A Tough Nut to Kill (Nut House Mystery Series) (4 page)

I cleared my throat and bit at my bottom lip. I’d much rather go on talking about Daddy, but I had this Uncle Amos story to tell.

“Somebody came in the store while I was there this morning, Mama.”

“Let me guess. Your uncle Amos. I’ve been expecting something ever since I heard he was back in Riverville, but if he bothers Miss Amelia . . . Why, I swear I’m taking a shotgun and going over to Conway’s myself. Why’d Harry hire him in the first place? Thought he was a friend of ours. Now he’s given that miserable . . . well, you know what I’d call him if I wasn’t a lady . . . giving him a job right next door, like he did . . .”

She blustered on awhile then stopped, smiling a chastened smile. “Guess you better tell me what happened before I explode in a million pieces and mess up my office.”

“He asked to see you.”

“What for?”

“Didn’t say. Just that he’s got something for you and wanted to warn you. Don’t know what about. Probably some crazy idea he got in his head.”

“Maybe he’s suing me. That’s ’bout what I’d expect from the man. Jake, like his daddy before him, kept hopin’ Amos would straighten up, get off the booze, and become a man. Then your daddy was dead and Amos worse than ever. Best thing that ever happened was Amos leavin’ town the way he did. Too bad he came back at all. I don’t wish harm to nobody on God’s green earth, but I’d like Amos to just go away and stay gone for the rest of his life.”

“Hunter Austen came on in,” I continued. “He saw Uncle Amos and was worried about us. I don’t like to bring up bad memories, but you know Hunter was there the night of Daddy’s funeral. He saw for himself what Uncle Amos gets like when he’s drinking.”

“Hunter can’t always be around to save us,” she sighed. “Good man. Still interested in you, if you ever get around to thinking about settling down someday.”

I frowned hard at Mama. Sore subject. Me heading straight for spinsterhood. Been going on since I moved into the Nut House apartment. “I’ve got my work right now, Mama. Until I’m sure I’m doing the right thing . . . well, Hunter, or any other man, can just stay away. And I wish you’d stop pushing . . .”

Mama threw her hands in the air. “Don’t go flying off like a mad crow. Just saying . . .” She thought awhile. “So what was it he wanted to give me?”

“Don’t know. Hunter drove him out before it got settled. I don’t think he’d give whatever it was to anybody but you. Hunter thought ‘subpoena.’ Maybe not. Uncle Amos was kind of quiet this time. Didn’t seem mad at us. I don’t think he was drinking either. Maybe bein’ gone the way he has been, he coulda changed.”

“Yeah, Lindy. Like a leopard growing stripes. You don’t want to stand around holdin’ your breath, waiting for that to happen. Doubt he’s changed one whit. He’s been stayin’ right next door there, with Harry and Chastity, had plenty of time to call me, if that’s what he wanted. Didn’t say nothing to nobody about wanting to see me and make up for all those bad times. Just nothing—couple weeks now.” She shook her head.

“But, Mama, you and Daddy already paid him plenty. He still gets money on our gross profits. Why’s he think he deserves more?”

“You tell me. Could be part of this Blanchard thing we all buy into. You know, pride in what Jake’s daddy and his daddy’s daddy, before him, accomplished here. How much our name means in Riverville. Heck, how much the name means in all of Texas, if it comes to that. Kind of hard to let go of, I suppose. You know, the family pride part.”

“You gotta earn that pride. That’s what Daddy always told me. You gotta earn it by working the ranch, by standing up for the rest of the family. Uncle Amos never did any of that.”

“Woulda just killed Jake, all this wrangling with his brother. Looks like Amos figures on being a problem to us for as long as he lives.”

She looked down at her callused hands. “We all work so hard, Lindy. Just a darn shame. Justin heard he was back and went ballistic on me.”

No sense going there, I warned myself. “There’s something else I gotta talk to you about . . .” I said it tentatively, but it was eating at me.

Miss Emma ran a hand through her thick, short hair. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

“Well, Meemaw said not to tell you, but I’m worried. Treenie told Meemaw somebody in town’s spreading stories about her. And then Ethelred was there, saying people are talking, saying she’s getting too old to run the Nut House.”

“Somebody’s saying that about Miss Amelia! Nonsense. Not a person in Riverville who doesn’t just love Mama.”

“Somebody doesn’t. Saying she’s got Alzheimer’s or some such thing. Now there are whispers going around town that her baked goods don’t taste right.”

“You see anybody not buying her pies? Sales are better than ever. Who’d say such a thing? Can’t imagine a soul . . .” She thought a minute. “Well, Miss Ethelred, that woman’s jealous as can be of Mama. Thinks she’s just as good a baker. Wouldn’t put it past her to spread that story around herself.”

“I was wondering if Uncle Amos might be doing it. Seems it just got started, maybe since he came back. Like him, to try to hurt all of us.”

“Amos can be mean as a rattlesnake, but he’s not stupid. We’re still his only source of income. Ruin us, he ruins himself.”

“Then who?”

“One of those evil gossips we’ve got here in town. Who knows who’d take pleasure in hurting us? I’ll just bet if we ignore the whole thing, it’ll go away.” Mama yawned. “Don’t know why it pours when it rains,” she said. “I’m about worn out.”

“I hate to do this . . .” I gave her one of my “sorry” looks again.

“Lord love a duck, Lindy. How much do you expect me to take on in one day?”

“Just something . . .”

“Well, go ahead.”

“I went back to my apartment this afternoon to get a newspaper article I left there. About a new kind of tree in California. Nuts filled with nutrition. No diseases. I’m thinking of ordering a few, maybe trying a graft on my new cultivars. See what I get.”

“Go on,” she sat back, sighing.

“Somebody was up there in my living room. Things were moved on my desk.”

“You keep yer place locked, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Well, then. Nobody but you was in there. Anyway, I told you, you shoulda stayed right here at the house with everybody else.”

“The Nut House is an old building, Mama. Lots of keys around.” I swept on past the old complaint and skipped my patter about needing privacy.
A place of my own
.

“Look, Lindy. If I were you, I’d just put it down to leaving too fast this morning and messing things up more than usual. You forgot that article, didn’t you? Must’ve been in a hurry.” Miss Emma swiveled her chair around to face her computer screen.

“I don’t think so—” I began.

“So how’s Miss Amelia now?” she interrupted, tired and at the edge of her ability to listen to any more.

Recognizing a dismissal when I heard one, I got up. “I tucked her into bed for a nap. All of this was hard on her.”

“I’ll be up to the house soon to see about supper. Just got a little longer here with your father’s bills. Then I gotta take a look at something . . . can’t put my finger on it but this last bid from the Butcher Brothers seems way too low. Market shouldn’t be going down on the pecans. If they’re gonna be scarce, market should already be heading up.” She frowned and turned back to her computer. “Where you going now?”

“Out to my grove. I’m keeping a close eye on those transplants. I’ve got five still in their pots, might need to be brought back into the greenhouse tonight. I’m not sure enough to leave them out . . .”

“Maybe it’s time you started getting patents on your new stock. I been thinking about it. Some ranchers would look at your work as being worth a lot of money someday. I know . . . I know . . .” She raised her hands to stop my protest. “That’s not what you’re thinking about. I’m just saying, to be on the safe side.”

I wrinkled my nose at her. “I will, Mama. I’ll look into it. Just let me get something I’m sure of before we start talking protecting the work, okay?”

“Up to you.” She turned her chair away and then back. “Go on now. Better get out there and check those saplings of yours. Kiss every one of ’em, Lindy.”

She sighed as she leaned back over Daddy’s ledger book. “If I didn’t still hope for better, I’d say the only grandchildren I’m ever getting out of you will be a bunch of little nut trees.”

• • •

I drove under rows of our beautiful trees just coming into
bud; across acres that had always been my own magic forest. It was my favorite time of year: spring along the Colorado River. As a child I’d loved skipping under the tall trees, listening as they talked to one another when the wind blew, telling myself I could understand them, that they were happy we took care of them, that they loved all the Blanchards—including me.

My happiest memories were here, when my daddy was alive and running the ranch, when Mama wasn’t so harried with work, Miss Amelia not under attack, and when Uncle Amos hadn’t been a threat—kept under control by my daddy, who swore he’d always see to his brother, no matter how far he fell into drinking. “And,” I muttered to myself, despite Mama’s assurances, “when nobody got into my apartment without me knowing it.”

I waved to Martin Sanchez, our ranch foreman, as I drove past the barns and through another grove. He was busy mowing the tall grasses. I didn’t stop to talk. The sound of the huge mower echoed through the grove. He’d have to shut off the motor to hear me, and Martin didn’t like being interrupted while he worked.

I looked around for Justin. Be a good thing to give him a heads-up about Amos coming into the store, but he wasn’t with the other men cleaning out the drainage ditches. With so much needing to be done this time of year, I figured he was somewhere fixing another broken-down machine or repairing fences where the wild hogs were coming in, or maybe he’d run into town for more spray. He could even be in Riverville hunting for spare hands, men who waited to be picked up and carted out into the groves to work.

I drove my favorite stretch of two-track alongside the river. I flipped off the air-conditioning and opened my side window, inhaling the thick, river smell of water and vegetation and damp and cool. The river was down when it should have been up, climbing our high banks, but it was still beautiful; running slow; ripples where it crested over old logs; tiny whirlpools where it got ahead of itself.

I passed two old sheds, not used much anymore except for extra shovels and such, and passed places where the bank had been dug out by the hogs. I’d have to tell Justin. He, like everybody else in rural Texas, was always fighting back the hogs that ran wild, mostly coming up into the groves from along the riverbanks, moving along from places where the land was still wild and vegetation grew to the river’s edge, giving the hogs cover.

At my greenhouse, I parked around back. I loved the words “my greenhouse,” like I was who I had wanted to be since grad school, the person my professors there told me I could be: a helper to all pecan ranchers, to my own family, saving millions that bad years took, and even better, saving the terrible heartache brought to families just like ours.

That was what got me into bioengineering in the first place, that awful year I stood out in the grove beside my daddy, Jake, and watched the blossoms fade. That year the drought during the spring went right on through summer. I told myself back then, when I was still a kid, that I would do something about it. I wasn’t going to be like the other ranchers, who bowed their heads and talked about God’s will. Things were changing in all sectors of farming now. New kinds of trees and plants. If there was a stronger strain of pecan, I knew I would be the one to find it. Just as David Milarch, the Michigan farmer who cloned ancient trees of the world to save them for the future, did. I hoped to promise a better future, too. A sturdier pecan tree that would save Texas ranches from global warming.

And I was getting close, using clones from our own trees. A process called micropropagation. Branch tips harvested and planted in baby food jars with my own vitamin-enriched gel. New jars, new beginnings. Hundreds in the greenhouse, along with two-year-old saplings, and the four-year-old trees I’d already moved outdoors, into my fenced test grove.

Soon I’d be cutting further back on water, to see how the trees fared, maybe take the five-gallon buckets away and depend solely on drip irrigation. Then, at the end, if scab didn’t attack them and no fungus survived, and the new trees could withstand a drought better than the old trees, and the pecans were as good or better—they would go into the regular groves, replacing dead or fallen trees, some that had been around for as long as 150 years.

The test grove was board-fenced with wire below, driven into the ground to protect the new trees from those feral hogs. I’d put a lock on the gate just so lookie-loos—maybe a workman, or his family—didn’t wander in and decide to grab themselves a little pecan tree.

Just getting near my own grove made my heart beat faster. I took a deep breath, taking in the sweetish smell of spring and tree buds and something even sweeter and thicker in the air, then dug down in my shoulder bag for the key.

When I reached out for the lock, it hung sideways, open and dangling from its severed hasp. Somebody had cut the lock, then put it back on as if to fool me.