Eighteen

Somewhere in the distance, the tractor rumbled and the sound of muffled laughter hit our ears. I knew that Tate had started the cherry blossom tour out by the main road, driving to the very front of the orchard. There he would let the passengers off to wander under the oldest fruit-bearing trees on the property. Once the guests were back on board he would continue, driving up and down a few of the long, dense rows of blossoming trees. Eventually he would veer off into our wooded acreage and travel down a scenic trail. There he’d hit upon the clifftop road, giving the guests a spectacular view of the seemingly endless lake and a few of the islands that sat at the head of Cherry Cove Bay. From there they’d continue down a winding gravel road that would bring them out to Lighthouse Point and the Cherry Cove Lighthouse. Since this was part of the crime scene, the guests would not be allowed inside. After a quick blurb about the old lighthouse, Tate would continue another half-mile down Lighthouse Road to the processing sheds, the last part of the tour before bringing the guests back to the inn. Today, however, the sheds were also off limits. Hopefully Tate had supplied enough alcohol so that nobody was too disappointed. From the sound of the tractor, I could tell the tour had just entered the woods. I sent Hannah a quick text, asking her to alert me when they were at the lighthouse.

As Tay and I made our way toward the processing sheds, we were aware that we were the only two souls in this part of the orchard. And yet, ever since finding the crime scene and stumbling upon that eerie twig-face, the area had taken on a menacing air. I thought it was just me—just my highly suggestive imagination—but Tay had sensed it too. We both had the feeling that someone or something was watching us. Twigs snapped. Tree limbs rustled. Rogue burst of petals blew into our path. And every time we looked, no one was there.

We’d nearly come to the end of the long row where Jeb’s body was found. The sheds sat just across the way, separated by a swath of grass and a hundred feet of crushed gravel. We were walking steadily toward the buildings, looking for any noticeable sign of footprints, when the sound of a tree limb snapping nearby spooked us into a mad dash. It was crazy. Our imaginations had gotten the best of us. Because, once again, no one was there.

“Holy Hogwarts! What the deuce is wrong with us?” Tay asked, breathing heavily while blocking the shed door with the weight of her body. It was a logical precaution, in case our imaginary pursuer thought to follow us inside. “You have an excuse,” she continued, pointing an unsteady finger at me. “Your brother hosts that sketchy ghost show on cable, so crazy obviously runs in the family. But I’m sane. No one was actually there, right?”

“No one that I could see,” I said, ignoring her sarcastic remark as I flipped on the light and headed for the cherry pitter. “It’s probably just the fact that we stumbled upon a pretty creepy pile of sticks next to the place Jeb died. And,” I said, turning back to her, “if it was the restless spirit of Jeb Carlson trying to reach out to us from beyond the grave, clearly whatever he was trying to tell us fell on deaf ears. We’re a couple of fraidy-cats. Tay, forget the door. Come look at this.”

I’d entered the processing room, a climate-controlled area where every glorious cherry grown in our orchard was washed, pitted, and deposited into ten-gallon containers. Once they were in the containers, the proper ratio of sugar was added. From there the cherries were sent to the refrigerators to sweeten before either being bottled for use in cherry pies, or dried and packaged for use in other baked goods or snack products. It was a big operation, and nearly all of it automated. But it was the industrial cherry pitter I was interested in.

It was a vast, ingenious machine. The cherries, coming in straight from the orchard, were washed and then dumped into a large holding bin. Once they were in the bin, a special conveyer, divided into trays four feet long by one foot wide and covered with holes the size of cherries, would pass through the bin, loading each cherry into a separate hole. The loaded conveyer would then pass beneath a block of thin steel rods, each one lining up with the tray of cherries. The pitter would come down and de-stone the entire tray at once before dumping the cherries onto another conveyer belt, which then carried them to the awaiting ten-gallon containers.

From all appearances, the entire operation had been meticulously cleaned after last summer’s harvest, yet I was hoping my hunch would be correct. I went around to the other side of the machine, opened the hatch to the pit collector, and pulled out the bin. It was spotless. Of course it would be, I thought, chiding myself. Jeb would never let a bin full of sticky cherry pits sit all winter.

“Wow,” Tay remarked, standing beside me. “That’s clean. Not a pit left in sight. So where did they go?”

“Probably some landfill,” I remarked, thinking.

“You guys don’t use them to plant new trees?”

“No, not anymore,” I said. “All new stock is grafted from existing trees. Fruit trees have been so genetically modified over the years that you never know what traits are carried on in the pits. Grafting new stock directly from existing trees is akin to cloning. It keeps the flavor of the cherries consistent and unique to the orchard.”

“Look at you. I love it when you talk cherry to me. But I still don’t get it. Where did the cherry pits at the crime scene come from then?”

I looked at her and shrugged. “Got me. I thought Jeb dropped them, but maybe the cyanide poison that killed him wasn’t made from cherry pits at all. Unfortunately, cyanide isn’t too hard to come by.” I paused to pull the cherry pit I’d taken from the scene out of my pocket. “See how this pit looks remarkably clean—like it’s been washed and dried? Maybe Jeb was actually thinking of germinating these.”

“Then again, maybe not.” Tay inspected the pit through narrowed eyes. “I want to think your initial hunch about these pits was correct. Something about that crime scene doesn’t add up. Let’s keep poking around.”

We left the room and continued searching the building. I glanced into the walk-in refrigerators, which were empty, and walked into the store room where some of the lighter equipment was kept, including rows and rows of reusable ten-gallon containers and boxes of plastic liners. Next we poked our heads into the stockroom, which now only contained our private stock—all the cherries we used at the inn and what was sold in the shop. Nothing looked suspicious. We continued searching and then decided to split up. I would search Jeb’s office while Tay volunteered to poke around the employee break room and kitchen. Before she left, she asked, “So how’s it done?”

“Making cyanide from cherry pits? I was just reading about it on the way back from the morgue. Cherry pits don’t actually contain cyanide—they contain a substance called amygdalin. When a cherry pit is chewed or crushed, the amygdalin is released. This also isn’t a big deal on its own until the enzyme beta-d-glucose is released. It’s contained in the cherry pit too, and also in the digestive tract of humans. The beta-d-glucose enzyme breaks the amygdalin down into a couple of compounds, hydrogen cyanide being one of them. But the amount in one cherry pit is relatively small. One cherry pit won’t kill a person. That’s why maybe my theory is wrong. If somebody was going to make enough cyanide poison from cherry pits to kill a person, they’d need to use at least fifty, crush them, and suspend the mashed pits in spirits or some type of liquid.”

“Sounds like a lot of work. Then again, what better place to find a lot of cherry pits than at a cherry orchard.” Tay cast me a knowing look and started down the hallway. She paused long enough to add, “Did you know that historically, poison is considered to be a woman’s weapon?”

I stood before Jeb’s office, noting that the door was already open, and reached in to turn on the light. “Is it?” I answered. “I imagine that historically, poison was used by anyone who wanted to inflict an anonymous death. Think of the Borgias,” I called after her, and then stared at the scene before me. It felt surreal—a moment frozen in time, one of the last fleeting acts of Jeb Carlson’s life. The crime scene might have been in the orchard, but I had the feeling that it had all begun here.

On the desk was a typical working clutter of papers and bills, equipment catalogues, an open can of Coke, a golf magazine, and the black screen of a desktop monitor shut down for the day. And then there was the still-life violence of the scene: Jeb’s comfy leather high-back chair abandoned with haste against the wall, and on the cement floor a highball glass that had burst into jagged shards. Beneath it was a dark splatter mark that had all but dried, indicating that there must have been a little liquid still left in the glass when it was dropped. There was little doubt in my mind that whatever had been in that glass had likely killed him.

As I stared at the mess on the floor, Tay, from the vicinity of the break room, was still going on about the history of women and poison. I was only half-listening as I walked further into the office, careful not to touch anything. I recalled that Jack hadn’t been in this room yet. Last night he’d been too busy with the actual body, the hysterical guests, my frantic parents, and the bloody croquet mallet. Murder in Cherry Cove wasn’t a common affair, thank goodness, and poor Jack said he’d had a heck of a time getting the support he needed from Sturgeon Bay to properly investigate. I knew that eventually he would work his way around to the processing sheds, and I also knew that me coming here wasn’t going to sit well with him. It was a risk I was prepared to take, though, since this room confirmed the autopsy findings. Jeb Carlson had been poisoned here before he ran into the orchard. But by whom? How was it done?

I took out my iPhone and snapped a few pictures. That’s when I spotted the container on the other side of the desk. The lid was askew, showing the lip of a plastic liner. I left the broken glass to peer inside the box. I inhaled sharply. The box was full of clean, dried cherry pits—just like the ones found at the crime scene.

“Hey, Whit,” Tay called from the kitchen as I was snapping a few more pictures of the cherry pits. “You’re gonna want to take a look at this!”

I ran from the office, my heart racing with a painful, excited fear, and found Tay in the break room. She was staring into a garbage can. “What’s up?” I asked.

“You said one cherry pit isn’t enough to kill a man. How about a few hundred?”

“What?” I ran over to the garbage can. Scattered among the remains of food wrappers, water bottles, and a brown banana peel were a whole lot of what looked to be pulverized cherry pits. They looked damp, as if they’d been soaking for a while in some kind of liquid. Without thinking I reached in and scooped out a handful. Tay looked disgusted. It was disgusting. But I’d learned, in the few short hours since donning the hat of an amateur sleuth, that sometimes detective work required one to do disgusting things, like visiting a morgue or sift through break room garbage. I narrowed my eyes at her and sniffed the cherry pits. I was hit with the distinctive smell of rum.

“They’ve been soaked in rum,” I said, dropping the pulverized pits back into the garbage.

“Nice work, Sherlock, but I can smell that from here—rum and rotting banana peel. You didn’t actually need to dive in there to figure it out, but I’m kinda impressed you did.”

“I forgot that you’re a rum aficionado.”

“I’ve told you thousands of times, every good weekend is fueled by rum.”

“Well … not every good weekend. Not for Jeb. That’s got to be the source of the poison.”

Tay twisted her lips in a troubled expression. “I had a hunch something was up when I found a blender in the dishwasher.”

“A blender?” I was impressed that the sight of a blender had caused her to open the lid on the garbage can.

Then Tay added, “Well, not just a blender. Among all the plates and coffee mugs, I found a strainer and funnel. I thought it a bit odd. And it’s just our luck that whoever did this ran the dishwasher. Everything’s spotless. Not a fingerprint left behind.”

Abandoning the garbage can, I went to the dishwasher to investigate. I pulled out the lower rack and took a picture of the blender among the plates. I did the same with the top rack where the funnel and strainer were. I then looked in the bottom of the dishwasher by the drain, pulled out the collection screen, and found what I was looking for: a few granular pieces of pulverized cherry pit. “As if we needed it, here’s further evidence. Who’d be brazen enough to grind the cherry pits right here in the processing shed?”

“What I want to know,” Tay said, “is where they got all those pits in the first place? I’ve checked all these shelves. There’s a few bags of dried cherries, cherry granola, herbal cherry blossom tea, and a ton of coffee. The fridge is stocked with water, soda, and a few abandoned lunches.”

“From a box in Jeb’s office,” I told her. “I found one full of clean, dried cherry pits just like the ones in the orchard.” My phone buzzed then. Hannah had sent me a text. The orchard tour had left the lighthouse. I looked back at Tay. “I have no idea why he’d have a box of pits, but I’m sure whoever did this got the pits from that box, ground them up, soaked them in rum, and somehow got Jeb to drink it.” I then remembered the open can of Coke sitting on Jeb’s desk.

We both ran back to the office. Tay swore when she saw the broken glass on the floor. I sniffed at the can of Coke on the desk. It was half full and, as far as I could tell, only contained Coke. That’s when Tay opened a desk drawer.

“Bingo!” she cried. “A bottle of rum, and I’ll lay odds it’s been tampered with.”

“Don’t touch it,” I warned, and snapped another picture. “Jack told me that murder is usually a personal crime. He might be right. Whoever did this knew Jeb’s habits. They knew he was keeping dried cherry pits in his office, and they knew he liked to have a drink after work. Who knew Jeb was a rum and Coke kind of guy?”

“What are you doing?” Tay asked.

“Sending Jack a text. Although he’s forbidden me to snoop around, he did ask me to let him know if I came across anything suspicious. We just found the actual murder weapon. I have to let him know.”

“Wait!” Tay warned. “Don’t send it yet.” She was biting her lip, looking extremely troubled. “You’re not going to like this. I wasn’t going to tell you either—not until you said that whoever did this knew Jeb’s habits. I found the base of that blender in one of the cupboards, Whit. Whoever owned it had a label maker, and they put their name on it. According to the label, that blender belongs to Jenny Lind.”

“Grandma Jenn? That’s ridiculous. Why would she leave it here? And why would she know anything about Jeb’s habits?”

“You don’t know?” Tay cried. Seeing that I didn’t, she added, “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but if anyone knew Jeb’s habits, it would be your grandma. They’ve been engaged in a torrid affair for the last two years. I even stumbled upon them one night. They were skinny dipping in the lake near Jenn’s beach. And let me tell you—”

“Nope,” I said, cutting her off right there. I didn’t need to hear any more. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Probably because it’s none of my business. They’ve been friends for years, but they were keeping the affair secret. Maybe Jeb was two-timing her and she found out.”

It was then I remembered the look on Gran’s face before we’d left for the orchard. Had it been remorse? Guilt? Whatever it was, I felt even more sure that she knew something she wasn’t letting on. Tay was right—I needed to get to Grandma Jenn before Jack did. I deleted the text message.

“Do you hear that?” Tay asked. It was the sound of drunken voices raised in bawdy song. Tate was leading them. “The orchard tour. We need to move fast.”