A Tough Nut to Kill (Nut House Mystery Series) (5 page)

Nobody should have been in my test grove. There were workers who helped me inside the greenhouse, even planted the trees outside, but at the end of the day, I was always the last to leave. Nobody needed to get inside for any reason.

I reached out and touched the hanging lock, pushing it from where it dangled. I pulled the gate toward me, praying whoever had cut the lock wasn’t still in there.

I stepped through the gate and looked around for anyone ready to jump me. It took a long moment before the change in my grove registered. A single long moment before I saw that every one of my trees had been hacked in half, the leafed tops bent to the ground. My precious grove was a ruined forest of dying trees. I couldn’t breathe. It couldn’t be the way it looked.

I reached out to the first tree in the first row. The strong, young trunk hadn’t been cleanly sawed. It was splintered, and jagged, the leafy crown wilting. I walked down each of my precisely laid out, straight-arrow rows. Every tree—destroyed. Nothing left of my years of work.

I fell to my knees. I couldn’t help it. All my perfectly
manicured rows—no weeds; every line straight and true. Every five-gallon bucket I filled with water, weighted with stones, holes drilled in the bottom—extra irrigation in this time of drought—all of it destroyed.

I pulled my shoulder bag around my body and dug out my cell phone. There was only one person I could think to call. Everyone would have to know . . . they’d all be sad for me. But Hunter . . . he would help. He would find who did this . . .

“Riverville Police,” Sheriff Higsby answered.

I took a deep breath and put a hand on my chest, trying to control the waves of shock running through me.

“Riverville Police,” the sheriff said again.

“Sheriff, this is Lindy Blanchard. Is Deputy Austen there?”

“Sure thing, Lindy,” the sheriff said. “Just walked in . . .”

It didn’t take two minutes to spit out what had happened there in my test grove. Hunter caught on even as I sputtered the words.

“You stay right where you are, Lindy. Or get the heck out of there—that’s even better. Whoever did this could still be around.”

I turned to look behind me, at the metal door to my office. The greenhouse was beyond the office. There was only one doorway in. Whoever did this could still be there, doing more damage.

The window to the office was oddly blank—as if someone had covered it. But it wasn’t covered. The window swirled with dirty smoke.

“My office!” I screamed at Hunter. “It’s on fire . . .”

“I’m on my way,” he yelled back at me. “Don’t go in there. Lindy. Lindy! You hear me? I want you safe, Lindy . . .”

I dropped the phone, grabbed my purse, and pulled the ring of keys from an outer pocket. I ran up the row of broken trees to the office door, fumbling with the keys, pushing first the wrong key and then the right one into another lock that wasn’t locked. I put my hand out to touch the metal door handle—only warm, not blazing hot. I threw the door wide open and stepped inside.

A cone of fire, like a large campfire, burned at the middle of the concrete floor between my long desk and the rows of filing cabinets where I kept my files and plans and daily logs on progress. The open door behind me sucked a whirling plume of smoke toward me. The fire blazed higher.

My fire extinguisher was in a little corner alcove by a microwave oven and small fridge. I grabbed it from the hook next to the sink and ran back to the pile of papers blazing and crackling on the floor—curling separately as they flared and glowed and turned to burning embers spiraling high into the air.

I didn’t let myself take in the damage—not yet. I fought the fire, holding hard on to the extinguisher, which bucked back when I pressed the handle, blowing paper everywhere. I chased sparks and flapped my arm at the smoke.

When I looked around at something other than the fire, I saw my file drawers hanging open; a trail of scattered file folders ran from the wall of cabinets to where the fire had been set. Soot covered the walls. It made a greasy, black mess over the floor and kitchen nook and books . . . my exposed desk where my computer should have been . . . but wasn’t.

I took a deep breath then coughed hard as I inhaled thick smoke. I wasn’t falling down to my knees this time. I was madder than I’d ever been in my life. Whoever had done this would pay . . .

My mind ran to the greenhouse. The door was closed. No window to see if there was more fire, or if anyone was waiting . . .

All my test seedlings in their yellow pods were in there. My two-year saplings. My work. No one had the right to do this.

Maybe I could stand in the doorway and scream and scare them. Maybe I could still save something. My mind clicked fast. Turning and running wasn’t in my nature.

But fear was.

Still, if anyone was in the greenhouse . . . every minute I stood there, frightened or intimidated, meant more destruction.

The last thing, right then, I could think about was my safety.

The door was closed but not locked. It didn’t lead anywhere but to the large, open expanse of greenhouse with its light and heat—for chilly Texas nights—and my young trees and planting tables and bins of soil and tools and hoses and coolers with dormant grafts.

I threw open the door. My body was rigid, expecting an attack. I kept my arms at my sides, fists clenched hard, nails digging into my palms.

Nothing moved. No sound beyond the click and whirr of an overhead blower in the long, echoing building. There were the usual earth and water smells of the sprayers; the cool curls of dampness across the concrete floor—all the familiar markers of who I was and what I loved.

I saw nothing at first, only the gleaming, stainless steel tables that should have held my neat rows of yellow tubes, and black pots with saplings—all divided by genus, and then divided again by test grafts, all neatly held straight by my green metal stakes with a number tag at the top—the numbers recorded in my log books and on my computer.

It was all wrong.

There were no trees on the tables closest to me. Instead, there was chaos. The neatly kept trays of baby food jars were dumped on the floor. Yellow tubes holding my new trees, all the black pots, were upended. Soil—my special mix—covered the tables and the floor like dirty snow. A slight, black haze hung in the air. I stepped into the building. Bright, clean sunlight streamed down from the greenhouse windows, growing hazy as it fell on my emptied plant tables.

I buried my face in my hands for just a minute. That was all the grief I would allow myself. Later—I’d think about what had been done to me, and to my family. Later I’d think about vengeance. Right then prickles of panic scrambled up and down my spine.

That fire hadn’t been burning long when I got there. Whoever did this could still be hiding. But the building felt so still and empty.

I looked hard again. Something was wrong at the far tables, nearest the outer wall. Or—something was right. There were yellow tubes there, just as I’d left them.

There was order—row after row. Stock for future years. Tiny, struggling plants. Little soldiers, all in their colorful, plastic tubes.

I stepped forward then stopped to look around, make certain no one was behind me. The destruction, at those far tables, had been stopped somehow. Maybe whoever had done this heard Martin’s mower coming closer. They might have heard me pull up beyond the fence.

If I could just touch one tiny tree, I thought. See that they were really okay . . .

I scurried, almost skipping, toward the far tables. My sneakers stuck slightly to the concrete. I slipped once on the dirt covering the floor.

As I turned a corner toward the untouched plant tables, I tripped hard over something and began to fall. All I could do was grab out frantically to stop myself. Unable to grip the closest table, my hands flailed in air. My body seemed launched in space. When I fell, I hit the concrete and scraped my face. The pain was fast and hard. My chest hit the floor. I couldn’t breathe; no air left in my lungs. I scrambled back up to my knees and bent forward, gasping as blood ran from my chin.

When I lifted my head and forced my eyes open to see what I’d fallen over, a man lay on the floor beside me, half under one of the stainless steel tables, half out into the aisle.

I pulled away as far as I could get before he reached out and grabbed me.

But the arm didn’t move. It lay very still.

The man was face up, his dark head turned away, arms spread wide; feet, in well-used cowboy boots, splayed in opposite directions.

He wore a washed-out plaid shirt and washed-out jeans. Near my right hand, a black cowboy hat trembled on its crown.

Uncle Amos . . .

I crawled toward the body.

Uncle Amos . . . with one of my green metal plant stakes, number tag moving gently, sticking up from the very center of his chest.

Somewhere in my head I heard a siren, and then the
clang of a fire truck, but I couldn’t move. Not now. I knelt beside my dead uncle, hands at my mouth, until I heard Hunter’s voice, first from the open doorway to the office, then as he pounded across the greenhouse, heading toward me, yelling my name.

When he rounded the end of the row of tables where I knelt, I could only shake my head at him.

“Holy . . .” Hunter stopped dead, then made his way around Amos’s body, to take me by the shoulders and lift me up beside him. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed the clean white square to my chin, where blood still dripped down to the front of my shirt. “Lord’s sakes, Lindy. I guess you had to stop him, but . . .”

Everything after that was a blur: Hunter leading me back outside, taking me to my truck, opening the door, and pushing me up to sit on the front seat, then leaving to hurry to the sheriff’s car just pulling in beside mine.

I watched the swirl of firemen running in and then out of my office. Time passed and the fire trucks pulled away and more police cars and a white van pulled in.

Sheriff Higsby came over to take a look at me, stopping to tip his hat. “Lindy.” He frowned as he took in the blood down the front of my blue shirt and my injured face.

“Terrible thing in there.” He looked off, squinting up into the late-day sun, over toward the ruined grove. “Suppose that was the only way to stop him.”

“No!” I shook my head. “He was like that. I was running to the trees I had left and fell over him.”

The sheriff drew in a long, slow breath and let it out as he shook his head. “Doesn’t look good. Everybody knows how you Blanchards hated Amos. Not that anybody blamed you. But not this, Lindy. Not even Blanchards can up and kill a man.”

“Sheriff, it was like that when I got here. All of it. I saw my trees first, then called Hunter. There was smoke in my office. I ran in and put out the fire. I had to check the greenhouse. It was all I had left . . .”

“So you found him knocking over your trees and . . .”

I shook my head hard enough to start my chin bleeding again. Blood fell on my hand. I pressed Hunter’s handkerchief to my face and held it there for comfort. “I told you. He was already dead. Sheriff, somebody destroyed my work. I would have said that it had to be Uncle Amos. Who else hates us this much? But there he is, dead. And it wasn’t me who did it.”

Sheriff shook his head. He seemed sad. “You gotta look at it from my point of view, Lindy. The mess in there was stopped halfway through. Fire was already set. You come in, catch him, and drop him the only way open to you—a stake through the heart. Come to think of it, seems kind of fitting . . .”

“Sheriff . . .” I moaned. “You’ve known me since I was born. Do you think I could do that to anybody? Even Uncle Amos?”

He rubbed at his upper lip, sniffed hard, and looked off into the distance, over the truck door. “Anybody can kill, Lindy. Given the right circumstances. Anybody.” He hesitated, thought awhile, then said, “Justin wasn’t here with you, was he? I know he thought Amos there had a hand in your daddy’s accident. If Justin was with you and he came on yer uncle doing what he was doing . . . no question what he would’ve done. Any man, feeling the way he did about Amos Blanchard and finding him trying to ruin the family—well, wouldn’t be called murder, Lindy. We’d call it self-defense. Why, in Texas we’d call that justifiable homicide. I think there are folks here in town that would want to throw your brother a parade. So you see, all I need is the truth and we’ll put all this behind us.”

I could only stare at Sheriff Higsby.

“Your office’s sure a mess,” he said after a long pause. “Looks like whoever did this was after your records. Grafting, aren’t you? Anything secret about what you’re doing in there?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have secrets. I don’t share my work—not yet, ’cause I don’t have anything for sure. But now my records are all gone except—”

“They stole your computer, Hunter says.”

I nodded and then remembered what I’d wanted to tell Hunter.

“Sheriff, somebody was in my apartment over the Nut House earlier today. I could see where they were messing with the laptop I keep there. When Hunter came into the store, you know, when Amos was there—I’m sure he told you; I was going to tell him about someone being up there but didn’t get a chance.”

Sheriff Higsby nodded. “You think it was Amos looking around?”

“Amos would never have gotten by Miss Amelia.”

“She’s distracted at times, I’ll bet. Not young anymore, ya know.”

I flinched but didn’t have time to think about the implications of what he was saying. “I told my mama and she thought it was nothing . . .”

“Let me get somebody right over there to the Nut House. Seein’ as whoever did this was after your work, better secure that place, too. Can my men get in?”

I felt in my pockets for the apartment key then looked around for my purse. “I don’t know where my keys are right now, but I think Miss Amelia leaves a key up over the door. Same one probably opens my apartment. Nothing too secure. Never had to be.”

I felt a cloud settling heavily in my head. What I had to do was stay quiet until my mother got there. Or even Miss Amelia—Meemaw would stand up to the man, tell him Blanchards didn’t kill people and wouldn’t want parades thrown because a man was dead.

As if in answer to a prayer, Emma’s old black pickup pulled in behind the sheriff’s car. Emma and Miss Amelia both got out at a run. Emma pushed the sheriff aside and leaned in to take me into her strong arms. I closed my eyes and rested my head on Mama’s shoulder. From behind her came the sheriff’s protesting voice, and then Miss Amelia, loud and angry and peremptory, the way she could get when her children were threatened. “What’s wrong with you, Willard Higsby? Our girl’s had a terrible shock and you badgering her? Why, shame on you. Just shame on you, Willard. Now you get the heck away from our Lindy and go find yourself a killer. Poor Amos . . .”

Her voice trailed off as she followed the quickly retreating Sheriff Higsby back toward the greenhouse building.