A Killer Maize Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE FARMERS’ MARKET MYSTERIES

  Crops and Robbers

  “Shelton has dished up yet another tasty mystery . . . Readers will also get a nice taste of a potential love triangle between Becca’s artsy love interest and the principled police officer who’s willing to wait in the wings. And, of course, the recipes at the end of the book nicely top off this otherwise satisfying mystery.”

  —Mojave Desert News

  Fruit of All Evil

  “Spunky Becca should appeal to fans of Laura Childs and Joanne Fluke.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fun characters and a great setting are the highlights of this series full of homegrown goodness.”

  —The Mystery Reader

  Farm Fresh Murder

  “Watching jam-maker Becca Robins handle sticky situations is a tasty delight.”

  —Sheila Connolly, national bestselling author of Sour Apples

  “Becca is a genial heroine, and Shelton fashions a puzzling and satisfying whodunit. The first in a projected series, Farm Fresh Murder is a tasty treat.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “An appealing heroine . . . As satisfying as visiting the farmers’ market on a sunny afternoon.”

  —Claudia Bishop, author of Dread on Arrival

  “A breath of summer freshness that is an absolute delight to read and savor . . . A feast of a mystery.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Paige Shelton

  Farmers’ Market Mysteries

  FARM FRESH MURDER

  FRUIT OF ALL EVIL

  CROPS AND ROBBERS

  A KILLER MAIZE

  Country Cooking School Mysteries

  IF FRIED CHICKEN COULD FLY

  IF MASHED POTATOES COULD DANCE

  Special

  RED HOT DEADLY PEPPERS

  A Killer

  Maize

  PAIGE SHELTON

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  A KILLER MAIZE

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / December 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Paige Shelton-Ferrell.

  Cover illustration by Dan Craig.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61331-3

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  For my grandpa, Stanley Grzyb, who, when I was a little girl, always took me to the Fourth of July Carnival. He would give me two stacks of quarters and help me bet on the Money Wheel. Then we’d ride the Ferris wheel twice and have to go home because he always had to get up at 4:00 A.M. the next morning to get to work on time. Those were the best forty-five minutes of every summer.

  Contents

  Praise

  Also by Paige Shelton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on symbolism

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Recipes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A special thanks to:

  Bonnie Mills Schelts and Laine Barash for the idea of adding syrup to Becca’s product line, and for helping me and Becca with the recipes.

  Jenny Hanahan for her South Carolina real estate advice.

  There is a group of people who are dedicated to a job that is painstakingly tedious; they are copyeditors. Thank you to Caroline Duffy for the blood, sweat, and tears you’ve shed while copyediting the Farmers’ Market Mysteries. You are invaluable.

  My agent, Jessica Faust, and my editor, Michelle Vega. Geez, I’m lucky.

  My supportive and enthusiastic parents.

  My guys, Charlie and Tyler, who help with every book in different ways. This time, as I was working on the recipes, I overheated some oil and the entire house became quickly filled with smoke. They hurried in to clear out the smoke and then helped me fix the recipes, all without one word of complaint. Geez, I’m lucky again.

  Spider Symbolism from Wikia.com: Linked to treachery and death in many cultures, the spider was seen as a “trickster” in ancient Africa and a “spinner of fate” in ancient goddess cultures; in ancient Greek myths, the goddess Arachne was turned into a spider by her jealous rival Athena. Christian cultures have viewed the spider as an evil force that sucked blood from its victims and, alternately, embraced it as “good luck” because of the cross on the back of some species. The Chinese have welcomed the spider descending on its thread as a bringer of joys from heaven.

  Corn Maze: A thing that I have
no desire to ever enter. Ever. Sincerely, Becca Robins.

  One

  I love a good Ferris wheel, so much so that even as I stared up at this one, I was willing to tell myself that it really didn’t look like it might fall apart at any minute. I wanted to hop onto one of the swinging seats and ride the never-ending circle. I wanted it to stop when I was at the top, so I could look across the countryside and see . . . well, from there, I supposed I’d only get a glimpse of more countryside, but it’d be a nice view.

  It probably wasn’t the best idea, though. Maybe it was the strange noise the engine made when Virgil, the operator, pulled the handle. Clunk, clunk, buzz, whoosh didn’t instill the confidence that a smooth engine rev would have. Maybe it was because the swinging seats didn’t seem to swing quite right. At least two of them didn’t appear to be swinging at all but were instead frozen in an uncomfortable leg-up position. Maybe it was because I’d noticed that at least a few of the security bars didn’t look like they could lock into place; they bounced open and closed unless someone was holding them down.

  Maybe it was how the Ferris wheel was decorated, but fake spiderwebs only added a sense of the season, not something ominous. No, those were the least of my concerns. I liked the way they enhanced the spirit of the mid-October Swayton County Fall Fair and Festival.

  Even with all of my doubts, I loved Ferris wheels. I was sure I’d ride this one at some point. I just had to work up the courage.

  “You sell jams and preserves?” Virgil rejoined the conversation after he set the wheel in motion. There were only two riders, teenage boys who either didn’t have much else to do or were related to someone who worked at the fair and were still young enough to feel invincible.

  “I do. I make them first, then I sell them.” I leaned against the tall measuring stick that illustrated the height requirement for the Ferris wheel. I was short, but at least I was tall enough for all the rides, I’d noted to myself. “I have a small farm. I grow strawberries and pumpkins.”

  “That sounds interesting,” Virgil said.

  Virgil Morrison was somewhere north of sixty, but not far. He’d told me that he’d been working at the fair since he’d moved to Orderville, South Carolina, twenty years earlier. It was one of the many odd jobs he worked to pay the bills. Over the past few days I’d asked him a number of times about his other odd jobs and his life before the last twenty years, but he’d ignored the questions with either silence or a change of subject. His thinning gray hair was so short that it required only a washcloth to groom. His eyes were dark and seemed pupil-less until you looked really closely. When I first met him, I thought he might be angry about something, but that was just the way he held his face: scrunched and strained, uncomfortable and suspicious. After talking to him a few times, I decided that he didn’t know how his face looked and he didn’t much care anyway.

  Virgil also had a tattoo on the side of his neck. It was this, even more than the Ferris wheel or our common wardrobe of overalls, that drew me to him. I was fascinated by a senior citizen with a tattoo on his neck. It was small and only a simple black ink spider, but it had piqued my curiosity. I’d initially thought it might be just a temporary addition, something to go along with the fake spiderwebs. But I was now pretty sure it was permanent. What was the story behind it? I hadn’t come out and asked directly. After all, I couldn’t even get him to chat about his life outside the fair and festival; I didn’t think he’d be willing to tell me about the tattoo. Yet.

  “It is interesting,” I said. It was the first time Virgil had asked me something personal. I thought I might finally be making headway, and I hoped to ride the wave a little longer. “I’m really lucky to be able to do what I do, even though it is a lot of hard work. Stop by my booth, I’ll give you a free sample.”

  I had plenty of jars of jams and preserves. I might have sold three since we’d set up temporary stalls on Monday. Today was Thursday, which meant I needed to sell at least one jar today to keep at a one-per-day pace.

  The Bailey’s Farmers’ Market owners had requested that Allison, my sister and Bailey’s manager, round up some market vendors to sell their wares at the Swayton County Fall Fair and Festival. The annual event was full of the things a fair should be full of: rides, albeit I wasn’t sure of the safety of any of them; games; baking contests; butter sculptures; and some wonderful and adorable animals to peer at and pet. It was also the rev-up and kickoff to the opening of South Carolina’s biggest corn maze.

  The fair ran from the second Monday in October to the third Friday, with the maze opening on Wednesday during the second week. The deluge of activities was a great way to both offer some family fun and gently shift everyone into fall and the upcoming Halloween holiday.

  I’d been asked to donate some pumpkins for a decorating contest that would be a part of the maze’s opening day. I was happy to donate a whole truck-bed full of pumpkins to the cause, but I was currently doing everything I could to stay as far away from the maze as possible, and it wasn’t even open yet. I wasn’t a maze person, but that was only because I wasn’t the sort of girl who enjoyed being in spaces where I couldn’t see a way out, couldn’t see over the top, or might end up hopelessly stuck at a dead end.

  Plus, the whole corn-as-part-of-a-horror-story idea was well rooted in my psyche.

  Fortunately, the temporary stalls set up for me and the three other Bailey’s vendors were on one side of the fairgrounds and the far-stretching field of corn was on the other side, past the Mad Maniacal Machine, aka the old, small roller coaster. But no matter where I was, at my tent, or visiting the rides, food carts, or some of the animals in the two small barns, I could glance out and see the large hand-painted sign that stuck up from the middle of the maze. It was a cartoonish but eerie portrayal of a house that apparently used to sit on the property. Whether the actual house had been as spooky as the one in the illustration, with its big gaping windows and leaning walls, I wasn’t sure, and I hadn’t had much luck finding out. Every time I tried to get more of the house’s story, my questions were met with either shrugs or comments like “I dunno” or “Ah, gypsy magic.” The reactions only added to the atmosphere, though, so I’d begun to think that the people I’d asked were being purposefully mysterious.

  So, not only did I avoid the maze itself, but I also tried to avert my eyes from the sign. I did think that business might actually pick up once the maze was open.

  The fair owners had been mostly honest when they told the Bailey’s owners that their annual event had become less and less popular over the years and needed some help. They thought that the popularity of Bailey’s products might attract more fair attendees.

  The fair, however, seemed not merely “less popular” but rather, pretty close to all the way dead. Bailey’s might have made a great name in the world of farmers’ markets, but we weren’t doing anything to help the fair’s attendance numbers.

  “That’d be great. I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” Virgil said to the offer of samples. “Thank you.”

  I smiled. We were finally getting somewhere.

  “Becca!” called a voice from somewhere behind me. I thought I recognized it, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I mumbled as a mental image of a face formed in my mind.

  “Uh-oh, that doesn’t sound good,” Virgil said.

  “Is a tall blond man with a cowboy hat walking—with bow legs—in this direction?”

  “No cowboy hat, but yep to the rest.”

  “Is he wearing jeans with holes in the knees and a T-shirt that’s seen better days?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh no. How did this happen?”

  Virgil stepped forward. “You want me to get rid of him?”

  I didn’t know exactly what he meant. Would he tell him to go away, or would he get rid of him permanently? It was a tempting offer either way.<
br />
  I reluctantly shook my head and then turned around.

  “It is you!” said the man in worn jeans and ratty T-shirt as he pulled me into a hug, lifted me up, and twirled me in a circle. “It is damn great to see you, sweetheart.”

  “Hey, Scott,” I said when I landed again. I didn’t want to smile, but his enthusiasm was infectious, and even though I’d never fall for that off-center grin and those overly happy green eyes again, it was kind of good to see him. That very same infectious enthusiasm had been the reason I’d stayed married to him about a year too long. Despite his many faults, he’d always been fun to be around.

  “How are you? You look great, the same as when you dumped me, actually. Becca and I were married,” he said to Virgil.

  “That right?” Virgil said, his face breaking with its own smile. He was amused. I liked seeing his stern features soften. I felt a pull at the corner of my mouth.

  “I’m fine, Scott. What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “The shooting gallery, right over there. Come over, I’ll give you some free shots.” He held up an invisible gun and shot it off to the side. “Boosh, boosh.”

  “Really? What happened to the dealership job?” When he and I had divorced, he’d left for Charleston and a mechanic’s job at a Toyota dealership. It was the best job he’d ever had.

  “Ah, lots has happened since then. The shooting gallery helps me be my own boss some of the time, Becca. You know all about that, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I own it.” Scott crossed his arms in front of his chest and winked. “’Cept between you and me and you, sir”—he looked at Virgil—“we picked a bad gig. This place is a graveyard.”

  I looked at Virgil. Though I’d yet to crack his concrete-wall exterior, I knew he had pride invested in the Swayton County event. Perhaps the feeling was simply the result of having worked there so many years, but I could tell he liked the fair. He liked working the Ferris wheel. He even liked the frightening and disconcerting noises the engine made. It wasn’t hard to see that he took his job seriously. The expression on his face told me I was right on target. His dislike for Scott was quick and obvious.