Red Delicious Death Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Recipes

  Praise for

  One Bad Apple

  “Antique apple trees and historic houses—what’s not to like about Sheila Connolly’s One Bad Apple? It’s a delightful look at small town New England, with an intriguing puzzle thrown in.”

  —JoAnna Carl, author of the Chocoholic Mysteries

  “There is a delightful charm to this small town regional cozy . . . Sheila Connolly provides a fascinating whodunit filled with surprises.”

  —The Mystery Gazette

  “A true cozy mystery [with] a strong and feisty heroine, a perplexing murder, a personal dilemma, and a picturesque New England setting . . . Meg Corey is a very likeable protagonist, and her future in Granford hopefully guarantees some further titles in this delightful new series.”

  —Gumshoe Review

  “An example of everything that is right with the cozy mystery . . . Sheila Connolly has written a winner.”

  —Lesa’s Book Critiques

  “A warm, very satisfying read.”

  —Romantic Times (4 stars)

  “The premise and plot are solid, and Meg seems a perfect fit for her role.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A fun start to a promising new mystery series. Thoroughly enjoyable . . . I can’t wait for the next book and a chance to spend more time with Meg and the good people of Granford.”

  —Sammi Carter, author of the Candy Shop Mysteries

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Sheila Connolly

  ONE BAD APPLE

  ROTTEN TO THE CORE

  RED DELICIOUS DEATH

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  RED DELICIOUS DEATH

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / March 2010

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18546-9

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  In honor of

  Alice Waters of Chez Panisse

  and

  Michael Pollan,

  who both changed the way

  I look at food

  Acknowledgments

  As always, this book could not have happened without the combined efforts of my agent, Jacky Sach of BookEnds, and my tireless editor, Shannon Jamieson-Vazquez.

  Getting acquainted with the local foods community has been a pleasure. I owe thanks to the Chefs Collaborative in Boston and several of its members, particularly Justin Melnick, executive chef at Tomasso Trattoria & Enoteca in Southborough, who let me tour his kitchen and who answered my questions about finding and using local products (and thanks to Sister in Crime Gail Clark, who introduced me to his fine restaurant), and Jamie Bissonette, who demonstrated how to reduce a pig to dinner.

  Thanks again to Sisters in Crime and the fabulous Guppies, who provide boundless encouragement, and to my family, who dutifully accompanied me to restaurants near and far and suffered through many excellent meals for the sake of this book.

  Bon appetit!

  1

  “They’re all dead.”

  “What?” Meg Corey dragged her gaze from the orderly rows of apple trees that marched over the hill. Almost all were past bloom now, and some of them had what even a novice farmer like Meg could identify as apples. Small, maybe, but it was a start. She turned her attention to Carl Frederickson, her beekeeper. Until this morning, Meg hadn’t even known she had a beekeeper, but it seemed like every day since she’d inherited the orchard, something—or someone—new she hadn’t known about turned up. “Who’s dead?”

  “The entire hive. See?” Carl held up a wooden frame with what she recognized as honeycomb filling the middle section. Carl was wearing a beekeeper’s outfit, including gloves and headgear. Meg was not, so she decided to stay where she was. But even from a safe distance Meg could see that the wax looked shriveled and discolored.

  “What happened?” Meg asked. Poor Carl sounded like he was about to cry. It was abundantly clear that he loved his bees; when he pulled off his headgear, the look on his face made Meg even more convinced he was devastated.

  Carl had shown up at her door early on this bright June morning. “I’m here to check your hives,” he had announced.

  Meg had had a wild flash of an image of this good-looking
stranger checking her out for a rash. He had the face of an angel, if the angel was middle-aged and had spent a lot of time gazing at the sun, although his wreath of brown curls suggested a younger man. Then she realized he must mean beehives. She had beehives?

  “Um, okay. What does that involve?” she asked.

  Carl could apparently sense her confusion. “You are Meg Corey, right? That’s your orchard up there?” He waved vaguely up the hill beside her house.

  “Yes. But I didn’t realize I had beehives.”

  “You do,” Carl said. “Fifteen. Technically they’re not yours, though—you lease them from me. Christopher Ramsdell had a contract with me, but when we talked about renewing for this year, he said I should ask you about it.”

  “Oh.” She had no idea that one could lease bees. Rent-a-bee? One more thing Meg didn’t know. Luckily, she trusted Christopher Ramsdell, the professor who had been using her orchard as a university research site for years. “If Christopher’s happy with your arrangement, I’m not going to argue. But isn’t the season over?”

  “Just about. But the contract ran through this bloom, and we’d have to renew for next year—if you’re interested. Right now I’m just checking on the hives, to make sure everything’s all right. Haven’t you seen them?”

  She thought for a moment, and was embarrassed to realize she hadn’t been paying attention. “I’m sorry—I’m kind of new at all this. So you figure out how many bees I need, and you come around to make sure they’re happy and healthy?”

  “That’s about it. I can show you the hives now, if you’ve got the time.”

  “Why not?” It was a beautiful day, and Meg hadn’t visited the orchard for, oh, at least three hours. Something might have changed, as it seemed to do all the time. It really was fascinating, watching the bare trees bloom and leaf out, and then seeing apples appear. Meg was looking forward to watching them become a real crop in a few short months. “Lead the way.”

  Carl climbed straight up the hill and headed for the far side of the orchard, toward a wooden box about three feet high, painted white. Meg had noticed it and the others like it scattered through the orchard, but hadn’t given them much thought. Before approaching, Carl pulled on his protective gear.

  “Do I need to wear something like that, too?” Meg asked.

  “No, not unless you’re opening up the hive. You should be fine. This is a second-year hive—it has two tiers, and the frames hang inside the tiers. That’s where the bees build the wax chambers.” He carefully lifted the lid off the box, and then pulled out a vertical frame. A few bees, annoyed, flew away, but otherwise there was little activity. Meg could make out the yellow of the wax, and the deeper gold of what must be honey in a good number of the cells. And, she realized, even from where she stood, she could hear a constant low humming. How had she missed the sound of all those bees?

  “Do you collect the honey?” Meg asked Carl.

  “I do, and I sell it, too—though I can let you have it, if you want, for a fair price.”

  “I’ll think about it. But if you’ve got buyers lined up, that’s okay.”

  “Thanks. But later you might like to watch how I harvest the honey, if you’ve never seen it before.”

  Nope, Meg had never seen a honey harvest. It was only one of a long list of agricultural events she had managed to miss during her previous career as a banker in Boston. She was catching up fast, out of necessity: the orchard she had inherited was supposed to provide her with a steady income, now that the banking job had gone away. “I’d like that. You said I have fifteen hives?”

  Carl carefully replaced the honey-filled frame in the hive, and closed the top again. “Yup. One per acre is the standard. Sometimes we can go with fewer—depends on what else is around you, what other pollinators you’ve got.” He led the way to the next box, some fifty feet away.

  As they approached, Meg could read the change in Carl’s body language. If he’d been a cat, his ears would have pricked up. Then she noticed the silence—this time there was no hum coming from the hive. And when Carl lifted off the lid, nothing moved.

  He stared sadly into the silent hive. “They were fine just a couple of weeks ago.”

  “So we got through pollination all right?”

  “I think so. I hope so. Listen, this really isn’t your problem. The contract says you get fifteen healthy hives, and if some of these have crashed, I’ll need to replace them. But it’s getting harder and harder to find healthy hives, and it takes a while to start up new ones.”

  “What do you mean, it’s getting harder? What’s happening to the bees?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows what’s killing them off, not even the guys over at the university. Best guess, it’s a virus or something that’s been passed around from country to country, but we don’t know how it spreads from hive to hive, why it takes some and not others. And without knowing that, we don’t know how to stop it either.” He shook his head. “I’ll have to see what I’ve got to replace this hive for you. Sorry, Meg.”

  “Hey, don’t apologize—it’s not your fault, is it?” Meg made a mental note to ask Christopher or Bree Stewart, her new orchard manager, about this whole bee death phenomenon. She’d heard it mentioned in the class she had audited at the university this spring, but she hadn’t expected to witness it up close.

  Carl glumly surveyed the rest of the orchard. “No, I guess not. Most people around here have had problems with it. Look, you don’t have to stick around for all of these. I’ll take care of swapping the rest of ’em out.”

  “Thank you, Carl—I’ll let you handle it.”

  Carl sighed. “No problem. Good to meet you, Meg.”

  “Same here,” Meg said. “I hope you find that most of them are all right.”

  “So do I,” Carl said mournfully.

  As she made her way down the hill, Meg could hear her phone ringing through the open windows. It was nice, after the long New England winter and grudging spring, to finally be able to air out the house, let it breathe. The phone had stopped by the time she let herself in the front door, but when she checked her messages, she saw her friend Lauren’s name on the missed call log. Lauren still worked at the bank that had nudged Meg out the prior year, in what seemed to Meg like a different universe. She called Lauren back.

  “Hey, farm girl!” Lauren’s cheerful voice greeted her. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, fine.” Meg wasn’t about to mention the dead bees, which would mean nothing to city girl Lauren. “When are you coming out to see the place? Better hurry, or I’ll make you pick apples for your keep.”

  “Promises, promises. Listen, I called because I’ve got kind of an odd request.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “I know these people—I mean, they’re not exactly friends, but sort of friends of friends, if you know what I mean?” Lauren was apparently in a talkative mood, so Meg tucked the phone under her chin and searched through her refrigerator for something cold to drink as her friend went on. “Anyway, they both graduated from a cooking school in Rhode Island—Providence, I think—and they got married right after, and they’ve been working in Boston for a couple of years and now they want to open a restaurant.”

  “I hope you’ve told them they’re crazy? From everything I’ve heard, it’s not easy, and most restaurants go broke in the first year.” And those were the statistics in a strong economy—who knew what the odds were now? “Do they have money? Or someone backing them?”

  “So they say—apparently one of their daddies is footing the bills. And they claim that they’ve studied the financial side of the business, so they know what they’re getting into.”

  Meg suppressed a snort. Like anybody knew what they were getting into with a new venture—just look at her.

  Lauren was still talking. “They knew they didn’t have a prayer in Boston, between the cost and the competition, so they decided to look at other areas, and they really like the Pioneer Valley—that’s what you call your ne
ck of the woods, right? Did I mention they’re into local foods? Anyway, they’ve done some looking around there, but I think they were kind of shocked by how expensive space was in Amherst and Northampton.”

  Meg settled herself in her chair, and her cat, Lolly, immediately jumped into her lap. Meg rubbed her head idly. “From what I’ve seen, there are a lot of pretty intense foodies there, too, so lots of competition. Well, good luck to them. But why are you calling me?” Meg could sense a request for a favor coming.

  “I’m getting there. I remembered that you lived out there in the country, and I wondered if you had any ideas about a good place in the area to set up a new restaurant.”

  Meg suppressed a laugh. She could count on the fingers of one hand the times she had eaten in a real restaurant since she had moved to western Massachusetts. “Lauren, I’ve been here less than six months, and I don’t know a whole lot about the restaurant scene. But . . .” Meg stopped as an idea sprouted. “What about here in Granford?”

  “What about it? I thought it was a flyspeck of a place.”

  “It’s small, but it’s an easy drive to both Amherst and Northampton, where the foodies lurk, and there’s no competition in town. And I know there are a lot of farmers around, so they’d have suppliers on hand.”

  “Interesting idea. I can run it by them. What kind of sites might be available?”

  “I can’t tell you offhand, but I know a real estate agent in town who’d love to help.” Frances Clark had hoped to sell Meg’s property, and since Meg had decided to stay rather than sell, she felt an obscure obligation to help her would-be real estate agent out. “You want me to call her?”

  “Sure. Of course, the kids will have to see the place, do some homework, but it’s a start.”

  “The kids?”