Bitter Harvest (31 page)

“I’ll be at Seth’s, remember,” Meg dutifully gave her reply.

“Oh, right. Then I’ll see you when I see you. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Bree said, sounding surprisingly natural. “Bye!”

Step one accomplished. Now Meg had to wait a few minutes before heading over to Seth’s to pick up Bree. Seth’s van pulled into the driveway a minute after Bree had left.

“Right on schedule,” Meg said.

“I’ve got some stuff to drop off, and I need to pick up some house plans.” He came close and kissed her, then said in a low voice, “So what’s your excuse for going out now?”

“Liquor store?” she replied in the same tone.

“Perfect.”

Meg raised her voice. “Shoot! I forgot to pick up a bottle of wine for tonight at your place. You’re busy—why don’t I just run and get some now?”

“Good idea. I’ll see you later at my house, then,” Seth said. In a lower voice he added, “You know, we’re lousy at this.”

“Tell me about it. Do you really think anyone is watching?”

“I don’t know. Go.”

Meg, feeling foolish, went inside to collect her coat and keys. Might as well actually go to the liquor store: while drinking was definitely not on the agenda for tonight, maybe by tomorrow they’d have something to celebrate.

Seth had already vanished inside his shop, turning on more lights than usual, when Meg pulled out of the driveway. The detour to the liquor store took no more than fifteen minutes, and then Meg headed over to Seth’s house to collect Bree. She found her sitting in her car, reading by the car light.

“About time!” Bree said, getting into Meg’s car.

“Seth’s at my house, and we followed our silly script. I had to go to the liquor store to make my story convincing.”

The drive back took no more than two minutes, and when Meg arrived home, she was happy to see that Seth had pulled the van up close to the front doors of the barn and was unloading what looked like large boxes of plumbing fixtures. It would be easy for Bree to slip inside unnoticed. “You ready?” Meg asked her.

“Let’s do it!”

In the lee of the barn, Bree slipped out of the car and headed quickly for the door. Her dark clothing blended well with the night, and the swirling snow camouflaged any movements. If Meg hadn’t been looking, she wouldn’t have noticed anything. Seth came out of the barn, sliding the big doors shut behind him, then slammed shut the van door. He walked over to Meg’s car, and she lowered her window. “See you in a bit,” he said.

“Right. I’ll bring the wine.”

He ducked in for another quick kiss. They were certainly doing their part to convey the impression of an amorous couple looking forward to a romantic night—at Seth’s house. At least no one watching would think they were planning to sneak around in the dark setting a trap.

Meg went inside and tried to look busy as Seth left the driveway, headed for home. Step two accomplished: Bree was in place. Meg fed Lolly and tidied up aimlessly. How many lights should she leave on? If they were supposed to slip back into the house unnoticed, fewer would be better. But she always left some lights on, the evenings she wasn’t home, didn’t she? It was a gesture more symbolic than practical: anybody could open one of her aged windows in about a minute, with no special tools. But it made her feel better to come back to a lighted place. In the end she compromised, leaving on the light over the front door, but not the one in the back; leaving on a bedroom light; and one in the front parlor. She debated briefly about leaving on one over the sink in the kitchen, until she realized that they were supposed to come in through the back, and that light would make that difficult. She gave Lolly one more pat, then headed out into the night.

At Seth’s she came in through the kitchen door. He was waiting. “I guess we’re committed now?” Meg said.

“Unless you want Bree to be really, really annoyed at you, I’d say so. By the way, I filled Art in about our plan, off the record. He can’t approve what amounts to vigilantism, but he’ll come if we need him.”

“Before or after the fact?”

“Look, if we see someone who’s acting suspicious, we call him. We don’t have to try to stop this person, but we do have a legitimate complaint if there’s a prowler. We do not try to do something brave—or stupid. Let Art deal with it.”

“How anticlimactic. So we sit in the dark, waiting for someone to show up, and if we happen to see anyone, then we call the cops. And if we aren’t careful—or lucky—the sneak will be long gone. By the way, where’s Max?”

“What, you think he’d be any help? He’d probably bring the guy a chew toy and want to play. I left him with Mom.”

One less thing to worry about. “Should we go?” Meg asked.

“Might as well. Look, when we get there, we go in through the shed door, right?”

“Yes. I left the light off in the kitchen, so it will be dark.”

They stepped outside into swirling darkness. Meg waited a moment for her eyes to adjust—Seth had turned off the outside lights, as though they had retired for the evening, expecting no additional visitors. The snow blew in her face, and she settled her knit hat more firmly on her head. At least there wasn’t much accumulation yet. She’d walked this path before, but never under these conditions.
Think of your ancestors, Meg!
They must have done this regularly. Did churches hold evening meetings, a century earlier? Did local citizens walk, rather than riding or hitching the horse to a carriage? Did they use lanterns, or would it have been easier to see in the dark, or to trust the horse’s sense of direction?

She stumbled over some unseen clod and Seth caught her arm. “You okay?” he asked.

“Sure. I love wandering around in the dark for questionable reasons. Sounds like the story of my life.”

“We can still call this off. Just pull Bree out of the barn—unless she’s gotten really chummy with the goats.”

“Hey, they’re nice enough, once you get to know them. No, I want to go through with this. Or is this one of those Too-Stupid-to-Live things you read about in bad novels? Should we know better? At least we did try to involve the authorities, instead of just insisting that we could handle it ourselves. Art didn’t say no, did he?”

“Not in so many words. I’m pretty sure he wishes he could do more to help, but he hasn’t got the manpower, and he can’t commit what he does have to something as vague as this.”

“So here we are. How far do you think sound carries, under the circumstances?”

“Not too far, with this snow. Are you worried about it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. We don’t know what direction this person might be coming from. I mean, the road’s kind of obvious.”

“It’s not likely anyone is coming through the meadow. It may be frozen, but the footing’s pretty uneven.”

“I guess that’s good, since that’s one of our blind spots—Bree can’t see out the back of the barn easily. So that leaves the back end of the property—and this way, the direction we’re coming from. Maybe we should shut up?”

“Good idea.”

They trudged on in silence, until Meg could see the lights of her house glowing in the near distance. She stopped for a moment, listening, watching, but she couldn’t hear or see anything. The barn looked dark, so Bree wasn’t reading by flashlight—or if she was, she hid it well. “I guess we’re going in,” Meg whispered. “Should we split up?”

“I’ll go first.” Seth headed toward the house, and Meg hung back for half a minute. His dark-clad figure disappeared quickly, and she felt a moment of panic. It was all but impossible to see anyone, friend or foe, under these conditions. Maybe they should have waited for a better night. But it was too late now. Or was it? They could still call in Bree and just get a good night’s sleep and think about it in the clear light of morning. What had sounded like a good plan in the warmth of her kitchen turned out to be entirely different when Meg was standing in the middle of a snowy field in the dark.

But the first step was to catch up to Seth. Meg started moving again, placing her feet cautiously, and then slipped into the shed. Seth was waiting for her by the door, but she couldn’t read his expression. She reached out and pulled open the storm door, then the inner door, congratulating herself on remembering to oil the hinges. They moved soundlessly, and she led Seth into the dark kitchen. He shut the doors.

Step three accomplished. They were inside the house, and undetected as far as they knew. Now all they had to do was wait.

Meg listened hard but heard nothing out of place. She jumped when there was a sudden thud, quickly explained when Lolly appeared and wound herself around her ankles, pleased by the unexpected company.

“Now what?” she whispered to Seth.

“Are you okay keeping watch for a while, while I get some sleep?”

“I guess. What am I supposed to do? Stay put? Patrol through the rooms?” Meg had an absurd vision of herself crawling from room to room, popping up to peer out a window now and then, most likely with Lolly pacing alongside her.

“Yes.”

Meg sensed rather than saw his smile. “You’re no help.”

“What I meant was, you can stay in one place, but get up and check outside the windows every now and then. It’ll keep your circulation going, if nothing else.”

“Got it. You want to go upstairs?”

“I’m good for now. We can wait together, at least for a while. Let’s hope this person has an early bedtime.”

“Where should we sit?”

“You left the lamp on in the front room.”

“Yes, that’s what I normally do when I’m not here at night. I wanted to stick to my usual pattern, in case somebody really has been watching.”

“I’d say we could sit there, but if we moved around we might throw shadows, which would give us away. How about the dining room?”

“If we can sit on our coats. The floor in there may be historically correct, but it’s not soft.”

“Good thought.”

They stripped off their outer garments, then scrambled their way across the kitchen floor into the dining room, settling themselves with their backs against a wall. For once Meg was glad she wasn’t overburdened with furniture—there was plenty of room to stretch out their legs.

“Is it okay to talk?” Meg asked in a whisper.

“Probably. I don’t think anyone outside could hear, even if they were standing under the window. Is there something you want to talk about?”

“Mercy from Pittsford sent me a packet of stuff—I got it today. I’m trying to figure out what it means.”

“How so?”

“Well, the key information comes from an old diary, and there’s stuff in there that could be gossip, or could be fact—it’s hard to say now. But the gist of it is that after all the Lampson children and then the parents died, the town elders thought Violet would be better off somewhere else. I may be reading too much into it, but I wonder if they thought she had something to do with the deaths? Or maybe knew something she wasn’t supposed to?”

“Like what?” Seth asked.

“I haven’t thought this through, so I’m kind of guessing here. Violet was the eldest child, but she never knew her own father. Mom remarried quickly and started having more kids, and the last one—or two, actually, since they were twins—were born in 1791, when Violet was only five. And all the children died, the last one in 1794. And then the parents died.”

“Meg, I think it’s great you’ve memorized all this information, but what’s the point?”

“The diary writer claimed that Unity was driven to kill her husband, and then she killed herself. The language the town used was kind of vague, but implied a scandal, bad enough to think that removing Violet from the only home she’d ever known was a good idea. It fits. And there’s more. The writer of the diary said all the children were ‘sickly.’ Do you think the mother had something to do with it?”

“Like a case of Munchausen’s? She liked having the kids, but not raising them?”

“I wondered about that. Did that kind of thing happen back then? But Violet lived. What if Mom thought the weakness in the other kids was her husband’s fault? She’d borne one healthy child by her first husband, and the evidence was right there in front of them, but all the offspring of the second died early. Wait! The line on the sampler, remember? The Bible quote: ‘All the increase of thy house shall be cut down in the flower of their age.’ Violet was describing her family.”

Seth yawned. “If you say so. But things like that happened back then, for lots of reasons. What’s your point?”

“Where’s the scandal, then, if everybody died a natural death? What I think happened is that after the last child died, Unity just lost it. I mean, what mother wouldn’t, after watching four of her children die in the space of four years? It’s like a dose of postpartum
plus
postmortem depression, and it was too much for her. Poor Unity, driven mad with grief, kills her husband, and then herself—while Violet watches the whole process. And the town thought Violet would be better off far away from Pittsford, and sent her here. Unity would have known that Violet would be cared for, by one or another of her relatives.”