Bitter Harvest (10 page)

When she’d done what limited cleanup she could, Meg gave in to the siren call of the sampler. She still couldn’t power up her computer, but she could take a look at what her mother had put together on the Warren family first and see if any Coxes popped up. She’d been so busy with the harvest she really hadn’t had time to absorb the details her mother had so proudly assembled, beyond the barest outlines, and now was a good time to start. At least she could figure out who had lived in the house when young Violet Cox had made the sampler.

Meg had put all the Warren family genealogy information into one banker’s box, which did little to distinguish it from the several similar boxes of materials she was working her way through for the Historical Society. But she’d needed the space on the dining room table to spread out her financial records. Great: now she felt guilty no matter which direction she looked, because nothing was getting finished. At least the family documents and printouts constituted the smallest stack of material.

She pulled out the sheaf of papers on top, which included a family tree, tiers of boxes showing each generation lined up. Her mother had accomplished a surprising amount in a short time, given that she had no prior experience. Meg traced the line back from the two elderly sisters she had met years ago, who had left the house and land to her mother, their distant niece. Back through their parents and grandparents, to Eli Warren the carpenter, whom Seth said had been responsible for some substantial remodeling in the house in the nineteenth century, to his father (also Eli), and his father Stephen, and finally
his
father, likewise Stephen, who had built the house. Eli the younger had been the head of household in the years around 1800, with his wife Orpha—interesting name, that—and their three children. That gave Meg a place to start.

But there were no Coxes on this chart. Meg riffled through the other papers and found no reference to any other Coxes, in any time period. So much for the easy route. Maybe a daughter? But Eli the elder had had only one daughter, according to what her mother had found, and she had married a Dickinson. Now Meg was stuck. She would have to go at identifying Violet Cox by some other route, and that would take some more research.

Her thinking was interrupted by Max, who began barking frantically and pawing at the closed door to the kitchen. “You can’t be that hungry, Max. You need to go out?”

In reply Max whined and turned in circles, watching her.

“Okay, okay, I’ll take you out.” Meg pulled open the door to the kitchen, and Max rushed past her to stand by the outer door, quivering with eagerness. “Hang on, pal—I have to put on boots and a coat and all that stuff.” He watched her pull on outer garments, whining. In a corner of her mind Meg noted that this was not his usual “I gotta go” behavior—he seemed peculiarly anxious. Since she wasn’t the one who usually walked him, she wasn’t prepared when she opened the door and he rushed past her, almost knocking her down. “Max, wait!” she said, afraid he’d head for the road, or escape altogether.

To her surprise he didn’t bolt, but waded purposefully through the snow that all but covered his head, toward the back of the house. Meg followed as best she could. Seth hadn’t shoveled here—why would he?—and it wasn’t easy going, but Max seemed very determined. When she made it around the back of the shed, she found Max turning in circles again beneath the back window of one of the rooms on the west side of the house—one of the ones she never used. She didn’t understand what had gotten him so excited, until she looked down and saw footprints—human footprints, made by someone wearing what she now recognized as snowshoes. She looked around quickly and didn’t see anyone moving. But the footprints lead both toward and away from the house, toward the back of the property and into the woods. She followed them with her eyes as far as she could see, but there was no point in actually trying to track them—she’d never make it through the thigh-deep snow. Could it have been Seth who made them? But why would he have been at the back of the house? There was only one set of doggy-prints, from Max’s recent headlong dash. No, Seth hadn’t walked him here. It must have been someone else.

But who? And why?

Max, frustrated, trotted back to the cleared part of the driveway and laid his signature on a snowdrift, then turned back to her expectantly. Time to go in, she guessed. Still, why would anyone be lurking around the back of her house? Suddenly she was glad that Max was there. He was large, and he could be loud, even though in reality he wouldn’t hurt a mouse.

She whistled to get his attention, then opened the door for him to go into the kitchen. She followed more slowly—and made sure to lock the door behind her.

Back inside, Meg made the rounds of her windows, making sure that they all were latched. That wasn’t saying much, since most of the windows were held shut by antique latches, and the sashes were so loose that anyone could slip a knife in and shift a latch. It hadn’t troubled her before, mainly because although her house was relatively isolated from other houses, it was still plainly visible from the street, so any intruder would have been glaringly obvious. Plus there was really nothing much to steal, apart from her laptop, and even that wasn’t new. She’d already had one break-in since she had lived here, but that had been personal and wasn’t about to recur.

So who was her mystery visitor with the snowshoes? And what would have happened if Max hadn’t been here?

She shoved that thought out of her mind and studied the contents of her refrigerator. Feeding two people had depleted her supplies, and she had better figure on another trek to the market. Bree would be back eventually, and she would need to eat, too. Unless, of course, Bree didn’t want to stay in an unheated house, not when she had Michael to keep her warm. It wasn’t as though Meg needed to have Bree here during the off-season—once she had coughed up the paperwork she owed Meg.

That was essential if she was to plan for the future. Meg wasn’t sure what financial results to expect, or even what to hope for. She would probably settle for breaking even in her first year, if she could figure out how to squeeze more efficiency out of her second. If there was going to be a second year. While she still had some cash in her business account, it wasn’t going to last long, and Meg wasn’t sure what other expenses were still outstanding. She also knew that there would be more expenses before she could expect any more income from the orchard. Her reserves were pretty thin. Bree had a stake in the success of the orchard operation, too: it was her first real job, postcollege, and it was generating her paycheck. The bigger picture was: no profit, no job, no check for Bree.

She looked out the dining room window just in time to see Bree’s car slip-sliding its way into her driveway. Bree parked as far forward as she could in the cleared area, and a minute later Meg heard her at the back door, and went to meet her.

Bree was simultaneously stamping her feet and trying to greet Max, who was bounding around her feet, apparently thrilled by yet more company. “Hi, Maxie boy. Hey, down! At least let me get my coat off! Hi, Meg.”

“I thought you weren’t coming over?”

“Hey, I live here, don’t I? The roads over toward Amherst were okay, and Michael’s place gets kind of claustrophobic after a while. And he’s got roommates.”

“I need to dig the car out. We’ll be out of food by tomorrow.”

“Your car’s still in the shed? I’ll help you shovel it out. So where’s Seth?”

“Off running the town, it seems. He’s coordinating the snow removal process, and he swears I’ll have power by the end of the day. The furnace is a different problem.”

“Dead, huh?”

“Looks like it. I’m sure he’d fix it if he could, but there’s some major part that’s just plain worn out. It’s probably at least thirty years old, so it’s due.”

“Lousy timing, though, huh?”

“It is. So I’ll understand if you don’t want to stay here and freeze. Mostly I’ve been huddling in front of the fire with a lot of blankets. Seth’s not sure when he can get around to replacing the furnace—looks like there are some other priorities out there at the moment.”

“You been cooking over the fire?”

“I have.” Meg felt an absurd sense of pride. “Just call me Pioneer Meg. But I don’t want to do it long-term. At least when the power’s back there’ll be hot water and a stove. Oh, speaking of snow-plowing, have you met many of the neighbors here?”

“I don’t follow your jump from plowing to neighbors, but yeah, I’ve talked to some of them. I even give ’em a few apples now and then.”

“Have you met the Taylors from down the road? John apparently does some plowing for the town, but I don’t remember seeing him before. He stopped by to talk to Seth the other day.”

Bree shook her head. “Doesn’t sound familiar. Everything else okay?”

“The goats are in the barn, and Seth says they’re bored. That about sums up the excitement since you left.”

“You and Seth okay?”

“We’re good. We did some cleaning to keep warm.”

“If that’s your idea of a romantic adventure, I pity you.”

Meg resisted the urge to stick out her tongue at Bree and retreated to the living room, as Bree headed up to her room above the kitchen. Why not take another look at the sampler, now that she had ample light? She unrolled it from her makeshift storage and carried the piece over to the window to look at it. The colors appeared a bit brighter by full daylight, and the whole had a naive charm. Now she could make out the surname for the family: Lampson. Not a name she was familiar with. Too bad the story it hinted at was so sad—first the four children died, and then the parents. Meg knew that death, especially among children, was part of the reality of the era, but it was still hard to look at. Were all those children and their parents buried in the local cemetery, along with her Warrens? Meg almost laughed out loud: how long would it be before the tombstones emerged from three feet of snow? That piece of research might have to wait until spring. Of course, she wasn’t even sure the Lampsons were from Granford.

Shortly after four a snowplow dropped Seth off at the end of her drive. She met him at the door. “Are you staying, or did you just come by to collect Max?”

“If you’ll feed me I can hang out a bit, but I’ll head home after with Max. Hi there, pal.” Seth vigorously rubbed Max’s head. “I see Bree made it back?”

“She did. She’s upstairs, and I hope she’s working on the orchard figures. I feel like such a nag about them, but I need to know where I stand. Oh, shoot, she was going to help me dig out the car.”

“I can do that,” Seth volunteered.

“No, I should take some part of this, and I need the exercise. You’ve probably been digging all day. How was it out there?”

“Could have been worse. Could have been ice. Some limbs down, but that’s to be expected. A few lines down, but no fires. Mostly people had the good sense to stay home and wait for the plows.”

“If you really need something to do, you can cook dinner while I shovel.”

“Works for me.”

Meg donned her snow gear and headed out the back door. It was eerily beautiful outside. The sun was sinking behind the orchard, turning the trees into stark black skeletons against the sky, and the waning light made the ocean of snow look blue. And it was definitely getting colder. Meg grabbed the snow shovel and started to make a path to her car, safely housed in the open shed. She had no garage, and no room in the barn to put her car, with both the tractor and the old pickup truck she used for deliveries already crammed in there, but at least in the shed it was under cover and had escaped the worst of the snow. Better to clear it now while the snow was still fluffy and light; if she waited until tomorrow it might start melting, and then it would be much heavier.

Thrust, lift, toss, repeat. After a couple of minutes Meg was actually warm enough to unzip her jacket. A few more minutes and she thought she could maneuver the car out, as long as she didn’t mind running into a snowbank, just a little. She felt ridiculously proud of herself. She set the snow shovel against the wall of the shed and stepped back into the middle of the driveway. It was darker now, since the sun had sunk below the horizon, but the windows glowed gold.

Wait: glowing windows meant the lights were on, which meant the electricity was back! It must have come on while she was busy shoveling. And that meant she could cook, and shower—and boot up her computer. She dusted the snow off and went in the back door.

Inside Seth was busy at the stove, and Bree was leaning against a counter watching him and chatting. “Hi, Meg,” she said. “Look who’s cooking!”

“I told him to, while I went out to shovel. Smells great. Need help?”

Seth stayed in front of the stove, stirring. “Nope, it’s under control. You rest up.”

“Did you bring any more firewood?”

“Not with me, but a friend’s going to come over with some in the morning. You should be okay for tonight. You wouldn’t happen to have any electric blankets, would you?”