Warm Front

by Patricia McLinn

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Trent Stenner, coming in from the other room, called to the latest arrival at the back door, “Josh, how bad was it?”

  “Not a total loss,” the high school principal said to everyone, “but it’s put a major dent in our lab facilities. Not to mention Pratt’s and Duggan’s hair and eyebrows.”

  “But they’re okay?” Jennifer asked.

  “Yeah. They were checked out at the hospital and sent home.”

  “What happened?” Quince asked.

  “Tell it from the start, Josh,” Darcie said. “Trent’s not much of a story-teller. Gave us the bare bones and said you’d be late.”

  “I was wrapping up post-game duties, and was about to leave the building when I heard a sound like a car crash, coming from the south wing. I took off running. Trent came up from the locker room level—”

  “Needed something from my office,” the football coach filled in.

  “—and I’m happy to say I kept up with him, former NFL player and all, stride for stride down the hallway.”

  “Better than you did when I sacked you senior year,” Trent added.

  “Hey, that was—” Josh started.

  But Vanessa interrupted. “What happened when the two of you ended your race down the hallway?” Count on Vanessa to pull them back on subject.

  “We saw smoke billowing out around the charred door to the Chem Lab.”

  Someone in back sucked in a breath. “Oh, dear.”

  “Josh was on his phone calling 911, reporting the explosion, even before we got past all that stinking smoke,” Trent said.

  “That’s when we found Pratt and Duggan — a couple of sophomores — standing stock still under streaming sprinklers, glassy-eyed, and hair singed, but otherwise not hurt. Too bad the Chem Lab can’t say the same.”

  “How much damage?” Vanessa asked Josh.

  “Hard to tell. Tim — the chemistry teacher — and I will look it over tomorrow. Then get together Monday with our building services people and maybe a contractor or two to start on estimates.”

  “What is this? The third or fourth incident this year?” Darcie asked.

  “Fourth. The others weren’t anywhere near as bad.”

  “It’s Zeke’s fault,” she said.

  Zeke gave an inarticulate protest around a mouthful of potato salad.

  “We have experienced an upsurge in the number of students who think they have a future following in Zeke’s footsteps,” Josh acknowledged with a grin.

  “Hey, I never blew up the Chem Lab.”

  “No,” Darcie said, “but you broke in to do unauthorized experiments.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, I did. And who was my lookout?”

  “Whoever your lookout might have been,” she said with careful dignity, “would certainly plead the Fifth Amendment on that score so as not to self-incriminate himself or herself. And besides,” she added in her usual voice, “your lookout knew you were a genius.”

  “Maybe these kids are, too,” Zeke said.

  “These kids need to climb up to decent grades before they try claiming genius status,” Josh said. “While they’re doing that, let them blow up their parents’ garages or something other than the Chem Lab. In the meantime, I’m starved.”

  That broke up the knot by the door. Vanessa led Josh to the food, and Quince gladly followed in his wake.

  After eating, he circulated.

  From the Zeke-Techers he gained a sense of the mood about the move to Drago. It remained good. Construction on permanent headquarters wasn’t near starting, with designs still being mulled, not to mention the winter weather preventing construction, but an advance group had headquarters in former store-fronts near the computer lab in the center of Drago. They seemed satisfied with their progress, and, as one said, they were enjoying the fast pace of work and the slow pace of life in Drago.

  From the Dragoites he gained a sense of welcome and a few grains of insight into the county and its residents. Including those who lived out of town.

  Nothing drastic or—

  “You didn’t bring Anne.”

  Uh-oh. Darcie.

  He’d let his guard down and here she was.

  “Was I supposed to?” Wrong question — because he could see she was about to answer it. “I didn’t know you’d invited her for tonight. I would have been happy to give her a ride.”

  “I didn’t invite her specifically for tonight. I thought you would. As your date.”

  “Darcie.” The warning in his tone didn’t alter her steady regard. He expelled a short breath. “We’re not dating.”

  “Why not? You can’t tell me you’re not interested.”

  “I’m not — in case you didn’t notice — telling you anything.”

  “And I can’t believe she’s not interested in you,” she continued unimpeded.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but you better start believing. Anne Hooper is not the least bit interested in me.”

  His last sentence fell into one of those inexplicable, unpredictable lulls in conversational buzz, so it floated out over the group and hung there.

  He was aware of concentrated attention from Jennifer and Vanessa, confusion from Zeke, amused sympathy from Trent and Josh, and curiosity from the ring beyond them.

  “Are you sure?” Darcie insisted.

  “Darcie,” Jennifer said quietly.

  The two women exchanged a look Quince didn’t like any better than he’d liked the questions.

  But at least Darcie retired from the Spanish Inquisition.

  Temporarily.

  *

  Quince had heard Anne drive in — hard not to in that old farm truck — while he’d been on a conference call shortly before noon Monday.

  When it ended, he went to the kitchen.

  For coffee. Not because Anne’s presence exerted a gravitational pull on him that put the moon to shame.

  Their faces and the silence that fell when he walked in told him everything.

  “I’ll get some coffee and get out of here,” he said.

  Anne, leaning back against the sink, looked down at the mug in her hands.

  “Might as well stay,” Everett said gruffly. “Heard about your idea about oats and such. Seems you know we’re in a bind. Seems everybody this side of the Mississippi River knows. Including these damned moneylenders who won’t lend money to the people who need it.”

  Anne looked up. “I’ve tried every last place on my list. From the reasonable through the not-so-reasonable and now the last of the far-fetched. Everett, you know that if we can’t buy more seed — and fast — we won’t have enough acreage planted to even have a chance to turn this around. But there is one more thing we can do. What I’ve wanted to do from the start.”

  “No,” the older man said.

  “It’s what Chris would have wanted. You know it is. When the farm needs—”

  “No.”

  “Everett, it’s the—”

  “No. End of discussion.”

  In the silence that followed, Anne refilled all the coffee cups, stirring hers even though she drank it black.

  Quince cleared his throat.

  “No,” Anne and Everett said in unison.

  “If you won’t consider selling oatmeal, how about a possible infusion of cash from another source and one that doesn’t require any change from being crop farmers — farm tourism.”

  “What the hell is that?” Everett asked.

  “Hooper Farm becomes a tourist destination. People pay to come here.”

  Quickly, he explained about programs in agritourism he’d researched. Hooper Farm wouldn’t take on the major versions where guests stayed on the farm and sometimes joined in on the work. Certainly not right away.

  But they could try a modified event. Drawing visitors from the city to see a real family farm.

  Everett was not sold — to say the least.

  “Strangers all over? What do you want that for? How is being like an animal
at the zoo getting gawked at by these city people going to help?”

  Quince explained again, never letting his enthusiasm or patience flag. He could make this work.

  But he was concerned about Anne’s silence.

  Everett, on the other hand, was not silent. “What kind of fool would pay good money to come look at a bunch of frozen ground? It’s hard winter.”

  “Right. So we couldn’t charge a lot. Not for our trial run. But for anyone who hasn’t been to a farm there’s lots to see. You can tell them how it’s changed since you were a kid, and show the machinery, and what it takes to get an ear of corn on their plate at next summer’s barbeque.”

  Everett grumbled more without mounting any true protest.

  As if aware of both of them looking at her, Anne raised her gaze from her coffee to Everett.

  “We’ve got to try something.”

  Quince wasted no time in saying, “Weather forecast’s clear for this weekend, so—”

  “This weekend — this weekend?”

  “Sure, why wait? We’ll get the trial under our belts and then we can really start planning.”

  *

  The next five days were spent in outdoor house-cleaning. They couldn’t wash much because of the cold, but they moved machinery into orderly lines, organized equipment, swept and re-swept, outlined paths with fence posts laid end to end, and spiffed up Grandy’s pen. At night, Anne baked dozens and dozens and dozens of brownies, Quince cut the cooled ones, Everett wrapped them individually.

  Last night, Anne had suddenly recognized that visitors would likely need to use the bathroom inside, and had set to a frenzy of indoor cleaning.

  This morning, they’d set out the brownies, sturdy paper cups, and the urn borrowed from the Congregational Church filled with hot apple cider on a cleared workbench in the barn. Quince and Everett were finishing up spreading fresh straw on the paths to protect the visitors’ shoes as much as possible from a patch of not-entirely-frozen mud.

  Part of Anne had thought this would not actually happen, because no one would come.

  But somehow Quince had lined up fourteen people willing to pay to spend a few hours on a real farm in the middle of winter.

  Didn’t these people have socks to darn or something else more exciting?

  Now, with the “tourists” about to arrive any minute, Anne straightened the fresh towel hanging from the oven door handle, smoothed the clean tablecloth covering the mars on the kitchen table, and swallowed hard as the clock ticked toward the top of the hour.

  Quince entered on a burst of cold air and warm enthusiasm that simultaneously swept around her even before the back door’s slam resonated.

  “We’re all finished. Zero Hour is just about here.”

  “Zero Hour. That sounds suitably ominous.”

  “Hey, you’re not worried are you? Everything looks great.”

  “Worried? Who, me?”

  He grinned. “You shouldn’t be. Consider this: You viewed me as an uber city-slicker when I arrived—”

  “Still do.”

  “—yet now I love the place. So, if you converted me, other city-slickers will be easy.”

  He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek — solely to boost her morale, she told herself.

  It was a contradictory sensation, the cold of the outdoors carried on the surface of his skin striking her first, but followed immediately by the heat of his lips and the warmth of his breath.

  The second kiss, the one that definitely wasn’t a peck-on-the-cheek, she didn’t explain away.

  Because her reasoning abilities left the building even before his mouth covered hers.

  An odd pressure in her chest morphed to a whirling ball of heat shooting off emissaries to unexpected outposts in her body.

  Her fingers — the fingers now clutching the collar of his jacket — should have been ash for all the heat flowing into them. And why was she clutching his jacket collar? Drawing him closer? How much closer could they get? Holding herself up? He was taking care of that with his arms now around her and—

  Whack!

  Instinct kicked in long before reason. The familiar sound of the back door slapping closed had the effect of a cattle prod. Anne jumped back from him, spinning away at the same time.

  “They’re here,” Everett announced in gloomy accents. He stomped across the kitchen to the sink, ran some water, then stomped out.

  If he’d seen Quince kissing her — no, in fairness, they’d been kissing one another — that would mean Everett was displaying tact by not reacting.

  Tact. Everett.

  So he couldn’t have seen them.

  But how could he have missed seeing them?

  “Okay, here we go,” Quince said with enthusiasm. “This is going to be fun.”

  The first few minutes outside, Anne was too shaken by the kiss and the fact that she had been nowhere near ending it to think about what was going on around her.

  She drifted through the gathering group of visitors with impunity.

  Then a hand plucked at her sleeve.

  “Can girls farm?”

  She looked down into a child’s face of indeterminate gender. The knit hat made to look like the head of the Chicago Bears mascot was no help because girls and boys wore them.

  “They can start learning,” she said cautiously. “Takes a long time to learn everything and some of the equipment is dangerous, so you have to take it one step at a time.”

  “Are you a farmer?”

  As she drew breath, two more kids dressed very similarly joined the first and a trio of adults started heading her way.

  “When did you start learning?”

  “Do you drive a tractor?”

  “Why are barns red?”

  “Do you kill the animals?”

  “What about rats? Do you have rats in your barn?”

  “Are there cows to milk?”

  “Why does everything sleep in the winter?

  “What do you do when it rains?”

  “Do you have a pony?”

  “Did you have a barn raising to make this barn? We read a story about barn-raisings.”

  Oh, God, these people weren’t going to be content with just gawking at fields and building and machinery.

  They were going to insist on talking to one of the rare animals on Hooper Farm — her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Quince emerged from the barn, where he’d refilled the apple cider urn again, and took a moment to watch and listen.

  He hadn’t had many such moments, because he was busy keeping the gears turning while Anne and Everett talked about farming.

  Right now, Everett was answering a question about the history of the farm.

  “Second-oldest in the county to still be in the same family.”

  “Has it been divided up among family members?” someone from the back asked.

  “Was split in two back at the beginning of the 1900s, but one branch sold back to the other after a couple decades. Then, in my generation, my younger brother married a girl whose father farmed and inherited that place with her. They had two boys who both wanted to farm. Made sense that one stayed on his mother’s family place and the other came here to farm.”

  So that was how Everett’s great nephew had ended up here with him.

  “You never married?”

  “That ain’t part of the history of Hooper Farm.”

  That drew a laugh from the group around the Hoopers.

  “It’s kind of bleak this time of year, isn’t it?” a young teenager asked Anne.

  “Bleak? It’s cold, sure, and the days are short. But it’s that way in the city, too.”

  “But with nothing growing—” He gestured toward the fields. “—all you see is dirt. Or frozen mud.”

  “You might just see dirt — or frozen mud — but a farmer sees the crops that will grow there. A farmer plans for them and prepares for them. Farming is a profession of hope,” she said.

  It was a great insight a
nd the people directly around her nodded their appreciation, but anyone not right there hadn’t heard her words, because she spoke so softly.

  “Hope,” Everett repeated loudly enough that everyone heard. “And enough obstacles to make an Olympic steeplechaser sit down and cry.”

  That drew more general laughter.

  Everett was a hit, with the guests taking him as an amusing character and chuckling at his grumbling.

  Other than feeding her great uncle-in-law straight lines, Anne was struggling.

  She tried, but she clearly wasn’t comfortable. At least that was clear to him.

  What she’d said about growing up as a Foreign Service brat echoed in his head.

  It was mostly feeling like you never fit. Anywhere. Always surrounded by strangers.

  Great, and he’d invited a load of strangers to Hooper Farm.

  Most were pleasant, interested people.

  A few weren’t.

  Quince herded a red-jacketed boy of about seven back to his parents for the third time, while Everett kept the rest of the group entertained with stories of growing up on the farm.

  The boys’ parents looked more annoyed than thankful for the return of their offspring.

  Even Quince couldn’t describe this afternoon as going really well.

  Rather than sticking to the straw paths, a number of visitors roamed — then complained about their shoes getting muddy.

  Instead of sticking in a neat pack, they spread out, which made it difficult for the hosts to talk to more than a few at a time and impossible to keep up with others.

  Especially this wandering boy.

  Quince had plucked him off the fence and later found him at the back of the barn, preparing to scoot out to the fields beyond.

  A few visitors were genuinely interested, but more showed evidence of boredom.

  Everett could be viewed as local color. The curmudgeonly old farmer. But Anne … Anne was stiff and treated too many questions like an invasion of privacy.

  This had been a mistake.

  The recognition came into his head fully formed and obvious.

  His mistake.

  How could he have been so wrong?