Pumpkin Pied Page 4

  The announcements started promptly at noon. The sun was high in the sky, and despite the blackened field that had been the corn maze, there was still a festive atmosphere.

  The pumpkin contest was first. The contestants’ pumpkins were lined up on hay bales, and there was no question who the winner was; Phoebe’s pumpkin looked like Cinderella’s Carriage lined up next to a bunch of Snow White’s dwarves.

  Emmeline stood beside Henry, who was actively fuming, while Phoebe stood behind her monstrous pumpkin, a thin-lipped, superior smile on her face.

  Tom Lockhart, who had the bad luck to be in charge of distributing the awards, stepped up to the makeshift podium to distribute third and second prizes, and then, to no one’s surprise, announced Phoebe the winner. “Let’s have a round of applause for Phoebe’s pumpkin... weighing in at 96 pounds and breaking the record for the largest pumpkin ever grown on Cranberry Island!”

  Gertrude Pickens of the Daily Mail prepared to snap a photo as Phoebe walked up to accept her ribbon, beaming with pride.

  At this not unexpected news, Henry exploded, his face turning a dangerous shade of purple. “She’s a cheater!” he blurted. “She poisoned my pumpkin with vinegar and salt!”

  “I did no such thing, sir,” Phoebe said. “And I resent the implication.”

  “If my pumpkin dies, yours deserves to die, too!” he yelled, pulling a meat mallet out from behind his back.

  “Henry!” Emmeline caught his arm.

  “Out of my way, Emmeline,” he said. “My only regret is that I didn’t do this before the awards were given out.”

  “It wasn’t Phoebe who killed your pumpkin,” she said.

  He blinked. “Nonsense. She poisoned my sugar water. Now, get out of my way.”

  “Henry,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “I poisoned your pumpkin.”

  “I said, out of my...” Suddenly, her words seemed to sink in. “Wait. You... you poisoned Josephine?”

  “It even has a name,” Emmeline said. “Yes,” she said. “I poisoned Josephine. I was tired of being a pumpkin widow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve practically lived in that greenhouse since June,” she said, pumpkin earrings swinging. “I’m tired of eating dinner in the greenhouse. I’m tired of hearing about ‘Josephine.’ I just want my husband back!”

  “You killed my pumpkin?” he asked, looking like he was about to burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry, Henry,” she said. “But something had to be done.”

  Phoebe sniffed, looking superior, and for a moment, I had a desire to take the meat mallet and finish off what Henry had been about to do. But Tom Lockhart was moving on. “And now,” he said, “the results of the baking contest.” He was opening an envelope when Charlene came up and whispered something in his ear, looking gleeful.

  “You’re kidding me,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Just got word this morning.”

  “Before we get to the pie judging,” he said, “I have some excellent news.”

  A murmur passed through the crowd.

  “It looks like this won’t be the last year we have the Harvest Festival here after all. It turns out we’ve been holding the festival on an important archeological site for all these years,” he said.

  There was a murmur in the crowd.”

  “Apparently the buyer has backed out... and there’s a new one.”

  The murmuring got louder.

  “Let’s give a big round of applause to Murray Selfridge! He’s just signed a contract to purchase the property.”

  Confused silence. I could tell everyone else was wondering what I would be thinking: was Murray buying the property any better?

  “Not to build on,” Tom reassured the islanders. “He plans to donate it to the island!”

  Whoops broke out all around, along with applause. I glanced over at Emily; she looked absolutely elated. I winked at Catherine, who was standing beside Murray, and she grinned at me. I had to say one thing for Murray; he sure worked fast. I wasn’t surprised to see Gertrude Pickens making a beeline for him; she was going to get quite a scoop today.

  “And now,” he said, “let’s proceed to the final judging.” I noticed Claudette stand a little straighter. “Third prize goes to Fred Winters,” he said. “For his Pumpkin Custard pie.”

  “Really?” he asked, looking shocked. “It was my first try!”

  There was applause as he took his ribbon.

  “Second prize goes to Emmeline Hoyle,” he said, “for her pumpkin chess pie.”

  “I should have put vinegar and salt in your pie,” her husband said sourly. She gave him a light whack on the arm and went up to accept her ribbon.

  “And first prize,” he said, “goes to Natalie Barnes for her pumpkin caramel turtle pie!”

  Lucy whooped beside me, and Charlene pumped her fist as I went up to have my photo snapped by Gertrude. Maybe, for once, I thought, she’d have something nice to say about me in the paper.

  “Congratulations,” she said, and a moment later, the flash blinded me.

  “I can’t believe they’re not going to build a house on the property!” Lucy said when we got back to the inn later that afternoon. I took the rest of my pie with me, after giving Gertrude a slice and promising to e-mail her the recipe.

  “I know,” I told her as I slid the pie onto the counter. “For the first time ever, I actually think I like Murray Selfridge.”

  “That was awfully clever of him. Not quite legal, maybe... but clever.”

  “That’s Murray for you.”

  “At least it was in service of good. John’s mother is a good influence on him,” she said.

  “That’s what I told her.”

  “I just wish I knew who set fire to the corn maze—and put that heart by the entrance.”

  I shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know. So,” I said as I cut the last remaining slices of my Turtle Pumpkin Pie and handed one to Lucy, “that was an exciting day.”

  “And a successful one,” she said. “I’m thrilled you won the pie contest!”

  “You helped,” I reminded her.

  “I spread pecans and brown sugar on top of it and put it in the oven,” she said. “That’s hardly a contribution.”

  “Every little bit helps,” I said, slicing myself a thin wedge of pie and levering it onto a plate. “What a day.”

  “No kidding,” she said. “And I thought life in a small town would be slow!”

  “It’s anything but, I assure you,” I said as I sat down across from her at my pine kitchen table. “Did you decide what to do about the farm?”

  She took a deep breath. “I think I’m going to do it,” she said. “I feel like I’m absolutely crazy for saying it, but I just feel like... well, like if I don’t, I’m going to spend the rest of my life regretting it.”

  “I think this calls for a toast,” I said, popping a bottle of sparkling apple cider and pouring two glasses.

  “To Dewberry Farm,” I said.

  “To the rescue of the Harvest Festival,” she said. “And the success of the Gray Whale Inn,” she added as we clinked our glasses, grins on both our faces.

  Read on for recipes and a sample from Killer Jam, a Dewberry Farm Mystery by Karen MacInerney.

  Killer Jam

  Chapter 1

  I’ve always heard it’s no use crying over spilled milk. But after three days of attempting to milk Blossom the cow (formerly Heifer #82), only to have her deliver a well-timed kick that deposited the entire contents of my bucket on the stall floor, it was hard not to feel a few tears of frustration forming in the corners of my eyes.

  Stifling a sigh, I surveyed the giant puddle on the floor of the milking stall and reached for the hose. I’d tried surrounding the bucket with blocks, holding it in place with my feet—even tying the handle to the side of the stall with a length of twine. But for the sixth straight time, I had just squeezed the last drops from the teats when Blossom swung her right
rear hoof in a kind of bovine hook kick, walloping the top of the bucket and sending gallons of the creamy white fluid spilling across both the concrete floor and my boots. I reprimanded her, but she simply tossed her head and grabbed another mouthful of the feed I affectionately called “cow chow.”

  She looked so unassuming. So velvety-nosed and kind, with big, long-lashed eyes. At least she had on the day I’d selected her from the line of cows for sale at the Double-Bar Ranch. Despite all the reading I’d done on selecting a heifer, when she pressed her soft nose up against my cheek, I knew she belonged at Dewberry Farm. Thankfully, the rancher I’d purchased her from had seemed more than happy to let her go, extolling her good nature and excellent production.

  He’d somehow failed to mention her phobia of filled buckets.

  Now, as I watched the tawny heifer gamboling into the pasture beside my farmhouse, kicking her heels up in what I imagined was a cow’s version of the middle finger, I took a deep breath and tried to be philosophical about the whole thing. She still had those big brown eyes, and it made me happy to think of her in my pasture rather than the cramped conditions at Double-Bar Ranch. And she’d only kicked the milk bucket, not me.

  Despite the farm’s growing pains, as I turned toward the farmhouse, I couldn’t help but smile. After fifteen years of life in Houston, I now lived in a century-old yellow farmhouse—the one I’d dreamed of owning my whole life—with ten acres of rolling pasture and field, a peach orchard, a patch of dewberries, and a quaint, bustling town just up the road. The mayor had even installed a Wi-Fi transmitter on the water tower, which meant I could someday put up a website for the farm. So what if Blossom was more trouble than I’d expected, I told myself. I’d only been a dairy farmer for seventy-two hours; how could I expect to know everything?

  In fact, it had only been six months since my college roommate, Natalie Barnes, had convinced me to buy the farm that had once belonged to my grandparents. Natalie had cashed in her chips a few years back and bought an inn in Maine, and I’d never seen her happier. With my friend’s encouragement, I’d gone after the dream of reliving those childhood summers, which I’d spent fishing in the creek and learning to put up jam at my grandmother’s elbow.

  It had been a long time since those magical days in Grandma Vogel’s steamy, deliciously scented kitchen. I’d spent several years as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, fantasizing about a simpler life as I wrote about big-city crime and corruption. As an antidote to the heartache I’d seen in my job, I’d grown tomatoes in a sunny patch of the backyard, made batches of soap on the kitchen stove, and even kept a couple of chickens until the neighbors complained.

  Ever since those long summer days, I’d always fantasized about living in Buttercup, but it wasn’t until two events happened almost simultaneously that my dream moved from fantasy to reality. First, the paper I worked for, which like most newspapers was suffering from the onset of the digital age, laid off half the staff, offering me a buyout that, combined with my savings and the equity on my small house, would give me a nice nest egg. And second, as I browsed the web one day, I discovered that my grandmother’s farm—which she’d sold fifteen years ago, after my grandfather passed—was up for sale.

  Ignoring my financial advisor’s advice—and fending off questions from friends who questioned my sanity—I raided the library for every homesteading book I could find, cobbled together a plan I hoped would keep me from starving, took the buyout from the paper, and put an offer in on Dewberry Farm. Within a month, I went from being Lucy Resnick, reporter, to Lucy Resnick, unemployed homesteader of my grandparents’ derelict farm. Now, after months of backbreaking work, I surveyed the rows of fresh green lettuce and broccoli plants sprouting up in the fields behind the house with a deep sense of satisfaction. I might not be rich, and I might not know how to milk a cow, but I was living the life I’d always wanted.

  I focused on the tasks for the day, mentally crossing cheese making off the list as I headed for the little yellow farmhouse. There might not be fresh mozzarella on the menu, but I did have two more batches of soap to make, along with shade cover to spread over the lettuce, cucumber seeds to plant, chickens to feed, and buckets of dewberries to pick and turn into jam. I also needed to stop by and pick up some beeswax from the Bees’ Knees, owned by local beekeeper Nancy Shaw.

  The little beeswax candles I made in short mason jars were a top seller at Buttercup Market Days, and I needed to make more.

  Fortunately, it was a gorgeous late spring day, with late bluebonnets carpeting the roadsides and larkspur blanketing the meadow beside the house, the tall flowers’ ruffled lavender and pink spikes bringing a smile to my face. They’d make beautiful bouquets for the market this coming weekend—and for the pitcher in the middle of my kitchen table. Although the yellow Victorian-style farmhouse had been neglected and left vacant for the past decade or more, many of my grandmother’s furnishings remained. She hadn’t been able to take them with her to the retirement home, and for some reason, nobody else had claimed or moved them out, so many things I remembered from my childhood were still there.

  The house had good bones, and with a bit of paint and elbow grease, I had quickly made it a comfortable home. The white tiled countertop sparkled again, and my grandmother’s pie safe with its punched tin panels was filled with jars of jam for the market. I smoothed my hand over the enormous pine table my grandmother had served Sunday dinners on for years. I’d had to work to refinish it, sanding it down before adding several layers of polyurethane to the weathered surface, but I felt connected to my grandmother every time I sat down to a meal.

  The outside had taken a bit more effort. Although the graceful oaks still sheltered the house, looking much like they had when I had visited as a child, the line of roses that lined the picket fence had suffered from neglect, and the irises were lost in a thicket of Johnson grass. The land itself had been in worse shape; the dewberries the farm had been named for had crept up into where the garden used to be, hiding in a sea of mesquite saplings and giant purple thistles. I had had to pay someone to plow a few acres for planting, and had lost some of the extra poundage I’d picked up at my desk job rooting out the rest. Although it was a continual battle against weeds, the greens I had put in that spring were looking lush and healthy—and the dewberries had been corralled to the banks of Dewberry Creek, which ran along the back side of the property. The peach trees in the small orchard had been cloaked in gorgeous pink blossoms and now were laden with tiny fruits. In a few short months, I’d be trying out the honey-peach preserves recipe I’d found in my grandmother’s handwritten cookbook, which was my most treasured possession. Sometimes, when I flipped through its yellowed pages, I almost felt as if my grandmother were standing next to me.

  Now, I stifled a sigh of frustration as I watched the heifer browse the pasture. With time, I was hoping to get a cheese concern going; right now, I only had Blossom, but hopefully she’d calve a heifer, and with luck, I’d have two or three milkers soon. Money was on the tight side, and I might have to consider driving to farmers’ markets in Austin to make ends meet—or maybe finding some kind of part-time job—but now that I’d found my way to Buttercup, I didn’t want to leave.

  I readjusted my ponytail—now that I didn’t need to dress for work, I usually pulled my long brown hair back in the mornings—and mentally reviewed my to-do list. Picking dewberries was next, a delightful change from the more mundane tasks of my city days. I needed a few more batches of jam for Buttercup’s Founders’ Day Festival and Jam-Off, which was coming up in a few days. I’d pick before it got too hot; it had been a few days since I’d been down by the creek, and I hoped to harvest another several quarts.

  Chuck, the small apricot rescue poodle who had been my constant companion for the past five years, joined me as I grabbed a pair of gardening gloves and the galvanized silver bucket I kept by the back door, then headed past the garden in the back and down to the creek, where the sweet smell of sycamores filled the air. I di
dn’t let Chuck near Blossom—I was afraid she would do the same thing to him that she did to the milk bucket—but he accompanied me almost everywhere else on the farm, prancing through the tall grass, guarding me from wayward squirrels and crickets, and—unfortunately—picking up hundreds of burrs. I’d had to shave him within a week of arriving at the farm, and I was still getting used to having a bald poodle. This morning, he romped through the tall grass, occasionally stopping to sniff a particularly compelling tuft of grass. His pink skin showed through his clipped fur, and I found myself wondering if there was such a thing as doggie sunscreen.

  The creek was running well this spring—we’d had plenty of rain, which was always welcome in Texas, and a giant bullfrog plopped into the water as I approached the mass of brambles with their dark, sweet berries. They were similar to the blackberries I bought in the store, but a bit longer, with a sweet-tart tang that I loved. I popped the first few in my mouth.

  I went to work filling the bucket, using a stick to push the brambles aside, and had filled it about halfway when I heard the grumble of a motor coming up the long driveway. Chuck, who had been trying to figure out how to get to the fish that were darting in the deeper part of the creek, turned and growled. I shushed him as we headed back toward the farmhouse, the bucket swinging at my side.

  A lanky man in jeans and a button-down shirt was unfolding himself from the front seat of the truck as I opened the back gate. Chuck surged ahead of me, barking and growling, then slinking to my ankle when I shushed him with a sharp word.

  “Can I help you?” I asked the man. He was in his mid-forties, with work-worn boots and the roughened skin of a man who’d spent most of his life outdoors.