Golden Malicious (Apple Orchard Mystery)

Praise for the Orchard Mysteries “Sheila Connolly continues to include fascinating facts about apples and orchards within her stories . . . Not only will you get hooked on the mystery, but you will be racing to the kitchen to bake an apple treat!”

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Cozy Mystery Book Review

“Fans will enjoy the heroine taking a bite out of crime in this fun regional cozy.”

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Genre Go Round Reviews

“Really well written . . . I was constantly kept guessing. This series is in its stride, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next book in this series.”

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Fresh Fiction

“Meg is a smart, savvy woman who’s working hard to fit into her new community—just the kind of protagonist I look for in today’s traditional mystery. I look forward to more trips to Granford, Massachusetts!”

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Meritorious Mysteries

“An enjoyable and well-written book with some excellent apple recipes at the end.”

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Cozy Library

“A wonderful slice of life in a small town . . . The mystery is intelligent and has an interesting twist . . .
Rotten to the Core
is a fun, quick read with an enjoyable heroine, an interesting hook, and some yummy recipes at the end.”

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The Mystery Reader
(4 stars) “Full of rich description, historical context, and mystery.”

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The Romance Readers Connection

“Meg Corey is a very likable protagonist . . . [A] delightful new series.”

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Gumshoe Review

“An example of everything that is right with the cozy mystery . . . A likable heroine, an attractive small-town setting, a slimy victim, and fascinating side elements . . . There’s depth to the characters in this book that isn’t always found in crime fiction . . . Sheila Connolly has written a winner for cozy mystery fans.”

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Lesa’s Book Critiques

“A warm, very satisfying read.”

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RT Book Reviews
(4 stars) “The premise and plot are solid, and Meg seems a perfect fit for her role.”

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Publishers Weekly

“Meg Corey is a fresh and appealing sleuth with a bushelful of entertaining problems . . . One crisp, delicious read.”

—Claudia Bishop, bestselling author of the Hemlock Falls Mysteries “A delightful look at small-town New England, with an intriguing puzzle thrown in.”

—JoAnna Carl, author of the Chocoholic Mysteries “Thoroughly enjoyable . . . I can’t wait for the next book and a chance to spend more time with Meg and the good people of Granford.”

—Sammi Carter, author of the Candy Shop Mysteries

Berkley Prime Crime titles by Sheila Connolly

Orchard Mysteries

Museum Mysteries

LET’S PLAY DEAD

County Cork Mysteries

Specials

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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GOLDEN MALICIOUS

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author Copyright © 2013 by Sheila Connolly.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

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For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA),

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Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / October 2013

Cover illustration by Mary Ann Lasher.

Cover design by Annette Fiore DeFex.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

Acknowledgments

As always I owe a big thank-you to my agent, Jessica Faust of BookEnds, and my editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez. Without their help this book and series would never have seen the light of day.

But for this particular book I also need to thank an unlikely pair of organizations which inspired the story: The Daughters of the American Revolution and the United States Department of Agriculture.

A couple of years ago the Easthampton Colonial building owned by the Betty Allen Chapter of the Massachusetts Daughters of the American Revolution was struck by a fast-moving car, causing significant damage to one corner of the house. Luckily eighteenth-century carpenters knew what they were doing and their building was meant to last, so the damage could be repaired. Restoring a building to historical standards isn’t always easy, but the restoration community in western Massachusetts stepped up and contributed materials, labor, and expertise to make sure it was brought back to its original state.

My husband, who is a research entomologist studying the control or elimination of invasive species of insects in this country, has worked for one or another agency of the USDA for much of his career. In the past he studied the Asian longhorned beetle, a threat to forest trees, including those in a part of Massachusetts not far from Granford. I’m familiar with the insect, and now I’ve found a way to use it in a story, with a twist that surprised even some members of the USDA. How often can a mystery writer claim to have invented a new crime?

To find out how I manage to combine these elements, read on! And to all of the readers who have taken Meg and Seth and the other citizens of Granford into their lives, thank you!

Meg Corey awoke before 7 a.m. to the sound of Seth Chapin’s cell phone ringing, and she wasn’t happy about it. Even though he grabbed it up and answered after the second ring, she had been hoarding the last few minutes of sleep, and now some impatient idiot had stolen them from her. The day hadn’t even started, and she was already tired. At the rate things were going in the orchard, she would be tired for the next six months.

Meg could hear the sound of Seth’s voice in the hall, where he’d carried the phone. He sounded startled but not upset, so maybe for once an early-morning call wasn’t bad news. She decided to lie there and wait for his report, and managed to doze off.

When she opened her eyes again, a fully dressed Seth announced, “Good morning—sorry about that. I made coffee, if that’s any consolation.”

“Depends,” Meg mumbled into the pillow. “What was so important that whoever it was couldn’t wait until a civilized hour? It’s not even”—she squinted at the digital clock near the bed—“seven o’clock.”

Seth sat down on the bed next to her. “It looks like a job, and they need someone fast. Last night some idiot took a curve too fast and ran his car head-on into Donald Butterfield’s house. You know—over on the northeast side of town? The driver was a drunken kid. He walked away, but Donald says the house took a big hit.”

Meg, still feeling like a newcomer to town after less than two years, did not share native son Seth’s encyclopedic knowledge of all the people and houses of Granford. “Do I know Donald?”

“Probably not, but I bet you know the house. It’s one of the oldest in town, older even than our two places. Mid-1700s. You must have driven by it, on the way to Amherst.”

“Mmm,” Meg replied noncommittally. “So what happened?” She accepted that more sleep was out of the question, rolled over, and propped herself up on a couple of pillows. “How bad’s the damage?”

“Hard to tell without seeing it,” Seth replied cheerfully, “but it’s pretty clear that one whole corner is trashed, and more is probably knocked askew. They built houses strong in those days, but they weren’t counting on a couple of tons of metal hitting one at high speed.”

“If I remember that road, it’s kind of hard to go very fast. And how do you go off the road and into a house?” Meg said. “But I can tell you’re just drooling to get your hands on the place.” Seth’s renovation business had been picking up as the economy improved, but his heart lay with restoring the surviving Colonial houses in the area, and this damaged house would give him a prime opportunity to show what he could do.

“Of course. But it gets better. Donald is very proud of the house, because it’s been in his family since it was built. So not only does he want it repaired with historically correct materials, I’d guess he’s going to want me, or whoever, to use period tools, too, so even the tool marks match.”

“Sounds kind of obsessive, don’t you think?” Meg said.

“I can understand where he’s coming from. Besides, Donald hinted that the kid who was driving the car comes from a family with money, and they’re willing to pay whatever it takes to keep Donald Butterfield happy—and keep Junior out of court.”

“Do you have to compete for this, or is the job yours for the taking?”

“I’m hoping the latter. I know a couple of other guys I can pull in, who have the right skills, especially in woodworking and replicating antique plaster. And it needs to be done not only right but fast, since the place is wide open, except for some tarps. At least we’ve got decent weather for it, and a couple of good months to get the work done. If it had happened in winter, Donald would have had to move out—or would have insisted on staying and frozen to death.”

“Go!” Meg said, laughing at his enthusiasm. “I give you my blessing.”

“We didn’t have any plans for today, did we?” Seth asked belatedly.

“Not ‘we’ as in you and me. Bree and I have plenty of plans.” As to exactly what those plans were, though, Meg largely deferred to her young orchard manager and housemate Briona Stewart, who knew far more than novice farmer Meg did about running an apple orchard. “Another round of spraying, since the weird weather this year is throwing off a lot of biological schedules, and some pests have arrived early. Plus irrigating, particularly in the new part of the orchard where the baby trees don’t have well-established root systems yet. So the short answer is, a lot of hauling things from place to place, rinse and repeat, at least for the next couple of weeks, if we don’t get any rain.”

“I should be done in time for dinner. I’ll cook tonight.”

“You’re working, too. I wish Granford had a decent pizza place, one that delivered.”

“I’ll put it on the town’s wish list—one of the perks of being selectman for Granford. Not that it means it will happen. Look, I’d better run. I’ll talk to you if plans change. You go back to sleep.”

As if. The sun was shining and there was work to be done. A lot of work. Well, she’d asked for it when she took over the orchard. And then expanded it. What was she, a masochist? She wasn’t a newbie anymore, and she knew that insects, pests, and water shortages were ordinary parts of raising any crop. She also knew even better that doing anything in the orchard meant doing it herself, alongside Bree, and it was often dirty physical work. So much for the romance of farming. There wouldn’t be any other help until harvesttime—and there wouldn’t be a harvest unless she got her butt in gear.

She dressed and wandered down to the kitchen, where Bree was already sitting at the table reading some sort of farming journal.

“I saw Seth breeze by—what’s his hurry?” Bree asked, munching on a bagel.

“Apparently somebody ran a car into a house at the far end of town, and the owner asked him to work on the repairs, so he went over to look at it. He seemed very excited about it.”

“I can’t believe how badly some idiots drive around here. Was the guy drunk?”

“I love the way you assume it was a guy, like no woman ever lost control of her car. But yes, Seth said alcohol was involved, plus stupidity and speed. Seth can fill us in later,” Meg said as she helped herself to coffee. “He said he’d cook dinner. So what’s on our list for today?”

“There’s no rain in the forecast, so we’ll be irrigating again. We’re lucky to have the well up there in the orchard.”

“I wish I could say it was brilliant planning on my part, but it came with the place. I agree, though, it’s a blessing. Tell me again why we’re doing this by hand?”

“What, you don’t like following in the footsteps of your ancestors?” Bree grinned at her.

“Not if it means heavy lifting. Aren’t there easier systems available?”

“Of course there are. Just install drip irrigation. We’ve got the water supply.”

“But not the money, at least not right now. Why didn’t we do this last summer?”

“Because it rained enough last summer that we didn’t have to irrigate. Lucky us.”

Meg sighed. In a way she was grateful that she’d had it relatively easy in her first year of working with the orchard—not that it had felt that way at the time!—but part of her wished she had known that an irrigation system lay somewhere in her future, so she could budget for it. Ha! There was no budget. They’d been lucky to do better than break even last year, and she’d been hoping things would improve this year, but then she’d laid out money to buy and plant new trees. Which was a good business move but had eaten into her cash. “Do we need any more pesticide?”

Bree didn’t look up from her magazine. “Not today, but soon. The trees are stressed enough by the lack of water, without having critters gnawing on them.”

“Global warming?” Meg asked.

Bree shrugged. “Maybe. But I’m not going to worry about something I can’t do anything about. Still, I’d bet our yield will be down this year, for a number of reasons.”

“Gee, thanks. I love starting the day with such cheery news,” Meg said. Fewer apples meant smaller profits, although they wouldn’t need as many pickers. But the pickers were counting on the income from their seasonal employment, so she couldn’t cut back too far there. Ah, well. As Bree had said, it made more sense to worry only about the things they could actually control.

“Well, you wanted to be a farmer. Welcome to the real world.”

“I know, I know. Let me finish breakfast and we can get started.”

The day proceeded much as planned, which meant a lot of hard work. In the absence of a permanently installed irrigation system, Bree and Meg were relying on a tried-and-true manual system: a tank hauled behind their creaky tractor. The tank had spray heads on both sides, to water the trees, but it had to move slowly to provide enough water, not just a surface sprinkling. Worse, the tank’s capacity was limited, which meant that they had to return to the wellhead often and refill the tank. It was a time-consuming process, little changed from nineteenth-century pictures Meg had seen, except that back then the tank was pulled by horses. But at least she had the well; without it, she would have had to depend on municipal water. Another expense she couldn’t afford.

So here she was, trucking water around her eighteen acres of apple trees. If her mother or her college classmates could see her now! Meg thought to herself. Sweating and filthy. And worried—to her inexperienced eye, there weren’t as many baby apples as there should be, or as there had been the year before. She knew she’d been lucky with her first crop, but it made it hard to accept less this year. Was the weather going to improve anytime soon? Bree didn’t seem optimistic. What constituted an official drought? Was this one? Was it only last winter that she had yearned for sun and warmth? Well, she’d gotten it, and then some. Temperatures hadn’t gone much below eighty for a couple of weeks, even at night.

It was after five when Meg walked slowly down the hill, glad to see Seth’s car in the drive, and hoping he had remembered his promise to make dinner. She let herself in by the back door and found Seth absorbed in reading one of her cookbooks.

“All you need now is an apron, and this would be the perfect picture,” Meg said with a smile when he noticed her.

“Glad to be of service. You look beat. Where’s Bree?”

“Bringing the tractor back down the hill for the night. It’s not much, but I’d hate to lose it. There are probably other farmers worse off than I am who might decide to drive off with it. And I am beat. I think I’ll claim executive privilege and grab a shower before she gets here.”

“Go for it. Dinner should be ready soon.”

“Sounds good.”
Especially since I don’t even have to cook it.
Meg trudged up the stairs, feeling every muscle. Twenty minutes later, minus a layer of dirt, she passed Bree coming up the stairs as she went down. “It’s all yours,” Meg said. Bree grunted in return and kept going. Meg ran her fingers through her hair, almost dry already, even though she’d been out of the shower for only a few minutes.

Back in the kitchen, Meg dropped into a chair, and Seth handed her a glass of chilled wine, a thin sheen of moisture beading the outside. Meg accepted it gratefully and took a long sip. “Oh, that’s good. So, how was your day?”

“Interesting. I saw the house and went over it with Donald and his insurance assessor. The car did a real number on it—took out the corner altogether, so we have to shore that up so the second story doesn’t collapse. An original eighteenth-century corner cupboard is now in splinters, and a lot of the wainscoting is beyond salvage. A number of windows are gone. Donald is in mourning for every fragment.”

“I assume you got the job?”

“Yes. Donald knows my work and trusts me.”

“How much can be repaired or replaced?” Meg asked, feeling pleasantly buzzed by the wine.

“All of it, for a price, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem. I’ll check out some of the salvage places locally—you remember Eric, over in Hadley?—and see if there are any windows of the right size. But most likely we’ll have to reconstruct them. Matching the boards for the wainscoting is going to be a bigger problem, since they’ve got to be eighteen inches wide, like yours.”

“Is that kind of stuff still available?”

“Not at your local box stores, but there’s an old family-owned sawmill not far from here that can probably help us out.”

“There used to be a sawmill at the back of this property,” Meg said. “I remember seeing a picture at the historical society in town.”

Seth sat down across the table from her, with a bottle of beer. “Back in those days it didn’t take anything fancy, and you weren’t supplying more than your own needs and maybe a couple of neighbors. Once the insurance comes up with a figure, I need to go back and get some measurements so I can give Donald estimates for materials, and since he’s got the budget for it, I may call in a professional cleanup team, although I’ll have to keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t take away any of the good stuff that can be reused. Even if it’s only a piece of board, it can be recycled somewhere in the house. Did you ever notice that some of the timbers in this house in the attic were recycled?”

“No, sir, I did not. How can you tell?”

“A few of the long beams have mortises that don’t match any timbers with tenons. And they’re pretty major beams. Why waste a perfectly good piece of lumber? Especially one that nobody was ever going to see?”