Hidden Path

by Melissa F. Miller

  He waved the mat up and down, over the porch railing, letting the wind help do the job. A clump of mud fell to the porch at his feet. He draped the mat over the railing and stooped to pick up the mud. As he stood to pitch it into the dirt underneath the porch, something caught his eye. The lump was dotted with cream-colored, slightly flattened seeds, ranging in size from one-third to three-quarters of an inch.

  Lima bean seeds.

  He picked them out of the earth, brushing the loose mud off with his fingertips. He pocketed four of the seeds and one hard, rock-like nugget of mud. Then he retrieved the doormat and went inside.

  “The tea’s ready.” Feng gestured toward the small, scarred wooden table against the wall where he’d laid out the tea tray.

  Bodhi replaced the mat and washed his hands at the sink. He joined Feng at the table.

  “Thank you.”

  Feng nodded. “Of course.”

  “You’re in charge of the garden?”

  “Mother Nature’s in charge of the garden, but I help her out. I enjoy working with my hands. The smell of fresh dirt and green shoots is my favorite perfume.” He smiled.

  “Were you a gardener, before?” Bodhi knew the novice would understand that he was asking about his life before he took up his robes.

  Feng laughed. “No. I was an insurance adjuster in Sacramento. I didn’t have a houseplant, let alone a garden.”

  “That’s a big change.”

  Feng sipped his tea. “It’s been a good change. Aside from having the opportunity to learn so much here at the center, this place suits me.”

  “Onatah?”

  “Yes. I like the pace, the feeling of community among the farmers, and the simpler relationship between a man and his food. It feels as if this is the way it’s meant to be. Picking dinner from the garden, not from the Whole Foods salad bar.”

  Bodhi didn’t doubt the man’s sincerity. But the idyllic, bucolic picture he painted didn’t square with everything Clark, Clausen, and Thurman had told him about big business, agri-technology and world domination.

  This wasn’t the time to engage him in a philosophical discussion about designer seed lines and drop management software, though. Bodhi had actual questions that needed answering.

  “Do you grow lima beans here?”

  Feng furrowed his forehead. “No. Maybe in a few years. I’m hoping to clear a plot for the three sisters. Why do you ask?”

  “The three sisters?”

  “That’s what the Iroquois called corn, beans, and squash. Most, maybe all, of the Native American tribes grew them together and used them together in cooking. The three plants grow best when planted together because they’re interdependent and they provide complete nutrition. All from one plot.”

  “How does that work? The interdependence, I mean?”

  “The corn is tall. And the beans—usually lima beans or pole beans—need something to climb as they grow. So the cornstalks fit the bill. The corn supports the growing beans. Then the beans do something called nitrogen fixation. Do you know what that is?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Bodhi admitted.

  Feng was warming to his subject now. He leaned across the table, his eyes bright. “There’s a bacterium that colonizes the roots of bean plants and pulls nitrogen from the air, converting it to ammonia in the soil. This fertilizes the soil for all three plants. It’s brilliant.”

  “And the squash?”

  “Squash is a sprawling plant with big leaves. So the squash leaves keep the soil moist and cool, shading it from the sun and preventing weed growth. And squash have prickly stems. So animals avoid the plants.”

  Bodhi nodded, impressed. The three sisters appeared to have the perfect mutually beneficial arrangement. “It sounds as if they’d be worth planting that way. Do many of the farmers still use the system?”

  Feng’s face clouded. “No. Even the organic farmers are obsessed with yield, yield, yield. Corn is king around here. Beans and squash would take up valuable inches of soil. They want to plant ‘fencerow to fencerow,’ as they like to say. Bigger is always better. And of course the company farmers would laugh themselves silly at the thought of trading their chemicals, genetic marvels, and computerized watering systems for Native American companion planting methods that are hundreds of years old, maybe even older.”

  Feng’s voice was laced with bitterness and something more—despair, anger? Bodhi couldn’t tell. Before he could respond, the monk stood.

  “I’ve enjoyed talking with you. I need to go prepare for my day.”

  “I enjoyed it, too. Thank you for the tea and for explaining about the three sisters. I hope you have a peaceful day.”

  Feng met his eyes. For a moment, Bodhi thought he was going to share something important—a secret dream or fear, perhaps. But the moment passed. Feng’s expression closed off. He nodded, took the tea tray to the sink, and left the room.

  Bodhi felt around in his pocket and removed a lima bean seed. He balanced it in his palm and looked down at it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “I don’t have time to talk to you about lima beans, Dr. King.” Elise Clausen’s voice was polite, but her strained patience was clear.

  Agent Thurman clasped a hand on Bodhi’s shoulder. “Don’t mind her. She was up all night trying to break that code.”

  Thurman was unnaturally cheerful for a man who’d spent the night in a barn. Especially considering he’d had Clausen for company.

  “Can you answer my question, then?”

  Thurman tapped a finger against his lips. “You want to know who around here grows lima beans, right?”

  “Not exactly. I’m looking for a list of farmers—or even home gardeners—who grow three sisters companion gardens.”

  “And the three sisters are corn, beans, and squash, correct?”

  “Right.”

  Thurman lifted his shoulders then dropped them in an exaggerated shrug. “I wouldn’t know. They wouldn’t be on our radar unless hostile foreign governments are trying to hack into their computers to access their gardening plans. But, I’m pretty sure those plans are freely accessible at every hipster co-op and vegetarian potluck in the country.”

  “And on the internet. And in readily available gardening magazines. And fourth grade textbooks,” Clausen added without lifting her eyes from the diary.

  “Not exactly breakthroughs in modern science you’re talking about,” Thurman concluded.

  Bodhi exhaled. “There were lima bean seeds on the bottoms of Jason Durbin’s shoes,” he reminded them.

  “Right, and leaving Chief Clark’s belief that Durbin wouldn’t trespass aside, he did live next door to a lima bean farmer.”

  Thurman airily dismissed the only piece of actionable evidence Bodhi had found during the autopsy as if it was no great shakes. Which, Bodhi was willing to concede, it may not have been. But it was the only shakes they had, as it were.

  Bodhi was about to remind the agents of this not insignificant fact, but the man door to the barn opened and Chief Clark hurried inside, stamping the dirt off her boots.

  “Morning,” she said crisply.

  “She might know,” Thurman said to Bodhi. “Morning, Chief.”

  Clausen looked up and nodded a greeting to the police chief.

  “What might I know?”

  “Who around here maintains a three sisters garden,” Bodhi said.

  She pulled a face. “I’d have to think about it. But right now, we’ve got a bigger issue to deal with.”

  “Not another dead body?” Bodhi asked, steeling himself for her response.

  “No, not yet, at least. But I just walked through my crime scene—”

  “Which one?” Thurman countered. “There are three of them, after all.”

  “This one, Agent Thurman. The meadow where Dr. King found your Chinese spy.”

  “And?”

  “And someone spent a fair amount of time there. Last night, if I had to guess. The grass was disturbed, and so was my c
rime scene tape.”

  Clausen closed the journal. Thurman’s happy-go-lucky grin slid off his face.

  “Fyodorovych?” Clausen asked.

  “It’s almost got to be, doesn’t it?”

  Bodhi interjected. “One of the monks thought he saw someone or something moving in the trees last night. Then he said he heard an engine running in the woods, so I assumed it was you two circling back to the barn.”

  “The car was us, most likely us, but Thurman stayed in the car until we were in the clearing,” Clausen said.

  “That Russian SOB was watching us?” Thurman marveled, half-impressed, half-outraged. “Take me to the spot,” he said to Chief Clark.

  “What about your partner?”

  “She’s not going to be any use until she cracks that code. She can stay here with Dr. King. We won’t be long.”

  Thurman pulled on his jacket and followed Chief Clark out the door.

  Bodhi watched Clausen work. Her blond head was bent over the encrypted book. Scraps of paper covered the workbench she’d commandeered as her makeshift desk. When she stopped scribbling on the scraps, she chewed on her pencil, holding it sideways between her teeth.

  After about a minute, she must have felt him studying her. She raised her head and blinked at him.

  “What?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to break your concentration. You’re very focused.”

  Her lips curved into a smile. “Focused, hmm? I think you’re being polite. Charlie would say you mean intense. Or single-minded. Or relentless.”

  “None of those is a bad trait.”

  “Not for a man. But for a woman …” she trailed off.

  Bodhi wasn’t in the business of psychoanalyzing federal intelligence agents. He said nothing.

  “Spit it out,” she demanded.

  “Spit what out?”

  “You’ve got something to say. You look like you’re going to burst.”

  “I don’t know you, but you do come across as sort of …”

  “Dour and humorless?”

  “Uh, serious. I’d say serious.”

  She blew a stray tendril of hair out of her face. “I’m a conventionally attractive single woman working as a federal law enforcement agent. I have certain limitations on my ability to be winning, charming, or funny. Charlie Thurman, lacking such constraints, is well-loved by everyone he meets. And as his partner, I instantly become the foil. The Felix Unger to Oscar Madison; the Bert to his Ernie. You get the idea.”

  Picturing Agent Elise Clausen as a bright yellow puppet did him in, and he chuckled at the image before quickly regaining his composure in response to Clausen’s glare.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I made the mistake of visualizing you as Bert. Anyway, are you making any progress?” He gestured toward the book.

  She sighed. “First, I thought it was a substitution cipher, but that’s not feasible.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, there’s not a Chinese alphabet. Written Chinese is a logosyllabic language. The characters function similar to glyphs, and each syllable in a word is represented by one character. I’ve heard estimates that there are as many as fifty thousand characters.”

  “But the average Chinese person doesn’t know that many,” Bodhi pointed out.

  “True, but still, if you were going to do a substitution cipher, first you’d want to transliterate the characters into one of the romanized writing systems, probably Pinyin. That’s what the Japanese did in World War II. They transliterated Japanese characters into a romanized system called Romaji, then used an alphabet keyboard to encode the syllables.”

  “So, it could be a substitution code.”

  “It could be, but assuming he wrote in columns bottom to top, right to left, my frequency analysis leads me to believe it’s not. It just doesn’t make sense. Even though the characters look columnar to me, I’m playing around with it as if he wrote it left to right, top to bottom, just to see. But that doesn’t work either.”

  Bodhi thought. “Would Cantonese be transliterated the same way?”

  “No, Pinyin is short for Hanyu Pinyin—it’s the standard Chinese romanization system. But standard more or less means Mandarin, and you can imagine how Cantonese holdouts feel about that. Cantonese is transliterated into its own system called—wait for it—Cantonese Pinyin. Why?”

  “I’m sure our dead spy was fluent in Mandarin, but Matsuo, the Zen teacher, also knows enough to have a conversation. He tried to talk to the man, and he said our guy answered him in what sounded like Cantonese. I’m sure he was feigning that he couldn’t speak Mandarin, but if he could also speak Cantonese, maybe he used that system for his code?” Bodhi shrugged.

  Clausen’s face lit up, transformed with excitement. “That could be it. Thank you.”

  “I hope it helps and isn’t just another dead end.”

  “If it doesn’t work, at least I’ll have ruled another option out.”

  “Great.”

  She smiled and reached for the pencil, eager to be finished with their conversation so she could return to her work. Then she paused for a moment and laid the pencil down.

  “You helped me work through my problem, so I guess it’s only fair to help you—what’s the deal with the lima bean seeds?”

  “Jason Durbin was pretty impassioned about sustainable agriculture, right?”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “There’s a monk at The Prairie Center who’s also very interested in sustainable or traditional farming methods. He and I were the first people awake this morning. He tracked lima bean seeds into the house on his shoes, but he doesn’t grow them in the garden.”

  “Okay, that’s a little odd.”

  “That’s what I thought. He told me all about the three sisters. And he’s also the guy who thought he saw someone in the woods. He’s on high alert. It’s as if he’s nervous about something.”

  “Maybe he’s nervous because one man was murdered and another disappeared from the house. I’d be nervous if I were staying there. It’s like living in a slasher film.”

  He had to concede that point. “That might explain some of his jumpiness, but something feels off.”

  “What?”

  Bodhi shook his head. “I don’t know, Agent Clausen. All I really know is Jason Durbin had seeds on his shoes that he shouldn’t have. When I perform an autopsy, the police are typically fairly interested in evidence like that—someone else’s hair on the victim’s clothing, a matchbook from a specific bar in the victim’s purse, that sort of thing. I’m a pathologist, so this isn’t my area of expertise, but it seems significant.”

  She tilted her head. The sunlight from the window behind her streamed in and framed her face with a luminous glow. “When you put it that way, you’re right. I think the issue is you’re not an expert in crime scene investigation, and none of us is an expert in plants.” She gave a small laugh. “Too bad there’s no such thing as a plant pathologist.”

  He stared at her.

  “Get it, a plant pathologist? Someone who’s an expert in plants and … see, this is why I leave the jokes to Thurman.”

  “No, it’s not a joke. I know one.”

  “You know one what?”

  “A plant pathologist. She works at Supra Seed.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you waiting for? Call her.”

  Bodhi hurried out of the barn. He turned in the doorway. “Thank you for talking it through with me. And good luck with the code.”

  She lifted her left hand and waved to let him know she’d heard him, but she was already concentrating on her cipher. He closed the man door quietly behind him and pulled out his cell phone as he walked toward the clearing.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Hannah gripped the phone, pressing it to her ear, unable to believe her good fortune. She realized he was waiting for a response.

  “Oh, yes. I remember you.”

  “I�
��m glad. I hope it’s okay to call you at work?”

  She glanced around the quiet laboratory. “Yes, of course.”

  “Good. I’ll get right to the point. I need your help.”

  She blinked. Was this some sort of stress-induced aural hallucination? Or was this the actual answer to her literal prayers? Bodhi King needed her help? That solved the problem of crafting a way to see him for help with her problem.

  “I’ll be happy to help you if I can.”

  “I need to know everything you can tell me about some lima bean seeds.”

  “Lima bean seeds?” she repeated to make sure she’d heard him correctly.

  “I know you work with corn, but I was hoping—”

  “A seed is a seed. I can help you,” she cut him off quickly before he had second thoughts and contacted some other lima bean seed expert. She needed to talk to him about a murder. If her entrée to that conversation was lima beans, that worked for her.

  On the other end of the line, he exhaled. It was a barely audible whoosh of relief. “Fantastic. Thank you. So, this is somewhat time sensitive.”

  “A lima bean seed emergency?”

  “Pretty much. And, as you might remember, I don’t have a car here. Could you come to me?”

  “Um, at The Prairie Center?” That was less than ideal, but at this point Hannah wasn’t going to quibble about the details.

  He hesitated. “Sort of. I know this may sound strange, but could you drive straight past the driveway and continue on another tenth of a mile or so? There’s an access road that runs through the property. I’ll meet you there. We need to go to the county hospital.”

  She had zero desire to set foot on The Prairie Center’s property until she confirmed that Zhang had really left, if not the country, at least the county. How she planned to do that remained a mystery. But one step at a time. So she didn’t question why he wouldn’t just meet her at the end of the driveway if he was in such a hurry. If he wanted her to pick him up on the side of the road, that suited her just fine.