seventeen

I took a tentative step toward the crying girl. “Hey, it’s okay. Can I get someone for you? It can’t be as bad as that?”

“It is. Dr. Beeson is dead, and it’s my fault.” She covered her eyes with her hands.

I froze. “Come again?”

She dropped her hands, and her mouth fell open as if she’d just realized what she’d said. “I have to go.” She raced around the side of the greenhouse.

Without pausing to think that I might be chasing a killer, I ran after her. As I came around the corner, I saw a door slam open on the back of the building. I raced for it and caught it before it closed. Stepping inside, I had to blink a few times as my eyes adjusted to the dark.

Three long black counters cut across the room, surrounded by stools. Equipment filled the space, and dozens of tropical plants bent toward the sunlight pouring in the bank of large windows on the far side. It was a lab.

“Hello?” I called out.

There was no answer. I remained quiet for a full minute, listening hard for any snuffling sounds from the upset girl. Nothing. Clearly she was a very quiet breather, or she wasn’t there. There was another door at the end of the room. I suspected it led to the hallway and she was long gone.

I removed my cell phone from the back pocket of my jeans. It was almost noon. The school children would be filing into the cafeteria by now for their pancake lunch, and the members of Stroud’s class would be in the maple grove drilling holes into the trees and setting the spiles for sap. I should return to the Farm and help out. That was my real job, not chasing after some emotional college student or catching a potential killer.

Then I heard a sneeze.

She was in the lab. I inched forward, trying to make as little noise as possible. Then I ran into a rolling cart with my hip and sent it careening into the closest lab table.

There was a scream, and the girl popped out from under one of the tables and bolted for the door on the other side of the room.

“Wait!” I cried.

To my surprise, this time she stopped and spun around. “Why? What do you want?”

I held up my hands as if to show her that I meant no harm, which was the truth. “I want to make sure you’re okay. You seemed pretty upset outside.” Who was I kidding? She was still upset.

She rubbed her eyes and smudged her eye makeup. Although the eye shadow smeared a little, the mascara remained perfectly in place. She must have been wearing a heavy-duty waterproof brand. “Who are you?”

“I told you that back in the greenhouse. I’m from Barton Farm.”

She blinked her wide eyes at me, reminding me of one of the many deer that I startled on my early morning walkabouts on the Farm. “I know that, but why are you following me?”

I decided to play it straight with the girl because clearly I wasn’t getting anywhere being evasive. “I overheard you mention going to the police. Do you know something about how Dr. Beeson died?”

She flopped onto a stool, buried her face in her hands, and bawled.

I walked across the room and slid another lab stool close to her. “Shh, shh, calm down. You’ll make yourself sick.” I heard myself repeating my mother’s words. Many times she would use the sick card when I was an inconsolable child in order to make me stop crying. I can’t say that it ever worked on me, but it seemed to do the trick on the girl.

There was a roll of paper towels on the neighboring lab table and I ripped off a half dozen sheets and handed them to the girl.

She took the entire wad and rubbed them across her face. After she gave her face a thorough scrub-down, she crumbed the paper towels into a tight ball in her fist and took a shuddering breath. “This is his lab. It’s even harder to think about his death in this room.”

I glanced around the lab, noticing Beeson’s nameplate on the teacher’s desk for the first time. “What did you mean when you said that Dr. Beeson’s death was your fault?”

She looked at me with a confused expression.

“I’m not the police,” I said reassuringly.

She nodded. “I know that. If it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have even been on the Farm yesterday.”

“Why do you say that?”

She swallowed, and an idea struck me. “Were you the one who called me and told me you were Robert Stroud’s daughter and that he had gone to the hospital, so he couldn’t teach the tree tapping class today?”

She didn’t meet my eyes. At least one mystery was solved.

“And you called Stroud and told him that I’d canceled the class because of low attendance, which was also a lie.”

She pressed the paper towels to the corner of her eye. “Dr. Beeson asked me to. He was a tough professor, and not tough in a nice way. Everyone knew that he enjoyed failing students. I wasn’t failing, but I was getting a C in his lab. He said that if I did it, he’d give me an A. I have a 4.0 GPA, and Dr. Beeson was the only one who was going to give me a lower grade. I’m hoping to go to a four-year school next year, and I need the best grades possible to get the most scholarship money.” Her eyes pleaded with me as if begging me to understand.

Her reason for making the calls for Beeson hadn’t been what I’d expected, and I was relieved about that. I’d had an employee the year before who got tangled up in a love affair with an older man, so automatically my mind had gone there. It hadn’t ended well for anyone, especially for the man.

“Why did he want you to do this? Did he give a reason?”

“He said that he should have been the one teaching the class anyway, since he wrote a book about it.”

“Maple Sugar and the Civil War?”

She nodded.

“Let me get this straight. He asked you to lie to two people because he wanted to teach my class at the Farm.” I frowned, remembering how obsessed Beeson seemed with the idea of teaching the class, especially when the trees were frozen.

She chewed on her lip. “So you see, it is my fault. If I hadn’t made those calls, he wouldn’t have been at the Farm that day. He would still be alive.”

“Dr. Beeson had a heart attack. It seems to me that he would have had one eventually. You can’t be blamed for that.”

She stared at me. “But I heard he was stabbed in the chest with a drill.”

There was that. It appeared the news about the stabbing had gotten out after all. The question was whether it was just a rumor on the college campus or if it had reached the rest of the town.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Why?” She shrank back.

I waited and didn’t say anything. After a beat she said, “Landon.” However, by the way she said it, I suspected it wasn’t her real name. But it didn’t matter. Detective Brandon would figure out who she was; I had to share this information with the cops. It might help Gavin, or it might not. If Landon said that Gavin knew about Dr. Beeson plotting to take over the tree tapping class, then it might look even worse for him.

I decided to cut the girl not-named-Landon a break. “This isn’t your fault. If you hadn’t agreed to make the call for Beeson, he would have found someone else who would. He seemed like a determined man to me.”

“You think so?”

I nodded.

“Are you going to tell the police about this conversation?”

There was no point in lying to her. “Yes, and if you answer their questions honestly, as you did mine, I’m sure that there won’t be any repercussions for you.”

She stood up from her stool. “I should get back to work. I need to finish watering.”

I stood too.

She gave me a worried smile, but she still didn’t tell me her real name. “Thanks for talking to me.”

“You’re welcome, Landon.” I said her name in a way that told her I knew it wasn’t real.

She grimaced and left the lab. I waited a beat and headed for the door after her. Then I paused. Hadn’t Landon said this was Beeson’s lab? I glanced around the room. There might be something here that would give me a clue as to why he was killed and who may have done it.

There was a filing cabinet in the far corner of the room with a potted ivy plant on top of it. The ivy’s vine spilled over the sides of the filing cabinet and hovered just inches above the floor. It seemed as good a place to start as any.

The drawers were unlocked, and the first drawer listed what looked like scientific names of plants. Had Beeson been poisoned, I would have found this drawer much more interesting.

I realized that although this was Beeson’s lab, he wouldn’t keep anything important, like his research or his student files, out in the open like this where students or pesky museum directors could poke their noses into it. His office would be the best place for that information, but I was short on time and had to return to the Farm if I didn’t want to completely miss the school visit and what remained of the tree tapping class.

I was just closing the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet when the lab door, which Landon had exited through, swung open. I expected to see her, or maybe Buckley—being caught snooping by either one of them was problematic. In reality, the person who came through the door was ten times worse.

“What do we have here?” Detective Brandon asked in her deceptively smooth voice. “Ms. Cambridge, I wish I could say you were the last person I expected to see in the deceased’s lab, but then I would be lying.”

“I—I—” I couldn’t think of a good excuse for being there, because I didn’t have one.

She flicked on the lights, and I was momentarily blinded by a fluorescent glow. She stepped into the room like a cheetah stalking her prey. I bet I could outrun her about as well as I could outrun a cheetah. “I’m interested in hearing your reason for being here,” she said.

I straightened my shoulders and got ahold of myself. “I followed a student in here. She was distraught over Dr. Beeson’s death. I thought I could help.”

“How kind of you.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Where is the student now?”

“She left just a little while ago, through that door. I’m surprised you didn’t run into her.”

“Did she run out before or after you started opening Beeson’s filing cabinets?”

“Before,” I admitted. “I was just looking to see if there were any notes here that could be used for the tree tapping class at the Farm,” I explained, sticking to my original story.

“And what did you find?”

“Nothing,” I said, heading to the door that led outside. “I’ll just be going now and leave you to it. I’m sure you have some detecting to do.”

She jumped in front of me and blocked my way to the door. “Not so fast. Do you know that I could take you in for tampering with a crime scene?”

I gritted my teeth. “This isn’t a crime scene.”

She took a step backward, closer to my escape door. Drat. “No, but it’s a place of interest because of its relation to the murder victim, and you have no reason for being here.”

“I told you about the student,” I said. “If you choose not to believe my story, there’s nothing that I can do to change your mind.”

“What was her name?”

“She told me it was Landon, but I’m certain that wasn’t her real name. I think she didn’t give it to me because she was afraid that the police would want to talk with her.”

“And why would we want to do that?” Detective Brandon asked.

I told her what faux-Landon had told me.

The detective wrinkled her flawless brow. “So Beeson wanted to be on your Farm to teach? Why?”

“I have no idea. Maybe he wanted some more publicity for his book—we’re selling it this weekend. It seems like a very extreme course of action to take to sell a few copies of his book, but …” I trailed off.

“Interesting theory.”

I made a gesture of looking at my watch. I didn’t wear a watch. “Gosh, look at the time. I really need to get back to the Farm or I’m going to miss the school visit that we have there today.”

She stared at me and finally stepped aside. “I know where to find you.”

I sidestepped around her and put my hand on the doorknob.

“I will find out what happened, Ms. Cambridge. Don’t get in my way. You might think you’re protecting your friend Gavin, but in truth, you’re only making it worse for him.”

I slipped through the door without a word. She wanted me to argue with her, but I refused to take the bait. Detective Brandon hadn’t liked me since the moment she’d met me last summer at the Civil War reenactment. It didn’t help that she was Chase’s former fiancée.

Outside, I let out a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. I knew that the detective let me off easy. I could have gotten into some serious trouble snooping in Beeson’s lab. In fact, it made me even more nervous that she’d gone so easy on me. I wondered what her game plan was. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wouldn’t like it.