A Late Frost Read online

  Praise for the New York Times Bestselling Orchard Mysteries

  “Fun and entertaining . . . [A] well-written mystery with a wonderful cast of characters and a pleasant setting . . . Sheila Connolly’s writing style brings the reader into the sights, scents, and sounds of a small town. You can almost smell the apples as they are picked off the tree. She draws the reader in and does not let go.”

  —Open Book Society

  “Meg’s determination to run an orchard on her own without any experience makes her an admirable character, as she faces each new challenge with good humor and a smidgeon of exasperation. A reliable cast of characters support Meg and make this a strong series that continues its streak of compelling plots.”

  —Kings River Life Magazine

  “Sheila Connolly continues to include fascinating facts about apples and orchards within her stories . . . Not only will you get hooked on the mystery, but you will be racing to the kitchen to bake an apple treat!”

  —Cozy Mystery Book Reviews

  “Fans will enjoy the heroine taking a bite out of crime in this fun regional cozy.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  “Really well written . . . I was constantly kept guessing. This series is in its stride, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next book in this series.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “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.”

  —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.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “Meg Corey is a very likable protagonist . . . [A] delightful new series.”

  —Gumshoe Review

  “An example of everything that is right with the cozy mystery . . . [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.”

  —RT Book Reviews (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 crisp, delicious read.”

  —Claudia Bishop, bestselling author of the Hemlock Falls Mysteries

  “[A] delightful look at small-town New England, with an intriguing puzzle thrown in.”

  —JoAnna Carl, national bestselling author of the Chocoholic Mysteries

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Sheila Connolly

  Orchard Mysteries

  ONE BAD APPLE

  ROTTEN TO THE CORE

  RED DELICIOUS DEATH

  A KILLER CROP

  BITTER HARVEST

  SOUR APPLES

  GOLDEN MALICIOUS

  PICKED TO DIE

  A GALA EVENT

  SEEDS OF DECEPTION

  A LATE FROST

  Museum Mysteries

  FUNDRAISING THE DEAD

  LET’S PLAY DEAD

  FIRE ENGINE DEAD

  MONUMENT TO THE DEAD

  RAZING THE DEAD

  PRIVY TO THE DEAD

  DEAD END STREET

  County Cork Mysteries

  BURIED IN A BOG

  SCANDAL IN SKIBBEREEN

  AN EARLY WAKE

  A TURN FOR THE BAD

  Specials

  DEAD LETTERS

  AN OPEN BOOK

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Sheila Connolly

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the B colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698165663

  First Edition: November 2017

  Cover art © MaryAnn Lasher

  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.

  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.

  Version_1

  To all the small farmers who believe in fresh healthy food grown locally, and who are inspiring a new generation of farmers’ markets in towns all over New England and beyond.

  Acknowledgments

  After a honeymoon (and a murder) in New Jersey, Meg and Seth Chapin are back in Granford trying to figure out what comes next. Meg’s longtime manager has taken off for an internship in Australia, so she’s training a new person, recommended by her friend and ally Christopher—who is now courting Seth’s mother, Lydia. Life goes on in the small New England town—and so does death.

  Granford is based on a real town in western Massachusetts, and that moves on too. Since I started this series, they’ve added a wonderful new library, as well as a new police station. The town’s offices are also hunting for new space. But the heart of the town remains the same. I thought the Yankee citizens of the town deserved some fun before farming season began again, so I gave them a new town festival, just when everyone is getting cabin fever.

  I want to thank my editor, Tom Colgan at Berkley, and his able assistants for shepherding this series for so long, through a lot of turmoil in the publishing world. I also want to thank my agent, Jessica Faust of BookEnds, who has nudged and prodded this series all along the way. And as always, the support and professional insights provided by Sisters in Crime (and my local chapter, New England Sisters in Crime), the amazing SinC Guppies, and Mystery Writers of America have been essential. It is an ongoing pleasure to be part of the writers’ community, which provides generous support and encouragement to all writers.

  Contents

  Praise for the Orchard Mysteries

  Berkley Prime Crime Titles by Sheila Connolly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

&nb
sp; 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

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Recipes

  About the Author

  1

  “Did we celebrate Christmas this year?” Meg Corey Chapin asked her still-newish husband, Seth.

  He turned from the stove in the kitchen, holding up a coffeepot. “More?”

  “Please!” Meg told him.

  Seth refilled her cup, topped off his, and sat down across from her at the kitchen table. His dog, Max, a solidly built Golden Retriever, laid a head on his foot and resumed his nap. “Christmas . . . yes, I believe we did. I seem to remember there was a tree, and boxes with paper and ribbons on them, and family members kept popping in. Why are you asking now?”

  “Because it all seems like a blur. After the honeymoon, which wasn’t exactly normal or typical—not that I’m complaining, and it wasn’t our fault that we got stuck solving a murder—we came back and Bree told us she was taking another job and leaving in two weeks, and somehow I haven’t gotten things together since. Thank goodness there’s nothing that absolutely needs to be done right now in the orchard.”

  “It’s too bad Bree had to leave,” Seth agreed.

  Bree had been Meg’s orchard manager since she’d first arrived in Granford to find she owned an apple orchard and might actually need to make an income from it. When they’d first met, Bree had recently graduated from UMass in nearby Amherst, but she was young, untested, female, and born to Jamaican parents, any of which could have been an impediment to finding a job in agriculture. But she’d come highly recommended by a respected professor at UMass, Christopher Ramsdell, born in Australia, and Meg knew she needed someone to manage the orchard, since she was clueless about it, so she’d agreed to hire Bree. Christopher had been using the orchard as a sort of living demonstration for his students, so he knew it well. Meg had hoped that he had transferred most of that information to Bree, and it turned out that he had.

  Meg couldn’t afford to pay Bree much. She had thrown in free housing to sweeten the deal, so since her arrival Bree had been living in the Colonial house Meg had acquired along with the orchard. She’d proved to be a good roommate: she had kept to herself, done her share of the cooking and cleaning, and been invaluable to Meg in getting to know her orchard and learning what trees she had and how to harvest, store, and sell the apples. Bree’s Achilles’ heel was keeping financial records for the orchard, although she was good at tracking what had been done with which trees and what needed to be done from year to year. But Meg could more than compensate on the financial side since most of her professional experience had come from years of working in a Boston bank. They’d made a good team, even after Seth had started spending more and more time at the house, until they had finally married in December, almost two years after Meg had moved to Granford.

  And then Bree had left for an internship in Australia, with Meg’s blessing. She wanted Bree to succeed and be happy, but it had left her high and dry. Even after two years, there was still a lot she didn’t know about growing apples.

  “Tell me about it,” Meg told Seth. “But Christopher said he had a good candidate to replace her.”

  “You think she’ll come back here?”

  “I really don’t know. Selfishly I’d like that, but I want her to do well, so I can’t exactly stand in her way. We’ll have to see how the new person works out.”

  “You have anything major on your calendar?” Seth asked.

  “Not until we need to prune, and that’s not urgent—yet. You?”

  “A few small clean-up projects, and I suppose I should start drumming up some new business for when the weather warms up.”

  “You like the old-house projects better?” Meg asked. Seth had been a plumber, running what had been his father’s small company, when they’d first met, but his heart lay in house renovation and restoration, mainly for the older buildings in the area, and there were plenty of those.

  “Better than what?” he replied. “There aren’t a lot of major projects coming down the pike. Well, the town is still wrestling with what to do with the old library, now that the new one is open, but if they can’t decide what that building should be, they can’t exactly advertise for architects, much less contractors. And there might be a conflict of interest, since I’m a town selectman. You and I both know I’d give them a fair estimate, but we don’t want anybody to challenge the process. I’m okay with that.”

  “And that’s the only major project? That suits your particular skills, that is?”

  “For now. Most people wait until winter’s over to see what work their homes need, so I’m not worried. Besides, you can support me, right?”

  “In your dreams! But we’ll always have apples to eat. I can plant a garden, and maybe you can trap a muskrat or two in the swamp.”

  “There aren’t a lot of muskrats in Massachusetts, and I think you need a permit to trap them. You want to make a fur coat? I’m not about to shoot anything. How do you feel about eating frogs?”

  “I’ve tried them once, I think. Kinda like chicken? But not a lot of meat on them.” Meg took another sip of her coffee. “So, the bottom line is, there’s nothing either one of us has to do today?”

  “Looks like it. You have any ideas?”

  “I am at a total loss. I don’t know what to do with spare time anymore. And I refuse to look at spreadsheets, though I know taxes are looming. Even if I was a financial professional.”

  “We should discuss our shared finances at some point, you know,” Seth said.

  “My head knows it, but right now I don’t wanna. Very adult of me, isn’t it?”

  “We could schedule a time. You know, we’ve got two unrelated businesses to consider, both of which are sole proprietorships, and the details are complicated.”

  “Seth, my love, you are depressing me. You think I don’t know that? Let me ask you this: do we have money in the bank right now, after all the wedding and honeymoon hoo-hah?”

  “So that was hoo-hah? Live and learn. Yes, we have some money, and we can cover our bills. But we may never be able to retire.”

  “That is the farthest thing from my mind at the moment.”

  Their banter was interrupted by an insistent banging on the front door. “What time is it?” Meg asked. “That much noise this early is seldom good news. And nobody who knows us uses that door.”

  “So you want me to go, right?” Seth said, smiling.

  “If you will, please, sir. I’ve got your back.”

  Seth stood up and headed through the dining room and the living room to the front door. Meg didn’t move. Please, let it not be a crisis. They’d had more than their share in recent months. She heard the creak of the door opening, and the rumble of male voices. All right, their unexpected caller was male. Salesman? State trooper? Religious fanatic? She couldn’t begin to guess. Luckily Seth returned quickly, followed by a twentysomething guy wearing well-worn clothes and a heavy, shapeless coat. He was shorter than Seth—maybe about her height? He could use a haircut, but at least he didn’t have one of the scruffy beards that seemed to be popular among his age group.

  “Meg, this is Larry Bennett. He says Christopher sent him.”

&nb
sp; “Hey, hi,” the guy said. “Sorry—Christopher said he’d meet me here so we could do the introduction thing. He told me you needed an orchard manager?”

  “Ah. Yes, we do,” Meg said. “Please, sit down. You want some coffee?”

  Larry sat. “Yeah, sure. Please,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Seth, can you do the honors with the coffee?” Meg asked. “I’m Meg Corey, uh, Chapin. Sorry, Seth, but I’m still getting used to it.”

  “No problem—I think my ego will survive.” He set a mug of coffee in front of Larry and took a seat next to Meg.

  “We just got married last month,” Meg explained, feeling foolish. “I don’t know how much Christopher has told you, but I’ll give you the short version while we wait. I kind of inherited this place about two years ago, and when I decided to stay I realized I’d have to make a living from the orchard, if possible. But I had no experience, so Christopher suggested I hire Bree—Briona Stewart—who was one of his students. Did he explain all this?”

  “Not a lot. So she’s been working here for two years? Why’s she leaving?”

  “She was offered an internship in Australia, which would be a big plus on her résumé, and I told her she should take it. She left right after New Year’s.”

  “So you need someone to manage the whole thing? What’ve you got?”

  “’Bout fifteen acres of mature trees, and we put in another three acres of new trees last year, mostly heirlooms.”

  “What do you do for storage?”

  “Seth built some refrigerated storage units in the barn when we started, but mostly I sell direct to local markets.”

  “So no big contracts?”

  “No, and I’m not looking for any right now,” Meg said, reflecting that this Larry person wasn’t exactly making nice with his new employer, although he was asking the right questions. A little rough around the social edges?

  Larry turned to Seth. “You—Seth, is it?—you work in the orchard, too?”

  “No, I’m a renovator, but I know plumbing. Separate operation, but I use the building next to the barn as my office space.”