Kernel of Doubt: A Neela Durante Mystery

by Hillary Avis

  “You don’t need my permission. Obviously.” Neela moved toward the entrance to the stairwell, but she flinched and stopped when she felt Miles’s hand on her shoulder. He withdrew it almost immediately.

  “I don’t want to step on your toes.” He looked embarrassed. “I’m not implying that you should be the one looking more closely. I mean no offense.”

  Neela smiled sardonically. If Miles thought he could accomplish more in one night than she had in an entire year, he was welcome to try. “None taken. Fair warning: prepare to lose your entire life if you get sucked in on this one.”

  “So you don’t mind?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  ON THE WAY HOME NEELA felt like her old Ford pickup was floating above the roadway instead of bumping its way over the potholes and gravel. Her sense of relief was much greater than she had expected.

  “You got used to the weight of it,” Demetrius said, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he fiddled with the radio knobs. They were on a stretch of road between towers so nothing was coming in clearly. He turned it off. “Want me to drive? You look drunk.”

  “I do feel a little tipsy,” she admitted. “But everything is in focus. Crisp and light, like I’ve been living life under an umbrella for the last year.”

  “You’ve been in capital-L Limbo, my friend. Welcome to the other side. Maybe now I’ll see you somewhere other than the car and the cafeteria.” One of his wide warm smiles spread across his face, and Neela was glad for peripheral vision.

  “I hope so,” she said, trying not to be too hopeful. Her life was complicated—maybe too complicated for someone as straightforward as Demetrius. She eased down the driveway of his neat little cabin as slowly as possible to avoid making ruts in the gravel.

  “You want to come in for a beer to celebrate?”

  She did. It was late already, though. “I should get home. I need to call my folks before they hit the hay.”

  She waved at him as she backed out of the driveway. He stood on the porch until she turned onto the road. On the ride home, the heater in the truck stopped working, and as the heat seeped out of the cab, so did her high spirits. By the time she got to her place she was somber and chilled.

  Chapter Two

  She could hear Molly whining at the cottage door as she unlocked it. Poor dog. Or at least that’s what she thought until she opened the door and the smell hit her.

  “Bad! You are a bad dog!” Neela glared at Molly, who cowered her little patchwork body on the floor. “There is a dog door for you to use when I am gone!”

  She slung her backpack on the hook by the door and went to find some paper towels and disinfectant. Molly slunk along behind her, two steps behind.

  “Don’t look at me with those beagle eyes.”

  Molly laid down to watch her clean, looking mournful as usual.

  “I know, you want to be with him.” Neela gave the dog an ear-scratching and flipped her over for a belly rub. “Friday, Moll. He’s coming for you in a few days.”

  She missed the little stinker when the dog was with Teo, but for the two-week stints she had Molly, the dog seemed so miserable that Neela couldn’t help feeling guilty. When Molly was with Teo, she got to spend her days rolling around in the field by his office at the Department of Agricultural Law Enforcement, or riding in the passenger seat of his black SUV. During Neela’s weeks, Molly just spent long hours moping on the sofa, waiting until she got home from work.

  Molly moaned hopefully when Neela walked past the front door again. For the sake of the kitchen floor, she put on a sweater and took the dog out. The clouds had thinned out a bit and the moon illuminated the fields, the corn sprouts in neat rows. They walked together past the main house, where Burt Sawyer’s TV glowed blue through the window, to the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

  There was only one address for the farmhouse and the one-room cottage behind it that Neela rented, but the Sawyers had put up a second mailbox and sorted her mail into it every day when they picked up their own. One part kindness, one part nosiness. Today there was only a single piece of mail for her, a thin white envelope that gave her a paper cut when she opened it with her thumb. It was from the county. Teo had filed for divorce. Irreconcilable differences with no hope of resolution.

  Beside her, Molly squatted to do her business. Neela stood frozen in place next to the mailbox, unable to focus her eyes or breathe. Their separation had begun a year ago, but it was still incredibly painful that it had come to this. Divorce was the logical progression of their separation, but in a way, she had been oddly content with the way things were. They had such a civil arrangement, trading off weeks with Molly, exchanging news from their families, even a shared dinner now and then. Almost perfect, actually, better than it had been when they lived together in Davis. Less resentment, fewer misunderstandings, more distance from each other’s faults.

  Some part of her had believed the separation was just a temporary measure until they figured out how to solve things. We’ll do marriage counseling when work lightens up. We’ll take a trip back home together when work lightens up. I’ll spend a Saturday at the movies with him when work lightens up. And now on the very day work lightens up, this slim little envelope like a brick to the temple. She was sorry there had been enough moonlight to read it and would have preferred delaying the news by any length of time, even the five-minute walk back to the house.

  When Neela could finally drag the sharp air into her lungs, it gagged her with the smell of dog do, and she leaned over a half barrel that held Lily Sawyer’s tulips in the spring and threw up into it. Nerves. She scooped some dirt over it, and kicked some over Molly’s business on the ground, too, for good measure. Molly danced from paw to paw, waiting to go back inside. She stuck a cold nose into Neela’s hand and licked her palm. The sloppy caress was more than Neela could take, and tears began winding down her cheeks in a steady stream.

  Oh, Molly. What would she and Teo do about the dog once the divorce was final? Would they continue with their too-civil, two-week custody arrangement? Could she bear to see Teo every two weeks, talk with him as if nothing had happened? Or maybe he wanted Molly all to himself. Maybe the papers said something; she hadn’t even read the second page, the page that surely required her response. They had no marital assets to speak of, other than the truck, the bed, and the dog. He had left all of them behind when he moved out, so maybe he wasn’t asking for anything.

  Neela stood as long as she could outside in the cool dark, until she started feeling bad for Molly, who’d retreated to the Sawyers’ porch and leaned against the back door for warmth. She called the dog with a low whistle and went back inside the cottage to brush her teeth.

  The phone was ringing somewhere in the house—not in its cradle on the wall of course. Not behind the sofa cushions, not on the kitchen counter, not on her desk slash bedside table, all the usual spots. How many places could a phone hide in a one-room cottage? She finally found it under a pile of Molly’s toys where the dog must have stashed it. Teeth marks on the handset. The burst of adrenaline during the frantic search had at least boarded up the tear-factory, so Neela answered the phone on its sixth or eighth ring instead of letting it go to the machine.

  “Neela, oh my god, you’re actually home! Before nine p.m.! And I had a message all written up for your voicemail so I wouldn’t forget anything. Should I read it to you?” Her sister Robin. She of the long legs, the oldest of all the girls, freckled head-to-toe like her twin sister Dottie.

  “Sure,” said Neela, not trusting her voice any further.

  “Okay, here goes. I feel all weird reading it now that you’re listening, though!” Robin paused, and then her voice changed and became more modulated as she began reading. “Hello, Neela. It’s your family. We hope you are doing fine. If you can find time this weekend would you please call? Orinda is going to her first school dance next week and she wants your advice on what to wear. Wendy just got her grades and did really good for her first seme
ster. And Dottie and Robin—that’s me—have something we need to talk to you about. Mama is still not speaking to you for missing Easter, but Papa says if you visit she will probably come around. We love you. Give our love to Teo and Molly too. Talk to you soon. Bye.”

  “You didn’t really need to say ‘bye’ unless you really are done talking to me,” Neela said, stinging from the mention of Teo.

  “I know, I was just reading the whole card so I didn’t miss anything.”

  “You could have stopped when you got to the word, dummy, and not said it.”

  “I wasn’t reading that far ahead!” Robin said, and then Neela heard the phone drop and someone fumble with it and pick it up.

  “What did you say to her?” Wendy asked. “She’s shutting herself in the bathroom.”

  “Nothing. She’s being oversensitive as usual. Nice job on the grades. What did you take?” To be honest she hadn’t even known Wendy was enrolled anywhere, but she was glad to hear it. Wendy was the brightest of her sisters, and her job selling fruit and vegetables at the family’s farm stand was far beneath her abilities.

  “Oh, it’s not a big deal, we can talk about it some other time. Did Robin tell you what’s going on?”

  “Yeah, Orinda’s first dance! Very exciting, she must be over the moon. Listen, your classes are a big deal. It’s great you are finally admitting that you have a brain.”

  “We all have brains here,” Wendy said chidingly. “You just don’t remember because you never speak to us anymore.”

  “I really don’t need a guilt trip right now, Wen. It’s been a long day. I just threw up in a flower pot, for goodness sake.”

  “Are you pregnant!?” Dottie squealed into the phone so loudly that Neela had to hold it away from her ear. She hadn’t realized that the phone had changed sisters again, or she wouldn’t have said anything about being sick.

  “No! Hush, Dottie!”

  “Are you drunk, then?” Dottie was giggling like she was drunk herself.

  “I wish,” Neela muttered under her breath, as her sister started in on a lengthy description of the dress she had sewn for Orinda’s upcoming junior prom.

  “I made it out of the bridesmaid dress I wore for your wedding. You don’t mind, do you? It doesn’t fit me anymore, anyway, but maybe you wanted it? I should have asked. Well, too late now, it’s all cut up. Rindy says it’s too shiny or something, but I think she is just trying to talk Papa into getting her a store-bought one from the mall.”

  Neela could hear Orinda complaining in the background. “It’s not too shiny—it’s too tight! You sewed it the wrong size. You can see my whole body right there! It’s vulgar!”

  Neela didn’t have to see her to know the expression on her face, her eyes the color of iced tea rolling in her head, bottom lip stuck out, chin up, a piece of her dark hair in her mouth.

  Dottie snorted. “Well if she wants to find a boyfriend she’s going to have to stop wearing boys’ clothes.”

  “Nobody needs a boyfriend except you!” Orinda yelled.

  Neela was beginning to think that she should have left the phone under Molly’s chew toys and let it ring itself to sleep. The conversation was giving her a headache, and she needed to move things along so she could head to bed with her friends Vino and Kleenex for a threesome guaranteed to last well into the night. “Robin said you two wanted to talk about something in particular? I really need to go lay down.”

  “Oh,” said Dottie, and Neela could hear her shutting a door. “I don’t know how much you know? About the situation?”

  “Just spit it out, Dot.”

  “We’re not going to make it this month. The mortgage. We haven’t told Papa. He’s...well, we didn’t want to bother him with it. You know how Robin does all the bills. Anyway, can you send a check? It’ll need to be for next month, too, because the stand is closed, and we’re completely tapped out. Address it to me of course, not Papa.”

  Anything to get off the phone. “Sure. I’ll put it in the mail tomorrow. I really have to go now. Tell Robin I’m sorry I called her dumb; she’s not dumb.”

  Once she’d hung up, Neela realized she hadn’t talked to anyone nearly enough. She hadn’t asked why the farm stand was closed or even said hello to her parents. She owed at least one sister an apology, if not two. Now that the point of no return had been reached when it came to her marriage, she should have said something to Wendy about Teo moving out. Wendy could have handled the information without blowing it out of proportion. But now, what proportion was there? There was no more proportion. She would have to tell them all.

  Eventually.

  She wrote out the check before opening the wine, so she wouldn’t forget to do it, addressing it to Robin instead of Dottie. Robin was the responsible one. She wasn’t sure why Dottie was making such a big deal about asking her for money. This was not the first time she’d written a check to keep the farm afloat for a month or two. She guessed that about a quarter of the time her paychecks kept the place running, or at least kept the bank off their backs about the mortgage.

  Even in the depths of grad-school poverty she would occasionally sign over one of her student loans to her parents in the winter, when the farm stand sales dried up and everything seemed to break. The pump would go out on the well, or the tractor would need new tires before a cover crop could be tilled in to the soil, or her father would have to choose between heating the house and buying seed for the spring planting. It weighed heavily on her when they needed things that could only be provided by an extra pair of hands, as if her hands were the only hands that could do what they needed. But if her hands were there on the farm, nobody would be earning money to pay the mortgage in the winter. This was what she’d worked so hard for, and why she’d spent so many years away from her family: the ability to write a check and have it clear.

  Once the check was written and Molly was snug in her dog crate, Neela let herself fall apart. Forget Kleenex—she soaked an entire throw pillow in tears before she fell asleep on the couch, her teeth stained purple with a bottle of pinot she’d been saving for a special occasion. Well, this was special all right.

  NEELA WAS GLAD THAT it was still dark when she cracked open her eyelids, which felt glued together, and she knew that when she stood up, her head would split open with the mother of all headaches. Even a couple glasses of wine would do her in the next morning, let alone a whole bottle on an empty stomach. She moaned in self-pity and heard Molly’s tail thump-thump-thump on the floor.

  “No thumping,” she said as sternly as she could manage, and staggered to the bathroom. Neela downed a couple of painkillers and sat in the bathtub for too long, topping off the water whenever it cooled. Had yesterday really happened? In light of the divorce papers, the day was shadowed from start to finish. She couldn’t remember why she was so happy that 375 was off her plate. It meant she had wasted a year of her life investigating the plant, a year that divided her from Teo, a year that undermined her professionally with nearly every colleague at Broad Earth, a year that kept her from her family when they needed her most, a year that held her captive in this fishbowl of a small town. She stayed in the bath until the water heater gave out, hoping that maybe she’d drown right there.

  She didn’t though, and wrapped herself up in an enormous bath sheet to lumber into the kitchen, where she put on a kettle of water to brew some yerba mate, her father’s favorite hangover cure. Actually, he said it cured pretty much everything. It didn’t hurt, anyway. Plus, it had a serious dose of caffeine, which could only be a good thing at this point. Neela yelped as she felt something warm and wet on her ankles. Molly was licking the residual drops of water off her legs, as though she didn’t have a dog bowl full of water two yards away.

  “You really need to cut that out. It’s not cute,” she said, even though it was, kind of. She sat down on the floor and pressed her forehead against the dog’s, willing somewhat guiltily that the headache would flow from her own head into Molly’s. Molly obliged by licking her
chin and mouth, which made Neela gag again. “Why do I love you so much, Moll? I should have gotten a cat. Or a fish.”

  It was almost time to leave for work but she saw Molly pacing in circles on the rug, her hind end quivering. She slugged a quick drink of her tea and burned her tongue. Bitter. She should have waited for the water to cool down more; boiling water always meant bitter mate. Oh well, it was medicine, and she took another gulp before pulling on her lab coat and boots. Molly couldn’t wait that long and dribbled a bit in front of the couch.

  “Out!” yelled Neela, and picked the dog up by the scruff of the neck and crammed her out the dog door, using her foot to push Molly’s reluctant behind past the flap. Molly immediately did a U-turn, came right back in, and finished relieving herself on the floor. The last of the paper towels had been used in the previous night’s cleanup, so Neela used the box of Kleenex that had been spared in her self-pity extravaganza, managing to get dog pee on her knee which necessitated a quick change into another wrinkled pair of pants. She’d be late picking up Demetrius, and they’d both be late to work, and there was no way she’d get to finish her tea.

  The day was already shaping up nicely.

  The truck coughed out exhaust in big gasps, and she wasn’t sure whether it was warmed up enough, but it purred along steadily enough once she got out to the highway. She lived pretty far from work, on the opposite side of Sunflower Springs, but she liked the drive. There were a few miles of cornfield and a dirt road to Demetrius’s place.

  He slid across the seat and handed her a breakfast sandwich wrapped up in aluminum foil, ready to eat as she drove. “Good morning, sunshine!”

  She took a bite. “What’s so good about it?” she muttered, her mouth full of buttery waffles and scrambled eggs.

  “Oh, I see how it is. Too much celebrating last night, huh? Well then, I’ll take that sandwich back and give it to someone who can appreciate good food. I ran all the way into town to get that from the Waffle Nook.” He feigned a swipe at her breakfast but stopped when he saw the tears welling up in her eyes