Fruit of All Evil (28 page)

I could drive and think at the same time. I had Bud's letter,
and a great way to make the time pass would be to make sure he had it in his hands.

I hadn't driven by my childhood home three times in the last ten years. As I drove past it for the third time in a week, once again a stab of something melancholy rolled through my gut. Or was it something else? I shrugged off the feeling and continued on to Bud's.

Ian would be successful, I knew that. Bud's land was beautiful and wide open. It was like a canvas just waiting for the right artist. I envisioned it all in purple, and realized just how much Ian was the right artist.

I parked the truck and made my way to Bud's shack. I knocked but received no answer. The door wasn't locked, so I opened it just a bit and peered in. There was no sign of Bud anywhere.

I grabbed some paper from my truck and wrote him a quick note, put it and the letter from the bank between the door and the frame, and got back on the road. I stopped in front of my childhood home again.

“What is it?” I asked aloud. That returning inkling made me want to remember . . . something.

The house was in great shape, well taken care of and loved. Nothing needed painting, nothing needed extra attention. It looked perfect.

I got out of the truck and stood on the road, staring at it. If someone was home, I was sure to cause suspicion, but I'd explain myself if I had to.

I stared at the windows, at the front door, at the welcome mat, at the walkway leading to the front door. Nothing, and yet something. I couldn't help taking a few steps toward the front door.

And it took only a few steps to realize what I'd been trying to remember. The scene was specific as it played in my mind's eye. I stood still so as not to disturb its flow.

When Allison and I had been young—very young, actually—we'd had a twice weekly ritual with our father. We would each try to be the first one out of bed on those days, even attempting to beat our early bird father. We never did. He was always up before the two of us, and on the front porch in his blue robe, waiting for his little girls.

“I didn't think you'd make it this morning,” he'd say as we hurried out to the porch, afraid we'd missed the big event.

“I was up first,” I lied.

“You were not.” Allison rolled her eyes.

I remembered catching my reflection in the glass in the front door, noticing how wild my hair was and how neat Allison's was. I remembered punching her in the arm that day, and our father being angry at me.

Soon, the real adventure began. We always heard the truck before we saw it. It rumbled down the dirt road and stopped in front of the house.

It was the Loder Dairy truck, white with black lettering and a black-and-white smiling cow. But for us children, it was more than the dairy delivery. Our father had turned it into an adventure. The driver/delivery person knew our names, and he always played a game with us.

“Heads or tails? It's your turn, Becca.”

“Heads,” I said as he flipped a coin that magically seemed to alternate wins between me and my sister.

“Heads it is. Do you want to carry the milk or the butter?”

“The butter!” It was always the butter. Whoever got to carry the butter got some extra time to feel the stamp impression underneath the wax paper, and whoever guessed the stamp impression correctly got to butter her toast first. Yep, it was always the butter.

But it wasn't our father, Allison, the milk, or the butter that made this memory so important. It was the deliveryman. I couldn't remember his name—any of their names over the years. But I suddenly remembered something else. All of the trucks were identical, and so was what the delivery people wore—they all, without fail, wore black-and-white checkered shirts. I'd seen the “scarf” around Madeline's neck but hadn't made the connection until that moment. Sam had told me it was not a scarf but a T-shirt. That's what had choked her.

“Oh. My. God,” I said aloud.

“Can I help you?” A young woman with a long brown braid peered out the door.

“Sorry. No. I apologize for disturbing you.”

I hurried back to my truck and waved to the woman as I pulled back onto the road and fumbled for my cell phone.

“Hey, Becca, what's up?” Allison answered after the first ring. Thankfully, she was where I needed her to be.

“Al, what happened to the Loder Dairy trucks?”

“What?”

“The trucks. I haven't seen them for years. Why haven't I seen them for years?”

“Becca, I have no idea. But you're right. I haven't seen them for years either. Huh, I wonder what happened.”

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Can you find out, somehow, some way, in the next five minutes?”

Allison laughed. “I might need a little more time. What's going on?”

“It's important.”

She was silent as she processed the tone of my voice and my words.

“I'll do my best. You'll be by your phone?”

“I won't make another call until I hear from you.”

We disconnected, and my thoughts turned as I drove toward town. I was certain that the shirt used to choke Madeline was a Loder Dairy deliveryman's shirt. The more I thought about it, the more I was certain. But why, and who had used it? I had some strong suspicions, but Allison would have to help confirm them.

The phone rang six minutes later.

“Al?”

“Becca, I have some information, not much but some.”

“Good. I'm ready.”

“Loder Dairy hasn't used delivery trucks for about ten years. Apparently, about then the dairy ownership switched hands, though I don't know who and how.” I didn't interrupt her to tell her that Loder Dairy had been in Madeline's family and that those new owners were Mid and Shawn McNeil. “Anyway, apparently when the new owners took it over, it had been losing money. It lost even more with the new ownership. They had to get rid of their home delivery trucks and work only wholesale. They have products in some local grocery stores, but that aspect of the business is small. Why do you need to know this?”

I told her what I knew about the ownership of the Loder Dairy.

“I had no idea,” she said. “I can't believe I didn't notice that the trucks weren't around.”

“Where did you get this information?” I asked.

“I called Jeanine. I remembered her telling me a few years ago that when her parents ran the egg farm, they supplied a dairy with eggs for fresh delivery. What other dairy could it have been except Loder? She said that when Loder quit the home deliveries, her family had to rebuild that part of their business. She knew the date they stopped almost exactly.”

“Do you think she'd know anything about Loder's current financial situation?”

“Do you want me to ask?” Allison said.

I thought a minute. “No, I think I already know.”

“Becca, what's going on?”

“Al, I need to call Sam. I promise I'll tell you all about it after I talk to him, okay?” I felt kind of awful for not sharing as nicely as she had shared with me, but there was only so much to tell, and after Alan had seen me looking at the letter in his desk drawer, there might not be time to tell enough of the story for it to make sense.

“Okay, but don't you dare forget to call me.”

“I'll call in a couple of hours. Thanks for your help.”

I wasn't going out to Loder Dairy by myself. When Abner had been suspected of killing Matt Simonsen, I'd taken on the killer without much thought for my safety. I still didn't know precisely who killed Madeline, but things were becoming clearer, and I didn't think I'd ever take such a chance again. Fortunately, Sam answered on the first ring.

“Hello, Becca.”

“Sam, listen. You need to question Drew's cousins Shawn and Mid more closely.”

“Why?”

The two hours I'd given Alan weren't up, but I didn't care. I told Sam that I'd snuck into Loder Dairy and what I'd overheard, but that it was more than that. I told him I wasn't sure, but I suspected that the business was in financial trouble because of the empty house and the small number of people working at the dairy. I told him about what had been happening at the bank and how Alan had been trying to solve the problem, but seemed torn between wanting it fixed and wanting it hidden. And I told him about the checkered shirts the delivery people wore when they brought milk and butter in their delivery trucks that weren't around any longer. Most of what I said was an information dump. I wasn't as coherent as I wanted to be, and I couldn't seem to find the words I needed:
So somehow this all has to tie together, doesn't it?

But my recognition of the shirt did it for him. I told him I didn't know exactly who killed Madeline, but I suspected that at least one of Drew's cousins was somehow involved. I hoped he'd be able to take all I'd said and see the same thing.

“I'll go out to the dairy right away. I'll send Norton and Sanford to the bank. And listen to me, Becca, let us do our jobs. Go home or go back to Bailey's or to Allison's or Ian's. I'll call you when we're done. Okay?”

“Sam, one more thing,” I said, ignoring his demand.

“What?”

“Look at the butter stamps.”

“What?”

“Look at the edges of the butter stamps. I think they might have been what made the defensive wounds on Madeline's hands.”

He was silent long enough that I knew he was processing what I said. It suddenly seemed so obvious.

“Thank you, Becca. I'll call you.”

We hung up, and I steered my orange truck on the proper course. I wouldn't go to the dairy by myself, but I sure wasn't
not
going to go. If Sam was there with me, everything would be just fine.

I parked my truck in the gully down the road from the dairy. I
didn't want Shawn, Mid, or Sam to see me, but I wouldn't be able to hide my orange truck completely. Sam's police cruiser wasn't at the dairy yet, and I wasn't going in until he arrived. The only drawback to where I situated myself was that some passing drivers thought I needed assistance. I smiled and gave the thumbs-up many times.

Where was Sam? By my calculations, he should already be at the diary. After twenty more impatient minutes passed, I began to think that he'd gone to the bank first, and was on to something there. I didn't leave, though; he still could be on his way.

I tried to call him but he didn't answer, his voice mail greeting message coming up after four rings. It was probably a good thing he hadn't answered; I wasn't supposed to be where I was, and he'd wonder how I knew he wasn't there yet.

For ten more minutes, I watched traffic. Finally, I decided I was tired of being patient. Sam would be there eventually, I was certain of that, unless he'd caught the killer at the bank. In that case, I wasn't putting myself in harm's way by visiting Shawn and Mid.

The mind is an amazing thing when it comes to justifying less-than-intelligent acts.

I drove the truck out of the gully and bravely parked it in the dairy's long driveway. There were cows in the pasture, but I didn't spy my new friend the calf, although I wasn't sure I'd be able to tell the difference between her and any other black-and-white calf. As on my first visit, there wasn't anyone else around. But if my hunch was right, there weren't many people to
be
around. Somewhere business had gone bad for Loder Dairy, and Shawn and Mid had to run the place with a skeleton crew.

I'd noticed it when I snuck in previously, but I hadn't known what I was noticing. With the information that Allison had supplied and the realization that I hadn't seen the delivery trucks for a long time, the pieces fit together: the Loder Dairy of my childhood no longer existed. Now there was a sense of emptiness, even a sense of abandonment, all around, and it went far beyond the empty house.