Hen of the Baskervilles Read online

  “Is he okay?” Vern already had his cell phone to his ear.

  “He has a pulse,” I said. “And it seems steady enough. But he’s unconscious. And his face is pale and sweaty.”

  Vern was repeating my words into the phone, presumably to Debbie Ann, the dispatcher. I sat back on my heels, took out my own cell phone, and called my father. Although theoretically semiretired from active medical practice, Dad had agreed to act as volunteer medical officer for the fair. Once the fair opened, we’d have EMTs and an ambulance on site, but this early in the day—well, Dad was always an early riser. Maybe he was here already. And there was nothing Dad enjoyed better than a nice adrenaline-laden medical emergency first thing in the morning.

  A capable-looking woman knelt down on the man’s other side. She loosened his collar and eased his head into a more comfortable position.

  The man’s wife hadn’t made a sound since he’d collapsed—she just stood there, staring and clutching the chicken. The chicken, though, was making enough noise for both of them, at least until a nearby volunteer in a BACKYARD CHICKEN FARMER t-shirt gently eased the poor bird out of her hands.

  “Debbie Ann’s sending the ambulance,” Vern said. “Let’s call your dad.”

  “I’ve already got him,” I said. “Dad, possible cardiac patient in the chicken tent. Are you here at the—”

  “On my way,” he said. “I was just over in the first-aid tent, getting ready for the day.”

  The capable-looking woman was taking the man’s pulse with one eye on her watch. The doctor’s daughter in me recognized the unmistakable demeanor of a trained medical professional, so I stood back out of her way. It actually wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before Dad bustled in, carrying his deceptively old-fashioned–looking doctor’s bag, which he’d equipped as a fully functional modern first-aid kit. The local EMTs had occasionally been known to borrow supplies and equipment from him. He waved absently at me and hurried over to the fallen man. After a few moments, he glanced up, gave me a quick thumbs-up, and turned back to his patient.

  I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and took Vern aside for a quick word.

  “Evidently Dad thinks he’ll be all right,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Does Randall know about this?” Vern’s cousin Randall Shiffley, in addition to being the mayor of Caerphilly, was the fair’s director.

  “Not yet,” Vern said. “He just took off to meet some reporter at the front gate and give him a tour of the fair. I figured it was better to wait until they’d finished.”

  “Good call,” I said. “But what if he was planning to bring the reporter here to the chicken tent?”

  Vern winced slightly and turned a little pale.

  “Yeah, he probably is planning to,” he said. “He’s that proud of all the rare and unusual chickens people brought. Can you figure out a way to get the word to him? I should stay here and handle the situation. It’d help if we can just keep the reporter away till the ambulance gets here. Once Mr. and Mrs. B are off to the hospital things should quiet down a bit.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “But find someone who can take care of their remaining chicken while they’re gone. Someone they trust.”

  “Can do.”

  “By the way, what is their name? We can’t keep calling them Mr. and Mrs. B.”

  Vern looked chagrined.

  “I didn’t quite catch it,” he said. “And they’re so touchy right now I didn’t like to ask.” He spotted something and his face brightened. “Hallelujah! Here’s the EMTs.”

  I stood aside while the EMTs trotted in. Then I left the tent and pulled out my cell phone. Randall’s phone went to voice mail.

  “Call me as soon as you get this, even if you’re still with the reporter,” I said.

  But I didn’t think it was a good idea to wait until he came back. I decided to look for him.

  I glanced around, wondering where to start. I saw a flurry of activity outside the produce barn—four people popped out, then two of them went running off in different directions while the other two popped back inside. I headed that way.

  Stepping inside reminded me that I needed to grab some breakfast before too long. Should I feel guilty, thinking about my stomach after the events of the morning? I stifled the thought. Dad seemed to think Mr. B was going to be all right. That was good enough for me.

  Or maybe my better nature was overcome by all the sights and smells in the produce tent. Right in front of me were long tables covered with apples of every kind—red, yellow, and green; large and small, all sorted and labeled with the cultivar and the name of the grower. Nearby were grapes, pears, and plums. And a little farther back—

  I heard a shriek from the back of the tent, followed by loud wailing. It sounded like a child. I knew my own two toddlers were safe at home with Michael, but the sound triggered a familiar stomach-twisting anxiety. People were turning and heading toward it. I scrambled to follow.

  At the very back of the tent were the entries in the largest pumpkin contest. There were already twenty contenders on display, with a few more due to show up today. I had to admit they weren’t the most attractive pumpkins I’d ever seen. None of them were the vivid orange you looked for in a pumpkin, and they didn’t have a typical rounded, wide-ribbed pumpkin shape. They all looked pale, bloated, and slumped. But they were undoubtedly large. The smallest ones looked like overstuffed ottomans, and you probably could have carved small carriages out of the largest few, which one veteran pumpkin aficionado told me probably weighed at least sixteen or seventeen hundred pounds.

  It had made me nervous yesterday every time another giant pumpkin came into the barn, hauled on a trailer behind a pair of tractors, with a dozen burly volunteers to lift it into place. I decided then it was a good thing the giant pumpkins weren’t cute and rounded—at least they weren’t likely to roll onto one of the hapless movers. Most of them looked more likely to collapse inward from their own weight.

  But what if one that was more rollable than most had been hauled in since I’d given up watching the arrivals? One that could roll over onto someone. Like a child. Of course, the child wouldn’t still be wailing if he’d been crushed by a giant pumpkin. He’d be screaming in agony if he could make any sound at all. But if he’d seen someone else crushed …

  When I pushed my way through the crowd at the pumpkin end of the tent, I saw a boy of about nine or ten sitting on the ground in the middle of the remains of a smashed pumpkin. He was crying uncontrollably and had some kind of goop all over him. Almost certainly pumpkin guts. At a guess, he was surrounded by close to sixteen or seventeen hundred pounds of pumpkin guts.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Is he hurt?”

  I was already pulling out my cell phone to call Dad.

  “Th-they smashed my pumpkin,” the boy wailed. He waved his arms, and since both of his fists were clutching handfuls of pumpkin debris, seeds and little bits of flesh flew everywhere. A man was stooped beside him, patting him on the back.

  “We came in this morning to check on it,” the man said. “And we saw this.”

  He indicated the mountain of pale orange and white debris.

  “Wasn’t there anyone here in the barn overnight?” I asked. I was pulling out my notebook and flipping to the page where I had a list of all the volunteers with their cell phone numbers.

  “Volunteer was at the other end of the barn,” someone said. “Didn’t see anything.”

  I definitely needed to have a word with the volunteers, who seemed under the delusion that their job was purely honorary. And was I premature in seeing a pattern in these two events?

  I already had my cell phone out, so I called Vern.

  “We have an act of vandalism in the produce barn,” I reported. “Someone smashed one of the biggest pumpkins.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Vern said. “Just seeing our patient off in the ambulance. He’s conscious and complaining.”

  “Good,” I said. “About the co
nscious part, anyway. Oh, and maybe you could send Horace over when he’s finished with the bantam forensics,” I added, before he hung up.

  “Now I’ll never w-w-win,” the boy was sobbing.

  “We don’t know that yet,” I said. “We need to put all the pieces of this pumpkin in something.”

  The bystanders gazed at the huge mound of pulp and seeds.

  “Like what?” one of them asked. “A swimming pool?”

  I was calling my tent volunteer. As I heard the ringing through my phone, a trilling musical noise arose from one of the bystanders. A woman in jeans, wearing a t-shirt with the FFV logo of the Future Farmers of Virginia, reached into her pocket, pulled out her cell phone, and then looked up to meet my eyes as she said “Hello.”

  “We need some containers for the pumpkin,” I told her. “Keep everyone away from it until Vern and Horace are finished. Meanwhile I’ll get Randall to deliver some steel drums—I’m sure they have them or can get them over at his construction company. When they arrive, weigh them on whatever you’re going to use to weigh the pumpkins, and then get some volunteers to help you load all the pumpkin debris into the drums.”

  “Will the judges accept a pumpkin in pieces?” she asked. “Or in a bunch of cans?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But before we ask them to consider doing so, we need to save every bit of this poor boy’s pumpkin. Before something starts eating it.” And another thought hit me. “For that matter, it’s also evidence and needs to be collected no matter what the judges decide. So Deputy Vern will be here in a few minutes. He can supervise the collection, and when the police are finished with it, we’ll see if we can get the judges to accept it.”

  “Okay.” She sounded glum, and appeared to be studying the size of the pumpkin mound with dismay.

  “After all, the kid had to work hard enough to grow it,” I said.

  “Work hard?” She frowned slightly. “I’d have thought the vine did most of the work.”

  “Not with a pumpkin this size,” I said. “They have to start the seeds indoors early so the seedlings can get big by the time the last frost is over. Then they plant them and hand-pollinate them. And once a likely looking pumpkin sets, they have to go around every day plucking all the other blossoms and fruit so the plant puts all its energy into the one pumpkin. And I gather growing a half-ton pumpkin takes at least half a ton of water and fertilizer. And after all that work for months, this happens.”

  “Mercy,” she said. “I never knew it was that involved. We’ll get every speck up; don’t you worry.”

  Vern arrived just then, and I turned the case of the pummeled pumpkin over to him. I needed to find Randall and warn him that we were having a rash of problems.

  Okay, two was a small rash. But the day was young.

  Chapter 3

  I ducked out of the produce tent and strode rapidly through the fair, tossing off hurried greetings to all the friends I met. I finally spotted Randall over near the front gate, shaking hands with a lanky man in khakis and a navy sports jacket.

  “There you are!” Randall was in a jovial mood. “We were just talking about you. This fair wouldn’t even be happening if not for Meg. Any real work gets done, she’s probably done it.”

  The reporter probably thought Randall was flattering me. Randall and I both knew he was only telling the truth. Not that I particularly blamed Randall, who also had a town and a construction company to run.

  The reporter and I shook hands and exchanged names and pleasantries.

  “So, getting back to my questions,” the reporter said, turning toward Randall. “This isn’t just a county fair, then?”

  “No, it’s a statewide agricultural exposition,” Randall said. “This is our second year.”

  “What inspired it?” the reporter asked.

  “The possible demise of the Virginia State Fair,” Randall said. “Oh, I know it’s not really dead now, but last year when we started planning our first event, the nonprofit that was running the official fair was in bankruptcy, and no one knew if there’d be a fair that fall. And we thought that was a shame, so we organized our own event. And since it wasn’t officially the state fair, we decided to call it the ‘Un-fair.’”

  The reporter chuckled at that, as most people did.

  “And you kept on with your plans even after the state fairgrounds and the right to hold the state fair were sold after all?”

  “We did,” Randall said. “The folks who bought the rights to hold the official Virginia State Fair own a bunch of state fairs and other events. They know how to run a nice fair, I’ll give ’em that. I enjoy going there. But they were out of state, and a for-profit company, so last year we weren’t sure what their event would look like. We decided there was room for another kind of event, locally run, and with a different focus.”

  “What kind of focus?” the reporter asked.

  “Heritage animals and heirloom crops,” Randall said. “For example, in the chicken tent, we probably have twice as many different breeds of chicken as you’ll find at most events. Here, let me show you.”

  Damn.

  “I’d wait on that if I were you,” I said, trying to sound casual.

  “Why?” the reporter asked. I didn’t like the slightly sharp tone of his voice.

  “Because the chickens have been there all night,” I said. “And the farmers are only just trickling in to clean up. You might want to avoid all the livestock barns and tents right now. Everything’s supposed to be clean as a whistle—or at least as clean as barnyard animals get—by opening time.” I glanced at my watch. “Two hours from now.”

  “Good point,” Randall said. “Let me take you over to the arts and crafts building. No cleanup needed there. Or would you like to get a backstage tour of the event stage?” He dropped the name of the minor Nashville luminary who would be giving nightly concerts there for the run of the fair. I’d never heard of her, but I wasn’t much of a country music fan. Randall, who was, assured me she’d go over big, especially with the over-fifty crowd.

  Maybe the reporter was a country fan, since he opted for the backstage tour. He and Randall strolled off. I waited till they were out of sight, then called Randall’s cell phone.

  I was in luck. This time he answered.

  “Don’t let on it’s me,” I said.

  “Good to hear from you,” he boomed. “I expect you have some news for me?”

  “Someone stole two bantams from the chicken tent last night,” I said. “And someone smashed one of the contenders for biggest pumpkin. No idea yet if it was the same someone.”

  There was a pause.

  “Good to hear it.” His voice was artificially hearty.

  “I take it the reporter is listening.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Vern is already working on the case,” I said. “And I suspect Chief Burke will be here soon, and my cousin Horace is doing forensics. Normally I’d say it was overkill doing forensics on what will probably turn out to be misdemeanors, but this could really hurt the fair.”

  “I completely agree with you,” Randall said. “Keep up the good work, and call me if you need anything.”

  “If it’s okay with you, I’m going to have your foreman deliver some steel drums to clean up the pumpkin debris,” I suggested. “There’s at least half a ton of it, and maybe if we save it all, the kid who grew it can still compete in the contest. And Vern asked if we could round up a few volunteers to search for the missing chickens.”

  “That’s a yes,” he said. “Catch you later.”

  I made my call to the Shiffley Construction Company and then took a deep breath. What next? Should I go back and check the progress of picking up the pumpkin debris and calming down the kid? Should I call Dad to see how Mr. and Mrs. B. were doing? Should I perhaps go back to the fair office, where I had a database of all registered entrants in my computer, and figure out what their name really was?

  I should probably check in all the other t
ents and barns to see if there were any more thefts or vandalism. And was it too early to call Michael to find out how the boys’ breakfast had gone without me? And—

  My phone rang.

  “Meg, dear.” Mother. “Can you come over to the arts and crafts pavilion?”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “We’ve had an incident,” she said. “In the quilt section.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  “You’ll see, dear.” She hung up.

  I swore under my breath. Knowing Mother’s penchant for euphemism and understatement, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what she’d call in “incident.” After all, she was in the habit of calling the Civil War “the late unpleasantness.” I didn’t quite break into a run, but I wasted no time getting to the arts and crafts barn.

  Chapter 4

  I stepped into the arts and crafts barn and looked around. All seemed quiet at first. To my left were the entrants in the various art categories—the walls and a number of freestanding panels were already nearly filled with paintings, drawings, and photographs, while tables housed sculptures, wood carvings, and ceramics. To my right were the food exhibits—jars of pickles, jams, jellies, apple butter, pumpkin butter, and every other kind of nut and fruit butter imaginable. A bank of glass-doored refrigerators stood ready to hold the homemade dairy butters, yogurts, cheeses, and other perishables, most of which hadn’t arrived yet. The delectable scent of fresh baked bread was already wafting from the bakery tables, where loaves and rolls had begun to appear in anticipation of this afternoon’s bread competitions, junior division—to be followed on subsequent days by the open bread competition; the junior and open cake and cookie events, junior pies, and on Saturday afternoon, the highly contested open pie event. A fair number of people were delivering foods, arranging the foods that were already there, or just strolling up and down, gazing at the tables and sniffing appreciatively. I made a mental note not to bring the boys here unless they’d been well and recently fed, so they’d be less likely to nibble any of the exhibits.