Nipped in the Bud

by Sheila Connolly

  “Thank you, Lauren—for everything.”

  Chapter 20

  They parted ways with Lauren on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, and Meg followed Seth across the busy street and into the cemetery opposite. Seth seemed to know exactly where he was going, so Meg just followed him. “That’s Paul Revere there,” Seth said, pointing. “Sam Adams is over there.” He pointed again.

  “Boston must have been a very different place in their day.”

  “Yes and no, I guess,” Seth replied. “But it’s worth it to me to come here and honor their memories, and what they did. Which has survived, in a variety of ways, until this day.” He made one more full turn, scanning the tombstones, then said, “Ready to go?”

  “I’d rather get home before it’s fully dark. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not. There’s commuter traffic to consider too. We can go—and we can come back again if we want.”

  “There is that,” Meg agreed.

  Fifteen minutes later they had extricated the car from the parking garage and were pointed in the right direction, although no one would say they were moving fast. “Now I remember why I don’t like cities,” Seth said as another car with out-of-town plates cut him off at a corner.

  “I do know what you mean.”

  Meg let Seth concentrate on his driving, remaining silent until they had reached the Massachusetts Turnpike in Weston and could move more quickly. Seth relaxed perceptibly as the road before him opened up. “What have we learned?” he asked.

  “From Toby? Well, he more or less confirmed my impression of Justin—he’s an opportunist, and he’s up to something, although it’s not clear what.”

  “Do you think he’s a threat? Or just overreaching?”

  “I don’t really know. A threat to what? Us? The investigation? Clearly he knew Jenn, but would he have killed her for a story? It’s hard for me to read somebody based on one encounter, but Toby didn’t think so. I might call Justin manipulative, and a little arrogant. Full of himself.”

  “Why arrogant?”

  “Because he thought it would be easy to fool me, that he could get by on charm and good looks, but he was careless.”

  “Hmm.” Seth drove a couple of miles in silence, then said, “Meg, what do you think is going on? And where does Justin fit? It’s been over a week now, with no apparent results. Even the drug police can’t let this drag on much longer without making a lot of people look stupid or incompetent.”

  “I agree a hundred percent. How could they not know anything by now? But big picture? Much as I hate to say it, I think there are drugs in Granford, being sold in town and beyond. I don’t know anything about how much money is involved, and how much trade it would take to make it a big operation. Could be it’s just a toehold, in a nice quiet community where nobody is looking for such a thing, but it could grow. Maybe that’s why the state police drug unit is so anxious to keep what they’re doing under wraps—they’d like to nip it in the bud. Without outside interference from people like us.”

  “Maybe. So Jenn was a threat to their effort?”

  “Maybe. She may have cleared it with narcotics, but it could be she got too involved with the story and went too far. It’s hard to say without knowing the woman.”

  “If the narcotics squad or whatever they are won’t talk to Marcus, who at least is playing on the same team, they probably didn’t say much to a journalist from Boston. Unless she had some prior connection to someone? But how do you call up someone in that group and say, ‘Hello, did you ever talk to Jenn Chambers about your current investigation?’ I’m sure they’d answer if I asked nicely.”

  “Meg, you definitely sound frustrated.”

  “Shouldn’t I? There are a lot of people who have some information, but nobody’s willing to share. I don’t expect them to provide this information to just anybody. Why should they? But I’m not just anybody. I have a track record with the police—they can ask Marcus. Oh, that’s right, they don’t talk to him either. But I did have a body in the backyard, so that should give me some privileges.”

  “There is that,” Seth admitted. “The whole idea of drugs in Granford troubles me. As a community leader, I should know about it. But I have no idea what I’m looking for, and every time I try to picture it, I come up with bad stereotypes of outsiders lurking in corners and handing out packets of something or other, when they aren’t shooting at each other in some turf war the rest of us can’t begin to understand.”

  “I know. But from what little I’ve read or seen on the news, things are a lot more white-collar than they used to be, which makes them less noticeable. You and I have probably had nice ordinary conversations with some of these people without even noticing. I’m beginning to feel like a naïve dinosaur.”

  “Interesting image, but I know what you mean. All this drug stuff boiled up over the past few years, while we weren’t looking. So what now?”

  Meg watched the wintry landscape roll by for a while. Finally she said, “Seth, Larry made a comment the other day about how much coming and going there is up at the house. Not him, obviously, but the other guys there.”

  “So? Should that mean something?” Seth asked.

  “Hear me out. Larry thought they were partying with friends, so he hid in his room and tried to shut out the noise. If that’s true, he wouldn’t know what they were doing. But he implied—and I’d want to check with him—that it went on a lot of the time, not just Saturday nights. So tell me: if you were a drug dealer, handling pretty clean stuff, how would you get it into the hands of your customers? You can’t exactly advertise or put up signs. And you can’t hang around on street corners in Noho or Amherst for long without somebody in law enforcement noticing. Maybe not right away, but if they’re doing their jobs I don’t think it would take long.”

  “Are you going somewhere with this?”

  “Yes, I think so. Say they want to set up a semi-permanent base somewhere that’s not quite as obvious as the center of one town or another, but not too far out to discourage customers. Wouldn’t an isolated old house in Granford be a good place to do business?”

  “And you’re saying you think that’s what all the traffic is about?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it? Somebody would have to keep track of who was coming and going—like the same people, or different people each time—but people would have a good excuse. “Oh, I guess I’m lost—I’d heard there was a party out this way.” And if they’re selling illegal prescription drugs, they would be really easy to conceal. You think drug-sniffing dogs could find them?”

  “Meg, I can’t guess. So you’re saying you think one or more of the three guys who aren’t Larry are running a drug operation out of my house, and none of us noticed?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it? It’s not something we’d be on the lookout for. Like Larry, we’d figure it was just a bunch of young guys leading a normal college life and partying a lot.”

  “And we have absolutely zero evidence for any sort of activity like this, apart from Larry’s word,” Seth pointed out. “Plus, if they are selling pills, that wouldn’t generate much trash, and it would be easy to hide.”

  “You do have the right to inspect the house—it’s yours, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I’d feel awkward barging in and telling whoever’s home that I needed to check if the plumbing was leaking.”

  “That kind of raises another point. Is there always someone there, who could be taking care of business? Or are there times when the house is empty and you could go in?”

  “Meg, this whole thing is like a house of cards. You’re suggesting that a couple or three kids are running a drug operation up the hill from us, which may or may not be large but was apparently important enough for someone to kill a snoopy reporter.”

  “Yes, I guess that’s what I’m saying. You have any better ideas?”

  “Not specifically. We can run it by Art, and I suppose I could give him permission to search the place legally, but if he
does that and comes up empty we will have upended the drug unit’s operation, and I don’t think they’ll be very happy about that.”

  “What can they do to us?”

  “We will have interfered with a police investigation based solely on a paranoid hunch. I’m sure there’s a crime in there somewhere. And I’m just about as sure that Art will catch some flack too.”

  “Can we talk with Art?”

  “Maybe. But if he officially knows what we believe, he might be liable if he doesn’t act on it.”

  “Maybe he already knows and hasn’t told us? To protect us?” Meg suggested hopefully.

  “Meg, I simply don’t know. I’m out of my depth here, and I suspect you are too. The problem is, we can come up with as many pretty theories as we want, but we can’t prove anything, and we risk doing harm to a variety of people—not just ourselves, but my mother and Christopher. And Larry.”

  “So we just sit around and wring our hands and complain? Behind closed windows and locked doors? Is that what you want life in Granford to be like?”

  “I didn’t say that, Meg. But we need to find out as much as possible before we do anything—if we do anything.”

  Meg swallowed a sharp reply. Seth was right: there was no good reason to go charging into this blindly, no matter how strongly she felt. But how were they going to get more information if no one was willing to talk? Including the authorities? She stayed silent for the rest of the trip back.

  It was already dark when they pulled into their driveway. Meg briefly entertained visions of a charred hulk of a house—torched in order to silence them. Or a mangled corpse of an animal, its throat slashed, deposited outside the door. Get a grip, Meg! she told herself. If—still an if—there was drug activity in the town, the dealers’ goal should be to keep a low profile so they could stay in business, not call attention to themselves. Perversely that made her and Seth safer.

  They’d barely gotten inside and fed the animals when the phone rang. Seth answered. “Oh, hi, Mom. No, we haven’t eaten dinner—we made a very fast trip to Boston and we just got back. Sure, that sounds good. See you in five.”

  “Let me guess: your mother just invited us to dinner,” Meg said with a half smile.

  “Got it in one. You okay with that?”

  “Sure. I don’t feel like cooking anyway, and we should fill Lydia in about what’s happened since we last saw her. Will Christopher be there?”

  “I didn’t ask, but probably. You ready to go?”

  “I’ll just put my coat back on.”

  After a brief debate about walking versus driving the half mile or so to Lydia’s house, they decided to take the car. The ride took them all of two minutes. Lydia greeted them happily at the door, and as Seth had predicted, Christopher was hovering in the background. “Something smells wonderful,” Meg said as Seth helped her off with her coat.

  “Corned beef and cabbage,” Lydia said. “I felt like cooking today, and there’s no point in making the dish for only two people, so I got carried away. How was Boston?”

  “Good,” Meg said. “We had lunch with an old friend of mine at the Parker House.”

  “Oh, dear,” Lydia said. “That may be hard to compete with.”

  “Hey, we’re happy to be here, Mom,” Seth said. “Good company. Although Meg and I did decide we should get out of Granford more than we have lately. Maybe the four of us could plan a short trip, although between the orchard, renovation season and the academic calendar, it would take some planning.”

  “But it’s worth considering,” Christopher said firmly.

  “Are you two ready to eat, after your elegant lunch?” Lydia asked.

  “More like ready to crash early,” Meg told her. “It’s been a long and busy day. I apologize in advance if we’re not sparkling company tonight.”

  “You get a free pass,” Lydia said. “You’re family.”

  The food was good, the conversation flowed easily, but in spite of that Meg felt her eyelids drooping, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. She really had turned into a farmer, keeping farmers’ hours—up with the sun, in bed by dark.

  She snapped back to attention when Christopher said to Seth, “There’s been a lot of comings and goings at your house, Seth.”

  “Really?” he replied. “I can’t see it from our place, but Larry said the other guys like to party.”

  “I do dimly recall being young,” Lydia said, smiling, “but I didn’t realize that today’s young people partied around the clock.”

  “What do you mean?” Seth asked.

  “There are vehicles coming and going much of the night,” Christopher said.

  “The headlights shine on our house, when they turn into the driveway,” Lydia added. “We never used to notice that.”

  “The odd thing is that the comings and goings seem to go on all day as well,” Christopher noted. “You know about Larry’s whereabouts, but it strikes me as surprising that three other young men would generate so much traffic.”

  That was odd, Meg agreed silently. And then she stilled, trying to drag out a nagging thought. “How much has Seth told you about the murdered woman?”

  “That she was a journalist,” Lydia replied, “and she was here working on a story about drugs. I know, we’re supposed to keep this quiet, but we haven’t talked with anyone except you two about it. Why do you ask?”

  “Because now we’re wondering whether the other boys—or men—are doing something other than having a good time over there. If there’s that much new traffic, and many of the cars don’t stay long, is it possible that they’re picking up drugs? That one or more of the guys is a dealer?”

  Chapter 21

  Lydia looked startled. “Why on earth would you say that, Meg?”

  “Well, you know it was the state police narcotics unit that clamped down on giving out any information about the death, right?”

  “That’s what you told us. What did you think that meant?”

  Seth picked up the thread. “That they believed there was something involving drugs going on locally and they had some sort of grand plan in place to shut it down, and they didn’t want anything reported on the news to mess that up. Jenn talked to the narcotics people about a big story covering the surge in drug activity in this area, and that was why she was here.”

  “But she never told Art,” Meg said, “although that might have made sense. She’d already talked with the narcotics unit, at the beginning, but maybe they believed she wouldn’t find what she was looking for, or maybe they just blew her off. But she didn’t stop digging. That’s why Seth and I were in Boston today—we needed to talk to someone at the paper who knew her and see if that person might have known what Jenn was doing. And if he did know, did he think that she had shared that information with anyone at the paper.” Like Justin.

  “And?” Lydia asked.

  Meg answered. “Toby, the reporter we met with—off the record—said he sat near Jenn’s desk and picked up enough by eavesdropping to figure out she had something big in her sights, but he didn’t pass that on to anyone. He also figured her editor had to know something.”

  “So why is the poor woman dead?” Lydia asked. “If only a very few people knew what she was doing here.”

  “That we still don’t know,” Meg said. “And we don’t know why she was dumped where she was. If I’d been the killer, I would have made sure she was found nowhere near my home base. Like in the river, or along the highway fifty miles from here. Seth and I guessed that maybe the killer was interrupted, or he was in too much of a hurry. Or he was an idiot, not to mention careless. Or I suppose he might have been sending a signal to any competitors.”

  “What kind of drugs do you think they’re selling?” Lydia asked tentatively.

  Seth answered that question. “Mom, Meg and I are babes in the woods when it comes to what’s popular in drugs,” he said. “The only name I’ve heard kicked around is fentanyl, and all I know about it is what I read online. It is fairly easy to mak
e, it’s very strong, and it can be deadly. Once you’re hooked, withdrawal is really hard. And law enforcement is scrambling to keep up with it. It’s the single biggest cause of the current opioid epidemic. Which is very real in the Pioneer Valley, and growing fast.”

  “You’re saying that they may be making this awful stuff next door?” Christopher asked, incredulous.

  “It’s possible,” Seth told him. “I don’t know all the details of production or what kind of equipment and supplies you would need, but there’s space in and outside the house, and I’m sure that would be plenty large enough to make enough of the stuff for local distribution. But that assumes that the owner—that would be me—wouldn’t be dropping by regularly just to chat and might see what they were doing. It also assumes that everyone at the house had to be involved or at least aware of what was going on there. I think it’s more likely that they would have taken an easier route and found a supplier somewhere else, who delivers the goods ready to sell. In which case they’re just distributing it, not making it themselves. But based on what you tell us about all the comings and goings, they’re doing a lot of business. Still, I don’t think the narcotics unit in Northampton would be eager to explain it all to us.”

  “Seth,” Meg interrupted, “you know we still have no evidence that this is what’s going on next door—only an increase in daily car traffic, which is not exactly conclusive. The state police would probably laugh at us if we told them what we suspect, whether or not it’s true. I suppose it’s possible that they might not have observed that particular fact, but they might laugh at us anyway just to throw us off. Their message for us—and even Marcus and Art—is loud and clear: butt out. But I’d guess the stakes are pretty high. I’m sure they’d rather not let it spread in the area and become a much bigger problem. And those guys at the house have had, what, only a couple of months to get established? They should be stopped before they become a neighborhood fixture.”

  “Assuming you’re correct, what should we do now?” Christopher asked.