Out of the Frying Pan

by Robin Allen

  I walked out of the kitchen and my eyes landed on Brandon rolling toward the fields on the four-wheeler. I took off after him, shouting, “Brandon! Wait up!”

  He idled near the hedge of the Field until I caught up to him. “Be right back,” he said. “I have to tell the guys they can knock off for now.”

  “Can I come?” I asked.

  “Hop in,” he said. He hit the gas pedal and we took off. Well, not gas because it was all electric.

  We hummed past plots of dirt that had been rowed out with sticks and string to be planted soon, and fields of lettuces and corn, the cooperative product of nature and farmer. I can grow gobs of mold in my refrigerator, but I have a necrotic thumb when it comes to growing anything with roots. I certainly don’t know all the ins and outs, all the what-have-yous about organic farming, but I know it’s harder than I want to work for a salad.

  From what I remember of Perry’s talk during the tour and others I’ve heard him give in years past, their farm lives revolve around such things as sustainable soil fertility and nutrient levels, crop rotation to confuse and disrupt harmful insects, host plants to bring in beneficial birds and bugs, and weed control—all with minimal environmental disturbance. And then there’s the USDA certification paperwork.

  This is part of the reason Brandon, Cory, and Kevin are still living at home as it were, well past the age of marriage and family. The farm depends on the boys for its survival.

  I wouldn’t want to be Dana’s killer, but I especially wouldn’t want to be the one who put the family business at risk.

  “That’s a pretty good idea y’all had to pre-wash the vegetables for lazy subscribers,” I said. The ride was so quiet, I didn’t have to raise my voice.

  “Not lazy, busy,” Brandon said as we turned onto a dirt road that led to the back of the farm. “It was Kevin’s idea. To bring in more money.”

  “Bjorn told me you weren’t using food-grade peroxide at the farm anymore, but didn’t you use some for the demo?”

  “We switched over to iodine, but Dad wanted us to use peroxide the other night because it looks nicer.” He parked and stood up in the passenger side, then whistled at a group of interns and waved them in.

  “What did you do with the bottle when you were done?” I asked after he sat down again. “You usually store it in the kitchen freezer, right?”

  “Dad didn’t want Dana or her cooks to accidentally use it, so he said to take it back to the house. That’s some wicked stuff if you don’t handle it right.”

  “Did you take it home right after the demo?”

  “Cory said he’d do it.” Brandon did a K-turn to get us going back where we came from.

  “It’s like a mini Jeep, this thing,” I said.

  “Uncle Ian’s working on getting us two more.” He gunned it and we shot up the road, shaken and stirred all the way to the buildings. He slowed down when we had to maneuver around the staircase that had, in our absence, been moved in front of the dirt road leading out of the fields, then rolled to a stop by the chicken coop. “We’re running low on juice,” he said. “I need to get this in the barn before it dies.”

  “Really?” I asked, not believing my luck at not having to finagle a reason to see inside the barn. “I mean, can I see how it works? Daisy and Erik are saving up to buy one.”

  “Giddyup!” he said.

  He rolled up to the closed barn doors and put the gear in Park, but I stepped out before he did. “I’ll get it.”

  “It’s heavy,” he said.

  “I do power yoga,” I said, displaying a bicep. “I’m strong like bull.”

  I unhooked the latch, then tried to slide the right side of the door open. Brandon smiled and put his feet up on the steering wheel, settling in for a long wait. I used both hands and gave the door a hard jerk. It scraped and squeaked and moved only a couple of inches. I did that a few more times until I had enough room to wedge my body between the two doors. I put my legs and back into it, but couldn’t push it open. I hated to do it, but I looked to Brandon for help.

  He swung out of the four-wheeler and slid open the left side, chuckling to himself as he returned to the vehicle.

  “You could have told me,” I said as he passed me and parked under the stairs that led up to the loft.

  He cut the engine then switched on the overhead lights. The barn looked and smelled as it had in my youth, its looming bigness giving me the same mixture of excitement and dread. In the center of the dirt floor was a pyramid of hay bales stacked about eight feet high, with wide dirt corridors between it and a series of livestock stalls in the wings. Instead of milk cows, the stalls on the left held more hay bales, the ones on the right, underneath the hay loft, held SUVs. Three of them. The same model, all painted charcoal gray, and all parked nose in.

  I whistled. “Fan-cy.”

  Brandon pointed quickly at each one as he said, “Ian’s, Tanya’s, Kevin’s.”

  “What are they doing in here?”

  “Dad wants them out of sight when subscribers are around.”

  I thought I knew the reason, but asked Brandon anyway. “Why?”

  “He wants everyone to believe that we’re but humble hippie farmers.”

  “Where’s yours?” I asked.

  “My Honda from college still has a few miles left in her.” He uncoiled a thick orange electrical cord from the wall and plugged it into the front of the four wheeler.

  “How long does it take to charge?” I asked.

  “Full charge? About eight hours. If Ian left it alone long enough.”

  “Where is Ian, anyway? He’s usually here on pick-up days.”

  “We slid the pick-up day to today because of Dana, and it messed up our other deliveries. Him and Kevin took some boxes to our drop at Zilker Park. Dad makes them take the Veedub on official farm business.” He thumped the gauges on the four-wheeler’s dash and seemed satisfied that everything was charging properly. “They should be back by now.”

  “I suppose they don’t much like the bus after driving one of these,” I said as an excuse to move closer to the three vehicles. I couldn’t tell which one I had seen sneak away from the barn the night before. But then I had an idea. “Are they automatic or standard?” I asked, opening the driver’s side door of the one closest to the barn doors. The interior light came on. Dang.

  “I don’t know,” Brandon said. “They just got them. I haven’t seen inside yet.” He opened the middle one and that light came on, too.

  I pinned all my hopes on getting that third car door open. If the light came on, I would have to figure out another way to know who left so secretly, but if it didn’t come on, I would have another angle to work while I was at the farm. I had run out of excuses to open doors, but Brandon was occupied with admiring the interior of the car he opened, so I slipped over to the third car and opened the door. No light! “They’re all sticks,” I said. “Even Tanya’s.”

  “That one’s Kevin’s,” Brandon said as he shut his door.

  “How can you tell them apart?” I said as I surveyed the front seat, passenger seat, dash, and console. I saw mud on the driver’s side carpet, but that was nowhere close to suspicious.

  “They always park in the same stall.”

  The police required more than that to point the finger at Kevin, but I didn’t. I hadn’t seen Kevin in the Field shooing people off the farm after the party, so he may have been the one driving off. And according to Tanya, he was in the “no Dana” camp, which automatically clicked him up a notch on the suspect list.

  I wanted to search the barn for whatever evidence Kevin may have left inside, so I had to think of a way to keep Brandon in the barn with me. I headed for the back and tried for a nostalgic tone when I said, “Do you remember when y’all used to have that cow?”

  Brandon closed the car door and came out of the stall to lean against a po
st. “Yeah, Mrs. Hoofster. She was mean.”

  I inspected the wooden countertops, but saw only rusty cans of bolts and screws, empty egg crates, old hand tools, and undisturbed dust. “You tried to show me and Daisy how to milk her that one time and—”

  “She kicked Kevin in the jewels,” Brandon finished with a snicker.

  I opened one of the lower cabinets. “Can you believe he used to fit in here when we played hide-and-seek?” I squatted down, pretending to assess the cabinet’s size. “Hard to believe he was that little.” Nothing but a bunch of crumbly rubber belts and an old horseshoe.

  “He’s still mad about that time we locked him inside on his birthday.”

  “He’s mad about a lot of things,” I said. “I think he needs a girl-

  friend.”

  “He says he’s working on building a nest egg first. Ever since that MBA, it’s nothing but money, money, money.” He started for the open barn door. “I’ve got to get back to work, okay?”

  I couldn’t come up with a good reason to keep us inside, so I followed him, taking my time as I looked up, down, and around. I saw an open cardboard box on the dirt floor by the door and—holy fortuitous serendipity!—soldiered inside were several slender white necks wearing little red hats!

  Twenty-Nine

  I figured there was no need for stealth, so I picked up a bottle and said, “Does this OxyGrowth stuff work? Daisy and Erik would love it at their nursery if it does.”

  “I don’t know,” Brandon said. “Dad’s still not convinced we should use it. Take a bottle and let them try it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We have tons of the stuff,” he said. “Kevin got us a deal.”

  “Thanks,” I said as I inserted the bottle into the outside pocket of my backpack. “And thanks for the tour.”

  “Any time, Pop.” He turned off the lights before he slid the doors closed, then we walked over to the buildings. He waved to one of the subscribers beckoning to him. “Excuse me,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  I stood outside the barn and processed what I had learned. First and most relevant, Perry insisted that Brandon and Cory use peroxide for the demo. Was it really because he thought it looked better or did he want the peroxide out of the kitchen where he could get to it easily? No, that didn’t make sense for two reasons: one, the farm is his domain and he could have gotten the peroxide at any time, and two, why direct the boys to take the bottle to the house afterward?

  I assumed that with Ian’s opposition to an all-organic restaurant, Perry had advocated bringing Dana and Herbivore to the farm, so he wanted Dana there as far as that went. Unless something went sideways between them at the last minute, like Dana insisted on a higher percentage of the partnership, or she changed her mind about the menu and wanted to serve pork sandwiches and bowls of chili.

  And all those brand-new McDougal SUVs were strange. The money, the impact on the environment, the reliance on oil—the opposite of green and sustainable, the opposite of the farm’s values. What had Megan said in the office earlier when I mentioned Ian cutting his hair? That he was doing a lot of things that were hard to believe. It had all the hallmarks of a run-of-the-mill midlife crisis, but why buy new cars for his wife and son, too? Guilt perhaps? That he had raised such a smarmy kid and had driven Tanya to drink and into another man’s tongs.

  At least I knew that food-grade peroxide was still on the premises, and now I had a bottle of OxyGrowth to test. It mattered which one the killer had used because it would either cull my suspects or swell the herd. The peroxide was known to and accessible by only a few of the farmers, whereas OxyGrowth was available to anyone at the party—especially those who had interrupted my phone call to Mitch in the storage pantry under one pretense or another.

  I bent down and plucked a couple of blades of grass, then went to the bathroom and hung my backpack on the coat hook on the back of the door. I pulled out the bottle of OxyGrowth, jammed my finger through the foil seal, and, as I had done with the gin the night of the party, poured a small amount into the lid. I laid the bottle and lid on the edge of the sink, then pinched off a small piece of grass and dropped it into the OxyGrowth. And then … nothing … more nothing … still nothing.

  Had I thought to sniff the bottle’s contents, all of that would have been unnecessary. It gave off a distinct chemical smell, and the liquid was pale yellow. OxyGrowth had the color and stench of urine, but the remains in Dana’s cup were clear and odorless, so she had definitely gulped food-grade hydrogen peroxide, which definitely pointed to Bjorn or one of the farmers as the murderer, which meant that I was definitely in the right place.

  My best assumption was that Dana’s killer had voted against her and Herbivore, so I needed to find more farmers and ask more questions. However, I had no authority outside the kitchen, so I would have to try to get information based on personal relationship. And that meant I had to court the company of persons.

  I walked up to the washing shed and found my name on the list of subscribers attached to a clipboard next to the sink. I initialed my entry then heaved up a box of vegetables from the now-­shortened stack and placed it on the table. As I transferred my haul into my crocheted bags, I caught sight of Perry on the plywood walkway between the shed and the office talking to Jesse Muñoz, the owner of a local equipment supply company. Megan had told me earlier that Perry slept late, but he didn’t look well-rested.

  Perry and Jesse shook hands, and I stowed my bags under the table and hurried over to speak with Perry before something else captured his attention. His face remained solemn as he watched me approach, and I wasn’t sure if it was due to my presence or to the dope-dealing son and dead ex-girlfriend situations.

  “Hello, Poppy.”

  “Hey, Perry. How are you? Megan told me you were able to get Cory out on bail.”

  “That was step one. We have another hundred to go.”

  “I’m really sorry you’re having to deal with all that mess,” I said. “Dana, too. Mitch tells me you started the farm with her.”

  He dropped his eyes and said softly, “That was a lifetime ago.”

  “What’s the status of Herbivore now?”

  He looked up at me. “What’s with all the questions?”

  I had already come up with an excuse in case someone thought to ask me that. I was just surprised that it hadn’t been asked sooner. “Jamie Sherwood wants me to gather some facts for him while I’m here.”

  “Facts for what?”

  “A story he’s doing on Dana.”

  “What kind of story?”

  That, I didn’t have a ready-made answer for. The mention of Jamie’s name usually induces logorrhea in people. “One on Herbivore. That was the announcement she was going to make after dinner, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you vote to bring it to the farm?”

  “Look, Jamie’ll have to get his facts some other way,” Perry said. “My attorney doesn’t want anyone talking to anyone for a while.”

  “Not even to say who won the recipe contest?”

  He finally smiled. “I guess we never got to announce it, did we? Daisy’s daughter, Logan. Her sweet potato pie.” He pressed his lips together. “That was the last thing Dana and I discussed. She said she was impressed with its complexity.”

  Perry struck me as truly heartbroken by Dana’s death—not that a killer can’t feel pain or remorse—and I didn’t think he did it, and since I felt my investigation slipping into a coma, I decided to take a chance and come clean with him. If he kicked me off the farm, the police would have to solve it themselves. “I wish it weren’t true, Perry, but I think Dana was murdered.”

  He frowned at me. “She had another heart attack.”

  “Induced by drinking food-grade hydrogen peroxide.”

  “It didn’t come from here,” he said. “We use iodin
e.”

  “Brandon told me they used some for the washing demo. He said you gave it to him.”

  Perry put his hands on his hips and gazed up at the sky. “I forgot about that.” He turned to me, finally grasping what had happened to Dana. “She drank that stuff?”

  “One of you put it in the measuring cup she was drinking from that night.”

  “One of … You have no proof of that.”

  “It didn’t get into her cup accidentally.”

  He massaged the back of his neck. “Who would do that?”

  “Someone who hated Dana and had access to the peroxide. Someone who didn’t want Herbivore at the farm.”

  Perry whistled sharply at one of the interns on a golf cart. When he looked up, Perry waved him away from the foot-tall rosemary bush he had almost crushed. “Watch where you’re going, son,” Perry said to the intern, then to me, “Is that why you’re here? To accuse one of us of killing Dana White?”

  I had to be careful with my answer. Depending on whether Perry’s loyalties lay more with protecting the farm or with doing the right thing, he might either banish me from Good Earth or give me the name of the killer. “We both owe it to Dana to learn the truth,” I said.

  “What if I did it?” he asked.

  “It’s possible,” I said, “but I’d be surprised if you did something to hurt the farm.” I pointed to his T-shirt and read the tagline. “Honest food from honest folks. Do you still believe that? Will you help me?”

  He shook his head and I slumped my shoulders. “I won’t stop you, though,” he said.

  That may have been the best thing to happen! If my intuition had fed me faulty vibes about Perry, he would run straight to any evidence still on the farm and destroy it. If he knew who killed Dana, he would run straight to that person and raise the alarm. And if he wasn’t sure who did it, he would run straight to the person he himself suspected. I tracked his movements toward the Field, but he stopped a few yards away and pulled his cell phone from his pocket.