A Dime a Dozen (23 page)

The only person who seemed to be keeping it together, besides me, was Pete. The picture of calm, he looked down inside the four-foot-high wooden box and then took control of the situation.

“Sam, your brother-in-law’s a cop, right?” he said to one of the workers.

“Yeah.”

“Call and tell him what’s happened and see if they can come out here without drawing a lot of attention, would you? No sirens. Please.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll see what I can do.”

The man ran off toward another building while Zeb and I stepped closer to the apple bin and looked inside.

Sure enough, nestled down among a bunch of apples was what looked like a mummy—though not with any gauze wrappings or other horror-movie trappings. Instead, it was simply a dried and shriveled-up human body, the skin yellowish-brown and papery and wrinkled like dried fruit. Though the hair seemed like normal hair, the face wasn’t really recognizable as a human face. The body was buried in apples up to its chest, so all we could see was the top half, which sported a ragged gray T-shirt with some kind of faded animal imprint on it.

Zeb let out a low whistle, looking a little green himself.

“Man, Pete, I guess you’ll have to write off the whole room. There goes a couple hundred thou worth of apples.”

Pete cleared his throat.

“I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” Pete said. “For all we know, this is some kind of practical joke or something.”

Of course, having studied a bit about dead bodies, I knew it was no joke. Given the right conditions, a body could easily mummify during decomposition. If this body had just spent the winter in cold storage in a room that had almost no oxygen, then it must’ve slowly dried out as it decomposed, turning into the mummified shell that remained.

“It stinks,” one of the men said.

“Not as much as you’d expect for a dead body,” Zeb added, bending over the bin to look closely. “I found one in the woods once. A man had shot himself hunting. I tell you what, that body stank so bad it burned the inside of my nose. I couldn’t get rid of the smell for days.”

He reached out one hand toward the mummy’s face.

“Don’t touch anything!” I said quickly.

“I wasn’t gonna hurt it,” he replied. “I just wanted to feel it.”

“You need to step back,” I said. “Nobody touch anything.”

“She’s right,” Pete said, pulling a cell phone from his pocket. “Y’all move away from the bin.”

“What happened, exactly?” Danny asked, still looking quite shaken as everyone followed Pete’s directive and backed up. “How did you know it was there?”

One of the men shook his head.

“It was the smell,” he said. “Soon as I lowered the bin down off the stacks and pulled it out, I said, uh-oh, we got ourselves a dead animal. I didn’t want to scare the ladies in the packing house, so I drove the forklift out here, thinking it was a dead cat or something, and I could just dig it out and toss it over in the bushes. But that’s no cat, I’ll tell you what. That’s a
person
.”

I wondered if anyone else was thinking what I was thinking, that this person might be the body of Enrique Morales. I listened to the nervous chatter around me and didn’t hear his name come up. Instead, the men were mostly talking about horror movies and mummies and Egyptian tombs. I supposed to them, this shriveled-up creature looked more like something out of Hollywood than the dried-out remains of a man they had once known.

Pete dialed on his cell phone, and I listened as he spoke somberly and softly into it.

“Lowell, it’s Pete. I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to let you know we have a situation over at the storage…no, sir…well, yes, if you’re up to it.”

He ran a hand through his thick dark blond hair and exhaled slowly.

“Well, it’s a…a dead body, actually. In one of the apple bins…Yes, sir…No, though I think I may have an idea…Okay. We did. They should be here soon…All right. Bye.”

He clicked off the phone and slid it into his pocket. I stepped closer and asked as softly as I could, “Pete, do you think that’s the body of Enrique Morales?”

Pete’s eyes met mine for a long moment, and then he nodded.

“I recognize the shirt,” he whispered. “And that looks like his color hair, though who’s to say by that face if it’s him or not?”

“They have ways they can find out,” I said, knowing that the medical examiner would most likely start with dental records, and if they couldn’t be found or didn’t show anything conclusive, then there was a method for rehydrating the fingers to plump up the tips and get the prints. If all else failed, of course, there was DNA testing.

“Do you think it was an accident?” I asked.

Pete shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I suppose it’s possible, though how a man could’ve gotten buried in a bin of apples, I just don’t have a clue.”

A few more people came running as word spread through the various buildings about the mummy in the apples. One by one, they crowded around the bin and looked inside, an odd sort of excitement infusing most of their reactions. With all of these people milling around, I was very worried about the integrity of the scene.

“Pete, you need to get everyone to back off,” I said, hoping he would understand the importance of preserving things exactly as they were. “At least until the police get here and they can secure everything.”

“Yeah,” he said, then louder again, “yeah, yeah, come on, people. Step back, step back. I don’t want to see anybody within five feet of this bin.”

He glanced at me for confirmation, and I held up ten fingers.

“Ten feet!” he amended loudly. “Nobody within ten feet of the box!”

They all did as he said, stepping back and forming a sort of circle. Now there were at least 20 people, and the murmur of the crowd was at a fevered pitch. I hoped the police would arrive soon. It would take only one person breaking the rules to get everyone else moving forward again.

Pete seemed concerned about the unattended machines inside the other buildings, and I watched as he pulled out several supervisors from the crowd and instructed them to get their people back on the lines. No one seemed to be cooperating, however, and finally Pete whistled loudly for everyone to give him their attention. Lacking a better choice, he climbed up and stood on the seat of the very forklift that held the bin in question.

“All right, folks,” he yelled, holding on to the metal frame as he leaned outward. Slowly, the noise of the crowd died down until there was silence. “Listen up,” he said a bit less loudly. “This situation is unprecedented around here, so I understand your confusion. But standing around and staring at it isn’t going to make things better.”

“Did you call the police?” someone asked.

“Looks like they’re here now,” Pete replied, pointing down the hill. Everyone turned and looked, and in the distance, a row of white police cars was just turning into the long driveway, with lights flashing but, as requested, no sirens. “The police are going to have a lot of questions,” Pete continued. “And I want everyone to feel free to answer anything they ask. But please do not get on the phone and start calling all your friends and neighbors. We’ve got enough people here as it is. Is that understood?”

He looked from face to face, a sea of nodding heads. One woman sheepishly lowered a cell phone from her ear.

“Now, I don’t know if having a dead body in there managed to contaminate the entire room or not,” Pete continued. “We’ll find out. But without question this will contaminate the integrity of Tinsdale Orchards if we’re not careful. I don’t want to hear any rumors, I don’t want to hear any jokes, and for goodness sakes, I don’t want to hear anyone talking about this to any reporters.”

He looked around and, again, most of the people nodded.

“We can’t stop the news of what’s happened here,” he said finally, “but the best thing you can do to protect Tinsdale Orchards—to protect your jobs—is to keep your mouth shut and do your job. Now get back to work.”

He stepped down from the forklift just as the police cars reached the parking lot. A shower-capped woman leaned over and whispered something in Pete’s ear, so he made another announcement.

“One more thing,” he said quickly before the people walked away. “If anyone suffers any, uh, mental or emotional distress because of what they’ve seen here today, I’m sure we can arrange for some counseling. Thank you.”

The crowd dispersed a bit, though many people simply stood back and watched to see what was going to happen next. I, too, wanted to listen and learn, so I found an unobtrusive spot near the wall and sat down, hoping no one would notice me for a while.

And there was plenty going on to see and hear. I listened as the police were brought up to speed on the situation, watched them put up work lights and rope off the area with yellow Caution tape, even held my tongue when one young officer put both hands down on the rim of the bin as he looked inside. Fortunately, the chief saw what was happening, reprimanded him, and sent him off to some other duty on the fringe of the situation.

After a while Danny came and sat next to me, ostensibly to check on my well-being, but really, I think, to find some comfort himself.

“Man, I’ve been wondering if I’m cut out for this apple business,” he said after a while, shaking his head. “After this, I’m thinking maybe not.”

“I’m sure this isn’t exactly commonplace,” I said. “I don’t know a lot about apples, but I know they don’t usually come with a mummy in the box.”

“Like Cracker Jacks?” he whispered, and for some reason it caught us both as funny. Hands over our mouths, we giggled silently, thinking of Pete’s edict not to make jokes but unable to resist the emotional release of laughter.

“Danny was supposed to be driving it!” we heard someone yell, and we looked up, sobering instantly as a worker pointed toward the two of us. I recognized the yelling man as the one who discovered the body, the forklift driver who thought he was smelling a dead cat. Now he seemed to be on the defensive with Pete and Detective Sweetwater. “Danny was supposed to be on forklift today, but when we unsealed the room he wasn’t anywhere around. So I did it instead.”

“Pete sent me off to fix the tractor,” Danny said, standing. “Besides, I didn’t think we were opening the room up until tomorrow.”

“He’s right,” Pete said. “I did send him to fix the tractor. And SR3 leveled out much more rapidly than any of us expected.”

“Look, nobody’s making any accusations here,” Detective Sweetwater said. “I’m just trying to get my facts straight. So you’re the one who drove the forklift and brought the bin out here, right?”

The man nodded and the volume of their voices dropped back to normal.

“I’m glad I was out working on the tractor,” Danny said softly to me, after he sat back down. “It was hard enough seeing that without being the first one to discover it.”

“Not easy to look at death, is it?” I said, wondering how it was that Danny had come to work on an apple orchard. He didn’t really seem suited to the harsh realities of farm life at all.

“Oh, man, do you know if anyone has called Karen?” he asked. “I’d hate for her to hear about this on the news.”

Without waiting for an answer, Danny stood and headed toward one of the buildings. I realized that as the orchard liaison, he might have some rather unpleasant duties coming up in the days ahead—particularly if that was a dead migrant worker in the box.

I needed to make a few phone calls myself, starting with Harriet. She didn’t answer her cell, but I left a message on her voice mail that something big had come up and I would be a while. My hope was that she had already given up on me and gone to dinner with the Webbers. The poor woman had worked hard all day, but I hadn’t yet given her a key to the cabin or shown her where it was, so she couldn’t even go home and put up her feet.

I was just trying Dean’s cell phone when I realized that a man had come up and was standing nearby, just on the outside of the boundary of police tape. I hung up the phone and slipped it into my pocket.

“Is that the body, over there?” the man asked.

I glanced around to see whom he was addressing, and I decided it must be me, since no one else was in earshot.

“Yes,” I said. “In that wooden box.”

He nodded.

“They figure out who it is yet?”

“I think they have some ideas.”

“Wonder how long before they get it out of there. Looks like they brought enough police cars to fill a parade.”

“I suppose so.”

I looked at the man, at the back of his bald head, at his stooped posture, and thought he was very old. When he turned and faced me, however, I realized that he was probably only in his late sixties, but he looked older than that because he was ill. His face was pale and sunken, and in his hands he held an aluminum cane with a three-pronged base.

“Who are you, by the way?” he demanded, as if resenting my appraising gaze.

“I’m Callie Webber,” I replied. “I was touring the orchard when the body turned up.”

He harrumphed and tapped his cane into the ground.

“Callie Webber?” he repeated. “Don’t know you, never heard of you. Do you work here?”

“No, sir,” I said, “I was just visiting.”

He gave another grunt. Then, as if dismissing me, he turned his back to me and faced the scene. I stood, feeling vaguely offended.

“Who are you?” I asked, stepping closer.

“Name’s Tinsdale,” he said, not bothering to look my way as he answered. “Lowell Tinsdale. This is my orchard.”

Twenty-One