A Hiss Before Dying

November 5, 2016 Saturday

Harry cut the motor on her lightest tractor, the John Deere forty-horsepower, already twenty-three years old. She turned around in the seat, satisfied with how straight the rows were. Then she cut the motor on, lifted the disc attachment, drove out of the large garden, and cut the motor again. She swung down.

“Straight as an arrow.” Cooper admired Harry’s work.

Like most farmers and gardeners in the Mid-Atlantic, Harry prepared the ground for spring in the late fall. Usually mid-October proved ideal, but the unusual warmth pushed the discing, harrowing, dragging chains to the first week of November. Get the timing wrong and shoots will pop up only to be killed by frost. Do the prep work too late and the fertilizer and winter seed, if planted, don’t properly work into the soil.

Harry loved trying to figure it out. Cooper, bravely attempting to garden, loved it less. Harry, knowing this and that Cooper wasn’t a country girl, took over.

Harry brought over equipment plus saved horse manure to make a rich mixture of commercial fertilizer, manure, and old straw.

Cooper observed all this, making a mental note to do her part in the spring and get the jump on weeding.

“Let’s unhook this and hook up the manure spreader. Oh, pour some bagged fertilizer into the manure, will you?”

“How many bags?” Cooper asked as they unhooked the disc and hooked up the manure spreader, a sturdy cart.

“Mmm.” Harry eyed the twenty-five-pound bags leaned up against the big tree. “Let’s start with five and see how it goes. You were smart to buy the lighter bags, by the way. We have nothing to prove by toting fifty-pound bags of fertilizer. That’s what my husband is for.” Harry laughed.

“That man could toss one hundred pounds like a basketball.” Cooper knew how strong Fair Haristeen was.

“Could.” Harry smiled.

Like many women, she appreciated a super-strong man.

The two cats and dog watched the humans work from the well-kept Jones family graveyard not far from Cooper’s large garden.

“Her garden is twice as big as Mom’s,” Pewter noted. “She must be feeding half the sheriff’s department.”

“Ha.” Mrs. Murphy flicked her tail. “When she paced out this garden in the spring, she had no idea what she was getting into. The good thing is, Mom didn’t have to do her garden. There was enough in Cooper’s.”

The three laughed. Cooper did overdo and Harry knew the tall deputy would never be able to keep up with even the tomatoes, much less the rest of her sprawling, ambitious garden. So Harry would help her weed, attack the beetles, pull up the okra, really good okra. The two women liked working together and having a friend to pull weeds with and chatter about this and that. And Cooper learned, yes, she did.

“Okay.” Harry turned around. “Two more bags and we’ve got it. Stuff is mixing in just great.”

Cooper opened two bags, pouring them in, Harry started the PTO again and the manure spreader churned out the cooked straw, old manure and the fertilizer producing an odor, not offensive yet most distinctive. Harry, smart, used what she had on the farm. Every three years she’d call up Rachel at Southern States and do an extensive fertilizer spread on her acreage, depending on the crops. Fertilizer prices could fluctuate with gasoline prices. Last year, Rachel convinced her to try carbon packing which added $58 per acre. Best thing Harry ever did. Her pastures, good, became spectacular. So she paid the money for another packing, this would be two years in a row. Then she thought she’d wait and see how many years the process held before doing it again.

Like all farmers, Harry knew Mother Nature was a harsh business partner. Sometimes she held a cornucopia. Other times, you lost everything. But sun, soil, and water were the key, and fortunately for Harry, she had all three in a potent combination.

Cooper, on the other hand, just west of the dividing creek, had poorer soils. So instead of working on all her pastures, Harry focused on the garden. If she could help her wonderful neighbor, a former suburban girl, learn from that, then in the future she might be able to convince Cooper to grow hay. You can always make a bit of money on high-quality hay.

“Done.” Harry triumphantly finished the garden fertilizer run.

Cooper, wiping her hands on her red kerchief, looked at the now-covered quarter acre. “Thanks to you, I really did have a terrific yield.”

“Wait until next year. Your asparagus will be up. Harvest it every two years. You can’t believe how good it tastes from your own garden. The next thing you need is chickens.”

“You don’t have any.”

“I used to, but the cats chased them. You can turn your chickens out in the morning and drive them into a pen at night. You will be amazed at how effective they are, so you don’t need to use chemicals. I hate all that pesticide stuff. I don’t care what anybody says, it gets into the water supply.”

“Yeah, I think so, too. Well, the chickens will have to wait until spring.”

“Good, then we can come over here and chase chickens.” Pewter puffed up.

“Waddle is more like it.” Tucker guffawed.

The gray cat shot straight up in the air, turned to land on the dog’s back. She dug her claws into Tucker’s shoulders, which forced a yelp.

“You two stop it!” Harry hollered.

“Kind of like Israel and Palestine.” Cooper put up her tools.

“Actually, they behave better than those two.” Harry drove her tractor into Cooper’s shed. She intended to drive it back to her place tomorrow. The sun was low, it set fast this time of year: Boom, it would just drop below the horizon. There might be a smashing sunset but no long, lingering twilights as in summer.

The mercury was dropping, that early chill touched your bones. The two women walked back to Cooper’s house, the old Jones place, the Reverend Herbert Jones’s family. He rented the house and farm to Cooper. Both were happy with the arrangement.

“Open the door!” Pewter insisted.

Harry stepped back onto the porch and did just that. The three animals joined them.

“Hot tea, cold beer, hot chocolate, um.” She looked around. “Port. I forgot I had a bottle of port.”

“Coop, save the port. I’d love a hot chocolate.”

“Tuna!” Pewter demanded.

“A greenie.” Tucker wasn’t shy, either.

As Cooper kept treats for Harry’s animals, Harry walked to the cupboard and pulled out the goodies. Soon the humans and the animals were all happy.

“Good hot chocolate.”

“Milk. Always use milk.” Cooper smiled. “Thanks again for all your work and the use of your equipment.”

“That’s what friends are for.” Harry stopped. “Funny how you change, learn things. When I was at Smith, I’d stay up for bull sessions. I thought that was friendship, you know, all this talk. Then one day I realized I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I felt closer to people by working with them instead of showing off how smart I thought I was. I like accomplishing something. Talk doesn’t do that.”

“Yeah. ’Course I was at Christopher Newport.” Cooper named a school down in Newport News, Virginia. “I never was the intellectual type. And then when I studied law enforcement, everyone thought I was really weird. Not many women in law enforcement then. Now I think in Virginia we’re around twenty percent of law enforcement officers. Loved it. Still do, but Harry, no matter what you do, someone is ready to jump on you.”

“The times.” Harry sighed. “Even Fair. How can you jump on a vet, but just the other day a client, new and rich, I might add, chewed him out because he didn’t tell her about navicular. And here’s the thing. Her horse didn’t have navicular. Just had a stone bruise, but she was sure Fair was keeping something from her. Called in other vets.”

“Crazy.” Cooper finished her hot chocolate, rose, and poured more for them both from the saucepan on the stove.

“Any luck on the fellow who was found at Sugarday? The paper gave his name. You know, Rice is an old Virginia name.”

“I knew we couldn’t get through the day without you poking around a case.” Cooper shook her head. “As it happens, yes, there’s information piling up, but nothing that points to murder. We’ve spoken to his sister in Richmond, Marvella Rice Lawson.”

“Marvella Lawson! She practically runs the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She’s a big deal and her husband is, too. Full partner at that powerful law firm, the one full of ex-governors and ex-senators,” Harry said.

“I liked her. She held it together. Helped us as much as she could, but the whole thing is odd.”

“You always say that until facts begin to make sense. Murder isn’t odd, it appears to be very human.”

“True.” Cooper agreed with her friend. “Pierre Rice, the victim, whose name you read in the papers, often worked for large corporations or government agencies. But we have no records, no phone, no computer. He was so circumspect he didn’t even buy books with a credit card, you know, if he was researching something. He would have his best friend do it, a cardiologist here. Beverly Ely.”

“I know Beverly. Not well but she rides, so I see her at meets. Seems solid.”

“She does. Whatever he worked on, he kept a low profile but this time, somehow he got caught. Or he frightened someone badly.

“Rick contacted the Environmental Protection Agency. Years back, Pierre uncovered a huge pollution problem down at West Point, thousands of pounds and gallons, more probably, of debris pumped into the river. But the EPA, who admitted knowing him, said he was not on a case for them.”

“Any thoughts about the Number Five chit?”

“After talking to Dr. Ely, I called her back because she had had lunch with him the day before we found him. He wore the chit.”

“And?”

“According to Dr. Ely, Pierre said he was descended from the Rices at Cloverfields. Then he teased her and said this would lead to buried treasure.”

Harry laughed. “If we dug at all the places where there’s supposed to be buried treasure there wouldn’t be an undamaged lawn in Albemarle County.”

“We still haven’t found Pierre’s Tahoe. If we had that it would help.”

“Black Tahoes are ultracool. All someone would have to do is put on new plates. Lots of Tahoes with tinted windows, too.”

“I know. We just need a break.”

She was about to get one out of left field.