Sour Apples (24 page)

The next morning, after finding nothing to eat for breakfast since she’d eaten the last of her cereal for dinner last night, Meg set off for the market. It was a beautiful day, warm but not unpleasantly so, and brilliantly sunny. The trees were just beginning to show pale shades of green or, in some cases, red. A few more weeks and they would be fully leafed out. Early in the day the market wasn’t crowded, and Meg quickly filled her shopping cart. Both she and Bree worked hard, and they deserved some decent and healthy food—even though Meg balked at paying outrageous prices for vegetables and fruits shipped in from California, Mexico, and Chile. She thought once again about starting a vegetable garden. Surely the past inhabitants of the house had had kitchen gardens, and she could put in herbs and tomatoes…The fantasy carried her home.

Inside she had finished unloading the groceries before she noticed the light blinking on her phone, the landline. She had forgotten to turn on her cell phone. It was a terse message from Christopher to please call him at her earliest convenience. He sounded uncharacteristically formal, and Meg wondered why. One way to find out: she hit the button to return his call, hoping he was still in his office.

He was. “Meg, my dear, thank you for getting back to me promptly. I received the report from my friend at the lab.”

“My, that was fast! I thought testing took days.”

“In some cases it can, but the tests for certain chemical substances are simple and quick. I do hope this is not land you are hoping to plant.”

Meg had a sinking feeling that she knew what he was going to say. “Because?”

“There were unusually high levels of certain toxic chemicals in all the samples you provided, although the levels varied among the samples. Particularly lead and arsenic. It would not be safe to eat any plant grown on such ground, not without soil treatment. Did you suspect that this would be a problem?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“If it is not your land, you will alert the owner of these hazards?”

“Of course.” Meg wasn’t certain whether Ethan Truesdell knew of the hazards yet, but she was pretty sure that someone out there already did. “Do you have a printed copy of the results?”

“No, but I could print out for you the e-mail attachment. My contact at the lab wanted me to have it quickly.”

“Even better—could you just forward me the e-mail?”

“Of course. Is there anything further you would like me to do?”

“Not right now. Thank you for rushing this through, Christopher, and for following up. I’ll tell you all about it once I work out a few things.”

“Whenever you’re ready, my dear. Take care.” He rang off.

Meg hung up the phone and stood for a moment, staring into space. So the samples from the field were full of lead and arsenic, which was exactly what would be expected from land that had once held a Victorian-era paint factory. The land that the state’s own Department of Environmental Protection had declared safe. The land that had sickened the cows and killed one, and sent Joyce Truesdell snooping—and maybe got her murdered.

Meg punched in Seth’s cell phone number, and he answered quickly.

“Meg? What’s up?”

She took a breath. “Christopher got the lab results back.”

“Not good, I take it?”

“Worst case. That land is definitely contaminated with lead and arsenic.”

“Damn.” There was a muffled sound, as though Seth was talking to someone else. “Meg? I’m in the middle of something here and I can’t break away. I’ll swing by on my way home, okay?”

“Fine. I’ll call Lydia.”

“Why—” Meg hung up before Seth could finish his question. She punched in his mother’s cell phone number. Lydia answered on the fifth ring.

“Lydia, it’s Meg.” There was no way to sugarcoat what she had to say. “I talked to Christopher, and unfortunately, we were right.”

Meg could hear Lydia’s sigh. “I’m truly sorry to hear that. What now? Does Seth know?”

“Yes, I called him first. Why don’t you come by after work and we can brainstorm? He said he’d stop by, too.”

Lydia agreed, and they arranged to meet at six. Seth arrived first, and Lydia followed within a few minutes, Max in tow. Meg had thrown together a quick casserole, but food was the last thing on her mind. She offered drinks all around, and then as they sat down at the kitchen table, Bree came down the back stairs, no doubt drawn by the scent of cooking, before stopping abruptly at the sight of them. “Jeez, you guys look like you’re planning a funeral! What’s up? Or do you want me to butt out?”

“You might as well stay, because you may be involved here, too,” Meg said.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea?” Seth asked. “She doesn’t need to know all this.”

“Yes, she does, Seth,” Lydia contradicted him. “Bree
lives here. Besides, she can be objective, since she doesn’t have a personal connection to any of this.”

Bree dropped into the fourth chair. “Okay, fill me in. This about your mysterious errand yesterday, Meg?”

“Yes, it is. The short version is that Lydia and I collected samples from the field that Joyce suspected had made her cows sick. I took the samples to Christopher, who passed them on to a friend at the soil lab, and the results showed dangerously high levels of lead and arsenic, on a plot that was supposed to have been cleaned up and that the DEP had signed off on years ago.”

“You think it’s from that old factory that used to be there, or could somebody have dumped something there since?” Bree asked.

Seth shook his head. “I haven’t seen the report, but given that there’s both arsenic and lead in the samples, in high levels, it almost has to be from the factory.”

“So somebody screwed up, huh?” Bree said.

“Yes, and possibly deliberately,” Meg responded. “The kicker here is that the company responsible for the remediation belonged to Rick Sainsbury’s father. Seth’s father worked on part of that project.”

“Wow, what a soap opera,” Bree said. “Is there anybody who isn’t involved? So what’re you thinking, that Joyce was killed to keep this quiet?”

Seth nodded. “That’s what Meg seems to be getting at. Now we need to figure out what to do next. I vote to turn over the tests to Detective Bill Marcus, tell him that we think it could be a motive in Joyce’s murder, and let him run with it. We don’t need to be in the middle of this.”

“Seth, we already are in the middle of it—what do you call the break-ins?” Meg protested.

“We don’t know that they’re related. They could still be nothing more than petty vandalism,” Seth said stubbornly.

“Oh, come on…” Meg stared at him, and in the end he looked away before she did.

He sighed. “I’ll concede that there’s something going on here and the break-ins may be part of it, but that’s as far as I’ll go. I’m not ready to point fingers at anyone.”

Meg wasn’t ready to give in yet. “I still think that somebody was looking for all and any reports about that land. I agree that Marcus needs to know, but what do you want him to do?”

“We’re handing him a motive for Joyce’s murder on a silver platter. We’ll give him a copy of the soil report. And he may not know about the break-ins, if Art didn’t tell him.”

“Hang on a sec,” Bree interrupted. “So, okay, somebody messed up the cleanup or fudged the reports. Say nobody ever found out—then nothing would happen. Or say somebody discovered it for some reason—then there would be some fines and penalties and stuff for the company, right?”

“That sounds right,” Seth answered. “When Joyce saw the results from her soil tests, she most likely would have alerted the MDEP and they would have handled it from there. Or told the town—which means me, I guess—the way she did about the blood work on the cows, and then I would have been obligated to tell the state. When she came to me to complain, she had the first report on the blood, and she said she had requested the soil testing but she didn’t know the outcome. So we know her report exists somewhere.”

“But somebody made sure she was dead pretty quick,” Bree said. “Why?”

“Because if word of the botched cleanup got out, the company that handled it would suffer,” Meg said.

Bree nodded. “Yeah, but they’d apologize to everybody, they’d pay whatever fines, and they’d fix the problem, and that would be that.”

“All the other remediation jobs the company had done would have to be reexamined—that could destroy them,” Seth pointed out.

“So that’s why they’d kill Joyce? Seems kind of extreme. I mean, cutting corners is one thing, but murder?”

“It is. But if you accept that covering up the poor cleanup job was the motive, it’s a little more complicated than that,” Seth said. “If Joyce was killed to keep it quiet, that implies that somebody knows the job was done badly or not at all, and doesn’t want that information to go public. The fact that somebody really wants to find the records suggests that there’s evidence buried in there somewhere.”

“Isn’t it ironic that the only reason this person didn’t find the records is because both I and the town are such lousy housekeepers?” Lydia said.

Meg smiled at her, then addressed everyone. “The murder and the break-ins suggest that somebody knew this and thought it posed a threat to the Pioneer Valley company, and that means to the Sainsbury campaign. I mean, as Bree pointed out, if it was an honest mistake by the company, Rick could have come out and taken his licks and promised to make things all better, and probably would have scored points for it. He could have blamed it all on his father, who’s not around to contradict him. Look, Sainsbury was and is CEO of Pioneer Valley. Even if he has no direct knowledge of the original cleanup, or if it happened under his father, if somebody at Pioneer Valley knows that someone is sniffing around the history of the Granford site, that person would most likely have warned him. The buck stops at the top, right? The fact that this came out just as he decided to run for office made it important to quash it—fast. How much do you think he knows?”

“That’s the big question. But aren’t you making an awful lot of assumptions, going from contaminated land all the way to Rick Sainsbury’s campaign?” Seth said.

“Do you have any better suggestions?” Meg countered. “As Bree said, if it was just the company, they could probably handle the negative publicity and the fines. But add the campaign to the mix and it becomes a bigger problem.”

Seth sighed. “Maybe. I hate to bring this up, Meg, but you have a way to find out.”

“What—Lauren? What would she know?”

“She’s been working for Sainsbury.”

“Yes, but only for a couple of months,” Meg said. “This problem goes back years and involves things that Lauren would have no reason to know about.”

“You’re suggesting that somebody in the campaign knows something. Okay, maybe I’ll buy that. But it doesn’t have to be Rick—maybe it’s someone working for Rick. Lauren can tell us who’s involved with the campaign, staff or volunteers. Also, she keeps Rick’s schedule—so she’d know if he had an alibi for the evening Joyce died.”

That last comment stunned them into silence for several moments. Then Meg shook her head. “We all saw him at the Spring Fling that night.”

“Yes, but not until late,” Seth said impatiently. “If Joyce was killed during milking, he would have had plenty of time to clean up and go on about his business. We don’t know what he was doing earlier. Lauren would.”

“I guess,” Meg replied. “But Lauren’s not very happy with me at the moment, so I don’t think she’ll take kindly to my asking that kind of question. I won’t believe
she’d
be involved in something like this. She admires the man.”

“She doesn’t know him very well, does she?” Seth said.

Meg tried to recall how Lauren had described how she’d originally gotten involved in the campaign. “Well, no, not exactly.”

“Meg, I’m not saying Lauren has anything to do with whatever this is, but she does know what’s been going on with the campaign during the past couple of weeks, which is when all this started. Lauren knows who’s working on the campaign—it’s still a small group. And if it turns out that the murder
is
connected to Rick’s congressional ambitions, do you really want your friend to be caught in the middle of it?”

Meg stared at Seth and reluctantly acknowledged that he
had a point. “Of course not. So you want me to try to patch things up and then pump her for information on who’s who and when what happened? Before or after we talk to Marcus?”

“I’ll deal with Marcus. You get to Lauren as soon as you can. I have a nasty feeling that this isn’t over yet.”

Seth and Lydia left soon after in their separate cars. Meg debated deferring calling Lauren until the next day but decided that waiting would be the coward’s way out. Meg hit Lauren’s number on her cell phone.

Lauren answered quickly. “What do you want, Meg?” she said abruptly. “You know I’m busy.” Her tone was anything but friendly.

Not the time to ask if her boss was a crook and/or a murderer. “Lauren, I feel bad about the way we left things. Can we get together and clear the air before you leave the area?”

“Meg, I’m out flat here. Rick’s getting ready to announce his campaign on Patriots’ Day, and that’s only a month away and I’ve got a million things to do. We can talk once that’s done.”