The Litter of the Law (17 page)

“She never spoke to you about this? About the Cherokee connection?”

“No. It was Dad who told me about that part of our ancestry.” She thought a moment. “Once I mentioned something about a bracelet I saw that had been made by the Pueblos. Aunt H said southwestern Indians, Texas Indians, were much different from the East Coast tribes but all were fascinating to study.”

“Anything else?” Cooper persisted.

“She said—and this I do remember, because I heard it at odd times, not a lot but enough to remember, and I heard it repeated by my dad, too—the Indians never raped the land.”

Both sheriff and deputy sat quietly for a moment, then Rick asked, “Were either of your parents ever involved in environmental causes or perhaps trying to return tribal lands to their original owners?”

“They supported the Nature Conservancy. They made vacations to go on field trips, wonderful places like southern Chile, Moosehead Lake in Maine. They really pitched in with the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited. We had to live in the now. Mom and Dad wholeheartedly believed that. Dad said that he thought in some ways Aunt H lived too much in the past.”

“And Aunt Hester’s attitude?” Cooper asked.

“That we needed to make amends. We needed to preserve the past and also make amends to other peoples, to wildlife. As you see, she preserved the past in this house. Aunt H was consistent
and she really did care about providing good food at her stand, about taking care of the land. Maybe that’s why she liked fishing. She could get away but still be part of nature. I suspect she threw back whatever she caught. Mom always did.”

Both interrogators smiled.

Cooper then said, “We combed her roadside stand. Lolly—you met Lolly?” When Sarah nodded yes, Cooper continued. “Showed us the back rooms, everything. She opened the cash register, lifted the tray where Hester kept notes, odd returned checks, stuff like that.”

Sarah quietly interrupted, “And you found that my aunt Hester was organized about everything but her financial records. I’ve found old bank statements in kitchen drawers, in the visor of her truck.”

Cooper smiled. “She appears to have used a system unique to herself. What interested us was a check for a thousand dollars written to Joshua Hill. Written on the bottom memo line was ‘Research.’ It had been cashed.”

Sarah registered surprise. “She wouldn’t write a check that size on a whim.”

“We don’t know what the research was, and his records are sparse,” Rick said.

“So there is a connection between the murders.” Sarah spoke lowly.

“It certainly seems possible,” Cooper answered.

“May I ask you a question?” said Sarah.

“Anything.” Rick liked her, obviously.

“Do you have any idea who would kill my aunt, or why?”

“I won’t b.s. you,” he answered. “We don’t but I promise you, Sarah, we will find out and we will bring them to justice. Your aunt was a good woman.”

Cooper looked Sarah in the eye. “I apologize for pushing you
with questions, but you knew Hester as well as anyone, perhaps better. The rest of us took her at face value, and even those who had been in her home, like Mim Sanburne, only knew a fraction of who and what she was.”

“You don’t think she was involved in anything illegal, do you?” asked Sarah, distressed. “I mean, I can’t imagine her doing something illegal. Aunt H was a straight arrow.”

“No. But my hunch, and it is just a hunch, is she may have stumbled onto something someone else was doing that was illegal.”

Sarah’s hand covered her heart for a moment.

“I wonder if she knew she was in danger. She would have kept it to herself. She was so independent, had lived her whole life alone—if she did think she was in danger, she would have thought she could handle it.” Sarah swallowed. “I make her sound unrealistic but who could have foreseen something like this? Aunt H never did understand evil.”

T
he wind rustled through the dried cornstalks in Buddy Janss’s one hundred acres behind the three abandoned schoolhouses. Buddy walked through the fields with an insurance agent. The crop insurer, on overload thanks to the drought, worked every day but Sunday. This Friday, October 25, he had already visited three farms before noon.

The U.S. government underpinned about sixty percent of insurance premiums. Until now, the premiums farmers paid for various farming insurance had more than covered the payouts, but this year it looked as though the government payouts would be greater than the intake.

Looking down at his clipboard, Drake Stoneman, thirty-two, traced acreage numbers with his index finger. “Why do you insure some acres and not others for the same crop?”

Buddy, fifty-two, didn’t much like the tone of this younger man nor the assumption, so prevalent these days, that one must explain one’s self exhaustively. “Because for years I carted some vegetables and corn to a roadside food stand where the owner was fierce about organic foods.”

“Given the losses to fungus, birds, and insects, you must have
gotten top dollar.” Stoneman looked up from his figures into Buddy’s dark brown eyes.

“I did not,” the large man replied firmly. “I did business with the lady who owned the stand and my father did business with her people. It’s just something I did.”

“Hard to farm if you don’t put profit first,” the college-educated fellow smugly said.

“You don’t have much of a life if profit is all you care about.” Buddy, feeling his anger rise, then followed with, “I make enough money elsewhere.”

Stoneman nodded at the equipment parked nearby. “This your boom sprayer?”

“Is. It’s calibrated for each nozzle to spray 1/128 of an acre. Been doing this all my life. Divide the tank capacity by the gallons per acre pesticide or liquid fertilizer application rate. Do the math. Set your nozzles correctly given the crop, figure your normal spraying speed, and record the travel time in seconds. It’s the only way to get the application correct. Otherwise, I waste my money.”

Drake looked at Buddy, slowly realizing it might be prudent not to lecture him on broadcast applications. “I see.”

“You asked about my organic corn, which is how I think of it,” said Buddy. “Silver Queen is in this field. As you are a bright fellow from Virginia Tech …?”

Quickly Drake replied, “North Carolina State.”

“Uh-huh. You know Silver Queen is hard to grow.”

“That I do.”

“My untreated acres did better than this one hundred. Look. Lost everything and I sprayed this patch every two days. In this climate, an insect like the corn borer can span three generations in one crop cycle.” He yanked an ear off the stalk. “No corn borers.”

Just to prove he was on the ball, Drake twisted off an ear himself, separate from the one in Buddy’s hand, and inspected it. “I see.”

“This entire crop is worthless. Couldn’t even use it for forage.”

Drake couldn’t miss the nasty signs of smut on the now dried-up ears. “It is possible to be fooled. This stuff sometimes just seems to appear overnight.”

“I kept after these acres. I shouldn’t have any disease in here, including the smut. I sprayed for that, too. I mean, I did everything. Sure, I want my crop insurance. That’s why I pay the premiums, but I want to know how this happened.”

“I would, too.” Drake was becoming a little more sympathetic. “Corn means big bucks. Our country’s exports for fresh corn alone, not counting frozen or canned corn, should bring in about $47 million for farmers, and this year it’s nowhere close.”

“Got to cut growing forty percent of the crop for ethanol when people go hungry,” Buddy firmly stated.

“That’s a hot potato, Mr. Janss.” He paused. “Do you mind if I look at your acres, the ones you used for the roadside stand?”

“Not at all. Everything’s off of them.”

“Plow under the stalks?”

“No, I leave stuff up until the first hint of spring. Gleanings for birds, bunnies, foxes. Brings ’em right in.”

“Why don’t you plow this under now so it can start breaking down?”

Buddy wondered what this kid had learned in college.

He calmly explained, “Smut spores can live in the soil, for one. But we do share the earth and the old corn helps wildlife. If I plow it under, the soil will compact by spring and I’ll have to break it up again—duplication of effort, hours, and cost, plus I just may have made it easy for the smut to regenerate.”

“Uh, yes.”

“A ripper and shredder, John Deere 2720, can just tear this up, save time, do a terrific job. But a seventeen-foot with forty disc blades costs almost fifty thousand dollars. The twenty-seven-foot with sixty-six disc blades starts at eighty-nine thousand dollars. Can’t begin to afford that. I use my old disc—well, it’s ancient, really, and sometimes I even pull my old York rake when the stubble’s down. I can’t just figure crop profit. I have to factor in equipment costs, hours, wear and tear, and then there’s wear and tear on me, too.”

Drake knelt down, pulled out a little brown paper bag and a small sharp trowel from his pocket. He dug out a sample of soil. He then walked twenty-five yards, took another one.

Buddy watched. He took his own soil samples each fall and then again in the spring. In this part of the world, a farmer needed to keep checking for magnesium deficiency. Out west the lack was often selenium, not a problem in central Virginia.

Drake came back, Buddy hopped in his new Ford while Drake followed in a serviceable old Ram.

They reached the harvested fields, where the younger man again took soil samples.

Buddy watched, his anger somewhat subsiding. “I can send you my soil tests for all my acres. I’ll shoot it to you from my computer.”

“That would be helpful. You’ll receive your check. Like you said, Mr. Janss, that’s why you pay the premiums, and your taxes, too. We need the government for a lot of this. You can imagine the stress on farmers in the Midwest and the Southwest.”

“I pray for those people.” Buddy meant it, too.

Drake shook his head. “Don’t see how people can argue with climate change.”

“Actually, Mr. Stoneman, I do see how they can and I have some real questions about our ability to predict and plan how to
handle Mother Earth, but I know something’s changing. I just want to know more and I’d sure like the politics to be taken out of it.”

For a flash Drake dropped his professional mask. “Politics is in everything.”

Buddy looked right into his eyes. “You got that right, brother.”

As Drake drove away, Buddy folded his arms across his chest, looking over some of his well-tended acreage. It was odd that the untreated Silver Queen corn had done better this year than the treated. He never planted more than two hundred acres with this type of corn, mostly because it took so much management. It was susceptible to about every pest and problem known to corn and needed steady water, too. But, oh, how sweet that Silver Queen was and how people looked forward to it come August, September, and this year, even early October.

Every now and then Buddy would think he’d just plant every field with orchard grass and the hell with it. But he couldn’t. He loved his corn crops, loved the squash, and
really
loved the small orchard he tended of the old Alberta pears. People would come from all around to get those pears, not much seen anymore.

Sighing, he stepped on the running board and got into the Ford’s cab. He drove back to the disease-ridden crop, parked at the three schoolhouses, and looked for a moment, then drove into the middle of the field.

Harry, pets along with her, happened to be cruising by at that moment to double-check the Halloween Hayride route that Tazio had given her.

She saw Buddy. So she drove out to the field, her old 1978 Ford churning through the hardened, bumpy earth with ease.

As she opened the door, the dog and two cats shot out.

“Buddy. Hey. Saw you here and wanted to thank you again for serving at Hester’s house and, well, for being a pallbearer.”

“It was an honor to be a pallbearer. Something hits you when you hoist that coffin on your shoulders along with five other men. Can’t explain it.”

“Well, thank you for honoring a special person.”

He leaned against his truck, having stepped out since she left her truck. “Here’s something funny goin’ on. Wish Hester were with us, she’d crow with delight. These acres, sprayed every two days. My Silver Queen. Well, smut ruined everything. The untreated Silver Queen acres—healthy. Oh, sure, a worm here and there, and always corn spiders, but they do no harm. The birds got some of the corn, but mostly my untreated acres are really healthy, even with our brief drought. I can’t figure it out.”

“What about your irrigated acres?”

“Same story. I irrigated half my plots. The irrigated rows did a little better but not as much as one would think, but, you know”—he swept his hand westward—“so many creeks, and I think some of that moisture in the air from them helped. But like I said to you before, my crop yield varied from one side of the road to the other, but this, this is smut and I don’t know what’s going on. I read all the time and I haven’t read anywhere where smut has become resistant to treatment. Now, we know some
insects
are becoming resistant. I’ll get my insurance check but I want to figure this out. I’m here to grow good crops, not to collect money for failure.”