Dale comes to Hawthorn House late Thursday afternoon — not for his usual dinner, because Agnes has quietly suspended the Thursday tradition “until things settle down,” but to drop off tomatoes from his garden and check on Agnes.
He arrives at four o’clock, carrying a paper bag in each arm. One bag is full of tomatoes — big, ripe, red as stoplights, the kind of tomatoes that only grow in coastal gardens where the soil is rich and the summer sun is generous. The other bag is heavier, and when Dale sets it on the farmhouse table, it makes a solid thunk.
“Last year’s walnuts,” he says, setting down a sealed bag. “From the freezer. I’m clearing it before the new crop comes in. Thought you might use these for the church sale.”
Agnes eyes the bag. “I don’t use walnuts, Dale.”
“For the church sale, I said. Somewhere else, if you prefer. I didn’t think.” He looks at the bag, and for the first time the gift seems to embarrass him.
“Russian tea cakes.”
“Those. You used to make them for the church bake sale. George loved them.”
Something flickers across Agnes’s face at George’s name — a shadow, a wince, the briefest collapse of the wall she keeps between herself and the rest of the world. Then it’s gone, and she’s Agnes again, straight-backed and sharp-eyed.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
“They’ve kept well,” Dale says. He lifts the sealed freezer bag, checks the date on its label, and puts it down again. “Melissa made me label everything after I served her a mystery stew. She said marriage shouldn’t require forensic science.”
Dale turns the bag over, checks that the seal is holding, and sets it beside the tomatoes. He is discussing ingredients with a cook. I know that. I also know what the lab found in Victor’s food, and I cannot make the two facts sit comfortably beside each other.
“I used some for the Rotary banana bread last month,” he says. “People asked for the recipe. That doesn’t happen often enough for me to be modest about it.”
He rinses a tomato and dries his hands on a kitchen towel — the blue one, the one Agnes keeps on the hook by the stove, not the white one by the sink. He knows which towel is which.
I watch him from the counter where I’m rolling out pastry dough for a quiche. My hands are steady, but something cold is moving through my chest, something that feels like watching a jigsaw puzzle assemble itself one piece at a time.
Dale has walnuts and knows how to bake with them. He brought a bag of them to the B&B — to the house where Victor Crane died from a walnut allergen a week ago. He brought them casually, cheerfully, the way a neighbor brings tomatoes or zucchini or any other surplus from a productive garden.
“You okay there, Tess?” Dale asks, peering at me. “You look a little pale.”
“Fine. Just tired.”
“You’re working too hard. Agnes, you’re working her too hard.”
“She’s working the appropriate amount,” Agnes says. “Unlike you, who stands around talking when there’s a perfectly good garden that needs weeding.”
“I’m going, I’m going.” Dale grabs his coat — the canvas jacket he leaves on the hook by the back door, because of course he has a hook — and heads outside. “I’ll be in the garden if anyone needs me. Try not to miss me.”
He disappears through the back door. The kitchen settles into quiet, broken only by the sound of my rolling pin and the ticking of the wall clock and the distant, muffled sound of Dale humming as he works in the garden.
Agnes watches him go. Then she looks at the bag of walnuts on the table.
“He brings me something from his garden every week,” she says quietly. “Tomatoes. Herbs. Zucchini. Flowers for the table. It’s his way of… contributing. Of being part of this house.”
“He seems very comfortable here.”
“He is. He always has been. Even before George died, Dale was the one who fixed the leaky faucet and mowed the lawn and remembered to bring milk when we ran out.” Agnes pauses. “George used to joke that Dale was a better husband than he was.”
She presses one finger against the sealed bag, then pulls her hand away. “Put those in the freezer,” she says. “Separately. I don’t want them anywhere near the guest baking.”
“Dale,” she says, almost to herself. “What did you do?”
The back door opens and Dale sticks his head in. “Agnes, the rose bed on the east side is looking rough. I think we’ve got aphids. I’ll bring some neem oil tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Dale.”
“Also, the conservatory door is sticking again. I’ll fix it this weekend — I’ve got a new set of hinges in the garage that should do the trick.”
“That would be helpful.”
He goes back to the garden. The bag sits between Agnes and me. I have accepted tomatoes from him without a second thought; the walnuts make the same ordinary gesture feel calculated. I cannot decide whether that tells me anything about Dale or only about myself.
“Agnes,” I say. “Those walnuts. If someone ground them very finely — into a powder — could you mix them into a biscuit dough?”
Agnes goes very still.
“You could,” she says. “If the powder was fine enough, it would bake right in. You wouldn’t see it. You might taste a slight nuttiness, but in a shortbread biscuit with butter and sugar and vanilla, you might not.” She takes her hand off the sealed bag. “But knowing how somebody could do it won’t tell us who did.”
“And if someone was allergic — severely allergic — to tree nuts?”
“Even a small amount could trigger anaphylaxis. If that person ate it…” She trails off.
Through the open window I hear Dale humming as he weeds the roses. I can no longer decide whether the sound is comforting.
Someone could have brought a separately baked biscuit. The thought sends me back to the crumbs by the settee. I will ask Davenport whether the food itself can tell us anything more.
It’s a theory. It’s only a theory. I don’t have proof. I don’t have the biscuit — Davenport took it. I don’t have the grinder or the powder or the gloves or a single piece of physical evidence that connects Dale Musgrove to the murder of Victor Crane.
What I have is access and opportunity. Neither belongs to Dale alone. Yet the sight of him through the window is enough to make me move the bag farther from the dough.
And I have a decades-old land deal that gave George Hawthorn and Dale Musgrove a fortune and left Thomas Marsh in the ground.
Dale comes back inside at six o’clock. He washes his hands at the kitchen sink, dries them on the blue towel, and sits at the table.
“Tomatoes are on the counter,” he says. “And the walnuts. Agnes, seriously, make those Russian tea cakes. I’ll bring more walnuts next week.”
“I’ll think about it,” Agnes says.
Dale kisses her cheek, grabs his coat, and heads for the front door. At the threshold, he turns back.
“Oh—those gloves Harding collected from the greenhouse. They may be mine. I keep a pair there, behind the fern. Tell him he can check the name inside the cuff.”
He leaves.
The front door closes.
Agnes and I sit in the kitchen with the tomatoes and the walnuts and the bread rising in the oven, and the silence between us is full of the same terrible question:
How long has Dale been planning this?