Til Dirt Do Us Part (A Local Foods Mystery)

by Edith Maxwell

  A siren wailed in the distance. The rising and falling keen sounded like it came from the other side of the woods that formed the back perimeter of her property. Cam sniffed the air for smoke and scanned the skyline. She relaxed her shoulders, not having realized how tense she’d become at the thought of a fire. A childhood incident, combined with the barn fire, made her wary every time she heard sirens.

  She threw an empty bushel basket into the garden cart and headed for the tomato field. It was time to call it a day for the crop of larger heirlooms, even though there hadn’t been a hard frost yet. New England didn’t offer enough sun or warmth at this time of year to ripen the crop of baseball-size green fruit yet clinging to the browning vines. She filled the basket with the pale green orbs while thinking about green tomato–apple chutney and began pulling the spent plants, laying them in the wide garden cart.

  Preston sidled by and then shot off in pursuit of unseen prey. Cam worked for another hour, until her growling stomach demanded fuel. She hoisted the bushel on top of the cart full of vines. She trudged with the cart to the compost bins and carried the basket to the house. She set it down in the screened-in back porch. Extracting a key from the not-so-secret hiding place under a statue of a garden gnome sitting at a computer, she unlocked the back door and let herself in. Before getting involved in the search for her farmhand’s murderer in June, she had always left the door unlocked while she was outside working. Now she locked it every time she left the house.

  On the faded blue-speckled Formica of the kitchen countertop, the green light on her voice mail device blinked. The missed call was from Ruth Dodge. Cam realized Ruth and her little daughters hadn’t shown up at the dinner last night.

  She accessed the message and listened, gazing at one of the dinner centerpieces on her dining table. The flower vase needed topping off with water.

  “Cam, call me as soon as possible.”

  That was it. Cam frowned. Maybe Ruth needed some emergency babysitting. She checked the number—Ruth had called from her cell and not from the police station. Cam pressed the buttons to return the call. Ruth picked up right away and sounded relieved that Cam was on the line.

  “What’s up?” Cam asked. “Are the girls okay? You guys didn’t come to the dinner last night.”

  Ruth said they were fine, that she’d explain later. “This is an official call, Cam. I’m at work.”

  “Did I do something wrong?” It was odd that Ruth was calling from her cell phone at work.

  “Irene Burr was at the dinner, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. We had about eighty guests. It was a great event—”

  “Did she argue with anybody?” Ruth interrupted.

  Cam kept her silence for a moment, picturing the evening.

  “Cam?”

  “I’m not sure you’d call it arguing. She seemed to rub a number of people the wrong way. But that’s how she is. I think she probably means well.”

  “Any details on who she upset?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need to know. Tell me who she rubbed the wrong way.”

  “Her stepson, her mechanic, Wes Ames, even Howard Fisher. You might better ask who didn’t she get riled up.”

  “Oh?”

  Cam sensed that Ruth’s ears were perking up even more. The two had been friends since the first summer Cam had come to the farm, when she was six. “Has something happened?”

  It was Ruth’s turn to keep silent.

  “Has something happened to Irene?” Cam shivered. It wasn’t from the temperature.

  “I have to go, Cam. I’ll call you back.” The phone clicked off.

  Cam stared at the device in her hand, as if willing it to ring again. She set it down a little harder than it deserved and assembled a peanut butter and banana sandwich instead. Ruth wasn’t going to call back. Two bites in, a bell rang, but it was the doorbell.

  Hastening to chew and swallow, Cam checked the window. She opened the back door to Sim Koyama.

  Sim’s tough exterior now displayed a big crack. “Cam, you have to help me.” Her voice quavered. She wore a uniform of black similar to her garb the night before, but her hair stuck out every which way, like a thistle plant. Dark smudges lurked under tense eyes.

  “Come in. Are you all right?”

  “I am, but Bobby isn’t. Irene Burr is dead.”

  “Oh, no! That’s terrible.” So that was why Ruth had called. “Bobby must be really upset.”

  “And the pigs. My God, the pigs.” Sim’s dark eyes looked haunted.

  “The pigs?” Had Sim lost it?

  “It’s awful.” Sim paced toward the kitchen and back.

  “Is Bobby all right? What can I do to help?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know who his friends are, besides me. I thought maybe you’d be able to find him.”

  “He worked for me all summer, but he didn’t really talk about his personal life. I really have no idea where he would be or who he hangs out with.” Cam shook her head. “How did you find out about Irene’s death?”

  “My cousin’s a dispatcher. She knows Bobby and I are friends. She thought I might know where he is. The police are looking for him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. To notify him, I guess.” Sim’s voice shook.

  “Sit down. I think you need a beer or something stronger. Yes?”

  Sim agreed and sat at the dining table. Cam poured them each a glass of ale from a half-full growler the brewery had given her last night. So what if it was only ten o’clock in the morning? It was five o’clock somewhere. Sim drained half her glass straight off. Cam refilled it and sat.

  “What were you saying about pigs, Sim?”

  Sim shuddered. Her face drew in like she’d seen a demon.

  “Tell me.” Cam covered Sim’s hand with her own.

  “The cops said Irene was found in a pigsty. Half the flesh was eaten off her legs by the pigs.” Sim laid her head on her arms on the table.

  Cam gasped. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the image was worse. And when she reopened them, Sim was still there. The nightmare was still there.

  “A pigsty?” Cam shuddered at the awful vision. A body, Irene Burr’s body, in a pigsty. On a pig farm.

  Sim nodded mutely.

  “How did she get into a pigsty?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody saw her Jag parked at the edge of the woods.”

  Cam’s eyes widened. “Wait. Whose farm?”

  “The Jag was next to a path that leads to the Fisher farm.”

  “Oh, no! But why didn’t she get out?” Cam stared at her, the realization sinking in. “This wasn’t an accident, was it? Did your cousin say—”

  “Not an accident. Irene was murdered.” Sim slammed her hand on the table, making the vase jump. An orange nasturtium slid away from its mates and lay beached on the old oak of the table. “Lots of people would have been much happier if Irene disappeared, me included. I wouldn’t kill her, but it doesn’t surprise me somebody did.”

  Chapter 3

  Sim drove off on her motorcycle after saying she had customers waiting at her shop. Cam trudged back to work, with the news weighing as heavily on her as a bushel of new potatoes. She stopped and leaned against the southern wall of the barn, its rough wood warmed by a sun finally shining through the morning gloom, wood Bobby had hammered into place all summer long.

  Poor Irene. Cam tried without success to banish the image of hungry, snuffling pigs chewing on Irene’s flesh. She fervently hoped Irene had been dead or at least unconscious before that happened. Who would have gone so far as killing Irene? And why on Howard’s farm?

  The thought that cheery, hardworking, flirty Bobby was missing, and did not know his stepmother was dead, also disturbed her deeply. She had to admit to herself what she hadn’t said to Sim: maybe he had argued with Irene and somehow had accidentally killed her. And then had left town. She shook her head. It would be the act of a guilty p
erson, not a grieving innocent.

  Cam shook her head again. She had a farm to run. It was the police’s business to figure out what had happened, not hers. She grabbed a pitchfork from inside the barn and emptied the tomato vines from the cart into the bin holding the newest compost ingredients. She forked finished compost into the cart from the last bin in the row of four. The dark crumbly matter, more valuable to the soil than gold, was the result of mixing spent plants with fall leaves, horse manure from a neighboring farm, grass clippings, and kitchen waste. Cam turned the compost as often as she could. She sprinkled it with water as she worked and then let air, microorganisms, and worms do the rest of the work of breaking down the mix. She tried to find time, or sometimes a volunteer, to shift the working compost from bin to bin every week or two, which mixed and aerated it. By the time the compost hit the last bin, all the rough ingredients were combined, broken down, and ready to nourish the soil. As long as it had enough air in the process, the friable mix smelled as fresh as newly turned soil.

  This particular cartload was destined to nurture next year’s garlic crop. Cam dumped it on the recently vacated tomato beds and headed back to the barn. She brought the bag of seed garlic, a small knife, and a basket out to a picnic table Bobby had knocked together for her. As she sat separating the bulbs of Music and German Red into individual cloves, she searched her mind for where Bobby might be. Maybe he’d had an accident, too. Maybe he was sick in bed. Or maybe he was a killer on the run.

  One of the bulbs was particularly tight around its central stalk. This was stiff-neck garlic, the kind that grew in a single row of fat cloves around a pencil-thick stalk. She also needed to plant the soft-neck garlic. It featured several concentric circles of cloves, so some were smaller, but it kept longer than the stiff-neck varieties. She’d made garlic braids out of the soft-neck garlic at the end of August, and customers loved them.

  Cam poked the point of the knife into the middle of the tight bulb to try to separate the cloves from the stalk. She jabbed at it as if that would get Bobby found and would bring Irene back to life. The knife slipped and pierced her palm instead. She swore as she dropped the tool.

  A rumble from the driveway made her look up from her wound. The rental truck loomed. Cam pressed her other thumb to the cut as she directed the driver back to the tent. He and a helper, a young man Cam had seen bagging groceries at the Food Mart earlier in the year, set to work collapsing the tables and chairs, while Cam fetched a bandage from the house for her palm. When she returned to the tent, the driver approached her, holding something white.

  “Found this under a table.” He gestured behind him with his head. “Somebody must have dropped it.”

  Cam thanked him. It was a small envelope, unsealed, with nothing written on the outside. She opened it and drew out a slip of paper. She glanced at it and looked up with a quick movement. Had the man read what was written on it? But he had returned to his work. She read it again.

  MEET ME IN THE WOODS AT ELEVEN, OR I’LL TELL WHAT I KNOW.

  YOU KNOW WHERE.

  The message in all capital letters was a threat. She’d bet a bushel of heirloom tomatoes it was meant for Irene Burr. Or maybe Irene had threatened someone else. The real question was, who was it from? She slipped the paper back into the envelope and strode to the house, holding the envelope by one of its corners. She checked Albert’s yellowed phone list on the wall and dialed the numbers for the Westbury police station. She asked for Ruth Dodge.

  “It might be connected to Irene Burr’s death.” Cam tapped the countertop as she waited on hold. Or I’ll tell what I know, the note read. If it was for Irene, she must have harbored secrets she didn’t want made public knowledge. And if it was from Irene, who in town feared a secret revealed? Cam’s own life had been pretty straightforward up to now. Sure, she had a fear of fires based on an incident in her childhood. If that became generally known, it would be more embarrassing than dangerous. She was an adult. Shouldn’t she have been able to master the fear by now? But a secret that would allow someone to threaten her with disclosure of it? She had nothing.

  “Pappas here,” a voice barked into her ear. “Who am I talking to?”

  Oh, crud. “Detective Pappas, what a pleasure,” she lied. “It’s Cam Flaherty.” It had been anything but a pleasure working with the state police detective last June. He had to be in the local station, which could mean only one thing. Irene had been murdered.

  “Ah, Ms. Flaherty.”

  “I heard my customer Irene Burr is dead.” Cam didn’t want to use the words “was killed,” but the fact that Pappas was on the phone pretty much assured Irene had been murdered.

  “Who did you hear it from?”

  “A friend of Irene’s stepson’s.”

  “Name?”

  “Sim Koyama. She’s a mechanic—”

  “I know who she is.”

  Cam summoned up her inner adult, not an easy task in the face of his responses. “So I’m sure you already know Irene was at an event at my farm last night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, this morning, just now, in fact, the tent guy—”

  “Tent guy?”

  “I rented a tent. Guys from the rental company are here taking it down. One of them found an envelope on the ground and . . .” She rushed on, worried he might be losing his patience. “It has what I think is a threatening note in it.”

  “You think?”

  “Look, Detective. Am I not doing the right thing? The guy found it, I read the note, and I walked straight into my house and called the authorities. Do you want to see it or not?” Sheesh. He was the one who had accused her of withholding evidence after Mike Montgomery was murdered on her farm. No wonder she’d heard less than positive gossip about Westbury’s finest and their statie colleagues. Although Pappas didn’t live in town, this area in the northeasternmost corner of Massachusetts seemed to constitute his state police beat.

  He cleared his throat. “I’ll come pick it up. I wanted to ask you a few questions, anyway. Be there in ten.”

  Nice of him to ask if now was a good time.

  Apparently reading her mind, Pappas said, “If you’ll be available.”

  “I’m here. Separating garlic.”

  “What the . . . ? Oh, never mind.” The phone clicked off.

  Cam finished splitting the last bulb into cloves. The discarded papery sheaths from the bulbs floated out of the basket on a new breeze.

  The rental-agency truck was backing out when Pappas pulled in fast, nearly ramming the truck. Luckily, the driver leaned on the horn and the detective managed to swerve out of the way. Cam winced as she watched from the picnic table. The wheels of Pappas’s older-model Saab dug into the edge of the perennial flower garden Great-Aunt Marie had planted and lovingly tended until right before her death a few years earlier.

  Pappas approached Cam. His shirt, open at the neck, bore a web of wrinkles, and one side of the collar hid under his sport coat, while the other point skewed over the jacket. The laces on one of his black walking shoes flapped as he walked.

  “You want to sit down?” Cam pointed to the bench on the other side of the table. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him so disheveled. It was kind of a nice touch. In her earlier dealings with him he had always been neat to the point of fastidiousness. He seemed more human this way, less of an automaton.

  He remained standing, so Cam stood, too, and slouched against the table. She didn’t know if her two-inch height advantage bothered him or not. In her experience, most men didn’t enjoy having to look up at a woman.

  They exchanged brief greetings before Cam said, “I’ll get the note. It’s in the house.”

  Pappas shook his head. “First, show me where the dinner took place.”

  Cam gestured toward the back of the farm. She didn’t know what he expected to find. The tent and furniture were gone. This wasn’t the scene of the crime, anyway.

  “I assume the fact that you are investigating means Irene was mu
rdered,” Cam said as they walked.

  He nodded but didn’t meet her eyes.

  The closely mowed field where the tent had stood still bore signs of trampling from the guests, servers, and rental-agency guys. Clouds threatened the hour of sunshine that had blessed the day.

  “Sim also told me Bobby Burr is missing,” Cam said. “Have you had any luck finding him?”

  Pappas walked away from her without answering, tracing the perimeter of the field. He narrowed his spiral with each cycle until he stood in the middle, his hands empty.

  “I heard this Sim person threatened Irene.” Pappas turned toward Cam. “Is it true?”

  Uh-oh. “Who did you hear that from?”

  “Did she?”

  “It was simply conversational, I’m sure. I don’t think Sim would hurt anyone.”

  “Is she a close friend of yours?”

  “No. I only met her last night.”

  “I’m amazed at your confidence in people you know nothing about. Did Simone Koyama say, ‘I’m going to get her’ in regard to Irene Burr?”

  Cam nodded. Better to keep her mouth shut than get in deeper than she already was. She wondered if Sim had a criminal record. Or, for that matter, if Bobby did. He was a competent and attractive carpenter. Cam had no idea if he or Sim actually had it in them to kill someone.

  “Mr. Ames was also overheard arguing with Ms. Burr.” Pappas rubbed his head.

  Cam looked down at the matted grass without seeing it. She wondered who from the dinner had been talking to the police so soon. This was all taking on a surreal aspect, as if Pappas had had Irene under surveillance even before her death. She shook the thought off. It was a small town. People talked.

  “Ms. Flaherty?”

  “Yes. Wes Ames opposed Irene’s plan to buy the Old Town Hall. I’m sure he wouldn’t kill her simply to stop a sale, though.”

  Pappas raised his left eyebrow. “By the way, what did you do after the dinner was over last night?”

  “I cleaned up and—” Cam stared at him. “Why do you want to know?”