Farm Fresh Murder (5 page)

I smiled a return of his. Okay, this was weird in many different ways. We were here to talk to Abner, not flirt awkwardly over spilled sugar water. I stood and looked someplace other than at Ian.

“I don’t see a feeder or container for the syrup anywhere.”

“Maybe it’s inside.” Ian stood, too.

“No, wait. Look at the greenhouse. There’s a ton of feeders hanging on it.”

Ian looked toward the greenhouse and then seemed to scan the entire property. “Uh-huh
.
Abner’s probably just inside or in the greenhouse.” He turned, kept to the side of the puddle, and knocked on the door. “Abner! Hey, Abner, are you in there?”

The hollow silence that followed made the back of my neck tingle. I turned to scan for the pair of eyes that I felt was watching us, but didn’t see anything suspicious.

“Go inside?” I asked.

“Yeah, maybe.” Ian moved to his left and peered into a front window next to the door. “Yeah, for sure.” He stepped back to the side of the puddle, jumped over the syrup, opened the door, and disappeared into the house. “Abner. Hey, Abner.”

Woof!
Hobbit exclaimed from the open window of the truck.

“Nope, you stay right there. I’ll be cleaning your paws all night if you step in this stuff.”

“Sorry, girl.”

Hobbit sighed and rolled her puppy-dog eyes at me.

The light and shadows were just right that I couldn’t see much inside the open doorway. I jumped the puddle and found what had caused Ian to hurry in.

“Abner!” I added my voice. There was no answer.

Abner’s house was decorated in the style of single-man-who-hadn’t-purchased-furniture-in-about-forty-years. His couch was covered in green material that made me itch just looking at it. He had two nonmatching chairs at the sides of the couch, one of them threadbare and probably the place where he spent most of his time when he wasn’t in his greenhouse or at Bailey’s. Next to the chair was a small side table that held an old-fashioned phone—the kind you plugged into a phone outlet but didn’t require electricity to work. But it was the coffee table, worn and decorated with water rings and tipped on its side, that gave the whole room a sense of something gone wrong.

“He’s not in the house,” Ian said from the hallway in the middle of the structure. “I don’t see anyone, anywhere.”

“Damn.” I needed to see for myself that Abner wasn’t around, so I followed the path of Ian’s search.

The kitchen was furnished in a predictable manner: Formica table and counters, old cabinets that were at one time probably a clean cream color but were now dingy.

“Dishes in the sink, but nothing is broken—it doesn’t look as though there was any sort of struggle in here,” I said.

“Bed’s unmade, but that might not mean anything, either,” Ian said.

I hurried down the hall and stepped into the bedroom. There was a full-size bed with an unmatched dresser and chest of drawers. The furniture was adorned with the types of man-things that had become familiar enough; having a dad and a couple of husbands let me in on the secrets of coin-gathering spots, a good place to put a watch, lip balm, the unnecessary pile of receipts for small items, and so on.

“I don’t see his wallet on top of either the dresser or the chest of drawers.” I looked under the bed and saw a few pairs of shoes and fuzzy dust bunnies. “Nothing.” I stood and pulled open the closet door; there were only a few pieces of clothing. “Nothing.”

“His truck wasn’t out front, either, and I haven’t seen his keys anywhere. There’s a spot behind the greenhouse where he could park, but I really don’t think he’s here.” Ian stood in the bedroom doorway.

“Do you think we’ve overreacted?” My pounding heart whooshed in my ears.
Where was Abner?

“Did you see the coffee table?” he said.

“Yeah, but the living room didn’t seem messed up except for that.”

“It didn’t. I’m going to double-check.”

We moved so quickly down the hallway that I was surprised we didn’t pinball off the walls.

“What’s that?” Ian said as we reached the front room.

He pointed to something at the side of the table. In my previous quick survey of the room, I hadn’t noticed the three white squares lined up on the floor.

I reached for a lamp and flipped the switch, filling the room with gloomy, sallow light, and crouched down.

“Old pictures,” I said as I peered closely, careful not to upset the layout—it was spaced so evenly that it seemed planned, and maybe important. The pictures were obviously from another time—they were black-and-white images, slightly yellowed and warped.

“That could be Abner when he was younger,” I said as I pointed at a young man who had Abner’s roundish face. The smile was familiar enough, but the Abner I knew didn’t have the hair to compare. There was a young woman next to the younger Abner. She was very pretty, her hair white and poofy like Marilyn Monroe’s. Even with the lack of color film, I could see that she wore a thick coat of lipstick, most likely red.

“His wife? Was he married?”

“I have no idea. Remember, until you brought me here, I didn’t even know where he lived. But—though I hate to be stereotypical in any way—I don’t think there’s a woman on the planet who’d live here without at least covering that chair with a towel or something.” I pointed. “Actually, I’m really beginning to wonder if we were friends at all. This house—even the greenhouse—all of it is part of a person I don’t know. I can’t make any of this fit.”

“People can be pretty secretive.”

“I suppose.”

“The other two look like pictures of trees, or something,” Ian said.

“Uh-huh.” Flanking the picture of the couple were indeed pictures of trees. One was of three trees and the other one had just one tree. “Weird.”

“Tell you anything?”

“No, except that Abner might have had a thing for both blondes and trees.”

“Right. Come on. Abner’s not in here. Let’s check the greenhouse.”

“Yep.” I glanced at the pictures one more time, but they didn’t tell me anything at all.

We both leapt over the sticky puddle again and then closed the door behind us. I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her alone, so I let Hobbit out of the truck and we made our way along the dirt path to the greenhouse. It wasn’t terribly far away, but I couldn’t make my legs move quickly enough. The sky was darkening, and though I didn’t want to leave any wildflower unturned, I hoped that we could wrap this up quickly.

In truth, there was probably nothing creepy about Abner’s property, but with everything that had happened that day, it seemed like we were in the midst of the set for some scary movie. Would a mask-wearing someone step out from behind the bluebells and run at us with a big knife?

“What was with the coffee table?” I said, thinking aloud.

“Don’t know. At first glance, it looked so wrong, but at second glance, it almost seemed placed—like the pictures.”

“Doesn’t make sense. Do you think there was a fight—that Abner was taken from his house or something?”

“Can’t tell from what we’ve seen. It’s all strange but not really violent.”

When we were about ten feet from the greenhouse, our conversation was interrupted as an array of motion-sensor lights in between the hanging hummingbird feeders blazed on. Hobbit barked at the sudden change.

“It’s okay, girl.” I petted her neck.

“Hey, that could be the feeder that had the syrup from the porch in it,” Ian said.

I followed his glance and saw a busted hummingbird feeder. It was on the ground, next to the door of the greenhouse. The clear tube was cracked open like an eggshell.

“It doesn’t look like any of the syrup was spilled out here,” I said as I inspected more closely. A few drops still clung to the plastic, but if this was the feeder that had once contained the syrup, it had been pretty well emptied on the porch.

“There are no footprints,” Ian said.

“Huh?”

“There aren’t any syrupy footprints anywhere. We leapt over the puddle. If there was anyone else at the house—including Abner—they must have leapt over it, too, or they would have left footprints.”

“Where is he?” I said.

“Abner! It’s Ian and Becca,” Ian said loudly.

There was no response.

“Let’s go in.” With Hobbit close by, I stepped surely toward the door. I was ready to face whatever boogeyman was on the other side. Again with some sort of superheroweird speed, Ian’s hand was on the doorknob long before mine. “How do you do that?”

He shrugged. “Let’s be careful.”

“Right.”

Ian pushed the door open.

The greenhouse was mostly dark, but there was still enough light outside to cast shadows everywhere. One small, illuminated, white lightbulb stuck out from the wall underneath the main light switches. Its light didn’t travel far. There were so many switches—a dozen or so—that Ian had to partially reach under some thick twine that hung in a perfectly round ring on the wall to flip them up.

“Wow,” I said as I looked around. I had honestly never seen anything like it—so much so that I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing. “This is better than Oz.”

“Abner!” Ian called again. His voice echoed, but didn’t receive a response.

The greenhouse was half as long as a football field and probably not quite as wide. There were rows and rows of flowers that seemed to be planted in tables. All of the tables had deep bellies and were linked together by PVC piping. Beneath them, there was a grated irrigation runoff system that snaked up and down the aisles. Even with all the soil, the greenhouse was immaculate; the floor was spotless, and the temperature was controlled by some invisible machine that whirred quietly in the background. As time-warped as his house furniture had been, Abner’s greenhouse was modern, practically futuristic.

“I’m beginning to think he’s just not here, Ian.”

“Maybe,” Ian said, as he peered at the tables and underneath them.

Hobbit and I picked an aisle and began walking down it. The flowers were color-coded. On my right were red somethings and on my left were purple somethings. The flowers were healthy and bright. Where there weren’t flowers, there was either bare, even soil or healthy sprouts peeking up cheerfully. The entire space was filled with the earthy aromas of soil and flowers, but there was nothing artificial about the scent, nothing perfumy. I sniffed deeply. No one would ever figure out how to bottle this. I kept walking, recognizing some of the flowers from Abner’s booth, not recognizing others.

“How in the world?” I muttered. Hobbit nudged my knee lightly. “This must have cost him a fortune.”

“I can’t even guess,” Ian said as he joined us. “He’s probably been working on it a long time.”

“Explains the old furniture—why spend your money on the house when you could spend it here and create this?”

“I agree.”

“Oh, look, here are some of his favorite ones.” I pointed to some flowers with white petals and bright yellow centers. The stems, though mostly hidden by leaves, were obviously thick with thorns.

“They look wicked,” Ian observed.

“They are. They’re called Carolina horse nettle. Abner can create a bouquet, placing one of these just right so that it doesn’t ever touch the customer at all. It’s quite a trick.” I echoed what I had said to Allison earlier in the day.

“Look at these.” Ian picked up some old kitchen oven mitts that reached to his elbows. They were pocked with little holes in the red outer fabric, the white stuffing branching out here and there.

“Yikes. I think that any flower that requires wearing those for maintenance should be banned from all gardens.”

“Damn!” Ian said suddenly. He ripped off the oven mitts and stared at the ground behind me.

“What?” I thought maybe there had been thorns in the mitts, but once he got them off, he pushed past me, went to his knees, and looked at something under a table the next aisle over.

“Oh my God,” I said as I joined him and saw what he’d seen.

Underneath the table full of beautiful flowers, on the pristine floor, was something that not only looked out of place, but was stomach-roiling horrific, too.

It was an axe, the handle old and worn and the blade dark and bloody.

I have no idea what made me do it, but I reached for the axe and pulled it from the floor.

“Becca, I don’t think . . .” Ian said.

I ignored Ian’s hand on my arm and held the axe close. It was real, heavy and substantial.

“I think Abner’s in trouble, Ian,” I said.

“And I think perhaps you lied to me, Ms. Robins,” a voice said from behind us. “You really did know where Abner lived. Now, put the axe down and step away from it, please.”

After I swallowed my heart back down to my chest, I did exactly as Officer Brion said. He was halfway down the aisle, still in his crisp uniform. He didn’t have his gun drawn, but once I stood, I put my hands into the air, just like any common criminal caught in the act would do.