by K. N. Casper
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her heart was pounding.
“Someone’s sprayed my vines with herbicide.”
CHAPTER SIX
ETHAN AMBLED OVER TO the ringing phone and glanced at the caller ID. Kayla.
His mood instantly brightened, then as quickly sank. Was she calling to tell him he’d stepped over the line when he’d kissed her? He couldn’t argue with her. It was true, but she’d also kissed him back, or started to, before she’d decided she wasn’t supposed to like it.
“Hello?”
“Ethan, my vineyard’s been poisoned.” He could hear outrage in her voice.
“Poisoned? How?”
“Someone’s sprayed all the plants with herbicide.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she snapped. “I’ll have everything officially tested by a certified lab, but, yes, Dad and I are sure.”
“I’ll be right over.”
When she didn’t object, he hung up and ran out to his truck. Carter was scooping up horse manure from the entrance to the barn.
“Kayla just called. She says someone poisoned her vineyard. I’m going over to see what this is all about.”
“Poisoned it?” Carter shook his head. “That’s crazy. Who’d do a thing like that?”
“Tell Luella I won’t be here for supper, and she shouldn’t bother to keep anything for me. I can fix myself a sandwich when I get in.”
Carter snorted and shook his head as Ethan drove off.
He pulled up behind Kayla’s car a few minutes later. She hadn’t expanded the minimal landscaping around the old house, but she had filled the narrow flower beds with colorful pansies and petunias. The shrubs were neatly trimmed.
She was standing in the shade of the porch when he got out of his truck. He remembered what it felt like to hold her and cursed himself. The worried expression on her face made him want to hug her again, but of course that was the last thing he should do now...or ever.
“Come with me.” She came down the porch steps and led him to the building the previous owner had used as a storeroom. Inside it was neat and orderly, which didn’t surprise him. At the far end was a workbench with a microscope and several other gadgets, among which he recognized a small centrifuge. He’d never thought about all this paraphernalia being necessary for a vintner or that the cultivation of wine grapes was part art and part science. More or less equal measures of botany, chemistry and intuition.
“I pulled some of the leaves when I saw they were damaged,” she explained as she led him to the table. “Take a look.”
He hadn’t peered into a microscope since high school. This model was much newer and more advanced.
She turned on the back lighting. Adjusting the eyepieces, he stared down at the veins and ridges of a young grape leaf, completely at a loss as to what he was supposed to see or conclude. What he saw appeared to be foreign matter, tiny particles that didn’t match their surroundings.
“What am I looking at?” he asked, still bent over.
“The leaf of a vinifera grape. The blackish-brown pinpoints are the cells of a herbicide. Look here.”
He raised his head and saw she was pointing to the page of a textbook. The picture matched what he’d viewed under the magnifying glass.
“Someone has sprayed the entire crop,” she said.
His mind tried to consider options, explanations. “Could you or your father have sprayed them with the wrong chemical by mistake?”
She tilted her head. “No, we couldn’t,” she answered, her indignation sharp as a knife. “I’m not that stupid and neither is my father. We’re not opposed to the judicious use of herbicides for weed control, but all our supplies are intact. Besides, it would take a lot more than we keep on hand to spray ten acres. So if you think—”
He held up his hands. “Calm down, Kayla. I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just asking the kinds of questions the sheriff will ask when you report this.”
She sighed in exasperation. “Sorry. You’re right.”
“When do you suppose this was done?”
Her eyes roamed blindly. “Dad figures, based on the condition of the leaves, probably two or three days ago.”
“Where is he, by the way?”
“Making phone calls, arranging for tests—”
“At this hour?” He checked his watch. It was after seven.
“To the West Coast. They’re two hours behind us.”
He’d forgotten about that. “You were here all day Sunday and yesterday?”
She nodded.
“That leaves Monday when you were over at my place to help with the riding lessons. But your dad was here the whole time, right?”
She shook her head. “He was in town most of the day getting work done on the tractor.”
Could that have been sabotaged, too? Ethan tucked that question away for the time being.
“How long would it have taken to do this?” he asked.
She leaned against the bench. “If the person was organized and knew what he was doing, I’d say less than two hours.”
“And you were over at my place for at least three.”
She agreed.
“Who knew you’d be over there?”
“Probably half the county. It’s no secret I go over there to work with you and the kids. Millicent Niebauer has made it public knowledge that we’re giving riding lessons.”
“Dear Millie. But we really can’t blame her. She’s just—”
“Doing her job,” Kayla finished for him. “Sometimes she does it too well.”
He wanted to hold her, to protect her, to reassure her. But how? Her vineyard, her dream and all the work she’d put into it had been ruined.
“It could have been done during the middle of the night, too,” Ethan suggested. “We had a full moon the night before last. The weather was so clear you could have read a newspaper by moonlight.”
“But why would anyone do this?”
He shook his head, unable to answer her question.
* * *
“DO YOU HAVE an outside light here?” Ethan asked as Kayla started to lock up the workshop.
“Yes,” she said, not sure why he was asking.
“Leave it on tonight.”
“You think someone will come...? Why? There’s nothing here to take.”
“But someone could drop something off.”
“Like wha— Oh.” She finally understood. “You mean like putting empty Roundup containers on my shelves.”
“You said yourself you don’t normally keep enough around here for a job this size. Whoever’s responsible for this has to assume you’ll call the sheriff. Seeing a bunch of empty plastic bottles would certainly cast doubt on your story.”
“But why would I do this to myself?”
“Insurance?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t make anything on a claim, even if I could submit one, and I can’t do that until I have a crop. Besides, why wouldn’t he have left the bottles when he used them?”
Ethan shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t want you to find them before the vines were affected for fear you might wash it off.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good.”
“He may not have known that.”
“A lot of maybes.” She switched on the light over the door and locked the sturdy dead bolt above the knob.
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” Megan announced the moment they stepped into the kitchen where she was doing her homework.
“Okay, honey. I’ll start dinner now. Ethan is going to eat with us.”
“Oh, goodie. Can we have macaroni and cheese?”
“Rice tonight.”
Megan made a face.
Boyd appeared in the doorway from the living room. “There was no reason to call you.” He went to the refrigerator, got out two cans of Coke and handed one to Ethan. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“Lend moral support?” Ethan pulled the tab and sucked
down the foam that spurted out.
“We can certainly use some of that.” Boyd turned to Kayla who was measuring out rice. “I talked to Arnie at the lab in Portland. He wants us to FedEx him a dozen sprigs from different areas.”
While the rice cooked, Kayla removed the chicken she’d been marinating from the fridge, and Megan set the table for four. Boyd leaned against the counter near the sink and looked on, preoccupied. Ethan volunteered to grill the chicken on the small backyard patio. Just like a regular family, he thought as he stepped outside and lit the gas grill.
When they sat in the kitchen to eat, he was again struck by the homey atmosphere. Even the smell of the packaged broccoli and cheese, Angela’s favorite, conspired against him.
After the four of them had helped clear the table and load the dishwasher, Boyd excused himself to research online before going to bed. While Kayla helped Megan with her bath and put her to bed, Ethan went to the living room and paged through magazines that were mostly about grapes, fruit and nut orchards, truck farming and light agriculture. He was immersed in an article about crop placement and rotation when Kayla finally reemerged from the back of the house.
Her slouched shoulders were the only giveaway that she was tired. “I’m sorry that took so long. She wanted two stories before turning out the light.”
“She’s a good kid. You and your dad can be real proud of the job you’re doing.”
“Dad’s been a rock, but he only came with us to help get the vineyard started. He plans to go back to Oregon this summer.”
“So it’ll be just you and Megan. Can’t be easy being a single mom.”
She shrugged. “Easier, actually, than when Daryl and I were married.”
This was the first time she’d ever mentioned her ex-husband.
“What happened—if you don’t mind my asking?”
“You don’t want to hear my problems.”
“Actually I do.” He wanted to know everything about this woman.
She gazed at him for an extended moment, then dropped into the easy chair across from him.
“When Megan was first diagnosed with asthma, Daryl glommed on to the doctor’s comment that kids often outgrew it. And when that didn’t happen soon enough, he insisted it was all psychosomatic, to get attention. It really complicated things, because he seemed to think discipline would solve the problem. He was half-right.”
Ethan raised an eyebrow.
“It’s not psychosomatic the way he meant it, but emotion definitely contributes to episodes. You saw what happened when she got upset about not taking Birdsong home. Daryl didn’t get it that his constant harping and fighting was the biggest cause of her asthma.”
“So you divorced him.”
She looked sharply at Ethan. “You make it sound like I was the culprit.”
“That’s not what I meant. I was just stating a fact.”
“I divorced him after he walked out,” she declared. “And because it was the best way I could protect my daughter.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
“Does she miss him?”
“She misses the idea of him, of having a daddy, but please don’t ever ask her about him or bring up his name. It can upset her for days.”
The silence between them lingered. “What are you fixin’ to do about the vineyard?” he finally asked.
“Replant.”
He liked the quick response and the determination he heard in it. “Losing a whole year’s growth can’t be easy.”
“I won’t lose a year,” she said. “The ideal time for planting new stock is the fall. I missed that when we got here in January, but grapes can actually be planted anytime. I’ll tear out what’s there now and replant. I won’t have lost any significant time, since I wasn’t going to get a crop this year, anyway.”
“But it’ll still cost you.”
“The price of new vines,” she confirmed. “Not nearly as much as it did when I had to clear the land, install the grid and the irrigation system. I’d move it now, if I could afford to, to a location closer to the house, where I could keep an eye on things better, but I picked that spot because it was the best one.”
“How about installing a security system?”
“Too expensive. I don’t have that kind of cash and my savings will be drained when I purchase new stock.”
A plan was forming in Ethan’s head, but he decided not to say anything about it until he’d had a chance to think it through.
“Who would want to do this, Ethan?” she asked. “What threat could a vineyard possibly be to anyone?”
“A couple of decades back I might have blamed prohibitionists,” he said. “Most of Texas didn’t go wet until the mid-eighties, and there are a few counties that’re still dry. Not that that’s an issue anymore. Never was in Loveless County. Although you still have to go outside city limits for hard liquor. But your vineyard isn’t designed exclusively for the local market anyway.”
“So why? I don’t understand.”
“There was a lot of controversy when Miranda proposed the Home Free concept. Our consortium, KC Enterprises, had just gone bust and everyone was wondering what was going to happen. Everyone expected Clint Gallagher—” He paused. “Everyone figured he’d buy it, since it touched his spread and would have made him the biggest rancher in several counties around.”
“This consortium,” she said, “the Broken Spoke was part of it, wasn’t it?”
Ethan nodded. “My father was one of its organizers, along with Nate Cantrell, Jock Montgomery—”
“The sheriff?”
“His father. Robert Bell, Jase Farley and Nan Wright, the mayor’s mother. Some put in cash, a lot of it, for a few of them it was their life savings. Others, like Jase and my father, who were cash poor, contributed their land to the venture.”
“So when it failed, everybody lost. Was your father blamed?”
“He blamed himself. Felt he should have seen what was coming.”
“In what way?”
“KC Enterprises had borrowed a lot of money from the bank to increase stock, drill new water wells, install fencing. Then the drought hit, and the bank refused to extend us any more credit. We could have weathered even that crisis by selling off cattle, if the mad cow disease scare hadn’t struck. Foreign markets shut down and beef prices fell so low it didn’t even pay to haul the stock to market.”
“I heard Gallagher blocked the loan,” Kayla said, “so he could buy up the place.”
Ethan nodded. “Would have worked, too, if Miranda hadn’t come up with her harebrained scheme.”
“If everybody thought Miranda’s idea was so crazy, how did it get implemented?”
Ethan laughed. “You don’t know Miranda. Once she latches on to something, she doesn’t give up. Arlen Enfield was our mayor then, and chummy with Gallagher, if not exactly in his pocket. He refused to put the matter on the city council agenda, so she ran against him in the next election. People laughed at first. Enfield had been in office for twelve years, and his reelection was considered a slam dunk, but she made Home Free the focus of her campaign. When she won, I don’t think anyone was more surprised than Enfield, or maybe Gallagher. Anyway, her first order of business was Home Free. It passed the council by a narrow margin.”
“Do you think Enfield could be behind this?”
“I can’t imagine why. What would he have to gain at this point? He’s out of office. Wrecking the Home Free program won’t put him back in. Besides, I think he’s already looking at other options, like replacing Gallagher in the state senate.”
Ethan shook his head. “If I had to point in any one direction, I’d be more inclined to pick Gallagher himself. Most of the land still hasn’t been given away, but no one’s allowed to buy more than one parcel, which means he can’t just walk in and buy them all up. I imagine that sticks in his craw. On the other hand, if he were to scare enough people off, and the project failed, he’d be in an excellent position to make
an offer for it.”
“But he’s a state senator,” she objected, “and he already has a big ranch. What would he need more land for?”
“Pride, a sense of entitlement, prestige. Trust me, Clint Gallagher didn’t become a power broker in Austin by being a nice guy. He’s a cutthroat politician of the old school.” Ethan shrugged. “Of course this is all speculation.”
He rose from the couch. “It’s late and I’m sure you have things to do. Call the sheriff in the morning and let me know what time he’s coming out. I’ll be over to meet him with you.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
KAYLA STOOD ON the front porch and watched him drive off. She’d half expected him to kiss her good-night. In fact, she’d been tempted to give him a peck on the cheek, like when he’d given her the neck and shoulder massage. She could still see the surprise on his face and remember the kiss in the barn. Dangerous territory, but then, she’d known he was dangerous from the first moment she saw him.
Life was becoming too complicated. She didn’t need to make matters worse by giving in to the attraction she felt for Ethan. Not when he was so close; when she felt so needy and so vulnerable.
After fixing herself a cup of tea she sat at the kitchen table, wishing he was still sitting across from her. She forced herself to review the hazards of late planting.
Other than adjusting the watering schedule and spreading net over the new canes to protect them from scorching, there seemed few downsides. The vines would still have the long growing season to establish themselves before autumn pruning.
Worry about her vineyard made Kayla restless that night, but that was only part of the problem. It had been a long time since she’d had a man of her own generation to talk to, to lean on, to share concerns with, and now the one person she’d found just happened to be a smart, caring, fun-loving, very attractive eligible bachelor.
She rolled out of bed on schedule in the morning, showered quickly, dressed and went to the kitchen. Her father was already up, sipping coffee and looking over a list of things to do that day.
“What time are you calling the sheriff?” he asked after greeting her.