“As I recall, one of the local farmers’ groups. Once the crop was harvested, I had no further oversight. But I might have records in my files.”
“Bree has contracted with the pickers you’ve used before.”
“The Jamaicans. Excellent. They’ll do good work for you. Have you met them yet?”
“I have—Bree brought them by. She does have things well in hand, I think.”
“I’m glad. I have every faith in that young woman. And in you, Meg.”
“Why, thank you. I’m just trying to muddle through.”
“Ah, but it’s more than that. You found yourself thrown into a difficult situation, and you had no compelling reason to stay. And yet you did, and here you are. I admire your tenacity, especially in the face of adversity. I hope the gods of harvest are kind to you this year.”
“So do I. But I can’t control that, can I?”
“Alas, no. But it does help to take a long-range view. If this year’s crop fails, there will always be another year.”
“Oh please, don’t mention the term ‘fail.’ I don’t want to hear it. Though I am lining up contingency plans if the crop is, shall we say, less than perfect. I understand there’s a collective cider mill in the vicinity.”
“You see? You’re already thinking like a true farmer. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.” Christopher glanced at his watch. “Heavens, I must get back.”
As Meg drove back to Granford after depositing Christopher in front of his office, she reflected that in fact she probably would have turned tail and run if it hadn’t been for him. And Seth, of course. But it was Christopher who had assured her that she could handle running the orchard. He had taken the time to explain each step along the way. He had found Bree for her. And he had proven to be a true and supportive friend. Maybe that was what had inspired her to act as guardian angel to Nicky and Brian, since she knew how much that kind of help mattered.
Maybe there was something to making your own luck. In fact, she had been lucky about a lot of things since she’d arrived in Granford: good friends, a sense of community. And Seth. He was definitely on the luck list.
26
By early August, Meg felt as though she was running up to the orchard every few hours, to make sure nothing had changed. Bree had instructed her on the various means of testing for ripeness, but it wasn’t the same as actually touching or even tasting an apple. Or slicing into it to see if the seeds had turned brown, a simple but reasonably accurate indicator of ripeness. Of course, she felt a pang of guilt every time she pulled—correction, gently twisted, since pulling damaged the branch—an apple from the tree and bit into it. Each apple was precious, and she couldn’t afford to waste any, at least not knowingly. So far, unfortunately, nothing was ripe enough to pick, which meant she had to wait. The pickers had to wait. It was frustrating.
Lauren called occasionally from Boston—far more often than she had been calling before. Could it have anything to do with Detective Marcus, who, much to Meg’s regret, had yet to make any significant progress on solving Sam’s murder? The last time she had spoken to Lauren, Meg had probed a little—discreetly, she hoped.
“Have you heard anything from your detective lately?”
“Oh, so now he’s ‘my’ detective?” Lauren had said with a laugh.
“You know what I mean. Have you seen him lately?”
Lauren seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second. “Uh, yes.”
Meg was surprised, and possibly hurt. Did that mean Lauren had been in town, but hadn’t stopped by? Hadn’t even confided in her? But, well, if Lauren didn’t want to tell her about it, Meg wasn’t going to press. “Did he happen to say anything about the murder?”
“Meg, he wouldn’t do that—it’s not professional. But I think it’s fair to tell you that he’s frustrated.”
“Aren’t we all? Are you coming back this way anytime soon?”
“Um, let me get back to you on that, okay? But I’ll definitely be there for the restaurant opening. I love this idea you’ve cooked up—ooh, look, I made a pun. I put in a word to a friend at the Globe, and she said they might do an article.”
“Oh, Lauren, that would be terrific.”
“Well, you know the kinds of problems newspapers have been having lately, so don’t get your hopes up. I’ll let you know. And see you soon!” She hung up before Meg could garner any more details from her.
If Marcus was showing his frustration to a stranger like Lauren, Meg reflected, he must really have hit a wall. Meg was torn between hoping that the killer would be found, and hoping that the whole nasty event would fade quietly away and leave the path clear for the successful opening of the restaurant.
She was fidgeting around the house when her gaze lit upon the stack of boxes full of materials belonging to the Historical Society, which she was cataloging for Gail in her spare time. She squelched her guilt about not having made much progress recently; she’d been too restless to concentrate, especially when the weather was fine. The cataloging task was better suited to long winter nights, when her lamp cast a pool of light over the fragile documents she was trying to identify.
But, she realized, she had finished one box, and she really ought to return that one to Gail (and hope that Gail didn’t hand her another one, or worse, two, in its place).
Resisting the local tradition of just showing up, she called first. “Gail? Hi, it’s Meg.”
“Oh, hey, Meg. You picking yet?”
“Nope. I feel like an expectant mother. Right now all I can do is go visit the trees and say encouraging things to them. But I’ve finished going through one of the boxes you gave me, and I thought maybe I could drop it off. It also occurred to me a while ago that we never followed up on looking into the history of the restaurant. And Nicky’s looking for old recipes and food preparation info, so we could kill several birds with one stone.”
“Great idea! The kids are both in day camp, and I could be in town in, say, fifteen minutes. That work for you?”
“Sounds good. See you in fifteen.”
When Meg pulled up, Gail was already waiting, sitting on the granite stoop of the Historical Society building on the green. She didn’t get up, but called out, “Did you find any treasures?”
“No specific things, but cumulatively there are all sorts of goodies. I’m getting a real sense of how the town used to operate a century or more ago—how people got around, how and when they worked, how they socialized. I’m going to have to look up a few things to make sense of them, like what the religious and social organizations were back then. But I do love it, and I can feel useful while I learn.”
“Be careful or you’ll get sucked in just the way I did. History can be addictive.”
“So I’ve noticed. Have you had a chance to look for anything on the Stebbins house?”
“Now you’re doing it, too.”
“What?”
“Calling a place by the name of a prior owner. Or in this case, a century-plus of prior owners.”
Meg laughed. “Like my place is the Warren farm. I don’t mind. I guess I’m a Warren, several generations removed.”
“Come on inside—but brace yourself. It’s pretty stifling.” Gail pulled out a set of keys and opened the front door. “There’s no air-conditioning.”
Meg laughed. “There’s none at my place either—hard to retrofit a true colonial, even if I could afford it.”
Meg had been inside the Historical Society building months earlier, but then the problem had been a near-complete lack of heat, and she had been wearing at least three layers of clothes. Now she was blasted with a wave of hot air, and broke out in an instant sweat. She followed Gail into the dim interior—all the ancient roller shades were drawn. The peculiar collection of stuffed dead animals, a gift from a long-deceased taxidermist, looked less moth-eaten in this light, but no less ominous—all those beady glass eyes staring. Gail made a beeline to her desk in the far corner and retrieved a fat and tattered folder.
> “I pulled some stuff, but I’m sure there’s more. The only problem is, it’s scattered through all the houses the Society owns, and I’d have to track the records down. But this is enough to get you started, right?”
“I’m sure. It’s not like we’re going to write a book about it. Are there any pictures?”
“Sure. Let’s take this back outside before we melt,” Gail said, and headed for the door.
The air outside, a mere eighty, felt delightfully cool as they made their escape from the building. Gail headed for a maple-shaded bench in the middle of the green, with Meg trailing behind. When they were settled, Meg said, “Let me get this straight: in winter it’s too cold in there to do anything, and in summer it’s too hot. When do you get anything done?”
“There’s a week in April, unless it’s the kids’ spring break. And a few days in October, after the Harvest Fair. You’re coming to that, right?”
“I haven’t even thought about it,” Meg answered.
“A lot of it is aimed at the kids, but it’s fun. You should come.”
“I will. Now, what about those records?”
“We’ll have to be careful. I’m breaking every archival rule known to humankind, to be treating them like this. But it’s for a good cause, right? How’re things going? I hear you’re trying to gather the farmers together to help out the restaurant.”
“My, news travels fast.”
“It’s a small town, Meg. I can tell you what Doris Jacobs planted in her kitchen garden a month back, in part because she’s planted the same thing for years, but also because she ordered a new kind of sunflower she saw in a seed catalog, and she was talking about it in the pharmacy the other day.”
“Wow. I guess I’ll have to watch what I say. Even to the trees.”
“You talk to the trees?” Gail asked with a half smile.
“Doesn’t everyone? And now do I have to wonder if they’ve been bugged?”
Gail stared at her a moment, then threw her head back and laughed wholeheartedly. “My God, a pun. I didn’t know you had it in you. I knew I liked you.”
She wiped her eyes and opened the folder in her lap.
“Okay, here we go. From what I can tell, the place was built around 1820 by Joshua Stebbins. He was a merchant, with business dealings in Springfield, and he wanted to impress people, hence the brick, which was more expensive than wood back in those days. The house stayed in the family for quite a while, I think—you could find out more from property records, or maybe there’s a title search for when the kids bought the property. As I remember it, they bought it from one of the Stebbins descendants, but no one who’d ever lived here.”
“You call them ‘kids,’ too?”
“They just seem so young to me. In a good way. They’re fresh, and eager, and hopeful—everything’s in front of them.”
“As long as they get past the murder of a friend.”
“I think they can survive that, as long as it gets solved sometime soon. Any word on that?”
Meg thought briefly about sharing the information about the bee sting and the muddy footprint and vetoed it. “Nothing new. So show me what else you’ve got about the house.”
“There are a good number of pictures, because it’s right on the green, and it got included as background for a lot of fairs and events here.” She handed Meg a sheaf of pictures, and Meg leafed through them. The house lurked in the background, behind the crowds and tents and booths, with its distinctive gable line and flanking chimneys. Clearly little had changed over the last fifty or a hundred years, save that the bushes in the front of the porch had grown. The road in front went from graveled to paved, then paved again.
Meg handed the stack back to Gail. “Nothing with the house alone?”
“Not that I’ve found yet. You know, you really ought to talk to Caroline Goldthwaite.”
“Why? Has she worked with the Historical Society?”
“On and off, but more importantly, she used to live there.”
“Mrs. Goldthwaite? Really? She never said anything about that.”
Gail shrugged. “She’s got to be, what, eighty? Actually, I think she was born in the house—probably literally, back in those days, maybe 1925? She lived there until she married, which would have been around 1945. So it’s been a while.”
“She didn’t inherit?”
“No, she definitely wasn’t the one the kids bought it from. When she married, it was expected that she would live on her husband’s property, end of story. She’s pretty much into following the rules, you know?”
Meg nodded. “I certainly got that impression. There is only one way to do things, and Mrs. Goldthwaite’s the one with the rule book—which is out of date. You know, though, the fact that it was her family home could explain why she’s so opposed to it becoming a restaurant.”
“Because of fond memories of the house? Not necessarily. More like, she doesn’t want to see Granford change, ever. But even she can’t stop it. It’s kind of sad.”
“Does she have any real constituency in town? I mean, she was elected.”
“More out of respect for her, I think, than any kind of agreement with her political views. Heck, it’s not political anyway, not in the standard sense. She’s a local institution, but she can’t really stand in the way of progress, can she?”
“Seth says no, since Tom Moody’s on his side if it comes to a vote. Poor Mrs. Goldthwaite—it must be hard for her. Her husband’s dead?”
“A few years ago, yes. And they never had kids—too bad, since I think that might have mellowed her a bit. Anyway, you can think about talking to her, although since you’re allied with the side of darkness, she might not cooperate.”
“I’ll think about it.” Meg leafed through more of the documents. “You have anything specifically on food? Weren’t there ever any places to eat around here?”
“Ah, Meg, most people didn’t have the money to spend eating out. This town has never been rich. Nobody’s starving either, but there’s not a lot of extra cash. You know about the diner, where Edna used to work? There was that, and if you go back further, there was an inn, over there where the store is. Tavern downstairs, a couple of beds for travelers upstairs—nothing fancy.”
“Okay, so there’s at least a tradition of an inn on the green here. We could play that up.”
“We? How did you get so involved in this?”
“I wish I knew. I feel kind of responsible for the kids—I was the one who suggested Granford, when they had just started looking. And I like them. But I’ve got an orchard to run, and it’s my first time for everything. Thank goodness I found Bree.”
“She working out?”
“Definitely. She’s smart, and she works hard. She’s got the pickers lined up, and I’ve sorted out markets for the crop. Now we just need the apples.”
“Hurry up and wait, eh? That’s farming for you. So, how are you and Seth doing?”
Meg was startled by Gail’s abrupt change of subject. “Is this more of the Granford ‘everybody knows everything’ phenomenon? Is there a website where you all pool your information?”
Gail laughed. “Website? Heck, no—we use smoke signals, or carrier pigeons. Seriously, if I’m intruding, just tell me to mind my own business. But if things are good, I’m happy for you. Both of you.”
“Thank you,” Meg said primly. “Things are good, and that’s all I’m going to say.”
“Gotcha.” Gail’s cell phone rang, and she rummaged through her pockets to find it. “What’s the problem, sweetie? Oh, dang, you’re right. I can run it right over to you. See you.” She hung up with a grimace. “I forgot to give the kids their bag lunches this morning, so I’d better go drop them off. Listen, you keep that material for now. You can share it with Nicky and Brian, and I’ll keep looking, both for the house and for any food-related stuff. I’m sure we’ve got something.”
“Sounds good. I won’t keep you. Besides, I haven’t checked my trees for at least an hour, and may
be something will have changed.”
Gail laughed. “Right. You do that. I’ll talk to you soon.” She set off for her car—carefully parked in the shade of the church building—at a brisk trot.
Meg went back to her car more slowly, thinking. Funny that Mrs. Goldthwaite had never mentioned her association with the Stebbins place. Or maybe she just assumed that everyone already knew? Insider information took on a whole new meaning in a small town like this. Had Mrs. Goldthwaite even been inside the house since she had left decades ago? Had she seen the changes that Nicky and Brian had made? The whole way home, Meg mulled over this new view into Mrs. Goldthwaite’s resistance to the restaurant.
27
After a haphazard lunch, Meg was still restless. She could go through the rest of the materials Gail had given her, but that was inside work, and she really wanted to be outside, moving. She had talked to small markets between Granford and Amherst; maybe she should cross the river and try the rest on Michael’s list, and then she could tell Bree she had finished with it. And if she had any time left, she could stop by some of the Granford farmers’ homes, after they got back from work.
Energized, she grabbed her bag and keys and headed out. After several hours, with a few more tentative commitments from markets in hand, Meg decided to quit while she was ahead. She had to admit she had come to enjoy the process, which surprised her. The country roads were beautiful and far from busy, and she was beginning to recognize some of them and could get from one place to another without getting lost. Maybe she’d hate it in winter, when these same roads were piled high with snow, but right now it was lovely. She was learning so much, and found herself looking at produce displays quite differently than she would have only a month or two earlier.
She checked her watch: it was after five. Seth had said Jake Kellogg might be home at this hour. Maybe it was worth a trip by his place to talk with him.
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