Farm to trouble, p.1
Farm to Trouble, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Amanda Flower
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover illustration by Patrick Knowles
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Flower, Amanda, author.
Title: Farm to trouble / Amanda Flower.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series: A
farm to table mystery
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021116 (paperback) | (epub)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3606.L683 F37 2021 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021116
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Epilogue
Shiloh’s Quick Farm Tips
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For Shiloh Seymour, who let me use her name
Chapter One
It smelled like home before I even saw it. I caught a whiff of freshly cut hay and plowed earth when I got off the highway and drove down the long country road to the small town of Cherry Glen, Michigan. Huckleberry, my pug, held his flat nose in the air as if he recognized it too. With the top down on my red convertible, the country breeze caressed his small ears. The wind was in my long blond hair—hair that remained blond due mostly to my ridiculously expensive stylist back in Los Angeles.
Just before I crossed the line that marked the town limits, an enormous billboard with a photo of wind turbines on it came into view. “Support Cherry Glen Wind Farm” ran along the top of it.
Huckleberry looked at me questioningly with his round brown eyes as we whizzed past pine trees and rolling farms. We weren’t in California anymore, that was for sure. Huckleberry was a pug used to palm trees and traffic. He would get none of that in Cherry Glen. Although, like in California, there was plenty of sand. Beyond Traverse City, the closest city nearby, was the Sleeping Bear Dunes along the shores of Lake Michigan. There was more than enough sand there for a beach-starved pug even if the lake water was too cold to touch for nine months of the year.
I drove through the center of Cherry Glen. When I had grown up in this town, it was just a few mismatched buildings made of brick and weathered boards. Today, the downtown was quaint but bustling. Small businesses and shops lined the street. The two largest buildings held Fields Brewing Company, in an old grain warehouse, and Michigan Street Theater. The theater had been abandoned when I was a child. To my surprise, the marquee was lit and proclaimed the upcoming dates for Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.
It was just after seven on a Friday evening in the middle of July. The sun wouldn’t set for another two hours, and townspeople and tourists ambled up the new-looking sidewalk. Moms pushed babies and strollers, and school-age children ran in and out of the general store. The tourists, or fudgies as we called them growing up, were easy to pick out from their Michigan-mitten T-shirts and crisp shorts. We called them fudgies because most of them would travel up north to Mackinac Island and the U.P. in search of fudge before heading back down to wherever they came from. They stuck out from the farmers. The farmers wore their dusty jeans and work boots going about their day-to-day.
The town appeared to be thriving. It was nothing like the beaten-down, blue-collar hometown I remembered. Time had been kind to Cherry Glen. I hoped I would find the same at Bellamy Farm.
At the end of the street was the town hall, a modest brick building with a large Palladian window over the front door and a WWII Sherman tank sitting on its postage stamp-sized lawn. The tank had been a gift to the town from a collector who died before I was born. It was the only structure on Michigan Street that looked exactly the same.
I could distinctly remember climbing on the tank as a child with my father looking on. That was over twenty year ago, what felt like a lifetime, and it almost seemed like a memory from a movie I had seen rather than a moment in my own childhood. Despite the town’s improvements, it still had the same down-home feel to it, and anyone walking along the sidewalk would take one look at me and know I didn’t belong. Didn’t matter that I had lived in Cherry Glen for the first twenty-three years of my life. I’d been gone for fifteen years. My capped teeth, blond highlights, red convertible, and portable dog belied that fact. Very few people would know the new me, as I cut most of my friends out of my life when I left to recover from what I had lost. In many ways, my father and the land were my remaining ties to this place.
Distracted by the tank, I was driving a little bit too fast. I had been on the road for countless hours and wanted to be over and done with this last leg of the trip.
That was my mistake. I should have slowed down going through the town. It was an afterthought I regretted immediately when I heard the sound of sirens behind me. I would have hoped at thirty-eight years old the sound of sirens behind me would no longer make me jump like a sixteen-year-old with a permit. Sadly, that was not the case.
I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a police officer on a motorcycle coming at me at a fast clip. I shared a look with a bewildered Huckleberry as I pulled to the side of the road. Speeding with California plates through Cherry Glen was a very bad idea.
I watched as the large man climbed off his motorcycle and hitched up his pants. He removed his helmet and laid it on the seat. He wasn’t in a hurry to give me a ticket. He wanted me to sweat it out. If how damp my palms felt was any indication, his strategy worked. I wiped them on my skirt and reached for my small clutch next to Huckleberry on the passenger seat.
I had my license, registration, and insurance card out by the time the officer reached me. He was mostly bald but had tufts of hair springing sporadically out of his head. His hair was gray, but he had a wide, black mustache that was still dark, so I knew it had to be dyed. He looked familiar, but it had been fifteen years since I’d left Cherry Glen, so I couldn’t quite place how I knew him.
“Well, well, look what the cat dragged in. Shiloh Bellamy. I didn’t think we would ever see the likes of you around here again.”
I grimaced.
“Remove your sunglasses, please.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said and took off my aviator glasses. I blinked in the bright sun as the police officer came back into focus. On his chest, a bright silver star read “Chief.” Great. Not only did I get pulled over before I reached Bellamy Farm, but it was by the chief of police. What a terrific way to start my triumphant return home. It was time to negotiate, which, as a television producer who had spent most of my career trapped between a studio and directors and actors, I did best. “I am so sorry. I know I was going too fast through town. I wasn’t thinking, not that that’s any excuse. I’m just in a hurry to get to my father.”
“I know all about Sully Bellamy not feeling well. I was the one who took him to the hospital after his last fall.” He gave me a beady look when he said that, like it should have been me who took my father to the hospital. I bit the inside of my lip. He was probably right about that. I had wanted to be there, but meetings in New York kept me away.
“Thank you for doing that. My dad always speaks highly of his neighbors. I haven’t been around as much as I would like, and I’m grateful to the community for rallying around him.” I blinked back crocodile tears.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” the chief asked.
I dropped the tears schtick and felt my face redden. This cop looked like he didn’t do well with any funny business, so I simply waited.
He hooked his thumbs through his belt loops, and as he did, the gun on his hip shifted. “Chief Randy Killian, but everyone just calls me Chief Randy.”
The name Killian immediately struck me—this was Quinn Killian’s father. The Killians were a prominent family in the town. And the chief’s son, Quinn, had been my fiancé Logan’s best friend. I hadn’t seen Quinn since Logan’s funeral because I packed up the beat-up Jeep I owned at the time and left for California the next day.
I swallowed. I knew coming back to Cherry Glen would remind me of Logan and the guilt I carried over his death. I just didn’t know it would be before I even reached my family farm.
“Nice to see you again, Chief Randy.” I flashed him my thousand-watt smile—the one that made me believe spending three months’ salary on it was worth it. “Again, I’m really sorry about speeding, but you know how my father is unwell, so you can understand my haste. I should have been here yesterday, but I got trapped tying up some loose ends and left later than expected…” I shouldn’t be babbling to the police officer about my problems. What he said next proved that.
“You’re still getting a ticket, missy. I don’t abide by speeding in my town.”
The smile clearly didn’t work. Away from the bright lights of LA, my veneers were just another waste of money. I handed him my license.
Huckleberry and I sweated in the sun as Chief Randy took his good old time writing up my ticket. As I sat there, I remembered what summer in the Midwest was really like. Hot and humid with no ocean breeze to take the edge off. Huckleberry’s tongue hung out as he stared at me. His face bore a look of betrayal, eyes narrowed and nose extra scrunched, as if he was wondering why I brought him to this steamy place. Then again, it could have been gas. You never knew with Huckleberry; he was a pug after all.
Chief Randy came back and handed me my ticket. “You go light on the pedal, all right?”
I nodded dutifully.
“Now, go see your pops. He needs you right now more than you even know.” His black eyebrows, which were almost as impressive as his mustache, dipped down in concern.
I wondered what that meant. I knew my father needed me. He asked me to come back to Cherry Glen to help him with the family farm, and I was here, wasn’t I? I’d left my career behind in California.
Chief Randy smacked the side of my car like he would a cow he wanted to move out to pasture and ambled back to his motorcycle. I waited for him to ride away before I pulled out onto the empty road.
I glanced at Huckleberry. “Huck, we aren’t in LA anymore.”
His eyes rolled into the back of his head, and his long tongue licked his flat nose.
Chapter Two
The drive to my family farm took twenty minutes. I could have gotten there faster since there was no traffic to speak of on the road, but I wasn’t going to be caught speeding again by Chief Randy. I tried to push the speeding ticket out of my head and concentrate on what I had come to do: help my father and save the farm. For years, I’d been trying to talk my father into moving the farm in a new direction, but he wanted nothing to do with it. Though I’d mostly loved my LA life, I’d always wanted to come back to Bellamy and continue the family legacy—but my father’s bullheadedness held me back. That is, until he hurt his back so badly that he had no choice but to ask for help. However, I knew my plans to overhaul my family’s acreage into an organic farm-to-fork establishment was not what he had in mind.
Even so, I could see it all in my head. Fields of lavender, the cherry grove, community vegetable gardens that went on for acres, and even, someday, a café on the farm grounds. It was a lofty dream, but it was one that had come to me in the last few years as the grind of being a television producer in Hollywood had taken its toll. Fewer and fewer projects appealed to me the older I got, but my dreams of a revamped Bellamy Farm stood strong.
As paved streets turned into gravel and tar country roads, my car kicked up dust. Huckleberry sneezed and gave me another martyred glare. It seemed that I would have to do a lot to make things up to my pug.
As the farm came into view, I tapped the brakes. The steel archway over the entrance read “Bellamy Farm,” or at least it had. The F in Farm dangled below the other letters, and the Y was bent. The gravel driveway that led into the farm was overgrown; weeds and grass broke through the pebbles and small stones. This was a far cry from the Bellamy Farm I knew.
When I was growing up, the fence that separated the property from the county road had stood even and straight, and every summer, my father had me paint it white like the story from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer so that it shone in the afternoon sunshine. Now, the fence had fallen over, the posts uprooted and cracked. It seemed no one had painted that fence in a very long time. I turned into the driveway and slowed the car, continuing my assessment. If this was the state of affairs at the entrance, I was afraid to see what it looked like deeper in.
The farm itself was a mile from the road, and the closer I came to the house, the worse I felt as I saw the disarray of the unkempt pasture and weed-ridden fields. When I was young, in the midst of summer, the fields would have been bright green with soybeans, corn, cucumbers, and squash, and the pasture would be dotted with the cows and horses. Bellamy Farm had always, always thrived. However, it looked like most of the crops and animals were gone now, and what was left was unruly, fallow land.
Time may have been kind to the town of Cherry Glen, not so much my home. The farm was in much worse shape than my father had let on. This kind of condition didn’t happen in the few weeks since he threw his back out. The farm had been falling into disrepair for years, and I had no idea.
I should have come back home earlier, but as much as I wanted to drop everything and run to the rescue months ago, that hadn’t been possible. I couldn’t just walk away from life and my job that quickly, and Cherry Glen held its own demons that I wasn’t quite ready to face, no matter how much I wanted to. I had a house to sell and a position to pass on to another producer at the studio. Thankfully, my cousin Stacey was local in Cherry Glen and stepped up and had been helping my father. She had a farm of her own to care for that was an equal two hundred acres. I was sure she did the best she could. I knew better than anyone my father could pay very little for outside help.
I let out a breath. Maybe I was the one who could have done better. I thought I was helping by working in Hollywood—especially since Dad didn’t want to hear my vision for what I thought Bellamy could be. I was the silent pocketbook, and Dad was the one charged with distributing those funds across our debts to keep the farm going. I sent money back home so he could pay down the handful of mortgages he had on the farm. Mortgages that went all the way back to my mother’s cancer treatment. Mom got sick when I was just a toddler, and he had to use the farm as collateral to pay the piles of bills that were still rolling long after she died.
As an adult, I did what I could. Over the years, I had paid those mortgages off, but it didn’t happen overnight. It took over a decade. And now I realized that while I was chipping away at the debt, the farm was falling apart. It had started to come into focus a few months back when I learned my father owed the government years of back taxes. When Dad had mailed the tax bill to me at my office in the studio as a last resort, explaining his injury and the trouble he was in, I read it and knew, despite our differing visions for the farm, it was time for me to finally come home. Now, the wreckage was staring me right in the face.
