Six Cloves Under

Book 1: Garlic Farm Mystery

by Gin Jones

Genres: Female Sleuths; General Fiction; Cozy Mystery

Synopsis

App developer Mabel Skinner is about to discover something rotten on her late aunt's garlic farm—and it's not the compost heap . . .

Mabel doesn't know a stinkin' thing about garlic farming. She knows how to develop an app and how to code. But when her aunt, Peggy Skinner, dies suddenly, Mabel inherits her Stinkin' Stuff Farm in western Massachusetts. She arrives during peak harvest time—with three days to bring in the entire crop before rain can destroy it.

But Mabel has an even bigger problem: she suspects her aunt's "accidental death" was murder. As she digs for both garlic and clues, Mabel must contend with a mysterious crop thief, a rival garlic grower her aunt was suing, and a farmer who was after Aunt Peggy's green-thumb secret. It's up to Mabel to crack the code on a killer, before she joins the garlic bulbs six cloves under . . .

Release date: April 21, 2020

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 247

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

Mabel Skinner got out of her Mini Cooper at ten o’clock on a Sunday night, and peered through the pitch dark at the vague outlines of a two-story house and the gravel path that led to the front porch. Her GPS claimed she was at her aunt’s farm, but the last time she’d visited, the sign next to the driveway’s entrance had read “Stinking Rose Farm,” not “Stinkin’ Stuff Farm.” The name was close, and it had been more than a decade since she’d been here, so she’d probably just remembered it wrong.

She took a moment to stretch after being cramped in the little car for so many hours. The small size was fine for the usual local errands she used it for back home, but not as great for a six-hour drive. It had left her feeling as creaky as the nights when she’d gotten caught up in some coding challenge and had stayed hunched over her laptop for too many hours without a break.

The moon was waning, and what little light it might have offered was obscured by clouds. She ducked back inside her car to turn on the headlights again to light her way to the front porch. She was used to the dark, living as she did in the wilds of Maine, and usually she found it comforting, like a barrier against unwanted visitors. But tonight it added to her uncertainty about whether she was where she belonged.

The building in front of her was white, like her memory of her aunt’s place, with the wraparound porch and assorted gables that declared it to be a farmhouse, rather than some more specific architectural style. The house looked larger than she remembered it though. She distinctly recalled thinking it was too small for her and her aunt to share, even for a week’s visit, and yet now she could see it was large enough for a family of four. Wasn’t it more typical, when returning to a place after many years, to think that it looked smaller? Maybe her recollection was skewed by the fact that no home was large enough for her to share with another human being these days. Her three bedroom house in Maine felt like a perfect fit for her to occupy alone, and she seldom thought about how she’d once shared it with her grandparents.

Mabel also remembered her aunt’s home as being square and symmetrical, but now there was an addition of some sort sticking out from the left rear corner. Either by design, in keeping with the history of old farmhouses getting additions as the family expanded, or possibly by indifference or lack of funds, the addition hadn’t been particularly well integrated into the overall architecture. Its awkwardness was definitely something she would have remembered, so either her aunt had added it since the last time Mabel visited, or she was in the wrong place.

There was one way to know for sure: look for the key under the doormat, where Aunt Peggy’s lawyer had arranged for it to be left for Mabel’s arrival.

As she headed up the gravel path, a rustling sound came from her right, near where the barn was. She started, but then realized the noise had most likely been made by one of the barn cats. Aunt Peggy had always kept at least a dozen of them to deal with rodents and other critters that might threaten the crop.

Mabel jogged up the front steps and knelt to feel under the doormat. As promised, a door key was hidden beneath it. Of course, that didn’t prove much. It wasn’t exactly an inventive place to leave a spare key.

The Mini Cooper’s headlights were at just the wrong angle to illuminate the front door, so Mabel had to feel for the deadbolt the estate’s lawyer had arranged to be installed. She ran her hand over the wood panels, and bumped up against something affixed to the center of the door. It was metal and raised, but in the completely wrong place to be a lock. She felt along the edges of the metal, tracing an oval with a flattened base, which sparked a memory. It was the shape of a pineapple, she thought as she tested her theory by running her fingers over the center of the oval, finding the crosshatching she was expecting.

Mabel didn’t have to see it to recognize the foot tall brass pineapple door knocker. She was definitely in the right place. Aunt Peggy had adopted the pineapple as her talisman when she’d made the life changes that had brought her here. If she could have grown pineapples in New England, this would have been an orchard instead of a garlic farm, but Aunt Peggy hadn’t been willing to relocate to the tropics for her midlife crisis. In any event, it had never really been a matter of wanting to eat pineapples so much as believing in what they symbolized: hospitality. Almost to the exact same degree that Mabel preferred solitude, her aunt had craved companionship. The lack of frequent client interactions was about the only thing Aunt Peggy had missed from her career as an accountant.

Now that Mabel was confident she was in the right place, and wasn’t about to break into a stranger’s home, she quickly found the deadlock and opened the front door. Without conscious thought, she bent down to find the pineapple shaped doorstop right where it had always been, and used it to prop the door open. Her muscle memory was stronger than her conscious memory, so she let it guide her to the light switch. She flipped each of the three switches in turn, with no success.

The front porch lights had probably burned out after Aunt Peggy died, and no one had been here to replace them. Aunt Peggy had always left the porch lights on, so visitors would feel welcome. There were probably some spare bulbs around somewhere, although Mabel didn’t particularly care if the exterior was lit. She didn’t have her aunt’s desire to encourage visitors, and she seldom went out after dark, since that was when she settled down to do her job, hunched over her laptop.

If she changed her mind and wanted exterior lights, she could always have the bulbs overnighted from an online merchant. For now, she just needed to get her laptop and duffel bag out of the car so she could get settled in. She could do that without porch lights.

Mabel pocketed the front door key and turned to go back to the car. She took the first step down from the porch and felt something move beneath her foot. She flailed and grabbed the railing, catching herself as a large and loudly irritated tuxedo cat raced across the corridor of light in front of the car, in the direction of the barn.

She kept her grip on the railing for a moment, waiting for her pulse to return to normal. She could have been killed, tripping over that animal. Cats were an important part of farm life, but shouldn’t Aunt Peggy have found a way to keep them away from the house where they were a hazard to her beloved visitors?

Mabel continued down the steps, keeping one hand on the railing, prepared for another surprise underfoot. Aunt Peggy could have been hurt or even killed by the cats, just as easily as an unwary guest could have been. Mabel hadn’t thought to ask how her aunt had died. The lawyer had said she’d been found on the farm, but he hadn’t said anything about the cause of death. It was probably something too routine to mention, like dying in her sleep from an undiagnosed health problem. That was far more likely than a freak accident caused by a barn cat. Still, the cats needed to be rounded up, and a new home found for them before Mabel went back to Maine. She already knew her attorney’s opinion on pets—that they were a lawsuit waiting to happen—and she really didn’t need to give anyone more excuses to try to get money from her.

Even moving cautiously in case the tuxedo cat returned, it only took Mabel fifteen minutes to carry everything she’d brought with her into the dark front hallway, just beyond the front door. She’d decided to travel light, taking only her laptop, dual widescreen monitors, printer, assorted cables and connectors, some spare hard drives, an extra mouse, and two speakers. Almost as an afterthought, she’d filled a duffel bag with a week’s worth of underwear, a few pairs of jeans and a stack of t-shirts.

Mabel didn’t trust her memory of the floor plan for navigating the farmhouse, so she used her phone as a flashlight while she hunted for more substantial lights. After trying the switches inside the doorways on either side of the hall, and the knobs on two table lamps in what she thought was the living room, all to no avail, she had to conclude that the problem wasn’t limited to a few burned-out bulbs. The electricity was out, and she had no idea where the power came into the house or whether someone might have intentionally turned the electricity off when Aunt Peggy died. Or possibly even before then. Aunt Peggy had chosen a simpler life than the one she’d known in Boston, but had she continued simplifying since Mabel had last been here? Could she have gone so far as to give up electricity?

What about phones? Mabel’s cell service had grown sketchy as she’d approached West Slocum. She turned her smartphone so she could see the screen, and found that she had no service at all here on the farm.

The last time she’d been here, there had been at least one landline operational, and she had to hope it was still working, so all she had to do was to get the electricity turned back on again. Mabel headed toward the kitchen, where she could picture a clunky old avocado green phone attached to the wall near the harvest gold refrigerator.

Mabel shone her light around the room. The phone was right where she remembered it being, on the wall to her right, just inside the kitchen. It was a relic of the 1960s that had barely been functional twelve years ago when she was last here. It couldn’t possibly be the same phone, though. It had to be one of those nostalgia pieces, or even a real vintage phone retrofitted for pushbutton dialing, although she couldn’t imagine anyone finding it attractive enough to want to replace it with an exact match.

She lifted the receiver and shone her smartphone’s light on a dial that had definitely not been updated. She put the receiver to her ear. No dial tone. She tried clicking the plunger in case the circuit was stuck, but still no dial tone. That wasn’t encouraging. Landlines were supposed to work, even when the electricity was out.

Mabel hung up the dead phone. Her aunt had probably replaced the landline with a cell phone, and just hadn’t bothered to get rid of the phone. But if Aunt Peggy didn’t have a landline, where did she get her internet service from? Mabel had planned to crack her aunt’s internet account while she was here, and had been resigned to using dial-up service for the duration, figuring her Luddite aunt wouldn’t have a faster service. Aunt Peggy didn’t have a website for the farm, but surely she used email and other basic internet offerings for her business.

Mabel left the kitchen for the front parlor that Aunt Peggy had converted into a home office for the farm. From what little was visible in the light of her smartphone, nothing in the room had been upgraded since her last visit, including the twelve-year-old dinosaur of a desktop computer. The only difference was that the last time Mabel was here, the computer had been brand new, and now the beige plastic had a yellowish cast to it, beneath a solid half inch of dust.

The keyboard was missing, and where it should have been was a thick, leather bound journal. It was scarred and stained from daily use, but without any noticeable dust.

The light of the smartphone flickered, and Mabel checked her battery. It was running low, and there was no way to charge it. There was nothing she could do about the electricity or access to the internet tonight. It was only midnight, which left plenty of time to unpack and do a couple of hours’ work on her laptop before bedtime. She could find a public internet connection tomorrow to send the work to her boss.

Expending the last of her phone charge to light the way, Mabel carried the absolute necessities—her laptop and the duffel bag—upstairs. She wasn’t ready to face her aunt’s empty bedroom, so she chose the door on the right, which opened into the bedroom where she’d stayed during her last visit. It was too dark, even with the smartphone’s fading light, to see if the decor had been changed up here. The furniture was just as she remembered it, though, nothing more than a twin bed with the head against the wall just inside the door, a small dresser across from the foot of the bed, and a rocking chair in the corner next to the window. She tossed the duffel bag onto the rocking chair, and settled onto the bed with her laptop.

The alarm app on her laptop reminded her to get up and stretch after an hour, and as she did, she acknowledged the peace and quiet of the farm. She might not have any electricity, other than what was left of her laptop’s battery, and she might have to wait until tomorrow to send the finished beta version of her current assignment to her boss, but those were minor nuisances that would soon be taken care of. The only noise she’d heard all evening had been the muffled sounds of barn cats squabbling. They wouldn’t be a problem. She could work all night without any distractions and sleep until noon. After two more of the hourly reminders to stretch, Mabel decided to make an early night of it around three a.m. By going to bed early, she could be awake and on her way into town bright and early tomorrow, sometime around noon.

CHAPTER TWO

Mabel woke up to screeching sounds. It took a moment to realize she was hearing birds. Stupid, noisy birds. Even worse, she was fairly sure, from the gray light coming through the thin white curtains, that she was hearing the proverbial early birds. She checked her cell phone for the time, only to find that the battery was completely dead. She flipped open her laptop, still on the bed next to her pillow, and peered blearily at the corner where the time was posted. The first digit was a seven, and that was all she needed to know. It was still the middle of the night, when everyone, including noisy early birds, should still be sleeping. Quietly.

Where had the stupid birds come from, anyway? With all the cats roaming the farm, the bird infestation should have been taken care of.

She closed her laptop and pulled a pillow over her head to deaden the noise. Earplugs would have to top the list of things she needed to purchase later today, at a more civilized hour, when human beings were awake and stores were open. Of course, with her phone dead, she had no access to her to-do list app, so she was probably going to forget half of what she needed, and without internet access, she couldn’t simply order things online as she remembered them.

Mabel concentrated on her mental list: light bulbs, earplugs, groceries, room darkening shades. She repeated the items to herself for several minutes until she thought she’d remember them, and was about to relax and go back to sleep when a pickup truck’s engine joined the cacophony outside her window. The engine stopped, and voices took its place. They weren’t as easy to ignore, but perhaps if she just pretended they didn’t exist, they’d go away.

And then she heard a door open on the first floor, followed by the hushed sounds of someone moving stealthily around the kitchen. Cabinets were opened, hinges squeaked, and doors thudded shut, each sound followed by a prolonged pause. It brought back memories of Mabel’s last visit here. Every morning, Aunt Peggy had done her best to cook breakfast without waking Mabel. Aunt Peggy had tried to be quiet, but it was impossible to cook anything without some little sounds escaping. Each little clink or thunk had been followed by a moment of frozen silence while Aunt Peggy waited to see if the latest noise had woken her niece. Mabel had always pretended to sleep through the noise, partly out of affection for her aunt, who was doing her best to cope with a lifestyle she just didn’t understand any more than Mabel understood her aunt’s, and partly because her aunt would have dragged her out into the piercing, early morning sunshine if she’d known Mabel was awake.

If only it were Aunt Peggy moving around the kitchen, Mabel would have been more than happy to forgive her for the early awakening. Unfortunately, it couldn’t possibly be Aunt Peggy downstairs. She was dead.

Mabel sat up. What if someone had made a mistake, and Aunt Peggy had simply been gone for a couple weeks, and it was someone else’s body that had been found? Mabel hadn’t seen the body or even the death certificate for herself, after all.

She didn’t take the time to change out of the t-shirt she’d slept in, but just pulled on a pair of jeans and bolted for the stairs. At the top, her sleep-deprived brain caught up with her, and she stumbled to a halt. Much as she’d like to believe the person in the kitchen was her aunt, it was more likely that the noises had been caused by a burglar, looking through the cabinets for valuables, rather than for cooking implements. It was a fairly common practice among thieves to target the homes of people whose obituaries had run in the local paper, especially if there weren’t any local relatives listed as surviving them.

Mabel hesitated. Her best escape plan was to run straight down the stairs and out the front door, but then what? She still didn’t have phone service to call for help. Could she get her car keys from the bedroom without alerting the burglar to her presence, and then get to her car before the burglar caught her? What if she was wrong, and there was another, less criminal explanation? For all she knew, Aunt Peggy had a housekeeper who came in once a week, and today was her scheduled day to stop by.

Mabel crouched against the wall, where she could see through the railing without being too visible herself. The sound of her heartbeat drowned out any noises the person in the kitchen might have been making, and anger started to replace the fear. She doubted her aunt had a housekeeper, which meant that some stupid criminal had decided to profit from a tragedy, and he didn’t even have the human decency to commit his felony quietly. She might not have been so angry if he’d broken in at a more traditional hour, like midnight, when she’d have been awake enough to deal with him rationally, but no, he’d had to wake her up in the middle of prime sleeping time.

Mabel straightened, determined not to be chased from yet another home. Her aunt had never feared intruders, so it wasn’t likely she kept any weapons handy. Farm implements, like hoes and pitchforks were excellent weapons, but taking the time to go to the barn and then returning to clobber the intruder with them would look a bit too much like premeditation, rather than self-defense.

Mabel crept back to the guest bedroom to search for some sort of weapon. In the light of day, she could tell that, like the kitchen, the bedroom’s decor hadn’t been changed since her last visit, except perhaps to fade a bit. The walls were papered in a pale blue floral print, with a scrappy blue and white quilt on the bed and with ruffled, pure white curtains on the one window. The top of the dresser held only a woven basket filled with soap and shampoo. Underneath her duffel bag on the rocking chair was a stack of white towels. Nothing that might be used as a weapon, unless she wanted to attack the burglar with one of the ruffle edged throw pillows she’d brushed off the bed and onto the floor last night.

Then she remembered the stack of electronics she’d brought inside. Most of it was downstairs, in the front hall, out of her immediate reach, but she’d stuffed a bag of spare cables into her duffel bag last night before carrying it upstairs. A cable wasn’t as good as a pitchfork, but at least it wasn’t soft and ruffled.

Mabel quickly retrieved a spare cable, removing the twist tie that kept it coiled, and wrapped one end of the cable around her hand to make it easier to grip. With a little luck, the burglar would be gone before she had to try to use it, anyway. She vaguely recalled a long ago lecture about scaring burglars away simply by letting them know the building was occupied. Apparently professional thieves knew that they were more likely to get a harsh sentence in court if they robbed an occupied home instead of a vacant one. All she needed to do was to make a lot of noise, and the burglar would leave on his own, without her having to cable-whip him.

Which was kind of too bad, she thought. Whipping him would work off a lot of her irritation at being awakened so early. Being in a state of sleep inertia might even qualify as a legal defense to assault charges.

Mabel stomped her way out of the bedroom and down the stairs. She felt a moment of triumph when she realized that she was making more noise than the stupid birds had earlier this morning. Maybe they’d hear her and think twice about waking her up the next time.

Mabel rounded the corner at the base of the stairs, her cable-whip trailing behind her, prepared to see the back door slamming shut behind the scared off burglar. Instead, a thin young woman covered almost head to toe in Aunt Peggy’s frilly avocado-green apron was coming out of the kitchen and down the hallway toward her, arms spread in preparation for a hug.

Mabel didn’t do hugs. She never had, that she could recall. Not with the grandparents who had raised her and definitely not with strangers. Most people knew better than to try, so she hadn’t been prepared to ward off the impending assault. She froze for a moment, forgetting until too late that she had a cable for self-defense.

“You must be Peggy’s niece.” The woman wrapped her thin but surprisingly strong arms around Mabel. “I’m so glad you finally made it here. Peggy was always talking about you.”

“I hope not.” Mabel had been the subject of all sorts of gossip after her parents died, and it had made her extremely wary about sharing personal information with strangers, whether directly or indirectly. She finally managed to free herself and take a wary step back from her attacker.

“I’m Emily Colter.” She waved in the direction of the barn. “I live over there.”

“In the barn?”

“No, in the farm next door. On the other side of the trees.”

Mabel liked trees. They kept people away from her. “Why are you on this side of the trees?”

“I was driving by and saw your car out front,” she said. “You must have gotten in late last night.”

“Not particularly.”

Emily tugged Mabel in the direction of the kitchen. “Still, it was after I got home, and all the stores in town were closed by then. I thought you might be hungry, so I brought you some fresh eggs for breakfast, along with a few other basic supplies.”

“There’s no power for cooking. It was out when I got here.”

“I already took care of that. These old circuits tend to overload pretty easily,” Emily said as she deposited Mabel at the huge kitchen table that dominated half of the kitchen area. “Peggy kept meaning to update the circuit board, but there was always something more important. I’ll show you where it is, in case the power goes out again.”

Mabel had expected to know her way around the house, but the kitchen was a weird mix of familiar and new. The cooking half of the kitchen was the same as it had been before, from the wallpaper featuring little pineapples in a grid pattern, to the vintage phone and stove. The other half, where she stood beside the table, was new, with walls painted a lighter shade of the avocado green of the phone. The kitchen must have been expanded to include this huge dining area, big enough to feed more dinner guests than even her aunt could have expected on a regular basis. The expansion explained the change in the exterior of the house that Mabel had noticed last night.

Mabel coiled the cable and stuck it into her pocket where it would be easily accessible in case she needed to fend off another hug. Then she chose a chair where she could keep an eye on the exits and the woman returning to the avocado green stove. “Did Aunt Peggy’s lawyer give you a key? I know I turned the deadbolt on the front door.”

“Peggy would be turning over in her grave—if she had a grave, that is—knowing her front door was locked.” Emily turned the stove on under a large cast iron pan. “At least no one touched the back door. The doorknob’s been broken for years, probably since before your aunt moved here, but the door opens if you thump it in just the right spot. I thought everyone knew that, but I suppose it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d discuss with your lawyer.”

“Why not?”

Emily waved a spatula. “Oh, you know. Time is money, stick to the facts, no need for embellishment, that sort of thing.”

“Seems like a strange way of working with an advisor. Withholding information, I mean.”

“I’m sure Peggy told her lawyer everything he needed to know.” Emily removed a dishcloth from the top of a handled basket sitting next to the stove. “How do you like your eggs?”

“Chocolate.”

“Peggy always said you had an unusual sense of humor.” Emily cracked an egg and held it above the skillet. “Fried or scrambled?”

“It’s too early to eat. My stomach is still asleep.”

“Early?” Emily released the egg into the crackling pan, and then dropped two more beside it in rapid succession. She looked at the wall at the other end of the room, past the huge table. “It’s almost eight thirty.”

Mabel groaned and laid her head on the table, cushioned from the solid wood planks by . . .