A Killer Crop (10 page)

“Of Emily Dickinson? Actually I’m not sure. I know her more well-circulated poems, and her general reputation, but I’m afraid that’s the extent of my knowledge. I would enjoy seeing her home. Is that the ladies’ room over there?”

“It is. I’ll wait outside for you, if you don’t mind.”

As Elizabeth went toward the back of the restaurant, Meg headed out the door and intercepted Frances, who was still near the entrance. “So, twice in one week? Are you and Christopher . . . ?”

Frances smiled. “Maybe. He’s such a lovely man, if a wee bit older than I am. And you and Seth looked pretty cozy yourselves the other night.”

“I guess. Oh, if you happen to get together with my mother again, I haven’t managed to tell her about Seth.”

“Why ever not? He’s unattached, owns his own business, and he’s an all-around great guy. What’s not to like?”

“I know, I know, but I’d like to explain it to her in my own time. Okay?”

“No problem. Ah, here she is. Good-bye again, Elizabeth.” Frances turned and strode down the street toward her car.

“You ready, Mother? I should just feed the meter before we go—I wouldn’t want to rush.”

“That’s fine, dear. No hurry.”

Easy for her to say
, Meg thought. She didn’t have an orchard to run.

“You didn’t have a chance to see Emily Dickinson’s house . . . before?” Meg asked as they followed Main Street toward the large painted brick house down the way, ignoring the other pedestrians who jostled their way past them on the sidewalk. Might as well confront this now.

“You mean, did I see it with Daniel?” her mother countered.

“Yes, I guess I do. I understand Daniel Weston was a well-known Dickinson scholar.”

“So he said,” Elizabeth replied in a neutral tone. “I’m not particularly familiar with the contemporary academic environment, and I took his statement at face value. Although we did spend some time talking about Emily, and what she meant to the town of Amherst.”

“He was hosting a symposium on Dickinson and Whitman this weekend. Did he mention that?”

“No, we didn’t talk about specifics of what he was working on at the moment. We had a lot of catching up to do. In fact, we talked about
you
quite a bit.”

“Me?” Meg was surprised. “He’d never even met me.”

Elizabeth was silent for a moment, studying her daughter’s face. “Meg, can we wait for a bit to talk about all this?”

Meg straightened her shoulders. “Mother, I would be happy to, but the fact that Detective Marcus has talked to you twice now makes me nervous.”

“Are you accusing me of having something to do with Daniel Weston’s death? That’s ridiculous.”

“I agree, but Detective Marcus doesn’t know you as well as I do. And your presence here at this particular moment is one suspicious fact that sticks out like a sore thumb, as he keeps reminding us.”

“I suppose.” Elizabeth shook her head as if to clear it. “Please, Meg—can’t we just do something pleasant for a little while? It’s a beautiful day, and a charming town, and I’d like to do something nice with my daughter. Please?”

More evasion, but Meg didn’t have the heart to press. “For now, all right. But you’re going to have to tell me the whole story sooner or later, and it would help me to help you if it was sooner.”

Elizabeth smiled sadly. “All right, dear, I promise.”

“When?”

“Maybe tomorrow. I need a little more time to get my thoughts in order. And to grieve for Daniel.”

Meg was nonplussed by the last remark. Grieve for someone she hadn’t seen in decades? Or grieve for a past now lost, for things that might have been? What had Daniel been to her, and had he been looking to rekindle it? Had she? “All right, deal.”

“Now, may we please go pay homage to the Belle of Amherst?”

“See, you do know something about Emily,” Meg replied as they continued along the sidewalk. After a minute or so they came to the front of the house. Sitting on a small rise, it was a solidly built brick building, its windows flanked by wooden shutters, its front door guarded by a columned portico, the roof crowned by a windowed cupola.

“A handsome place, although it looks a little bare,” Elizabeth said, studying it.

“The town had to cut down the trees in front—some of them were diseased. It’s not like Emily or her family had planted them originally—they were twentieth-century additions. In fact, the land across the street”—Meg pointed—“was open farmland when the Dickinsons lived here, and of course they would have had a very different view. Shall we go in? They have guided tours.”

“Certainly. Have you been here before?”

“Just once. I keep meaning to come back, and to read a little more about Emily, but I never seem to have the time.”

“I can understand that,” her mother said.

Can you?
Meg wondered, but decided to hold her tongue. She didn’t want to disrupt their fragile peace.

They went around to the back of the house, where they paid for tickets and were admitted. “The next tour starts in ten minutes. Please enjoy the gift shop while you’re waiting,” the cheerful desk attendant said.

Elizabeth wandered into a small adjoining room. “Good heavens, was this the kitchen?” she said. “It’s so . . . primitive!”

“It was a simpler time, Mother. And Emily seemed to manage—there are even some of her recipes that survive, although I’m sure she had hired help.”

“I should hope so. It’s so hard to imagine the work it took, a century and more ago, just to keep a family fed and clean. I definitely prefer the modern era. What is there to see in the house?”

“Emily’s bedroom, a few pieces of her clothing, a view of the cemetery. Then there’s her brother’s house next door. That’s open for tours as well.” The last time Meg had visited, she’d found the docent well informed and very enthusiastic about the poet, but she would let her mother find that out for herself.

It was close to an hour later when the tour concluded in the small side garden, complete with a couple of young apple trees—Baldwins, Meg guessed. As the docent and the other people on the tour scattered, Meg and her mother drifted toward a bench. The afternoon sun was warm, the air crisp; they had eaten well, virtuously exercised both their bodies and their minds, and Meg was as well pleased as she could hope to be, given the looming harvest and Detective Marcus—who, as she thought about it, also loomed. They sat.

“It’s lovely here, isn’t it? How very strange that this one frail and frightened woman could have had such a lasting impact on our literary culture,” Elizabeth said slowly.

“I suppose it is, come to think of it,” Meg answered. “Although as you heard, Emily didn’t set out to change the world. She didn’t even let many people see her work, and it wasn’t until after her death that most of it was published. She wrote for herself mainly, and that was enough.”

Elizabeth sighed quietly, her eyes on the house across the street. “I’ve never felt I had that kind of talent, I’m afraid. Nor the compulsion to make my voice heard. It’s not for me to live an inspired life. Wasn’t it Thoreau who talked about ‘lives of quiet desperation’?”

Meg nodded. “Another Massachusetts writer, although far less self-effacing than Emily. And here we are visiting her house, and you can see where Thoreau’s cabin was on Walden Pond in Concord. They still influence our lives. It may sound strange, but I think I’ve tapped into that kind of historic continuity. I’m living in a house that one of our great-greats built two hundred and fifty years ago. That’s something I never expected.”

“Maybe you didn’t, but I would guess that great-great assumed his family would remain there forever. It would have been far easier for him to envision that than to foresee the reality. How different is what you do in your orchard from what he would have known?”

A question about the orchard? Whether it was simply polite conversation or her mother was actually interested, Meg rushed to answer. “Surprisingly little, actually. The techniques for propagating fruit trees have been around for millennia, and there may be descendants of some of the apples our ancestors planted in the orchard even now. Spraying? Pesticides have come a long way, but more and more we’re finding that they create as many problems as they solve—just ask Christopher. So sometimes we have to fall back on the old ways, which were simpler and cheaper. Harvesting? Apples are still fairly delicate, so you mostly have to pick them by hand. I think Thoreau would have recognized most of what we’re doing—well, except maybe the Jamaican pickers,” Meg joked.

“That’s an interesting twist—I wasn’t aware that Jamaicans were so numerous around here. Mainly we hear about Hispanic migrant workers when people talk about harvesting crops.”

“According to Christopher and Bree, the Jamaicans have been working around here for decades—they come back to the same places year after year. Bree is second generation, although she’s a lot more than a picker. And she grew up around here.”

“I’m still surprised that you hired her. Given your own lack of expertise, I would have thought you would go for someone more experienced.”

Meg tried to stifle her impatience at her mother’s naïveté. “I couldn’t afford anyone more experienced, Mother. But Bree came highly recommended by Christopher, whom I trust completely. And he’s available for backup if she gets in over her head. She knows the pickers and she’s been great at handling them so far. I don’t regret giving her a chance.”

“You don’t need to take my head off, Meg. I was just curious.”

“Sorry. You’re not the first person to wonder, but it seems to be working out. Next year will be easier.”

“You’ll be here next year?”

It was a question Meg really hadn’t answered for herself, but her mother’s surprise rankled. She turned on the bench to look directly at Elizabeth. “Why wouldn’t I? Look, this is not just a little hobby to keep me busy while I find the next desk job. For one thing, it’s a lot of work, and if I’m going to put this much sweat into it, I’m damn well going to stick to it, at least for a while. I don’t pretend I can learn everything about orchard management in a year or even two, but I’m going to learn as much as I can. And believe it or not, I like it here. I’ve made friends. People know who I am. That’s more than I could say when I was working in Boston.”

“But don’t you miss things like restaurants, culture?”

Meg laughed. “I’ll have to take you over to Northampton again. You may not have noticed, but they’ve got just about everything there—restaurants for all and any tastes, from vegan to snob; theaters; music venues. And that doesn’t even count the local colleges, which are some of the best in the country, and they bring in terrific lecturers. So I’m not exactly stranded in a cultural desert, you know. And I never had time to do anything of that kind of stuff back when I was in Boston anyway—we were all too busy trying to prove to each other how ambitious we were.”

“But how can you hope to meet anyone?” Elizabeth asked.

So that was the subtext. By “anyone,” Meg knew her mother meant a potential husband. An “anyone” that Meg had never felt compelled to pursue with any great enthusiasm. But things might be changing: Should she tell her mother now about Seth? Would it make things more complicated if she waited? As Meg opened her mouth, her phone, deep in a pocket, rang. She struggled to fish it out and checked the number: not one she recognized. “Hello?”

“Hello, Meg? This is Raynard. You need to come home. There’s been some trouble.”

“Trouble? What’s happened?”

“Just come, quick.” He hung up abruptly, leaving Meg staring at the phone.

“Is something wrong, dear?” her mother asked.

“I think so, but I don’t know what. I’ve got to go. Damn, I need to take you back to Rachel’s, but I don’t know if I can spare the time right now. Do you mind coming with me, at least for now?”

“Of course not. Let’s go.”

They walked swiftly but silently back to the parking lot while Meg turned over alternative scenarios in her head. Had the pickers found a new pest and they wanted to know what to do about it? Had the goats gotten loose? What was the worst case? She didn’t even want to go there—she could think of too many possibilities. Somehow, from Raynard’s tone, Meg guessed it was serious, but he would have told her if the house had burned down. Or the barn. Wouldn’t he? Back at the car they climbed in, buckled up, and Meg took off, back toward Granford and whatever awaited her there.