Farm Fresh Murder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Recipes

  Unusual Produce

  Two picnic tables stood on their sides at the end of the road, blocking my view. I took one of the worn ruts and suddenly the scene behind the tables became clear; unrealistically and frighteningly clear. Two police cars and an official-looking van, complete with a logo that read Crime Scene Unit, flanked a gathering of market vendors and something on the ground that looked like a large dead body. But it couldn’t be a body—this was a farmers’ market. Dead bodies didn’t just show up at farmers’ markets, did they?

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  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.

  FARM FRESH MURDER

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

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / April 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Paige Shelton-Ferrell.

  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.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18638-1

  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.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my agent, Jessica Faust.

  Thank you for everything.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to:

  Berkley editor extraordinaire Michelle Vega and all the staff at The Berkley Publishing Group who made this come together. You make dreams come true.

  All the market managers and vendors who took the time to patiently answer my questions. Any mistakes I’ve made are mine only.

  Patricia Snyder and Amy Snyder Hackbart for their Mmmm-Amazing Lemon Meringue Pie recipe. Delicious!

  Kelly Hindley, the first person ever to buy something I wrote. I’ve been hoping for an opportunity such as this to thank you.

  Marilyn, Julie, and Lloyd Peterson; Stacy, Dan, Jonathan, Michael, and Connor Bredbeck; Pat, Eric, and Megan Baschnagel; and the best buddy ever, Heidi Baschnagel. The weekend full of farmers’ market shopping, recipes, good food, memories, and friendship is something I will cherish forever.

  My numerous Blanchard and Ferrell in-laws, particularly my mother-in-law, Barbara Ferrell. Your encouragement has meant so much.

  My cousin, Lisa Light, who is more like a sister than a cousin; my parents, Chuck and Beverly Shelton; my husband, Charlie Ferrell; and the most “epic-ly awesome” person I know, my son, Tyler Ferrell. I love you all so much and can’t thank you enough for your support, guidance, words of wisdom, and ability to make me laugh until I can’t breathe.

  And to everyone who grows or creates farmers’ market products. Your hard work and creativity are inspiring.

  One

  “What?” I yelled into my cell phone.

  Again, Allison murmured something on the other end.

  “Hang on a second, Sis, I can’t hear a word.” I stuck the phone (still flipped open) into my overalls pocket, pulled off my face mask and a jam-splattered plastic glove, and turned down my version of morning coffee—today it was Springsteen. The jars I’d been boiling were nicely sterilized by now, so with a turn of a dial, I flipped off one burner. The blackberry jam would be okay to boil a minute or two without supervision. I left that burner on High and made my way out of the barn/kitchen—talking without my face mask around my preserves didn’t fall in line with my idea of sterile.

  I stepped surely over the polished wood-planked floor of the barn, pushed open the large door, and was greeted by both my short-legged retriever, Hobbit, and bright daylight. The sun was up? What time was it? Was I late again?

  I didn’t have a watch, but the time was shown in large block numbers on my phone. It was just after seven in the morning, almost a full hour later than I had planned on leaving.

  “Damn,” I muttered to myself as I petted my happy-to-see-me-emerge-from-the-barn dog. “Hey, Allison,” I said into the phone. “Are you wondering where I am?” The destination that I was late for was Bailey’s Farmers’ Market, the best market, in my opinion, in South Carolina and the place that Allison managed with near perfection.

  “Oh—I’m so glad you’re there! Thank God!” Her voice was unusually shaky.

  “Allison?”

  “Becca, you have to get here. Quickly.”

  “Why, what’s up?”

  “Just get here. Now,” she emphasized before disconnecting the call.

  Concern tightened my chest. Allison was the queen of the cool cucumbers. She rarely allowed her voice to waver with uncertainty, let alone the fear I thought I’d heard.

  I tried to call her back, but she didn’t answer. I tried again; she still didn�
��t answer. Suddenly, a thousand different pictures of horror formed in my mind. Was she hurt? How badly? Was someone else hurt? Her three-year-old son, Mathis?

  With a small tug of regret about the loss of the blackberry jam I’d been boiling, I made sure all of the stove’s burners were turned off. Then, with Hobbit at my heels, I ran across the side yard of my small farm and through the open back door of my house. Everything would have to wait until I found out what was wrong with Allison. My strawberry plants needed their September dousing, and my pumpkins needed attention and water of their own, but those would have to be this evening’s tasks.

  I grabbed my backpack and truck keys off the messy dining room table and ran out the front door.

  “Hey, girl, watch the place for me. I gotta run. I’ll be home as soon as I can,” I said to Hobbit. To acknowledge that she understood every word, she tapped one of her overly long paws on my thigh and then went to her mat on the shaded front porch. I’d fed and watered her first thing, so she’d be all right. “Good girl.”

  I locked nothing, checked nothing else, but jumped in my twenty-year-old bright orange truck that fortunately started with the first turn of the key, and took off up the dirt driveway and onto the old state highway.

  Bailey’s was only about fifteen minutes away from my farm when I wasn’t in a hurry. Today, I pushed the truck to its top speed of sixty-three miles per hour and was silently grateful that my neighbor, Ted Masters, wasn’t tooling down the road in one of his John Deeres.

  According to the time feature on my phone, I pulled into the middle road of Bailey’s eight minutes after I’d spoken to Allison. The metallic roof-covered market was set up in a U shape, and the vendors drove down this inside road to deliver their products. It snaked off here and jutted off there, the worn paths from truck and van tires marking the ways to the backs of the stalls set up with tables, product displays, and temporary walls usually made of canvas tarps. Allison’s office was in a small brick building that sat next to the entrance to the market in the middle of the south arm of the U. As I passed the back of the office, I looked for some sign of Allison but didn’t see her.

  Right now, two picnic tables/walls stood on their sides at the curve of the U, blocking my view. I took one of the worn ruts, and suddenly the scene behind the tables became clear; unrealistically and frighteningly clear. Two police cars and an official-looking van, complete with a logo that read Crime Scene Unit, flanked a gathering of market vendors and something on the ground that looked like a large dead body. But it couldn’t have been a body—this was a farmers’ market. Dead bodies didn’t just show up at farmers’ markets, did they?

  I stopped about fifty feet from the group and threw the gearshift handle into Park as I looked for Allison and tried to process the unlikely scene. The old-timer vendors, the ones who’d been selling at markets for years, the ones who were always ready to sell at 6:00 A.M., were standing together, shock and fear blanching their faces.

  “Holy crap,” I said, wanting to run to them and see what was going on at the same time my legs froze in place.

  I couldn’t figure out who was missing from the standing group. I couldn’t see clearly who was on the ground, and I couldn’t handle the process of elimination in my mind. I focused—okay, my close friend Linda was there, I could see her berry-stained fingers from where I sat; Barry, who sold the most amazing corn, chewed at his bottom lip; Brenton, the master of homemade dog biscuits, kept lifting and then replacing his well-worn Yankees cap.

  I was still taking roll in my mind when one of the officers began to shoo the crowd backward as he pulled out a roll of yellow tape that would soon mark the perimeter of the crime scene.

  “Allison,” I said to myself, as she came into view. She was just as frightened as the rest of them, but doing her best to keep in control.

  Though she and I were fraternal twins, she got the tall, dark, and mysterious looks of our father, and I got the small, blond, and pale looks of our mother. But at the moment, I would have said her skin tone was as green as an avocado’s innards. She was on her phone, attempting to keep her eyes away from the body.

  Though I had absolutely no desire to see death, Allison needed me, so I forced myself to step out of my surreal-view-of-a-tragedy-from-a-distance moment and unfroze my legs. As I walked forward, one of the police officers glanced in my direction, a stonelike, suspicious look on her face. I involuntarily quirked a nervous smile at her. She looked away.

  “Becca,” Allison said as she closed her phone and met me on the edge of the gathering. “Thank God you’re here. When you were late and this”—she waved toward the crowd—“happened, I got worried about you. Oh, Becca!” She sounded as though she were speaking the words accidentally, almost as though the sound was following her mouth’s movement, like one of those old foreign films with English dubbed in.

  “Sorry, Sis, sorry.” I touched her arm to reassure her that I was indeed there and that I was fine. “What happened?”

  She took a deep breath and made herself stand taller. She put her hand over mine. “Okay, it’s been a rough morning. There’s been a terrible accident—or something. Matt Simonsen was killed, Becca.”

  “Matt who?” I asked.

  “Simonsen.”

  I didn’t know anyone named Matt Simonsen, and I felt terrible about both the fact that someone had been killed and that I didn’t know who that someone was. I thought I was good at getting to know the other vendors. These people had been my life for some time, and I was friends with many of them, but the name Matt Simonsen didn’t ring any bells.

  “He just started working here last week,” Allison continued. “He grows”—she cleared her throat—“grew and sold peaches and peach products.”

  “This is just terrible,” I muttered as I gathered enough courage to really look at the body. He was on his back, next to an old van. He was a large man, only slightly heavy but very tall. I tried not to swoon as I looked at his bloody and violently disfigured head. The entire body was in a pool of its own blood, and Mr. Simonsen’s jeans and T-shirt were soaking it up from the ground. Oddly, a bouquet of flowers had been placed on his chest. The flowers’ beauty seemed pristine and out of place on the still body. “What happened?”

  “As far as I’ve been able to figure out, none of us heard a thing. The police questioned me quickly, but didn’t tell me anything except that they might want to talk to me again. I’ve tried to listen to what’s going on. Everyone who’s here got here early and unloaded without any problem. But when Abner arrived this morning, he found the body.”

  “Abner?”

  “Yes, he and Matt were the only ones who would have unloaded from this area. Because Matt’s van was hiding his body, the rest of us might have gone the whole day and not found him.”

  I looked up and through the crowd, finally spotting Abner as he spoke to a police officer. Abner was almost five feet of old, bald, and cranky. He’d been working at farmers’ markets and roadside stands longer than any of us. He grew amazing wildflowers at some place that he kept deeply undercover. With quick hands and honed skill, he could create special and unique bouquets before customers had even pulled out their money.

  From where I stood, Abner looked a mess. He was talking to the officer, but his eyes were glazed and unfocused. He kept putting his hands in his overalls’ pockets and taking them back out to wipe a red handkerchief over his bald head.

  “Oh, Allison,” I said as something occurred to me. “The flowers on Mr. Simonsen, are those Abner’s?”

  She nodded. “I think so. I heard Abner say as much, but he also said he didn’t put them there.”

  “Oh, ick! No wonder he looks so freaked-out.”

  “I think we all look a bit freaked-out, but there’s more to it.”

  “What?”

  “Apparently, two days ago Abner and Mr. Simonsen had a very vocal argument. I didn’t know anything about it until today, when Betsy told me that she heard part of it—though she wouldn’t give me any
details. Apparently there were other witnesses, too, and . . .”

  “And?”

  “Well, Abner said—according to Betsy—that he was going to kill Mr. Simonsen if he didn’t leave Bailey’s.”

  “Oh no . . . do you think . . . ?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  I looked at Abner again. There was no way he could have killed anyone; he was difficult to get along with, but he wasn’t homicidal. Actually, I’d never seen him get truly angry, but I had seen him be very ornery. And he’d been a friend to me when I’d needed a friend, when I’d needed guidance from someone who knew what the heck he was doing. He’d taken me under his wing; told me some of the finer points of good product display and excellent customer service. I’d worked at farmers’ markets for almost seven years, but it was Abner’s help and friendship that taught me that having a successful business went far beyond living on a farm or having the ability to speak to the soil and coax it to bring forth products that customers sought out. He’d been the one to tell me that it would be my passion for my products that would make me successful.

  And now he was talking to a police officer about a bouquet of his lovely flowers that he himself had found on a dead man; a man he’d apparently threatened.

  “Allison, what can we do?”

  “I don’t know, Becca. I have absolutely no idea.”

  Two

  The police and crime scene people were very slow about their business. They shut the whole market down for about three hours so they could gather evidence. During this time I helped Allison with phone calls to vendors who hadn’t yet shown up. We told them not to come in and that the police would be contacting them—no one was thrilled about this, but they understood. We explained the situation so many times that the dead body became surreal to me; a story, but not an actual event.