B00NRQWAJI (16 page)

“No,” I agreed, “but it’s getting dark. And it’s turned cold.”

“Yeah, but it’s good for business. That threat of frost sends customers in here like crazy. They’re afraid the apples will freeze on the trees before they get any.”

“Will they?” I asked, impressed that a high school student would know so much about the dynamics of the orchard business. “Freeze, I mean?”

“Sure. Probably not tonight, though.”

I looked at the last of the customers forking over their greenbacks at Miranda Barrett’s till and wished that could last a little longer.

But then Kayley said, “It’ll be all right. The truck should be here at the end of the week to pick up the bins.”

“Bins?”

“Yeah. You’ve probably seen ’em in the barn.”

But I hadn’t set foot in the barn.

“Mrs. Barrett isn’t technically a packer,” Kayley said, “but she
is
a wholesaler. Folks come here for the pick-your-own, but she pays Sutton Radcliffe’s guys to pick her apples from most of her trees. She sells bins of them to one of those big food companies. They make juice and everything out of ’em. Adam’s in the barn right now if you wanna know more about it. He can explain it better than I can.”

My heart, however, got hung up on the fact I’d located Barrett at last.

“Kayley,” Mrs. Barrett called, “aren’t you headed home yet?”

“I’ll drive you,” I repeated.

“It’s all right.” Kayley reached into a supply cupboard, grabbed a denim messenger bag dotted with neon daisies, and slung the strap over her shoulder. “I just live down the road. It’s not that far.”

The early evening, however, was already too cold for the long-sleeved T she wore.

Even if the rain held off, she’d be shivering by the time she got home.

“At least take my coat,” I said.

I slipped out of my suede jacket and passed it to her. Kayley put it on. She ran an eager hand along the sleeve, just to feel the nap.

“I never knew suede could be so soft!”

She grinned at me—and her shining eyes cut to my Beretta, now in plain view on my hip. Living in the country, she’d surely seen a firearm before. But I was willing to bet she hadn’t seen one clipped at the waist of a female private-detective-turned-security-specialist. Her brow knitted as she worked out what I likely did with it.

“It’s a tool of the trade,” I told her. “Nothing more.”

“Well, you should come to my school on Career Day and say that.”

And in an instant, Kayley giggled, restored to her usual self again.

“I’ll bring your coat back tomorrow,” she promised, and ran for the door as Mrs. Barrett called to her once more.

I watched her go, wondered if I’d possessed such worldly wisdom at her age. Or such precociousness. That, at least, I’d probably had in spades.

I could’ve used some of Kayley’s attitude, though, as I bypassed a long table piled high with pumpkins and other gourds. Behind it, the greenhouse gift shop met the barn proper. The rough door separating one from the other stood wide, and the opening was cordoned off with a pretty, red plastic chain. A sign hanging from the links read:
SHHH, THE APPLES ARE SLEEPING. STAFF ONLY
.

I peered past this and into the barn. It was a cavernous space with a soaring roof arching overhead—and corrugated cardboard boxes stacked sky-high on wooden pallets. Each box was as big as my kitchen table. And every one smelled sweetly of apples.

They were the bins that Kayley had told me about.

I ducked beneath the chain, stepped onto the wide heartwood planks of the barn’s floor, and made my way among them. Each was stenciled
BARRETT ORCHARD
. Tracking numbers and dates followed—and so did the names of apple varieties.
MCINTOSH,
most bins read. But a few said
ROME
and even fewer said
CRIPPS PINK
.

Truth be told, I could tell one apple from another in the grocery store, but I’d never have been able to differentiate between the graceful trees in their stately rows across the Barrett land. I didn’t have the faintest notion what it would take to cultivate each of these types. Miranda Barrett knew, however, and probably Barrett and his sister did, too.

And to my way of thinking, that was impressive.

No sooner had I turned this over in my mind than the sound of something heavy slamming into something soft drew me on. Where the bins stopped, a wide-open area began. A wooden wagon, as old as the hills, balanced on three tires and a jack. Behind it, a hulking tractor seemed to sleep in hibernation. Other equipment crowded close. One contraption looked like the kind of bucket lift electricians climbed into when they needed to reach power lines. And ahead, with its hood up as if waiting for a mechanic to come back, was a blue-and-white Chevy pickup that looked to be from Elvis’s era.

Past these things, on the far side of the barn, I could see half a dozen stalls for livestock. They were empty. Still, I could detect the faint, dusty scent of long-gone horses and the sweetness of alfalfa hay. On the wall beside the pens hung every kind of weird and wonderful pruning hook designed by the mind of man. Each item gleamed in the low light as if they had been recently oiled and put away for the season.

But the implements that dazzled my eye couldn’t hold it when I heard that heavy thumping again. Massive double doors at the end of the barn had been rolled open. A brisk wind, suggesting winter was encroaching on autumn’s territory, whistled past. Outside, night was coming quickly. I could see the orchard’s majestic trees only as charcoal smudges in the gloaming.

And there, framed in the doorway, was Barrett.

He raised a mallet high, slammed it down on a tire mounted on some kind of turntable in front of him.

He’d rolled his sleeves to his elbows, unbuttoned his shirt entirely. Muscle corded in his forearms, sweat slicked his chest and beaded his brow, and it was no wonder. He hammered the tire again and again as he tried to work the vulcanized rubber onto an unforgiving wheel rim.

“I’ve got to get this finished,” he said as I joined him. “I should’ve done it last spring.”

I glanced at the three-wheeled wagon I’d passed, looked again at Barrett, saw the fevered gleam in his eye.

He said, “When my granddad was alive, he made sure we
always
offered hayrides during apple season. It was a solid moneymaker. I should’ve made sure Gram could do that now.”

He grabbed a crowbar from an assortment of tools at his feet, went at the wheel with both hands and a vengeance.

“That truck hadn’t had a tune-up in so long, she couldn’t remember when. I took care of it this afternoon. I should’ve done it sooner.”

At last, under Barrett’s ministrations, the inner edge of the tire slipped into place.

But I wasn’t sure he noticed.

“Do you know why there’s an apartment over the garage?” he demanded as he wrestled with the wheel.

I shook my head.

“It’s housing for a full-time farmhand. Because at one time, this orchard brought in enough money, my grandparents could hire full-time help. Now Gram can’t do that. She’s getting older, there’s more work around here than ever, and she can’t afford help. I should’ve helped her more. I should’ve—”

“Adam.” I touched his shoulder. He jerked away as if I’d stung him. “Why don’t you take a break for a second?”

He dropped his crowbar onto the tire, pulled off a heavy leather glove, and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist.

I said, “You left Charlotte’s café pretty quickly.”

“There was too much to do here.”

“I see. While you were doing things, did you happen to call Shelby?”

“I forgot.”

Maybe he had.

I said, “Well, I want you to know I had a conversation with Luke Rittenhaus this morning. I think he’s pretty torn up about Eric’s death.”

“He should be,” Barrett growled. “Vance and I told him Eric was in trouble. We
told
him, Jamie. That makes Eric’s suicide as much Luke’s fault as it is my…”

Was Barrett going to say
own
?

I drew a deep breath, let it out slowly.

“Eric’s death wasn’t your fault, Adam.” I swallowed hard. This was difficult to say. Because I knew it would be difficult for Barrett to hear. “Eric didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.”

Barrett snorted, picked up his mallet again.

As succinctly as possible, I reminded him of the condition of the wall above the bathtub—and of the specifications of the shotgun.

Barrett pounded the tire like he was driving nails through concrete. “Who’d want to kill Eric?”

“I don’t know—”

“Exactly. Because there’s nothing
to
know. He killed himself.”

“With two shots? How?”

“Autonomic reflex.”

Barrett meant Eric’s dying body had spasmed with the kill shot—and inadvertently fired the weapon again. I was willing to admit it was possible, but it was also extremely improbable, because the butt of the gun hadn’t been braced against Eric’s shoulder when the Smith & Wesson went off. If he’d shot himself, it wouldn’t have been braced against anything while he aimed the barrels at his face. With nothing to stop the recoil, the force would’ve wrenched the gun from his hand. To assume anything else had happened without investigating was foolhardy—and risked letting a killer walk away.

When I said as much, Barrett abandoned his hammer. He dropped his gloves where he stood and stalked outside. I caught up with him in the barnyard as he glared at the rising moon, taking one deep, cooling breath after another.

It wasn’t hard to imagine him standing in this same spot as a teenage boy, seeking peace after the unjustified and unsolved death of his dad. Likewise, it wasn’t hard to imagine a sweet and sensitive girl like Pamela Wentz had seen in him then all the qualities I saw now. Without even trying, I pictured her cutting across the fields that fateful spring evening, her fine blond hair loose around her shoulders and her silky nightgown clingy with dew, to find Barrett here, heartsick and handsome. Worst of all, in my mind’s eye, I could hear her begging him to take her for all she was and all she was worth. And strangely, in my head, her voice sounded a lot like my own.

I shook off the sensation as Barrett said, “You just don’t want to face facts.”

He could’ve been speaking to the roiling clouds, since he didn’t turn to look at me. Without my jacket, the night wind driving those clouds sliced through me like a knife. Or maybe it was witnessing the depths of Barrett’s sorrow that cut me to the quick.

“What facts are those?” I asked.

“Regardless of what happened today, I still owe my old friend,” Barrett replied. “And you and I are still through.”

Barrett turned to me then. I couldn’t make out his expression. The cloud cover hid his face as surely as it hid the moonlight.

“Forget about me, Jamie. Forget you ever met me.”

“Why?” I challenged. “You haven’t forgotten a thing since Eric’s little sister caught up with you in this barn.”

“That’s right. I haven’t. Nothing’s changed in that regard. Nothing’s going to change and that’s all the more reason for you to hit the road.”

But that wasn’t true.

He’d changed.

Since the night Vance McCabe had forced his way into my home, Barrett had transformed from a guy looking forward to the future to a man whose past hurts held him hostage. He was a soldier, and for once in his life, he couldn’t see his true enemy was the regret he carried. To watch him suffer so willfully was grinding the broken pieces of my heart into dust—and I couldn’t take the pain anymore.

I turned on my heel, walked toward his grandmother’s little shop.

“Jamie? You don’t have to leave tonight. Daylight’s soon enough.”

But I couldn’t answer him. Not with the sudden tightness that had seized my throat. And had taken up residence in my chest.

I left him alone to think his misguided thoughts, ducked beneath the pretty plastic chain, and stumbled into the greenhouse. It was dark, but I found my way to the door Mrs. Barrett had left unlocked for me. I tripped along the drive and into the house.

“Jamie?” Barrett’s grandmother called.

“I’m sorry, I…I…”

Sorrow made my speech thick. I was close to tears and I didn’t want her to see me like this. But then I remembered I had an excuse to go out again. Because a special agent with the DEA was waiting for me at a watering hole called the Roadhouse. So I could evade Miranda Barrett and my own feelings, and if that agent could shed any light on the goings-on in Fallowfield, I’d listen to him talk all night.

Chapter 17

With a sharp eye and a heavy foot, I drove hard and put as much distance between me and Adam Barrett as quickly as the country lanes of upstate New York would allow. The night was dark. The wind was brisk. It buffeted my car as I took the turns a little too fast. Watching the Jag’s speedometer rhythmically rise and fall with each twist in the road, however, offered a kind of solace, albeit it a small one—but I was willing to accept any comfort I could find.

Such speed was freeing and I meant to be freer yet. Marc had said I’d find the Roadhouse halfway to Syracuse. That meant highway driving.

I’d nearly reached the highway when, on a lonely stretch of state route, headlamps appeared behind me out of nowhere. The car was suddenly too close to my bumper, and the glare of its lights lit up my rearview mirror and filled the interior of the XJ8 to bursting. I squinted into the reflection, tried to pick out a rack of rooftop strobes. Cops of all kinds zoom up on speeders. Admittedly, I deserved a ticket, so if I was about to receive one, I wanted to get it over with.

But the vehicle’s headlamps went black abruptly.

And trepidation took hold of my insides.

Because no legitimate law enforcement officer would douse his lights like that.

A sense of self-preservation had me stomping on the gas. But in the moment before the car could respond, the driver behind me did the same. The car on my tail hit me—and it hit me hard.

The impact yanked me back before throwing me forward. The seatbelt cut across my chest. It tugged at my hip. I gritted my teeth, gripped the steering wheel. And I heard the whine of my assailant’s overtaxed engine as he roared toward me again.