Murder Goes to Market by Daisy Bateman

Author:Daisy Bateman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Murder Goes to Marke
ISBN: 9781645060277
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Published: 2020-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

By the time Claudia left the Paks’ it was past lunchtime, but they had made good progress on the plans for the outdoor market and Teddy would now sit on command. She could have gone home and done some more work, but since she was out anyway, she decided to make a detour to visit another tenant. So, after a brief stop at San Elmo’s tiny grocery store for a replenishment of her wine and dog food stocks, and one of their surprisingly good deli sandwiches, she made her way to Robbie and Emmanuelle’s home and pork-curing emporium.

They lived at the end of a minor county road, where a sign hanging on a gnarled driftwood tree announced that you were approaching Happy Toad Farm. The name was widely suspected to be a drug reference, but Emmanuelle insisted it related to having found the namesake amphibian under a bucket when they were first viewing the property. What was not in dispute was that this was an agricultural operation like no one in the area had ever seen.

Claudia hadn’t spent a lot of time on pig farms, but she suspected most didn’t have their entrances framed by a graceful arch of trained fig trees. She passed through it (alone, having left Teddy in the car with the windows cracked and an improvised water dish, not being sure how well she was going to deal with chickens), to a small patio decorated with stylishly dilapidated furniture. Beyond the patio were two raised-bed vegetable gardens, displaying their rows of tomatoes, squashes, and beans under the bird netting like the jewelry case of a vegetable-loving giant.

It all looked like a picture from a magazine, and for good reason. In just the year and a half Claudia had known them, Emmanuelle and Robbie’s “little coastal homestead” had been the subject of three feature articles and one cookbook photo shoot. (Ironically, vegetarian.) The scene was perfect and precise in every way, but whenever the wind shifted there was an undeniable whiff of pig in the air.

Any new farm in the area was cause for local curiosity, but one so far outside the norm drew special attention. As soon as Robbie and Emmanuelle had arrived in town, Julie had gone on a fact-finding mission, which had turned up the information that Emmanuelle’s father was a banker of some variety, rich enough to set up his only daughter in whatever lifestyle she desired. What he thought of her choice to spend it here was as yet undetermined.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t that hard to understand. Claudia had rung the bell as she came in through the arch, and it was only a couple of minutes until Robbie came to greet her.

As happened every time she saw him, she found herself surprised by how good-looking he was. Robbie was at least fifteen years older than his twenty-something wife (though he affected the look of someone born a good century back), but no one thought of them as a mismatched couple.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.