“Remember that. I’ve got my eye on you.”
True to her word, Harry remained earthbound while wiry Seth scrambled around up on the roof. After a few minutes, he backed down the ladder.
“Is it worse than I thought?” asked Harry of the short young man.
“No,” he replied. “A two-foot-square area, just like you thought, should fix the problem and prevent more. The workmanship on that old roof is something, just something.”
“Our ancestors knew what they were doing and they weren’t deluded by technology. It still takes good materials and a good man who knows how to use them.”
Seth smiled, which enlivened his strong face. “Yeah. We’re losing it, though. Losing hand skills.”
“You haven’t lost yours,” Harry complimented him.
“Thanks, Harry. Once I decided to concentrate on older structures, things just fell into place. I don’t work with cheap materials. After I’ve repaired a roof, I don’t get calls back about leaking. I understand that most folks don’t know about construction. And they only have so much money, so they buy footage and flash instead of maybe something smaller that is well built. Being able to get up on this roof, seeing how those shingles were laid … I don’t know. Kinda gives me chills. Like I’m part of something that goes way back.”
“I know what you mean. Well, you know I have to report to the board, so as soon as you can write up an estimate, I will deliver it. They already agreed for the work to be done, but if I can present an estimate, that makes everyone feel better.”
“You’ll save money because I can do this with just one other man. We can work pretty fast together. The really good news is I have a source of slate shingles that should closely match yours. A huge old house was dismantled in Cumberland County. The heirs just let it go. Built in 1719.” He paused. “A little bit of history slips away but it takes money to restore and keep those old places going. I understand, but if you can’t do it, sell it to someone who can. Don’t wait until it falls apart.”
“Good advice, but when there’s more than one heir, things tend to get dragged out.”
“Boy, that’s the truth. Anyway, I can get on this next Monday. Figure a full day just in case. If all goes well, half a day. I don’t think the bill will go over four thousand dollars, and I will try to do it for less. Preacher’s price.” He smiled broadly.
“Seth, you’re a good egg.”
“You don’t know me,” he devilishly replied. “Want me to put the ladder back?”
“Sure. Thank you. I’ll walk with you to the shed.”
As Harry and Seth strolled away, chatting about SEC football, she noticed Neil Jordan drive up, followed soon after by Wesley Speer.
After Seth drove away, Harry returned to the chancery.
“There’s a lift to her step,” Lucy Fur noted. “Must be good news.”
“We’ll see.” Cazenovia hopped off the windowsill to hurry out of the room and down the hall to greet Harry, whom she very much liked.
Pushing open the back door, Harry beheld the beautiful longhaired calico cat already on her hind legs.
“Caz.” Harry knelt down and scooped her up. “Such a religious kitty. And such a good concierge.”
“I am.”
Carrying the contented cat, Harry peered into the large office. She didn’t want to disturb the reverend, as he seemed to be in the middle of a meeting. Neil and Wesley sat in the chairs around the coffee table. The reverend was standing at his desk, papers in hand. He looked up at her.
“I can come back,” said Harry.
“No, come on in.”
Putting Cazenovia down, Harry pulled off her work gloves. “Hi.”
Neil and Wesley stood up to greet her.
“Should I brace for the worst?” Neil joked.
“No. Good news. Seth can start on the roof next Monday, should finish the same day, and—here’s the good part—he’s got a source of old slate shingles and he feels sure he can keep the bill under four thousand. What luck.”
“I suppose if a bill can be said to be good, that is,” Neil solemnly replied.
“Neil, slate costs an arm and a leg,” said Wesley. “Old slate, especially. We’ll make up the shortfall if we have one, but I bet we don’t.” He beamed.
“Harry, sit down. Let’s all have a hot cup of cocoa or whatever. Betty!” Reverend Jones called.
A middle-aged woman stuck her head in the room. “Yes? Oh, hi, everyone.”
“How about cocoa?” The reverend looked at his small gathering.
“Cocoa sounds perfect.” Harry smiled.
“I’ll go with that,” Wesley agreed, as did Neil.
The young, pretty secretary usually outside the reverend’s office was now in her last months of pregnancy and on leave. Filling in was Betty Maddox, cousin to Dorothy, the sheriff’s department’s chief of forensics. You had to be careful what you said about people in Crozet, as most folks were related.
“While we wait, it’s good you’re here, Harry,” said Neil. “I’d like to give the church lawns a good dressing of fertilizer and put it down before mid-November. Give it plenty of time to get into the ground. Checked the soil. Good pH, selenium. Potassium okay. Needs a little magnesium.”
“Neil, that’s wonderful.” Harry smiled. “The little mini-drought that we had didn’t affect our lawns too much, but fertilizer always helps, and I’ll come on back in springtime and drill in some wonderful lush grass seed. I always throw some rye in, too. Give the clover and bluegrass early cover.”
Thanks to his real estate company, Wesley kept up with farming news. His largest sales were big estates and he had to know something about soil conditions and crop yields if selling to a true farmer, or even a new person who would lease out the land. Most new people wanted to live on a grand estate but didn’t want to actually farm, which was wise since they weren’t raised to it.
“Harry, did you see where the USDA”—he used the initials for the United States Department of Agriculture—“predicts the drought reduced our economic growth by almost half a percentage point? That’s extremely serious.”
“Sure is,” she agreed. “But I was talking to Buddy Janss and he said what was so bizarre was that sometimes fields on one side of a road twisted up while on the other side the crops were healthy. What crazy weather. Buddy has suffered some losses, though.”
Neil didn’t much like Buddy, in part because the large fellow didn’t buy his fertilizer. Buddy was so smart he’d worked out a deal years ago with horse owners to remove their manure and straw for free. This he put in piles, let it cook, then the next year used it himself, selling the extra for fertilizer. The horse owners, most of them owning but a few horses, gladly paid him to haul off the muck. Buddy used commercial fertilizers if a field needed extra potassium or another nutrient. That drove Neil crazy, but then, the two possessed such differing personalities they would have struggled to like each other no matter what. Neil was detail oriented and picky, whereas Buddy was expansive, and did his best but didn’t fret.
“Wasn’t Buddy friends with Hester?” Neil asked, as he had only lived in the area a few years.
“For years and years.” Harry smiled. “You know Hester wouldn’t sell anything that was sprayed or if the seeds had been genetically modified.”
“She was a crank,” Neil said. “Not that I wished her dead, but really.”
“Hester was an eccentric,” the reverend said in his most diplomatic tone, “but she worked hard for causes she believed in, she mentored younger people like Tazio, and I expect any of us could be considered a crank at one time or another.”
“Not you.” Harry grinned and the men laughed.
“You should live with him,” Elocution called out from her fuzzy den on the floor.
“He feeds us Fancy Feast and he even tried to see if we’d chew on greenies,” Cazenovia chided her from the windowsill. “He’s the best.”
“Yeah, Elo,” Lucy Fur chimed in. “Button your lip.”
&n
bsp; “All right, all right,” the Lutheran cat said, giving in.
Betty arrived with a tray of hot cocoa and sugar cookies. The Reverend Jones jumped up to carry it and place it on the table.
Wesley returned to the subject of Hester. “Horrible. Harry, you have endured two shocks. Finding that young man and then Hester.”
“Did,” she agreed. “As I didn’t know the fellow who was killed, it was a shock and that was all, but Hester, that hurt. Yes, she had her ways, but she was a good soul and really pretty smart. I mean a lot smart, actually.”
“That she was,” Wesley agreed. “The last time I stopped by the stand, we got on the subject of crop irrigation. I don’t remember how we did get on it—you know with Hester, one thing didn’t lead to another, it jumped to another. But anyway, she was telling me that farmers have been pulling water out of the Ogallala Aquifer since the early 1950s and some of those irrigation booms are a half mile long. A half mile!”
“Great day,” Reverend Jones exclaimed.
“It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?” said Wesley. “A half-mile boom spinning around a fixed water pipe? But there’s a lot of talk, consideration in a lot of the affected states, about cutting back on irrigation because the droughts are dropping water levels, as is all the population growth.”
“Where are water levels dropping? Which states?” Neil asked.
Fortified by the cocoa, Wesley leapt in. “Neil, it’s eastern Wyoming, about all of Nebraska, southern South Dakota, eastern Colorado and New Mexico, a huge swath of Kansas, Oklahoma’s Panhandle, and a chunk of Texas. The water shortage is huge.”
“The breadbasket,” Harry thought out loud.
“For us. For the world, too, really,” Wesley said. “Hester had been reading up on it, just like she was always reading about chemicals, her history interests, that sort of thing. I was so impressed at the facts she had at her fingertips. She felt if farmers didn’t cut back, wells would run dry and that would become a disaster, a true disaster. Irrigation accounts for one-third of our nation’s annual water demand. I told her that genetic engineering could create more drought-tolerant corn, soybeans, etc. We could reduce our irrigation, but she didn’t want to hear that.”
They laughed.
Harry stood up. “It was good to see you all and I’m glad I have what I think is good news about the roof. Tell you what we could do for Hester: Let’s sell all those tickets for the Halloween Hay-ride. The funds go to the library, and we know how much Hester loved the Crozet Library. Will you all help me?”
“It would be an honor,” Wesley immediately replied.
“Of course,” Neil agreed.
In his gravelly voice, the Reverend Jones said, “I can preach a good sermon on this. We’ll sell those tickets. We’ll sell out! Thou hast put gladness in my heart.” He smiled. “Psalm 4:7. If we sell those tickets, it will put gladness in all our hearts.”
“How many miles have you racked up on this car?” Harry asked later that day. The two friends were headed back to that shopping mecca, Warehouse Number 9.
In the driver’s seat, Susan glanced down at her Audi’s odometer. “Let’s see … 131,839. I’m averaging about 40,000 miles per year. Engines are so well made these days they aren’t even broken in until 100,000 miles.”
Swaying slightly as they turned right at the stoplight in Dillwyn on Route 20, Harry said, “True. The advances in engine longevity are pretty fabulous. ’Course, my old ’78 rolls along, but I baby that truck, as you know. Actually, Susan, I really like driving without computer chips.”
“That’s you. I don’t care.” Susan smiled. “Is everyone asleep back there? It’s so quiet without the cats.”
Harry twisted to look. “Owen is curled up with his sister Tucker. That was one of the best litters you ever bred.”
“It was.” Susan nodded. “I loved breeding corgis, but it was so much work, and part of that work was making sure the puppies found the right homes. I love all dogs but I especially love corgis.”
“I love Tucker. Sometimes I think about the German shepherd Mom and Dad had when I was a kid. That was a great dog. Funny how you can measure your life by animal lives.”
“Wonder if that scarecrow fellow had any pets.”
“No. Coop told me he lived an unencumbered life.”
“Sad,” Susan replied simply.
“I think so, too. What’s the purpose of being alive if you don’t have husbands, friends, cats, dogs, horses, birds, possums, more friends, and friends’ children? It just goes on and on. Mother used to say that if everyone in Virginia studied their bloodlines, we’d find out we are related. No one is all black, no one is all white. We’re all part of one another and that includes the Indians.”
“Can’t say ‘Indian’ anymore.”
“Sure about that? These labels we give ourselves are always changing.”
“Now, Harry. You look just like your father when you get muley.”
“Do I?”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, dear.” Harry slumped in her seat slightly. “Daddy could be …”
“Yes, he could.”
They both laughed, remembering Harry’s much-loved and very original father.
“Today is going to be a mob scene at the store. People are feeling that change in the seasons, the holidays looming. Those credit cards start burning in one’s pocket.”
“Not mine,” Harry staunchly declared.
“It is possible to be too tight. I mean, Harry, you don’t have voice messaging on your phone because it costs an extra three dollars a month. That’s silly. Three dollars!”
“A penny saved is a penny earned,” Harry countered.
“ ’Tis, but you can carry it too far. Hey, where do I turn?”
“Left up ahead.”
Susan turned onto the Farmville main drag, then turned left again at Harry’s direction, and shortly the Audi station wagon was parked in the lot closest to Number 9 warehouse. As predicted, the place was packed.
Susan cracked the windows for the two dogs, although the day was brisk. “You all go back to sleep. We won’t be long.” She hoped this wasn’t a fib. She loved looking at furniture, fabrics, even lampshades.
The two women walked into Number 9, and Harry immediately pulled Susan to the Halloween display.
“Exactly the same,” Harry declared.
“As I didn’t see the corpse in the cornfield, I can only imagine what a human looked like as opposed to this.”
“But that’s just it. From a distance, they look exactly the same.”
Susan stood next to the ghosts. “No witches.”
“Not in this display. It’s ghosts, little goblins, pumpkins, and the scarecrow.” Harry sat down in a kitchen chair for a moment. “You know, I think of Hester hanging all that black and orange bunting at the stand, then last week trussing herself up in a witch costume while unloading produce. She did have such a funny sense of things, and you had to laugh. Why would anyone kill her? I’ve thought of everything, including her being a Russian spy. I mean wild stuff. Nah.” Harry shook her head.
“Me, too.” Susan looked around. “I’m going to walk through the floor. Won’t be long.”
“I’ll tag along.” Harry did.
“Look at this.” Susan pointed out a distressed bureau painted a sky blue. “That would look good in my workroom.”
“What do you need with a bureau in your workroom?”
“Store papers in it. Better looking than a file cabinet.”
“Yeah, I guess. Here.” Harry handed her a notebook and pencil from her coat pocket. “Write down the particulars. If you decide you want it, you can call. They deliver.”
“I forgot about that.” Susan scribbled down the item number and manufacturer.
Harry again tacked over to the Halloween display. “Whoever killed Josh Hill had to have seen this scarecrow. It looks exactly the same. So the killer is someone who comes through here regularly.”
“Maybe. It could also be s
omeone with a good memory or someone who took a picture on their phone. That could be just about anyone.”
“You’re right. I’m jumping to conclusions.”
“They should make that an Olympic sport.” Susan put her hand under Harry’s elbow to steer her out of the store.
They walked over to Number 8, which had a courtyard featuring large outdoor sculptures for sale.
“I like the large horse.” Harry stood next to an almost life-sized horse resembling the horses of Piazza San Marco. “Can you imagine what would happen if I put one by the barn?”
Both women laughed. They knew the statue would spook the real horses, although eventually they would adjust.
Susan flipped the price tag over. “You’ll need smelling salts.”
Harry bent over to peer at the tag. “Nine thousand dollars!”
“You pay for your pleasures.” Susan checked her watch. “Speaking of which, if I stay here, I am going to spend money, and I don’t have it right now. Ned isn’t making as much at the law firm. He’s in session and there goes the income. He thought he could swing it, but there’s so much to do down in Richmond, so many meetings and so much material to master, plus he had to rent an apartment. It’s overwhelming. Yet he loves being in our House of Delegates. Anyway, I’m thinking of finding a job.”
Once they were back in the car and heading home, Harry said, “Your kids are out of the house. No reason you can’t work full-time.”
“When we graduated from college and I got my first job as a legal assistant, I remember shopping in the supermarket, seeing the women at the checkout counters and wondering what went wrong. You know what I mean? How did they wind up in that job?”
“I never thought about it. You were, are, better about that stuff than I am.” Harry put on her sunglasses.
“Well, I thought maybe those cashiers had picked the wrong man. He’d left them high and dry and with children. Or they were people who didn’t plan ahead and one day woke up at forty. As years rolled along, I realized that sometimes bad luck rolls over someone like a tide. I felt less superior after that. Now I look at those women and think it could be me, you know?”
Harry thought for a long time. “I don’t. Susan, I always knew I would farm.”
The Litter of the Law Page 9