Trial by Fire (6 page)

Aram wasn’t there, but there was a late-model car parked near one of the farm buildings.
I hadn’t seen it from the road. Nor had I seen the two men who were wandering around
the property. One was tall and muscular, in jeans, a T-shirt and a denim jacket.
The other was shorter and thinner and wearing a business suit. He was the one who
spotted me first.

“Hello, young lady. How are you this fine day?” His smile was as bright as a new
penny.

“Mr. Goran isn’t home.”

“Yes I see that no one appears to be here at the moment. I saw all the damage…” He
nodded at what used to be the barn. “I was wondering if maybe the owner—Mr. Goran—might
be in the market to sell.”

“He’s in the hospital.”

“I did hear that. Unfortunate.”

“His son is in town.”

The man in the suit cocked his head to one side and studied me. “You seem to be pretty
up-to-date on the Gorans’ affairs. By gosh, but you look familiar. We haven’t met,
by any chance? Are you one of the Goran clan?”

“I live next door.”

He grinned. “That’s it! I knew it.” He snapped his fingers. “You’re that girl from
the newspaper, the one who called the fire department. Riley, is it?” He looked as
pleased as if he had pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

I nodded.

“Well, Riley, you’re quite the local hero. As I say, I was just looking around. I
heard the owner had been badly hurt in the fire. I imagine he won’t be farming again,
and I’m interested in taking the place off his hands.” He pulled something out of
his pocket. “My card.”

“I’ll give it to Aram.”

“Aram?”

“Mr. Goran’s son.”

He handed me his card. Donald Curtis, realtor. No company name.

“Well then.” He flashed another toothy smile. “I’ll be on my way.” He nodded to his
companion, whom he had not introduced. They climbed into the car. The big man drove.

After they were gone, I left a note for Aram, asking him to call me so we could make
plans for the market. I pushed it and Mr. Curtis’s business card through the letter
slot. Then I did what Mr. Curtis had done—I took a good look around.

Everything on the farm was well kept, from the stone house surrounded by flower gardens
and shrubs to the equipment shed, the garage with the tractor and the pickup truck
in it, and the workshop (locked) with its workbench and array of tools. The barn,
of course, was a tangled mess of blackened wood and wet ash. But before the fire
it had been as neat and well maintained as any barn could be—except for a small hole
in one wall that Mr. Goran was going to patch to keep out small animals. I’d seen
the inside of the barn.
Mr. Goran had been proud to give me a tour. Now two walls
were badly charred but still standing, although signs had been posted warning of
danger.

But apart from the devastated barn, the farm was picture-perfect. Mr. Goran had worked
his whole life to scrape together the money to buy the place. Why would he destroy
it—especially in the way it had been done? He was terrified of fire. I’d seen that
for myself. He’d even refused to allow his wife to have the gas stove she coveted.
Even if he had needed the money, which was what Aunt Ginny had hinted, would he have
gone about it that way, through arson? I couldn’t imagine it. Not in a million years.

SIX

Aunt Ginny came in after midnight. I knew because she flung her shoes across the
front hall, hitting the table near the stairs and knocking over the little lamp on
top of it. It crashed to the floor, jolting me awake. I thought someone had broken
into the house, and, heart pounding, I crept to the top of the stairs with my baseball
bat.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” Aunt Ginny demanded when she saw me.

“I thought someone smashed a window and was breaking in.”

“And you were planning to do what, exactly? Didn’t I teach you better than that?”

I deduced that she was in a foul mood. “What if I’d called 9-1-1 instead?” I asked.
“And what if one of your new colleagues rushed out here only to find out that
you
were the cause of the call?”

She muttered something unintelligible.

“Bad day, Aunt Ginny?”

“I didn’t sign on to be a pet detective.”

“Another lost dog?”

“Not lost. Abused.”

“Isn’t that a job for animal welfare?”

“Yes. And they investigated. Then they called us, and, of course, I got the case.
The dog, which doesn’t have any tags, was badly beaten. I’m supposed to find out
who did it.”

“Badly beaten? Is it okay?”

“It’s going to be a long recovery.”

“Poor thing. Who would do something like that?”

“You sound just like the chief. I like dogs as much as the next person.” When I gave
her a skeptical look, she said, “Just because I don’t choose to live with one doesn’t
mean I don’t respect them as fellow citizens of this world.” That sounded rehearsed
to me. “But I
don’t want to end up as a pet detective. That’s not what I worked for
so hard all these years. I need a shower.”

“Aunt Ginny, about the washing machine—.” The laundry situation was getting desperate.

“I said I’d handle it, and I will,” said Aunt Ginny. “But right now I’m going to
bed.”

Aunt Ginny was snoring the next morning when I peeked into her room. Then I crept
downstairs. I left her a note and went outside to wait for Aram.

He arrived exactly at seven in his father’s pickup, its bed filled with baskets of
vegetables. We drove to the market down by the beach and unloaded at our stall, and
I taped a sign to it:
Goran Farm
. Then I started writing out price signs.

“How’s your father?” I asked as I set out brilliant-green cucumbers, ears of freshly
picked corn, green beans, field tomatoes, peppers and onions.

“There’s been no change. I get the impression the doctors aren’t expecting much.”

“There were two men at the farm yesterday. One of them said he was interested in
buying the place.”

“Mr. Curtis?”

I nodded.

“I got his card. But it’s my father’s farm. Any decision regarding it is up to him.”

I didn’t want to think how upset Mr. Goran would be if he was forced to sell his
beloved farm.

The stalls around us began to fill up. I couldn’t help noticing that people were
staring at us. Some of them whispered to one another. The ones who stared the longest
and hardest were at the Winters Farm stall. I glanced at Aram. He was staring right
back at them.

“Do you know those people?” I asked.

“I know the farm my father bought belonged to a man named Winters.”

The man who was staring came out of his stall. The woman with him—his wife?—grabbed
his arm and tried to pull him back, but he shook her off. He marched toward us.

“Who are you?” he demanded of Aram.

“Aram Goran. My father owns Goran Farm.”

The man’s face twisted in disgust, as if he’d bitten into something rancid.

“And you are…?” Aram said.

“Ted Winters. Your father stole my father’s farm.”

Aram stayed perfectly calm despite Mr. Winters’s belligerence. “As I understand it,
my father bought his farm at auction.”

“He had no business being at that auction.”

“Ted!” The same woman who had tried to hold Mr. Winters back ran over and grabbed
his arm. “Ted, we have to get ready.”

Ted Winters glowered at Aram for another moment before letting his wife lead him
away. But once he was back at his own stall, he kept staring at Aram.

“What is he talking about, stealing?” Aram asked. “Why would he say that?”

I had no idea. But I bet it tied in with what Sharon the waitress and Carol the florist
had said—that there were people who wouldn’t have called the fire department that
night.

“I can finish getting ready while you visit your father,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
It might be good for him to get away. Mr. Winters’s staring was making me nervous.

Aram agreed. “I would like to tell Father what we’re doing. The doctor says I should
talk to him. He says it might help.” He looked at the produce piled high on the table.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

“Positive. I have everything I need. But when you come back, can you bring some more
change? Just in case.”

He left, and I finished setting up. People were already sauntering among the stalls.
It wasn’t long before I was bagging beans and cucumbers, tomatoes and corn. Most
of the stalls seemed to be busy, but I heard a few people say that my prices were
better than those at other stalls. I had a steady flow of customers.

It was a hot day, and all the talking I was doing was making me thirsty. I wished
Aram would return so I could get a cold drink. Some kids wandered over. There were
a dozen of them, maybe more, all boys. I didn’t pay close attention to the whole
group because one of them, a tall boy with a mop of dirty-blond hair, stepped up
close and demanded to know who I was.

I told him my name and waited for him to tell me his.

He didn’t.

He ran his hand over ears of corn, cucumbers, tomatoes.

“Nice,” he said. He glanced at his buddies. A couple of them had pressed close to
the table. The rest stood
back half a pace. A girl stood behind them. Her eyes were
on the blond boy. She was watching as if she wanted to talk to him, and she looked
nervous. She was shifting from foot to foot and turning what looked like a large
coin over and over in one hand, like a magician practicing a coin trick.

“Can I help you?” I asked the boy.

“Yeah, you can. Can you step back a little?”

“What?”

Before I could do anything to stop them, the boys closest to the table flipped it
over. Tomatoes, corn, carrots, beets cascaded to the ground.

“Oops, sorry,” the blond boy said. He didn’t sound remotely apologetic. If anything,
he seemed pleased with himself. “Let us give you a hand.”

But instead of picking things up, as I was doing, he and his friends started to stomp
all over the vegetables on the ground.

“Hey!” I was furious. I grabbed the boy by the arm. “If you don’t stop that, I’ll—”
I had been going to say that I was going to call the cops—well, Aunt Ginny—and I
started to dig my cell phone out of my pocket. But someone grabbed it from me—I didn’t
see who—and someone else shoved me aside. Again,
I didn’t see who. I glanced around,
but the boys who were standing farther away from the table had formed a kind of screen,
blocking my stall from view and stopping everyone except the girl from seeing what
they were doing, and she was only able to see because she had moved in closer.

I started to elbow through the boys to get help. Someone grabbed me from behind and
held me back. I kicked him. He yowled but didn’t let go. I struggled as basket after
basket of produce was reduced to pulp before my eyes. Someone else shouted.

“Hey, what’s going on there?”

The boys drifted away, keeping their backs to the rows of stall. A man rushed up
to me and asked if I was okay. He offered to call the police, but I said I would
handle it. Ted Winters, across the way, stared wide-eyed at the destruction. He turned
to search out the boys, who by then had disappeared from view. He started to come
out of his own stall but then abruptly stopped.

“What happened?” said someone behind me. It was Aram. He was carrying a frosty bottle
of lemonade. He handed it to me as he took in the devastation. “Who did this?”

“Some kids.” I located my cell phone in a puddle of smashed tomatoes and wiped it
off with a paper bag. “I’m calling the police.”

Aram looked at the curious faces of shoppers and the hard faces of the neighboring
stallholders. I think we both saw the uniformed police officer at the same time.
He stopped at Mr. Winters’s booth. Mr. Winters pointed to ours. The cop frowned,
took in the scene and came across to us.

“What happened here?” he asked.

I glanced at Aram, who nodded at me and said, “Tell him what you just told me.”

I repeated what I’d already said. “Some kids trashed our stall.”

The cop bent down and picked up the sign that lay on the ground. “Goran, huh? Not
the same Goran that set fire to his barn.”

“My father’s barn burned down, if that’s what you mean,” Aram said stiffly.

“And now some kids are giving you a hard time. Don’t suppose you know their names?”

“I wasn’t here when it happened.”

“So no description of these kids either?” Maybe I was imagining things, but he didn’t
seem as interested
as I knew Aunt Ginny would have been under the same circumstances.

“
I
was here,” I said. “And I would
definitely
recognize the ringleader if I saw
him again.”

The cop gave me a slow once-over. “Are you a Goran too?”

“No. I’m a Donovan. You probably know my aunt, Virginia McFee.”

The cop’s eyes narrowed. “McFee?”

“She’s a detective.” I held up my cell phone. “Maybe I should call her.”

“You may not be able to reach her. The animal crime around here is keeping her pretty
busy.” His lips twitched as he tried to keep from laughing. That made me angry.