Poison Apples by Nancy Means Wright

Author:Nancy Means Wright [Wright, Nancy Means]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 2000-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty

The blue Horizon ground to a stop in front of the Willmarth farmhouse and Colm Hanna got out, feeling lame, feeling concerned that Ruth had ignored the warning and gone on to interview those pickers. “I know I’m being picky,” he quipped, “but...”

“Yes, you are,” she agreed when he carried his complaint into her barn, where she was finishing the afternoon milking. She appeared to be concentrating—as though she hadn’t another worry in the world. “What do you want me to do, sit back and make popovers while my neighbor’s orchard is being destroyed, tree by tree?”

“Exactly,” he said, leaning against a stanchion where a huge Holstein was on the machine. It turned a chocolate eye on him and then lifted its head and bellowed in his ear; it sounded like a foghorn. Jeez, his back was bothering him. He’d helped his dad lay out a body that morning—a 325-pound body. It wasn’t right. At that weight they ought to be made to cremate. “I just read in the Free Press about this guy out west who shot some other guy because the other guy’s rabbit got loose on his property and the guy said he warned the other guy twice and still the rabbit hopped over to his land and feasted on his veggie garden.”

“Good reason for a killing,” she said, pulling on the cow’s teats—to loosen them up before attaching the tubes, she explained when he raised an eyebrow. Prime the pump....

“Just a shooting, this time, in the leg. But there seems to be more concern here for listening to a warning. One killing already, right?”

“Yes, though in a slant sort of way. One might call it manslaughter, I suppose. If Bartholomew hadn’t been taking warfarin...” Now she was squirting milk into her palm. “Thank God,” she said, “no lumps. I mean, no mastitis. These poor cows are stressed out. Ripe for mastitis.”

“It was murder, however you look at it, Ruthie,” he said. “Look, woman, I want you to lie low, let this neighbor help herself. I mean, she’ll want you to when she hears about that cow slashing. Jeez.”

“It was Gypsy who got the worst of it. And Elizabeth—I’m worried about her calf. It’s due next month.”

“Elizabeth? The one who cornered me by the fence last spring? Practically sat on me when I slipped down in the mud? Maybe that slasher did you a favor.”

Uh-oh, he’d said the wrong thing. She was disconnecting the tubes, they flashed steel in her hand. Was she going to attack him? Milk his brain? He stepped back. “That was Zelda, not Elizabeth,” she said. “And I won’t lie low, damn it, Colm. I won’t play scared. I’ll bring the cows in at night. I’m not letting any creeps intimidate me. I’m not!”

He knew better than to cross her when she was up in arms. “Okay, down, woman. Go ahead. When they set fire to your barn, don’t come running to me.”

“Ha! I won’t. You can count on that. Anyhow, all the more reason why we should find out who’s behind this orchard bashing.

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