twelve

The next morning at seven thirty, Hayden and I stood at the end of Barton Farm’s long driveway and watched as the elementary school’s lumbering old school bus crested the hill. Hayden jumped in place. He loved school, and I was so grateful for that.

The bus stopped in front of us, and Hayden turned and threw his little arms around my waist, giving me a mighty hug. I hugged him back. I relished every squeeze and felt heartsick when I thought of the day when he would no longer want to hug me in public.

“I love you,” I said. “Have a good day.”

“Love you, Mom,” he said and galloped to the bus door.

The bus driver greeted him by name with a great big smile and waved at me.

I watched as Hayden made his way to the back of the bus and fell into a seat next to one of his classmates. I waved until the bus disappeared. Then I crossed the street into the village.

The village was closed up tight for the winter and wouldn’t officially reopen until mid-May. However, many of my seasonal workers would return in early April to begin the long process of cleaning and repair needed to make the village ready for another season.

A striking red cardinal bounced on a maple limb beside the pebbled path and cocked its head to look at me, as if asking why I was coming into the village at this time of year. What the cardinal didn’t know was that I walked through the village every day, sun, rain, or snow. As the live-in director of the Farm, I felt it was my duty to keep an eye on every aspect of it. That included Jason.

As I walked to the two-hundred-year-old barn just on the other side of the street, the two oxen, Betty and Mags, stared at me from the pen beside the barn. Jason hadn’t yet walked them across Maple Grove Lane to the large pasture. In the cold, they were the only two animals tough enough to be outside. I saw that the Farm’s milking cow didn’t even bother to stick her nose out the open barn door.

“Jason?” I called as I stepped inside the dim barn. I didn’t want to startle my farmhand. He could be as skittish as a colt.

There was no answer. I hadn’t really expected one. Jason was a nineteen-year-old young man of few words.

I found him in the middle of the barn measuring feed into pails. The three sheep baaed when I walked by. I suppose they expected me to feed them. They would have to wait for Jason.

Miss Muffins, the barn’s calico cat, jumped onto a hay bale and held out her neck asking to be petted. I gave her a good scratch. “Hey Jason,” I said. “How are the animals today? I know winter can be hard on them, and we’ve had a bad one this year.”

He didn’t look up from his measuring. “Everyone is fine. Some of the sheep had a tough couple days, but they’ve snapped out of it now that the weather is warming up.”

“Glad to hear it.” I picked up Miss Muffins and cuddled the calico under my chin. How much I wished that Hayden had wanted a cat like her to bring home instead of Frankie the Destroyer. “And how’s your trailer?”

“Good.” Jason looked up from the feed pail that he was filling. “I’m grateful to have it.”

Last summer, I’d learned that Jason was sleeping in the barn most nights. He claimed that he wanted to be close to the animals. I’d tried to convince him to move off the grounds, but I continued to find him on Farm property at all hours. After some prying, I learned that he had nowhere else to go. He was a former foster kid with social anxiety who’d put himself through two years of college to earn an associate’s degree in animal husbandry, with the plan to work with animals. I was impressed that he’d managed this feat. It seemed that living around other people was something he could not handle, and I didn’t have the heart to kick him out on the street.

Finally, I’d taken a little of the money from the trust and bought a small trailer for Jason to live in on the village side of the Farm. The trailer was tucked back into the trees a few hundred yards from the barn, out of the view of the tourists who would visit the village in the summer months. I took his minuscule rent out of his paycheck.

Not all my employees, namely Shepley, were pleased with my decision, but I’d found it was helpful to have another person living on the grounds when I needed help, especially during the winter when no one else was there other than Hayden and me. In fact, Jason had come to my rescue in January when a frozen pipe had burst in the visitor center in the middle of the night.

“Are you planning on coming to the pancake breakfasts this weekend?” I asked.

He gave me a look. Jason hated the crowds. He wouldn’t even face them for hot pancakes with maple syrup.

“You’re more than welcome to come.” I knew he wouldn’t. I sat on the hay bale with Miss Muffins on my lap. “I stopped by because I wondered if you saw all the commotion across the street yesterday.”

“I saw the ambulance,” Jason said as he poured the measured feed into the trough just inside the sheep pen.

I nodded. “The maple sugar expert I hired had an accident in the woods.” I paused. “He died.”

Jason pressed the lid down on the plastic container of feed until it clicked into place. He made no comment. Most of my conversations with him were one-sided.

“Did you see anything unusual going on? I mean, before the ambulance and police came?”

He gave me a strange look.

“The thing is, the police say that Beeson was murdered.”

“Murdered,” Jason murmured.

I stroked Miss Muffins’ back. I couldn’t get the memory out of my head of Beeson trying to tell me something before he died. Part of me—and it was a big part—thought that he’d been trying to tell me who his attackers were. “Did you see anyone on the grounds?” I asked. “What about a hiker who may have been wandering in the woods?”

Jason poured feed into the food trough for the dairy cow and shook his head. “I saw the police, the ambulance, and the school bus come and go. Nothing else. No one walked over to this side of the road. If they did, I would have spotted them. All the trees are bare, and I can see from the barn all the way across the green, and to Shepley’s gardens.”

I sighed. It had been a long-shot at best that Jason might have seen something. Although he had a clear view of all the happenings on this side of the Farm, he certainly couldn’t have seen across the pasture into the cluster of red maples where Dr. Beeson had fallen. “Have you noticed anything strange over the last few days, anything at all?”

He started to shake his head, and then stopped.

“What is it?” I asked.

He looked down. “I’ve seen the Hooper boys cutting through the village now and again.”

I frowned, remembering Judy saying that Pansy had stopped by the visitor center yesterday less than an hour before Benji and I had found Beeson in the woods. It seemed like I needed to drop in on my neighbors. It wasn’t a social call I looked forward to, so I’d decided to take Benji with me.

“Did the boys do anything other than cut through the village?” I asked.

Jason swallowed. “Not that I saw.”

I couldn’t exactly take that as a no, but I didn’t want to push my farmhand too far. It had taken me months building trust to convince him to talk to me this much. I didn’t want to ruin what I’d achieved.

I noticed his employee radio sitting on the edge of a barn stall. The green light wasn’t on. “Your radio isn’t on, is it?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, seemingly baffled by my question and by the radio all together.

I stood up and got the radio from the stall door. I turned it on.

“I was trying to save the batteries.” He swallowed.

“Don’t worry about the batteries,” I said. “I need to be able to reach you if something comes up. You need to have this on and with you at all times. That was part of our agreement.”

He nodded and clipped the radio to his belt.