A Killer Crop Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  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

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Recipes

  Praise for the Orchard Mystery Series

  “Meg is a smart, savvy woman who’s working hard to fit into her new community—just the kind of protagonist I look for in today’s traditional mystery. I look forward to more trips to Granford, Massachusetts!”

  —Meritorious Mysteries

  “An enjoyable and well-written book with some excellent apple recipes at the end.”

  —The Cozy Library

  “A wonderful slice of life in a small town . . . The mystery is intelligent and has an interesting twist . . . Rotten to the Core is a fun, quick read with an enjoyable heroine, an interesting hook, and some yummy recipes at the end.”

  —The Mystery Reader (4 stars)

  “Full of rich description, historical context, and mystery.”

  —Romance Readers Connection

  “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 likable protagonist and her future in Granford hopefully guarantees some further titles in this delightful new series.”

  —Gumshoe Review

  “Sheila Connolly’s One Bad Apple is an example of everything that is right with the cozy mystery. Her book has a likable heroine, an attractive small-town setting, a slimy victim, and fascinating side elements . . . There’s depth to the characters in this book that isn’t always found in crime fiction . . . Sheila Connolly has written a winner for cozy mystery fans.”

  —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

  “Meg Corey is a fresh and appealing sleuth with a bushelful of entertaining problems. One Bad Apple is one crisp, delicious read.”

  —Claudia Bishop, bestselling author of the Inn at Hemlock Falls Mysteries

  “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. And anybody who’s ever tended a septic system is going to empathize with amateur detective Meg Corey.”

  —JoAnna Carl, author of the Chocoholic Mysteries

  “One Bad Apple is 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

  Apple Orchard Mysteries

  ONE BAD APPLE

  ROTTEN TO THE CORE

  RED DELICIOUS DEATH

  A KILLER CROP

  Museum Mysteries

  FUNDRAISING THE DEAD

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  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.

  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.

  A KILLER CROP

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

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market paperback edition / December 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Sheila Connolly.

  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 : 978-1-101-44552-5

  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

  Acknowledgments

  The poet Emily Dickinson’s shadow still hovers over Amherst, Massachusetts, more than a century after her death, and it’s hard to open a magazine or newspaper these days without finding a reference to her. I am not immune to her lasting appeal, and since I’m writing about that part of Massachusetts, I thought it right to include her in this book. Many of the details of her local family connections are based on fact, which is why Meg and her mother, Elizabeth, are drawn into Emily’s story. I may as well confess: I can lay claim to being Emily’s fifth cousin, five times removed—a distant connection, but I’m happy to have discovered it.

  As always, I want to thank my agent, Jessica Faust of BookEnds, for making this series possible, and my editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, who always manages to excavate the essential story from my piles of words.

  Simon Worrall’s compelling book, The Poet and the Murderer, sheds light on the lengths to which some people
will go to possess an original work by Dickinson. Alfred Habegger’s richly detailed biography of the poet, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, which I read years ago, provides much detail about Emily’s life, as well as a helpful family tree. And I treasure a copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, which I purchased in the bookstore up the street from the former Dickinson home.

  And since the reproduction of Emily’s works is tightly controlled, the final words in the book are my daughter’s tribute to the poet. She accompanied me on numerous excursions to Amherst that always managed to include one of the delightful restaurants there, which I’ve included in the book.

  1

  Meg Corey set a cup of coffee in front of her mother and sat down across the kitchen table. “Mother, what are you doing here?”

  The morning light that flooded through the east-facing windows of the kitchen was not kind to Elizabeth Corey, highlighting the faint glints of silver in her carefully cut hair, the slight crepiness gathered at the corners of her eyes. She rotated the handle of the cup in its saucer, avoiding her daughter’s eyes. “Meg, dear, why shouldn’t I be here? Isn’t it about time that I visited you and saw what you were doing with our house?”

  She was stalling, Meg could tell. “Of course you should see it—although except for the kitchen floor, most of what I’ve done has been boring structural stuff and you can’t even see it. I would have invited you sooner, but the place has been such a mess, and I’ve been so busy, with renovations and the orchard ...” Meg stopped herself: why was she on the defensive? It was her mother who had shown up the night before without warning. Yesterday, Meg had been at the grand opening of Gran’s, the new Granford restaurant, which had served an extraordinary meal for the group of farmers of Granford who had provided all the locally grown materials. It had been an unqualified success for owner-chefs Nicky and Brian Czarnecki, and Meg was looking forward to many more delightful meals in the converted house on the town green. Seth Chapin had brought her home after dark, and she’d been anticipating . . . well, some quality time alone with Seth, as a happy conclusion to a wonderful evening. Instead they had found Elizabeth sitting on Meg’s front steps in the dark, waiting for her. That was totally unlike her mother, who usually planned things down to the last detail. “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

  “I wanted to surprise you. I love what you’ve done with the floor—is that the original planking?”

  Another effort to divert the conversation. What was going on?

  Meg sighed. Seth had seen them into the house and disappeared discreetly, and Meg’s mother hadn’t even asked who he was. But for that matter, neither one of them had asked many questions. It had been late, and both Meg and Elizabeth were tired. Luckily Bree Stewart, Meg’s housemate, was off spending the night with her boyfriend, Michael, so Meg didn’t need to worry about middle-of-the-night introductions. Meg had led her mother upstairs to the bedroom opposite hers in the front of the house, turning on lights as she went, and then scrounged up her one pair of spare sheets for the bed. She had pointed her mother toward the lone bathroom and retreated to her bedroom, shutting the door firmly. Morning would be time enough for questions—and some answers.

  Now it was morning, and Elizabeth Corey was no more forthcoming than she had been the night before. Her mother had never “just dropped in” in her life, so why had she made an exception now? There had to be a story here.

  “What would you like for breakfast?” Meg tried to remember what she had on hand. Ever since the apple harvest had begun a week earlier, she’d had little time for even basic things like grocery shopping. She barely got her laundry done, usually close to midnight, and then only because she needed clean jeans to wear in the orchard. She hadn’t had her hair cut in weeks—or was it months?

  “Oh, a little orange juice, if you can manage it. Maybe an English muffin?”

  Meg opened her refrigerator and checked. No orange juice. “How about cider? It’s fresh—I think it was pressed last week.” The first of the season, made from some of the apples that had been damaged in a recent hailstorm nearby—though not in Granford, thank goodness. Good, there was a package of muffins hiding in the back corner, along with the remains of her last stick of butter.

  “That’s fine, dear,” Elizabeth replied. “At least you have decent coffee. You would not believe the swill that some places serve these days. So, you seem to have settled in nicely. How long has it been now?”

  “Close to nine months, Mother. I arrived in January. You might have warned me that winter is a lousy time of year around here.”

  “I don’t think I ever saw this place in winter. I’m not sure how many times I saw it at all. There was that one trip we made together—remember that, dear?”

  “What I remember is two old ladies, and that I was bored to death. Didn’t you tell me then that you’d visited here as a child yourself?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “I did, several times.” A brief smile flashed across her face. “To tell the truth, I think Lula and Nettie seemed ancient to me even then. That old New England blood, you know. Which we share, you and I.”

  “You didn’t mention the orchard.”

  “I didn’t remember it. I don’t suppose I was ever here at the right time of year. You’re managing it now?”

  “I’m trying, with a lot of help. Speaking of which, Bree should be back any minute. That’s Brionna Stewart, my orchard manager. She lives here, too.”

  “Oh, really?” Elizabeth raised one eyebrow.

  “I can’t pay her much, so I threw in a place to stay. And we kind of share cooking.”

  Meg’s cat, Lolly, chose that moment to stroll in. She looked at her still-empty food dish on the floor, then wandered over to Elizabeth’s feet to sniff her shoes. Meg watched with inward amusement as Elizabeth tucked her feet under her chair.

  “I didn’t know you had a cat,” she said. “And are those your goats in that field over there?”

  Meg sat down. “Yes, they are. Dorcas and Isabel. They were a gift, sort of.”

  “Goats!” Her mother shook her head.

  Meg ignored her and went on, “Lolly here kind of adopted me a couple of months ago. I gather she had been abandoned by her previous owners and made her way to my house. Why didn’t we ever have pets when I was growing up?”

  “Your father didn’t like animals.”

  “Oh, right.” Meg got up as two muffin halves popped up from the toaster on the counter. “I thought you told me it was allergies.” Whose? Her mother’s? Her father’s? “Where is Daddy, by the way?”

  Elizabeth sat up straighter in her chair. “Your father went sailing. Or boating—I’m not sure what the correct term is. Mainly he’s indulging in a midlife fantasy. He and some of his cronies are sailing down the Intracoastal Waterway—one of them has a yacht or something that he wanted to take to Florida. They left from New Jersey last Thursday.”

  Meg put the muffin on a plate and set it in front of her mother, then pushed the butter toward her, along with a butter knife. “And you weren’t invited?”

  “Of course not. This is just an excuse for them to drink too much and skip bathing. Why is it men never seem to outgrow the need for personal disorder?”

  Meg refused to take up that challenge. “So you decided to come up here instead. If you’d let me know sooner, we could have planned some things to do.” Even as she said it, though, Meg wondered if her mother had known that she’d probably have said no to a visit. Meg would have said no: this was her first apple harvest, possibly the busiest time of her orchard year, and no way did she have any time to take off and have ladies’ lunches with her mother, or go shopping or leaf-peeping. If her mother had taken a minute to think, she should have realized that. “So you drove up last night?”

  “No, I actually came up a couple of days ago.” Meg’s mother again evaded her eyes.

  Something was not ringing true. Elizabeth had been in the neighborhood for a couple of days without ge
tting in touch with her daughter? Meg was about to ask why when Bree burst into the kitchen through the back door. “Hi, Meg. We’ve got to . . . Oh, sorry—I didn’t know you had company.”

  “Bree, this is my mother, Elizabeth Corey. She arrived last night, and Seth and I found her here after we came back after dinner. She was just about to tell me what she’s doing here.”

  Bree extended a hand. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Corey. Meg didn’t tell me you were planning to visit.”

  “That’s because I didn’t know,” Meg said tartly. “Bree, you were about to say something?”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Raynard says the McIntoshes are ready for picking, and I agree. We may have to juggle some of the boxes in the holding chamber, because the Macs hold better and longer than what you’ve got in there now. And isn’t it time to make another delivery to the markets?”

  Meg sighed. “Yes, it is. I know, don’t lecture me—I got kind of caught up in the restaurant opening this past week. What did you think of it, by the way?”

  Bree slid an English muffin into the toaster and helped herself to a mug of coffee. “I thought it went great. The food was terrific, and everybody looked like they were having a good time. Or maybe better than that—they looked like they felt comfortable, at home with the place. Betcha there wasn’t much food left over.”

  “Good. Michael enjoyed it, too?” When Bree nodded, Meg went on, “And I know Nicky and Brian were pleased. It’s a great start, and I hope they can build on it. Doing it right once is one thing, but doing it every night is something else.”

  Bree’s muffin popped up and she buttered it and put it on a plate. “I know, and I think they know. Hey, I’m going to grab a quick shower, and then we should head up to the orchard. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Corey.” Bree clattered up the back stairs that led from the rear of the kitchen to her room above.