Fruit of the Poisoned Tree plgm-2 Read online

  “That’s okay.” He smiled and kissed her gently. “I like it when my woman gets jealous. But no, I didn’t date Rue. She’s married.”

  “Looks like quite a crowd,” Peggy remarked, changing the subject as they went up to the house. She felt like an idiot for asking about Rue. It just suddenly popped out of her mouth. She wasn’t jealous. Just nosy.

  “I hope all the food isn’t gone.” Steve looked mournful. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast. All the excitement of the birth, I suppose.”

  They left their coats in the foyer and mingled with the other guests. Something smelled good in the kitchen, where a caterer was warming food and getting ready to serve. The large dining room table was set with crystal and china from end to end. A wonderful bay wreath was set in the center with a large, squat, white candle in the middle.

  Peggy saw Alice helping the caterer. The housekeeper turned her head when she saw her. She wondered if Al had spoken to her to give her such a sour face. The housekeeper might not be guilty of anything, but it couldn’t hurt to have her answer some questions. She couldn’t help but wonder what the answers would be.

  She left Steve by the fireplace with a group of professional-looking people who were asking about heartworm and went to look for Beth. She glanced at the counter when she reached the kitchen. All the cake boxes and food containers that had been there after Park’s death were gone, along with what was left of the gift basket he brought back from the hotel.

  A sharp stab of awareness shot through Peggy’s mind. Her stomach churned, and her heart skipped a beat. Bee pollen, Mai said. Where is the half-eaten jar of honey Park brought back with him from Philadelphia?

  “Peggy! I’m so glad you could come!” Beth threw her arms around Peggy’s neck and hugged her.

  “Where’s the jar of honey that came from the basket Park brought back from his trip?”

  “I’m not sure.” Beth glanced around the kitchen. “It might have been thrown away. But I have some other honey in the pantry. Would you like that instead? I could go out and get you some honey.”

  “No.” Peggy’s brain worked furiously, considering the possibilities. “When did you throw it away? Was your trash picked up yet?”

  “I’m not sure when it was thrown away. I can ask Alice. She might know. Or Mom might have done it. But today was trash day. I was surprised they came after the snow and all. Usually it takes a few extra days for them to get back on schedule. It was just as well though. With all the food boxes, we needed a pickup. Peggy? What are you thinking?”

  “Did you or the boys eat any of that honey?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Park ate almost the whole jar. You know how he loved sweets.”

  Peggy nodded, her mind already raking over the possibilities. “I have to go. Give my love to the boys. I’ll talk to you later.” She found Steve in the great room sampling some cheese puffs and talking with Beth’s parents. “Excuse me.” She took his arm and drew him away as she smiled and nodded at Beth’s mother and father. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

  “Is something wrong? Did someone call you? Did Shakespeare break out?”

  “Something’s wrong,” she confirmed, going back toward the front door for her coat. “I have to go to the landfill.”

  “The landfill?” He followed her, weaving through the people who were just arriving. “Please tell me that’s a pet name for the Potting Shed and not the place where they take the garbage.”

  Peggy smiled but didn’t wait to put her coat on before she scooted out the door. “I wish it was. But I may have a lead on something Mai told me today. I have to find a jar of honey.”

  Steve used his keyless remote to unlock the doors on the Vue. “Couldn’t we just go to Harris Teeter and buy honey? Isn’t all honey the same?”

  She closed her car door and took out her cell phone. “No, actually, all honey isn’t the same. It varies from place to place, according to where the bees gather the pollen. I wish it were that simple. You don’t have to feel obligated to come with me. It’s going to be a nasty job.”

  “You know I’m not going to let you go by yourself.” His voice said he wished he could. “Can we at least go home and change clothes? I just bought these shoes, and I really like them.”

  “Thank you, Steve.” She leaned over and kissed him as he started the engine. “Of course we’ll go home and change first. I’m going to see who else I can scrounge up to help us. It’s a big landfill. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  “In that case, why not call the police? Surely they’d have more manpower than we can muster. And it would probably be legal for them to search the landfill.”

  “I think it’s too soon to call them.” She squashed his dreams of sitting in the Vue and waiting to see what the police could find. “They have a little trouble believing I know what I’m talking about. Jonas was downright hostile about it. But I don’t think it’s against the law for people to look through the trash.”

  Steve accepted his fate with grace and dignity. “I’ll drop you off at your house and pick you up again in twenty minutes.”

  “That works. Thank you. If I’m right, we could find out what really happened to Park before he died.”

  After Steve dropped her off, Peggy changed clothes quickly into what she would normally wear to work with her plants. In a gray sweatsuit and dirty old Reeboks, she called Sam, Keeley, and Selena as she walked Shakespeare. The other three promised to meet her at the landfill and bring any other people they could find.

  Peggy spent the rest of the time cleaning up the mess Shakespeare made of a pillow he’d shredded while she was gone. “I don’t know what else I’m going to do with you,” she told the dog. “But if you don’t stop being so destructive, I’m going to have to lock you in the pantry.”

  The dog howled mournfully, as though he understood her threat. He lay down on the floor and put his paws over his face.

  She laughed and rubbed his head. “Don’t bother looking cute either. It won’t save you. You’d better learn something from Rue when we start taking those classes.”

  Steve picked her up again exactly twenty minutes later as promised. “So where is the city landfill?”

  “Get on Interstate 77 northbound, and we’ll go from there,” she explained. “I won’t confuse you with other street names, since you’re new to the area and probably wouldn’t know where I’m talking about.”

  “There must be more than one,” he remarked, turning the Vue toward the interstate. “How are you going to know which one?”

  Peggy smiled. “Carlos Gonzales. He drives a taxi now, but he used to work in sanitation. I called him to ask which landfill Beth’s garbage would go to. We should only have to search one. You’re in luck.”

  Steve laughed as he accelerated to match speeds with the other fast-moving cars on the interstate. “Boy, am I lucky!”

  “You don’t have to do this,” she told him again. “Sam and some others are going to meet us out there. You can drop me off. I don’t think scrounging through the landfill falls under normal dating practices.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it!” He grinned in her direction. “I’ve never actually been in a landfill. I always wondered what one looked like.”

  “Okay, that’s doing it a little heavy.”

  “Just tell me one thing. How are we going to find a single jar of honey in a whole landfill? That seems impossible.”

  “I’m banking on the fact that it’s fresh trash from today. Whoever works out there should be able to tell us where the trash from Myers Park gets dumped. I hope that will narrow down the search to a few hundred houses.”

  “When you put it that way, it sounds easy. What do you think the honey has to do with Park’s accident?”

  She explained about the pollen the police sent away to have analyzed. “It might not be the same, but I know Park loved sweets, and I know he wasn’t taking bee pollen for energy. Most of that jar was gone the last time I saw it. By the time the police get t
he tox report back from Raleigh, the jar will be long gone from the landfill, too. If it shows anything unusual, the evidence that could link it to where it came from would be lost.”

  Steve understood the concept. “It seems like the police would be interested in that.”

  “It seems that way,” Peggy agreed. “But if I tell them about it and they decide it’s stupid, they could keep me from finding the jar. This way, the worst that will happen is I’ll have wasted everyone’s time.”

  “Okay. I’m sold. I brought some pairs of surgical gloves and masks. I hope I have enough for everyone.”

  The landfill off Lakeview Road was enormous. It stretched over several acres, up and down hills. Trucks were still unloading. Bright lights kept the work possible all night long. Mounds of debris, some taller than houses, filled the horizon with every imaginable household item from mattresses to cookie dough with dirty diapers and empty dog food bags in between.

  Sam and Hunter were already there with several of Sam’s college friends. They got out of a brown van when Sam saw Peggy. “Wow! This place smells worse than it looks,” Hunter said. “What are we doing out here?”

  “We’re looking for a jar of honey,” Sam repeated. “And cheer up. It could be worse. I’ve brought stuff out here during the summer. It doesn’t smell bad at all right now compared to that.”

  Selena and Keeley came up together in Keeley’s orange Volkswagen Beetle. They got out slowly when they saw everyone else. “Are you sure this is the right place?” Selena asked Peggy. “I’m sure you didn’t really mean the landfill, right? You don’t really want us to search the landfill.”

  One of Sam’s friends, a burly soccer player with the UNCC 49ers gave a loud yell and dove headfirst into a big, steaming pile of trash. He made swimming motions with his legs and arms to show Selena how it was done. “Come on in, gorgeous. The trash is exceptionally fine this evening.”

  Selena turned her back on him and made a terrible face. “Yuck! Am I supposed to find that attractive?”

  “Let’s get organized here.” Peggy drew them all together. “I’m going to talk to that man in the shed over there and see where we need to go.”

  “Don’t we need some kind of special permit to look through trash?” Hunter wondered hopefully.

  “Let me find out,” Peggy said, taking Steve with her to the guard shack.

  The pock-faced man in the guard shack was wearing overalls and a ragged green sweater. He put down his stainless steel Stanley coffee thermos long enough to laugh at her request. “You’re kidding, right? You can’t just come out here and search for stuff. What if you’re a terrorist or something? We gotta keep whack jobs away.”

  “It’s very important,” she explained. “We need to look tonight before the item we’re looking for is gone.”

  He leaned back in his chair and sized her up with his eyes. “What’s it worth to you? I’m not an unreasonable man.”

  Steve reached for his wallet, but Peggy refused to believe it was the only way to get into the landfill. “And I’m sure you’re a compassionate man as well.” She smiled. “A man might be dead because of something out here in the landfill. We need your help to find it. I’m sure that would bring you deep personal satisfaction, wouldn’t it?”

  The man scratched his stubbled chin. “Probably not as much as fifty dollars.”

  Peggy’s smile changed as she leaned closer and tried another tactic. “There will be television cameras up here from every news network in North Carolina. You’ll be famous after they ask you questions about what happened.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” The man’s face brightened. “People say I sing like Roy Orbison. Look like him, too. Maybe I could get an audition for American Idol! Simon would love me! What do you need?”

  He told them where they’d find the fresh garbage from the Myers Park area. It covered an entire hillside. There was no other way to get there but to tramp through the muck to the spot. Avoiding potentially dangerous objects, the group walked out through the sea of trash while the landfill manager took out his electric razor to shave before the TV cameras got there.

  “Peggy,” Hunter began, “even if all of the trash from Myers Park is on this hill, how will we ever find a single jar of honey in it? It’s impossible!

  “There were a good many cake boxes, you know? Those big, square white boxes you get from Harris Teeter. I thought we could look for a group of those, and that would be Beth’s trash.”

  “Oh. I see. Easy.” Hunter rolled her eyes and mumbled, “We’re never going to find this.”

  Peggy squeezed her arm. “Never is a very long time to spend in a garbage dump. Let’s think positively, and maybe we’ll be done by morning. That way, it will be so much easier to get the smell out of our hair. Maybe only one or two shampoos.”

  Hunter groaned as they reached the designated area. “Let’s get this over with then. Too much shampooing makes my hair dry and frizzy.”

  Sam cordoned off individual sections for each person to search through. The trash was knee high on the surface. Fortunately, they didn’t have to dig below that level to look for the jar. The large, intense spotlights made the night brighter than day. They illuminated every aluminum pie pan, disposable diaper, and open can in the mix.

  Steve passed out surgical gloves and masks to each person, cautioning them not to touch their faces after rummaging through the trash. “These are only good if you don’t get the bacteria near your nose or mouth. If the glove breaks open, I have some others. If you get cut, I hope your tetanus vaccinations are up to date.”

  One of Sam’s friends hooted. “What about hepatitis, man? Not to mention a hundred other diseases we could get out here. This place is a germ haven. Don’t you love it?”

  Steve ignored him as he started looking through his section of trash. He watched Peggy, who was conveniently searching beside him. “He’s crazy, but he’s right, you know.”

  “You mean about the possibility of disease?” She kept searching without looking up at him. “There’s probably more of a possibility for disease when you push a shopping cart at the supermarket.”

  “Has anyone ever mentioned the degree of determination that drives you?” He smiled as she slowly looked up and focused on him. “You’re very persistent.”

  “If you mean I don’t let a few bugs and viruses get in my way, you’re right. I’m not sure we can find the honey jar, but at least we can try.”

  “Well then, have you thought what this might mean to an otherwise closed investigation?” Hunter asked from Peggy’s left side. “Bringing anything else into the equation could mean more trouble for Beth from both investigations.”

  “The truth about what happened to Park is more important than Beth staying out of trouble,” Peggy told her. “I know she’ll feel that way, too.”

  “I think I found something.” Selena held up a small jar from the other side of the hill. “It’s definitely a honey jar.” She slapped at a few ants who were keeping warm in the trash and didn’t want to let go of their prize. “Can we go home now?”

  “Does it have a blue label?” Peggy asked.

  “No.” Selena looked at the jar again, her hopeful smile fading. “It’s white. Does it have to be a blue label?”

  “The jar we’re looking for has a blue label.” Peggy started sorting through her trash again. “Sorry, sweetie. I forgot to tell you.”

  “That’s okay.” Selena tossed the jar over her shoulder. “I’ll look for one with a blue label until I fall down and die of disease from being out here in this cesspool of human waste.”

  “Wow! Nice words,” the soccer player beside her exclaimed. “Will you marry me and write my next thesis?”

  They continued searching past midnight as garbage trucks continued to come in and dump their loads around them. It was cold but thankfully, not raining. The orange sky looked far off behind the glaring lights, bright stars invisible. The stench was overpowering. From time to time, someone groaned as they stepped into
a partial cheesecake or a half-eaten chicken carcass.

  Peggy’s back was beginning to ache and her fingers were numb, but she kept digging. Doubt was beginning to seep in with the cold. Hunter’s words nagged at her.

  Even if they could find the jar and she could prove her theory about what happened to Park, who would benefit from it? It could reopen the investigation into her friend’s death. She was worried about Beth. A deeper inquiry would bring out some unpleasant facts about the couple that had managed to stay hidden so far. If someone had hurt Park, she didn’t want him or her to get away. Yet at what price? Foxx and Reddman stood to lose both their parents if Beth went to jail.

  It was the scientist in her that kept her from calling off the whole thing. Discovering the truth and understanding what made something happen drove her. She could never put away a jigsaw or crossword puzzle until the whole thing was finished. She couldn’t stop wondering until she knew what happened to Park either. She hoped he’d want it that way, too. She prayed they could prove Beth wasn’t involved in any way.

  Sam yelled from the top of the hill. Weary workers stood up and stretched as he ran down toward them. “I think I found it, Peggy! You said a blue label, right?”

  She looked at the jar Sam held up in the light. It was the jar from the welcome basket given to Park by the hotel in Philadelphia. The label was a little messed up with some trash on it, but the jar was intact with the cap on tight. Peggy held it up to the light. The honey was at the same level she saw it on Beth’s kitchen cabinet. “You’re right, Sam. Good work! We can all go home now.”

  Steve and Hunter stood beside her and looked at the dark gold, syrupy fluid. The hot, white lights made it seem brighter than it was, showing the small particles in the otherwise clear substance.

  “I hope it’s worth it,” Hunter said, transfixed by it.

  “I hope so, too.” Peggy put the bottle into a resealable plastic bag for protection. “We should know in a few hours. I have samples of honey and pollen in my collection. If I’m right, this could be what killed Park.”

  “No matter what, didn’t the car accident still kill him?” Steve asked.