed back toward the market, glancing over my shoulder occasionally to make sure Sturgeon hadn't turned around. What if he hadn't just been looking to stir up a little trouble but had come to Danger Cove prepared to shut the market down, even if he'd had to make up the evidence against us?

  Until now, I'd been thinking the worst he could do was to write a bunch of angry reports that no one would pay any attention to, or perhaps go beyond his actual authority and issue an order that no one would enforce, trying to shut down the market. But what if I'd underestimated how far he'd go to carry out his vendetta against Danger Cove? After all, I only had his word for it that he'd been assigned to inspect the market here. Given how uninterested the state's Department of Agriculture had been in inspecting the market or even meeting with me before this weekend, it seemed odd that when they suddenly found it necessary to send an inspector, it was one who was clearly biased against the town.

  What if Sturgeon hadn't actually been assigned to the market but had come here on his own initiative, flashing his identification card, counting on it to scare me into shutting down the market? When he'd realized I wouldn't be that easily pushed around, what else might he have done to destroy the market? Would he have been angry enough to kill someone like me, who represented the town he despised? He might not have intended to go that far, but my refusal to follow his instructions must have seemed like a repetition of the trauma he'd apparently experienced when he'd been fired from his long-ago job here in Danger Cove, and it might have triggered an irrational response. He could have followed Angela up to the cliff, thinking she was me, perhaps called out my name, intending just to talk to me, but then when she didn't respond to my name, he'd thought I was ignoring him, and he'd taken it as a further affront to him by the town. That could have caused him to lose what little was left of his self-control. He could have lashed out, and by the time he'd realized his mistake, Angela would have been dead at the base of the cliff.

  I didn't have proof, of course, and unlike Sweetwater, I wasn't foolish enough to directly challenge potential suspects to convince me of their innocence. I was definitely going to mention my suspicion to Merle, though, and if he thought my theory made sense, then I'd contact Detective Marshall to look into it.

  Unfortunately, getting Marshall to listen to me might be as impossible as convincing Sturgeon that Danger Cove was, as its residents always claimed, the friendliest town in the Pacific Northwest. As far as I knew, Marshall was still stuck on his suicide theory, but even if he'd come around to thinking Angela had been murdered, he'd shown himself to be extremely deferential to the state agricultural inspector. I'd have a better chance of convincing Marshall that someone like Comstock had killed Angela than that Sturgeon had done it.

  More accurately, Merle would have a better chance of convincing the detective to look into other suspects than I would. I needed his help. And it would probably be wise not to mention, even to Merle, my brief bit of paranoia when I'd considered the possibility that Fred Fields could have been a vigilante cop.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I managed to get to the Pear Stirpes Orchard stall without any new crises to delay me or send me into a renewed state of almost-panic. The reprieve was extremely welcome. A vengeful inspector, a fire at the demonstration grill, and a dead cosplayer were plenty of crises for an entire season, let alone a single weekend.

  I did like working with the vendors and their customers, but right now I was more than ready for some time off from this job. The pear harvest wasn't quite finished yet, and there would still be some routine work to do in the orchard over the coming months, with pruning in the winter and daily attention to the goats, but I was hopeful Merle and I could arrange to do some traveling in the off-season. It might be a challenge to convince JT to watch over the goats while we were gone, but I already had the beginnings of a plan in the works for that. JT's obsession with his brewing made him easy to bribe.

  "I need a drink," I told Merle as I flopped into one of the chairs at the back of his stall.

  He obligingly fetched me a bottle from the cooler. Sweet, not hard. I needed my wits about me for the last two hours of the market.

  "How bad is it?" he asked, sitting beside me.

  "Buzz thinks I'm a serial killer, Sturgeon is hoping I'm a serial killer, and there might actually be a serial killer—or at least a wannabe one—still on the loose and targeting me. So, pretty bad."

  "I was hoping I could assure you I'd heard worse in the course of my career, but I'm afraid that tops everything I can think of."

  I savored a long swallow of my drink before saying, "It gets worse. As far as I can tell, Detective Marshall still thinks it was suicide, and he thinks one of my suspects—the state agricultural inspector—is above suspicion."

  "I would have thought someone like your ex-client would have been a more likely suspect."

  "He was, until I remembered he doesn't drive, so he couldn't have been the one chasing me with an SUV yesterday." I watched idly as JT helped a customer pick out some pears. "Have you run into Wayne Comstock? Big, good-looking but grim guy, asking people what they
know about Angela's death? Meri Sinclair thinks he looks like he belongs in a noir mystery."

  "I saw him talking to Jim Sweetwater this morning. Didn't hear what it was about."

  I groaned. "Well, he's a private investigator. Maybe. I was planning to ask if you could find out for sure. He won't tell me who his client is, and he lied about not being here when Angela died. Said he only started his investigation today, but Meri saw him yesterday. And he was poking around down near where Angela's spyglass was found. At least, I think it was hers. It certainly looked like it. I'm not an expert, but it was pretty obvious that hers was real brass, not some cheap plastic prop. There were plenty of other pirates around this weekend, but none with anything that expensive as part of their costumes."

  "Angela came from a wealthy family. They don't flaunt it, but she definitely would have had plenty of disposable income to spend on her costumes."

  I gave him a curious look. I wasn't jealous of Angela, exactly, but it seemed odd that Merle had known so much about the young woman. "When did you become such an expert on Angela Henderson?"

  Merle shrugged. "I checked her out after she gave you a hard time on Labor Day weekend. Thought it might be good to know what pushback you might get if you kicked her out of the market."

  No wonder I found Merle so appealing. He was an even bigger believer in advance planning than I was.

  "What else do you know about her, besides her financial status?"

  "Not much." Merle paused a moment before ticking off his bits of information on his fingers. "She was twenty-two, went to Washington State University briefly in the environmental studies program but dropped out of college to come home and work in her parents' employment agency. She went to science fiction and fantasy conferences several times a year, and she'd gotten enough speeding tickets to lose her driver's license."

  "That's all, huh?" I teased.

  "It seemed sufficient for our purposes," he said. "It's one thing to be prepared and another to research something to death just to run up billable hours. Especially when I'm not billing for those hours."

  "I do appreciate your looking out for me and the market," I assured him. Especially since he'd been so subtle about it, I hadn't even known he'd done it. "I don't suppose you checked out anyone else who'd be coming to the market for the first time this weekend while you were at it, did you? Like the turkey farmer, Scott Vicente? I hear he's got a juvenile record."

  Merle waved a hand dismissively. "Everyone in town knows about that. Teenaged stupidity, long in the past."

  "It's not entirely relegated to the past." I told him about what Sturgeon had done to bring up the old news, spreading it all over social media, where the farmer's out-of-town clients might see it. "Scott blamed me at first, but he apologized later. Are you absolutely sure his drug use is all in the past? I can't help thinking that Angela's spyglass was found just a few feet from the turkey pen."

  "Why would Scott want to kill you because of something Sturgeon did?"

  "Originally he thought I'd told Sturgeon about the juvenile record. Scott said he only found out about the social media posts last night, but what if he saw them earlier? They'd been posted early in the morning. Scott could have seen someone he thought was me up on the cliff from where he was in the garden, raced up there to confront me, lost his temper, and then realized too late that he'd attacked the wrong person."

  "You could probably come up with a scenario like that for just about everyone here at the market."

  "Have I really upset all the vendors to the point where they want to kill me? I thought I had pretty good relationships with most of the vendors."

  "You do," Merle said in a reassuring tone that was more professional than boyfriend-like. "I just meant that it might be more helpful to exclude possibilities among the vendors than to figure out ways to include more suspects."

  "You mean I should be running around demanding alibis from everyone? Probably not a good plan." I looked to my right, where Jim Sweetwater was conspicuously absent, while his potatoes, carrots, and radishes were conspicuously not absent. "I kicked Sweetwater out of the market a few minutes ago for meddling in the police investigation. I would have waited to discuss it with you, but he flat-out rejected my request to stop annoying the detective, who'd threatened to shut down next year's market season if there was any more meddling. I told Sweetwater what the consequences could be for the market, but he didn't care. He was practically daring me to ban him."

  "I'll back you up." Merle followed my gaze. "I wonder if Sweetwater has an alibi for yesterday's attacks."

  "Jim Sweetwater?" I asked incredulously. "You think he might have killed Angela? And tried to kill me? That would have required him to actually take action instead of making pronouncements about how someone else should do something. Even the high school kids can tell you he never really does anything except talk."

  "Just playing devil's advocate," Merle said mildly. "It's not like it takes all that much planning to push someone off a cliff. And if you're right that Angela was killed by mistake, the killer isn't very competent. He got the wrong person with his first try, and he missed on his second. That sounds pretty Sweetwater-ish."

  I thought about it, but I just couldn't picture Sweetwater doing anything that he didn't first talk about or that he couldn't claim credit for accomplishing. "He's not exactly inept. It's more just that he's passive. If it was possible to complain someone to death, I'd believe he did it, but I can't picture him pushing anyone off a cliff. And while people are often desperate to get away from him, I doubt Angela would have jumped off a cliff to avoid him. She would have just told him to shut up—probably using stronger language than that—and then stomped away."

  "You're not wrong."

  "I just wish there were something I could do to help find her killer," I said. "Without getting in the way of the police."

  "And without getting yourself attacked again," Merle insisted. "That's important too, and I don't see what you can do that the police can't."

  "I know," I said. "I just need to be irrational and illogical every once in a while, and now seemed like an appropriate time, since planning and logic aren't getting me anywhere."

  We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes until I remembered the other thing I wanted to ask Merle about. "Did Cary tell you about his new job?"

  Merle shook his head. "Just that he has one and it's a secret."

  "Doesn't that worry you?" I asked. "He seems anxious about it. He had to do some sort of errand for the job during a break today, and he wouldn't tell me what he was doing. What if someone's asking him to do something illegal? He might be too easily led astray."

  "I'll talk to him after the market closes, while we're all packing up."

  "Thanks."

  "Do you want to go back to the orchard before coming back for the bonfires and folk dancing?"

  "I was planning on it," I said.

  "You know," he said casually, "you don't have to move back into the caretaker's cabin if you'd rather stay in the main house. Either temporarily until Angela's killer is caught or more permanently."

  "I'd been hoping Detective Marshall would make some progress in his investigation today, so I wouldn't have to worry about someone coming after me at home," I said, ignoring the bigger question of whether I was ready to move in with Merle for reasons unrelated to my personal safety. I had too much on my mind right now to make any major decisions, so I needed more time to think about taking such a major step. Time that we'd have in abundance once this weekend was over. Especially if the mayor listened to Sweetwater's complaints and decided not to renew my contract. "It's probably best that I not live alone until Angela's case is closed, but we can talk about it some more tonight. Right now, I need to go find Fred Fields and make sure both Jim Sweetwater and Lew Sturgeon have left the market."

  "The state agricultural inspector?" Merle's eyebrows rose. "You banned him too?"

  "That was something else I meant to discuss with you before I did it, b
ut there wasn't time," I said. "Sturgeon pretty much admitted he was here in order to carry out some sort of vendetta against Danger Cove, and I was convinced he was going to do some serious damage to the market as a whole and some of the individual vendors if he didn't leave right away. He'd spent more than enough time here this weekend to have already done any inspections that actually needed to be done, so he couldn't have any legitimate reason to stay any longer. I'm planning to talk to his supervisor later in the week. Maybe you'll join the call with me?"

  Merle nodded. "It sounds like we're going to have a lot to discuss after this weekend."

  * * *

  I would have liked to stay in my safe little hidey-hole at the back of the Pear Stirpes Orchard stall, but I needed to make sure that the two troublemakers—Sweetwater and Sturgeon—had left. Besides, it was coming up on the end of the day, and I needed to make my final rounds of the market.

  I stood up to leave, and JT came over to announce he was going back to the orchard to check on his latest batch of perry, and Merle would have to take over working with the customers. It wasn't quite closing time, but virtually all of the stock of the prior year's beverages had been sold, along with every last one of the fresh pears, so Merle decided to shut down his stall and go find out why Cary was being so secretive about his new job.

  I left Merle behind to close up the stall while I went looking for Officer Fred Fields so I could let him know that both Jim Sweetwater and Lew Sturgeon were personae non gratae. A quick glance confirmed that his bobby's helmet wasn't anywhere within the main market, so I headed down the Memorial Walkway to where the extra vendors were set up. From there, most of the lighthouse grounds were easily visible, so that was where Fields tended to do most of his patrolling.

  I stopped in front of the closed Dangerous Reads tent to make sure no one had taken advantage of Meri's absence to cause trouble for her. I pulled back the door flap to peer inside, but it was deserted, as it should have been. I turned my back on the tent and searched the area in front of me.