The Silence of the Llamas (6 page)

“No, Dot was. The sheep-herding demonstration had just ended and I had helped Jack Gibbons get the sheep back on his trailer. We just borrowed them for the fair,” he explained. “I came back up to the house to wash up and change my shirt. I smelled pretty nasty after wrangling those animals,” he admitted with a laugh. “Dot called me on the walkie-talkie. I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Or I thought I didn’t understand her. I mean, it sounded so bizarre. I ran down to the meadow and . . . well, you all know what I saw.”

Lucy thought he was about to say more, but Ellie breezed in with a platter of appetizers and set it down on the pedestal table by the love seat.

“Here’s a little something to munch on. I was running around all day and didn’t even eat lunch. I made the vegetable pâté myself,” she added. “Tell me how you like it. I want to sell it in the store.”

Lucy had not eaten lunch, either, and everything looked good. There were three kinds of cheese, a square of pâté, thin slices of apple, and slices of a dark grain baguette.

“The apples are from our orchards, of course, and the goat cheese from the farm down the way. Eden Farm, I think they call it,” Ellie explained, taking a seat. “They’re hippies—well, what we used to call hippies. Anyway, they make the most fabulous cheese. Live and let live, right?” She shrugged and sat down in an armchair near her husband.

“If only it were so simple, Ellie.” Ben took a sip of wine and gazed at his wife. “That might be our philosophy. But all of our neighbors surely don’t share it.”

“Do you think one of your neighbors is behind the attack on the animals?” Maggie asked.

Ellie glanced at her husband. When he didn’t answer, she said, “We really don’t know. It could have been . . . anybody.”

“Oh, Ellie, what’s the difference? We know who it is. Justin Ridley. He’s the only one who could have done this. The only one who has any reason to harass us. Who
believes
he has a reason,” he corrected himself.

“We don’t have any proof of that, Ben. We can’t go around accusing the man. There are laws about slander.”

“It’s not slander if it’s true,” Ben countered.

Dana leaned forward and took an apple slice from the platter. “Who’s Justin Ridley? Does he live nearby?”

“Right next door. The property to the east.” Ellie waved her hand in that direction. “He’s very eccentric. We tried to be friendly to him when we moved in. But he seemed to despise us on sight.”

“The guy is crazy. Paranoid,” Ben added. “Somebody told me he’d been a career military man but was tossed out with some psychological disability. He’s a loner. Sort of a survivalist, I guess you’d say. He’s off the grid. Drinks water from his own well, has solar and wind power rigged up all over the place. He doesn’t cultivate his land at all. There are just acres and acres of weeds back there.”

“I was miserable during ragweed season,” Ellie cut in. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“Who knows what he’s growing. Weeds of all kinds, for fun and profit, I bet. I can’t see how he supports himself otherwise.” Ben’s tone was harsh, his meaning somewhat nebulous, but Lucy got the general drift. He suspected Ridley was cultivating marijuana along with the ragweed.

Was that possible? Wouldn’t someone have noticed by now? she wondered. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was clear that Justin Ridley got under Ben’s skin in the worst way.

“He is odd,” Ellie added. “You rarely see any activity there during the day. But he roams around in the middle of the night, like a vampire or something. With these two crazy hunting dogs.”

“And a loaded gun,” Ben added, his voice rising on an urgent note. “He’s shooting at raccoons or chipmunks or something . . . in the middle of the night.”

“Chipmunks don’t come out at night,” Ellie gently reminded him. “They sleep, in burrows. I read about it before we moved here,” she told her friends. “I wanted to know more about the local wildlife.”

“Chipmunks, raccoons, what’s the difference? He obviously takes pleasure in killing poor defenseless animals. That’s my point. I guess we’re lucky he didn’t shoot our llamas with real bullets.”

“Ben, please. This seems like something he’d do. But we don’t know for sure.”

“We didn’t know for sure about the other times. But this one has Ridley’s name all over it, Ellie,” he insisted.

Ellie didn’t answer. She looked over at the women. “There have been other incidents since we moved here,” she admitted.
“Nothing nearly this violent, though.” Then she sighed and sipped her wine.

“Other incidents? Like what?” Maggie leaned forward, looking concerned.

“Childish pranks,” Ellie answered. “I found the mailbox stuffed with animal dung a few times. Annoying, but hardly life-threatening. And there were broken flowerpots all over the lawn in the front of the house. That happened a few times.”

“That’s how it started,” Ben clarified. “There was more.”

He offered the women more wine, but no one wanted a refill. He filled his own glass again, Lucy noticed. It might have been his third. But who was counting? Well, she was, she realized. He wasn’t driving tonight. What was the difference? He was in his own home, and it had been a very stressful day.

“The barn was broken into and some tools tossed around and bent, animal feed spilled out all over the place. Everything was generally messed up. Oh, our little Country Store was trashed once in the middle of the night, too,” he added. “That was a few weeks ago.”

“A big mess,” Ellie conceded. “A few dollars stolen out of the cash box. But it was more the breakage. Jars of jam and herbal hand lotion we sell smeared on our T-shirts. Apples all spilled out and smashed. There was a lot of yarn ruined, and they broke one of my spinning wheels.” She barely looked at them as she recited these woes but tugged nervously at the fringe of a pillow that was in her lap.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Maggie sympathized.

“All these things have happened since you moved in?” Dana sounded shocked. She was Ellie’s friend but obviously
had not been taken into the Kruegers’ confidence. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Ellie glanced up, then looked away. “I didn’t want to worry you. We were dealing with it. I think it sounds worse when we describe it than it actually was at the time.”

Lucy wondered if that were true, or if Ellie was just trying to downplay the situation, even deny it, for some reason.

“What do the police think?”

Ellie glanced at her husband. He set his mouth in a grim line but didn’t say anything. “We haven’t told the police,” she said finally.

“You haven’t? Why not?” Dana sat up, looking even more shocked by this revelation. “Hasn’t your insurance company asked for a police report?”

“We haven’t put in any claims. We have a high deductible, and the damage was either minimal or hard to estimate. It didn’t seem worth it,” Ben explained. He sighed. “I would have reported it, maybe not at first, but after a few. But . . . well, it upsets Ellie. She doesn’t want the bad publicity.”

“Not just that,” Ellie piped up. “We’re the newcomers. The outsiders. Most of the other farmers were raised in this community. Some are even living on the farms where they grew up and where their parents grew up. Say we go to the police and report these events—which, up until today, have been mostly just annoying. The police will go from farm to farm, bothering all our neighbors. They might think we were accusing them,” she pointed out. “And it will be in the newspaper. You saw how that reporter acted today. She was just salivating over the sad, negative story and hadn’t paid any attention to our grand opening.”

Ellie sighed and sunk back against the chair. “We just want to settle in and build our business. When people hear about Laughing Llama yarns, I want them to have a positive association. Not say, ‘Oh, right, that’s the place with all the vandalism. The animal droppings in the mailbox, the llamas hit with paint balls.’ Believe me, I know how this plays out,” Ellie said emphatically. “That is not the public image or the branding we’re aiming for.”

Lucy glanced at her friends. Personally, she would not be worried about “branding” under such circumstances, but the Kruegers did have a big stake in the success of this farm and their fledgling business. They had more or less put all of their eggs in this basket. Or, rather, all of their hand-spun yarn.

Maggie and Dana both looked eager to say something, but Ben spoke up first.

“We’ve talked it through a few times, and that was our reasoning for keeping the police out of it. So far,” he clarified. “I guess we have to report it now. But we do know who’s behind it. There’s no doubt in my mind. It’s Ridley. He’s off the grid and flipped his lid.”

Lucy nearly laughed out loud at Ben’s rhyme. But she caught herself. This situation wasn’t funny at all. Actually, it sounded a little scary.

“But why does he do it? Because he’s neurotic and paranoid?” Dana asked, puzzling out the situation with professional terms. “Is he fixated on this farm? Or on you two, for some reason?”

“Oh, we know the reason. It’s no mystery.” Ben glanced at his wife, who pursed her lips and looked away. “Ridley wanted
this property in the worst way. We bid against him. He finally gave up and we won, fair and square.” He glanced around the group, waving his wineglass. “I know his game. He’s trying to scare us off so we’ll put it up for sale and he’ll have another chance to buy it. That’s another reason I don’t want to call the police. That would be playing into his plan. He’ll think his tactics are working and we’re scared. But he’s wrong. He’s not going to chase us out of here. Nobody is. We’re not leaving. Ever.”

Lucy glanced at her friends. The accusation seemed extreme. But could it be possible? If Justin Ridley was the troubled personality the Kruegers made him out to be, perhaps it was true.

“Why does he want this farm? You say that he doesn’t cultivate his land or raise any livestock. What does he need it for?” Maggie sounded genuinely puzzled.

Ellie sat up and took an apple slice with cheese. “He wants to protect it, to make sure no one builds on it. He’d probably let the whole place grow over like his land, the forest primeval. He’s an open spacer,” she added. “I’m sorry, we forgot to tell you about that part of this situation. You know about the open space laws around here, right? The laws are about to expire, and the county has voted not to renew them. So the zoning in this farm area is about to change, big time. But there’s a group around here that wants to keep the laws in place.”

Lucy knew what open space laws were—legislation that protected rural communities, like the outlying area of Plum Harbor, from overdevelopment; from farmland suddenly transforming to shopping malls and condo communities or gated enclaves of mini-mansions.

But she didn’t realize that the laws protecting this farming community were about to go off the books. “The laws were changed? When did that happen?”

“Oh, it’s been fought over for years now,” Dana replied. “A real political Ping-Pong ball. But the county finally voted to let the laws expire a few months ago, and the change will take effect at the start of next year.”

“I’ve heard something about this, too,” Maggie added. “At a meeting of small business owners. Yes, it’s been a Ping-Pong ball, and it’s about to be the NASCAR of real-estate brokers. I can practically hear them warming up their engines.”

Dana nodded. “Good point. There will be a scramble for land out here. I’d guess a lot of people are eager to sell.”

“Absolutely . . . and a lot that don’t want them to,” Ellie explained. “They call themselves the Friends of Farmland. They’re trying to keep the laws in place just within the town limits. Justin Ridley is their ringleader,” she told the others. “The town council is going to have a meeting about this soon. In a week or two, I think,” she added.

“Friends of Farmland. Right. They’re no friends of mine, I’ll tell you that much.” Ben took a long sip of his wine. “When I think of those poor llamas, the way I found them in the field today . . . who would do that to defenseless creatures? What kind of person? I don’t care about their cause. That doesn’t make it right.” Ben’s voice sounded hoarse—he was getting teary-eyed. He pulled out a tissue and dabbed his eyes. “Hypocrites. How can they claim they want to save the environment . . . and hurt poor defenseless creatures? Don’t they have any heart?”

“Honey, please. Don’t get yourself all upset again,” Ellie crooned and patted his shoulder. “He talks tough, but I married such a sensitive man. He’s just a big softy.”

Lucy frowned. People did get passionate about issues like this. Though it was probably best to leave emotions out of such debates.

Ellie seemed to think it was time to reel her husband in a bit, too. She waved her hand at him. “Now, Ben, I know you’re upset about the animals. But we can’t take it personally. I’m sure none of those people have anything against us. They don’t even know us. We love this farm. It was our dream to move here. I think once people get used to us, they’ll see that we’re committed to staying here. Not just dabblers.”

“We researched this business for over a year before we even started to look for property or livestock,” Ben told the women.

“We even lived on a farm in Ohio for two weeks taking, well, llama lessons, I guess you’d have to say,” Ellie added, finally smiling a bit.

“The point is, we’re committed,” Ben continued. “We’re not here to just flip the property to some development group once the laws expire. That’s what Ridley thinks. I have a sound business plan, and we’re starting off slowly and carefully, trying to build a good name for our product. Ellie’s got other streams of income going to pay the bills. The little shop and her spinning classes. The apple orchard turned a nice profit this season, too. She might even do lessons online. We’ve got a nice website up and running,” he added proudly.

“We’re not dabblers or dilettantes,” Ellie insisted. “Though
I guess I understand Justin Ridley’s point of view. He thinks we’ll get bored here. Or the business will fail and we’ll sell out to developers. I’m sure he doesn’t think we’ll last until the end of the year.”

“Has he ever said anything like that to you directly?” Dana’s tone was gentle and even curious. But Lucy could see what she was getting at, trying to sort out the facts here from the hyperbole and accusations.