Where Love Grows

At the car, she fumbled for her camera. The bag’s heft felt dear and familiar in her hand. The camera had been one of the small things she’d managed to salvage after the debacle at the magazine. Becca pushed aside resentful thoughts of libel suits and searched for some quick-dissolve pain medicine.

She sat in the driver’s seat and closed her eyes, praying that the medicine would kick in before the pain settled for a long stay. The inner debate raged on. With some force, she managed to tick off the pros and cons of telling him the truth.

The biggest reason was her gut. It had never steered her wrong before—well, save one biggie in the form of her countersuit, but in the end, even a jury of her peers had said her gut had been right.

Maybe, though, her instinct to blurt out “Are you Rooster?” came from her distaste of lying, even by omission. Deceit never felt right to Becca.

But this situation was different.

You don’t know if it’s Rooster. You have no way to verify it, except for some story about a willow tree. He can’t have been the only one who’s ever put a hammock under a willow tree.

Yeah, right. And just what did her dad say about coincidence?

Her dad. Becca’s stomach did a nauseating roll and twist the way it did whenever she’d topped a roller coaster and prepared for the final gut-wrenching loops. Her father would kill her. Becca could imagine the scathing words her dad would say to her if she trotted back to Atlanta to tell him some sorry tale about how she knew Ryan MacIntosh was innocent because he’d turned out to be her online buddy.

Knowing Dad, he’d say it was no coincidence at all. He’d swear Ryan had targeted Becca.

The possibility niggled at her. It would explain how Becca, who never managed to win a door prize or a lottery ticket or even a church bingo game, had hit the trifecta of coincidence.

But, no. She had six months of correspondence with Ryan, anonymous correspondence. She knew him—knew him how it counted. He couldn’t be scamming her. He couldn’t be mixed up in some complicated conspiracy to defraud the government and Ag-Sure.

Could he?

Okay, so she couldn’t say anything to her dad. She had to go forward with the investigation if she wanted to keep her job.

So…

Maybe there was no fraud. Maybe it was some wildly improbable, but still true, story about a vine that had somehow gotten transported from Texas to Georgia. Truth was stranger than fiction, right?

All she had to do was prove that the story was true. All she had to do was figure out how it got there. Then not even the insurance company could fault her.

If she did it quickly enough, Ryan wouldn’t have to know now. Plenty of time to help him anonymously. Plenty of time to tell him later. He’d understand about conflicts of interest.

The tremulous panic within her subsided as she settled on a course of action. Becca drew in an easier breath. She could do this.

A tapping at the window made her jump. She opened her eyes to see a concerned Ryan crouched down, peering at her.

Right. Well, checking on her tallied with the considerate Rooster she knew.

She gripped her camera bag and opened the car door. Time to get the show on the road.

“I got worried,” Ryan told her. “You looked so…”

“Thanks. I took some medicine. It happens, these headaches. I get stressed out and boom. A good night’s sleep will put me to rights. Fish fed?”

“Yeah. Um…you have some different shoes? Those aren’t exactly…”

She glanced down at her leather slip-ons. “Oh. Right. Let me change into the sneakers I brought.”

Ryan dropped onto the grass while he waited for her to swap shoes. Wilbur nosed up to him and flopped down beside him. She watched the two of them roughhouse while she tied her last sneaker. It felt odd to see Rooster in the flesh, see him do the things he’d described in what he’d supposed was an anonymous way. They’d revealed more than they’d realized about each other.

The trick, of course, was not to inadvertently reveal that she was Sunny. That would be a devil of a dilemma. After all, hadn’t she let Rooster—Ryan, she corrected herself—into her soul? Wouldn’t it be as easy for him to spot her as it had been for her?

Becca gave an extra hard yank to her shoelaces and stood up. The quicker she could stamp Closed on this case, the better. “Let’s take a gander at this vine, shall we?”

A FEW MINUTES LATER she was jouncing up and down behind Ryan on the back of a four-wheeler, with Wilbur running alongside them. Rows of cotton slid past them as they headed into the field.

She tightened her grip on Ryan to avoid being bounced off when they hit a rut—and was rewarded with the feel of rock-solid abs.

“Sorry!” he yelled over the roar of the two-cycle engine. “Didn’t see that one.”

His scent—a mix of soap and water, her favorite laundry detergent and the faintest trace of some sort of drive-a-woman-wild aftershave—tickled her senses. She inhaled again, this time deliberately. This was what she’d been missing all these months. Too bad e-mails didn’t come with a scratch-n-sniff option; she would have discarded the blanket of anonymity months ago if she’d had a hit of this.

All too soon, Becca felt the four-wheeler slow and then stop. She climbed off the machine, tried to tell herself that the unrelenting vibrations were what had made her knees weak.

Becca couldn’t convince herself of that one.

“Well. There it is. The giant Asian dodder vine. Ugly critter, isn’t it?”

It was ugly. Thick vines with no leaves strangled the cotton. To Becca, the vines looked like nothing so much as some sort of monochromatic python.

She fumbled in her camera bag for her reporter’s notebook and a pencil, old habits so ingrained that she never could get accustomed to using anything else. “Right. So how long has this been here? When did it first show up?”

Some of Ryan’s earlier disgust came back. “Don’t you guys even bother to read the insurance claim forms? Or are you hoping I’ll trip myself up so you can stamp Denied on my claim and then go on your merry little way?”

Ouch. His tone had hurt. She was about to snap back with something like “Hey, easy, buddy, I’m on your side,” but she stopped herself.

Don’t assume that Ryan is going to treat you like he knows you. To him, you’re the bad guy, remember?

Becca struggled for professionalism. “Yes, I have those forms—I’ve read them, I assure you. But I think it’s best if you just think of me as a glorified insurance adjuster. I’m here to help, okay? The computer’s flagged this and other similar claims for a variety of reasons. It’s in your best interest to help me so that this case is resolved quickly. Then Ag-Sure’s happy, you get your money and you’re happy, too. After all, if everything’s on the up-and-up, you’ve got nothing to hide, right?”

The color heightened in Ryan’s face, and he glanced away. Damn. She wished he hadn’t done that. It set all her alarm bells clanging.

Maybe he was still just mad.

“Right, Ryan?”

His nod lacked a certain ringing conviction of innocence. It troubled her that he didn’t enthusiastically say “Of course I’ve got nothing to hide.” But she ignored her worries and focused on doing her job.

Because doing her job would be what saved both of them.

“So, then, how you can help is to tell me, to the best of your knowledge, the time line, how this vine came to be.”

“I don’t know how this ‘came to be,’” Ryan growled at her. “All I know—all I can tell you—is that one morning, I got up to come plow my cotton and I saw this. Do you realize that I can’t even plow it? Not this section, anyway. The vines are too thick. They wrap around the implements and the discs, and I spend half a day getting them unwrapped. Forget harvesting this in any sort of mechanized way—even the good plants that aren’t affected—the vines are too close and mess up the harvester.”

But Becca had already started counting off rows…and she realized something. The knots of snakelike vines were in a pattern. Several rows would be untouched, and then one lone row or two would be taken over by the dodder. Then it would repeat—within the distance of the common width of plows.

She looked from the field to Ryan. No. It couldn’t be. But another count of the rows confirmed that the pattern was too consistent to be natural.

There’s got to be an explanation for this.

But that desperate thought vied with another.

Face it. He’s hiding something—and not very well.

Becca disguised her suspicion by taking pictures. She stepped back, steadied her pen on her pad and pressed on. “I have to admit, I know zip about this plant except what I could find online. And what the insurance company provided for me.”

“Right, of course. I’m sure they were most helpful.”

“It’s your chance, Ryan. Tell me.”

Becca willed him to come clean with whatever was so obviously on his mind. She could see something warring within him, knew instantly that he was experiencing the same inner debate she’d had earlier.

He’d tell Sunny.

For an instant, it was on the tip of her tongue to tell him the truth. Just blurt it out and see if he’d take her into his confidence. But then, maybe it was best that Ryan didn’t know who she was. The insurance company would yank her and her dad off the case for sure, and then what sort of investigator would Ryan get?

No. Better to do it the way she’d planned.

He’d come to a decision, she could see that.

“From my research—and my experience, unfortunately—this stuff grows at, like, six inches a day. It has no roots, no leaves—doesn’t need ’em. It just attaches itself to a handy plant and sucks it dry. Then it spreads to the next plant. And the next. I have no clue how it got here. A bit of a vine could have dropped here, could have been blown in by the wind from some of these other farms. It could have been trucked in. It just happened to drop in a spot, sniffed out a plant it liked and boom—suddenly I’m out of business. Bad luck. Bad timing.”

“So herbicides won’t work?”

“Sure. Kill the host plant and you kill the dodder vine. You don’t make anything on cotton even when the rains come when they’re supposed to and the weeds are the everyday garden variety. I swear to God, though, this is the scariest thing to hit cotton since the boll weevil.”

Becca’s headache came back full force. She realized that darkness had crept up on them when Wilbur came bursting out of a particularly thick patch of cotton.

“Um…look, I’ll have loads more questions than I feel up to asking about tonight. Can I bug you tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to get some rest?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Again, her heart ached. She wanted to yell at him, “Don’t hate me! It’s me! It’s Sunny! I’m here to help.”

Until she knew what was going on, though, she didn’t dare.

Ryan didn’t wait for her answer. “C’mon. I’ll take you back. We’ll go a different way so you see how far down it goes.

“Listen…maybe I came across all wrong. I’m just really frustrated by all this. All I want to do is get this harvest in some way, somehow, or else call it a loss and take my lumps. Trust me. I’ll make more money if I can get the harvest to market than I would with the insurance. All the insurance money will do is maybe pay off my seed money, my fertilizer and my pesticide bills. Diesel? Electricity? My labor? Forget that. But—”

She lay a hand on his arm. “I’m not the enemy, Ryan. I know how hard farming is, how dicey it can be. You have to trust me.”

He nodded, an abrupt jerk of his head that told her he didn’t, in fact, trust her.

Ryan seemed more rigid, less at ease, on the trip back. They left the field behind and came into the farmyard proper, whizzing past a big old barn, a grain silo, some outbuildings. Ahead, she could see the lights of the house, contrasting with the descending twilight.

They slowed as they passed a tiny but colorful vegetable garden.

“Wow! Look at the size of those tomatoes! You really know how to grow ’em!”

“That’s Mee-Maw’s. Want some? I need to pick the ripe ones for her anyway—Son of a—”

He braked suddenly, the movement jerking her forward.

“What?”

Ryan switched off the four-wheeler’s engine, stalked over to the vegetable garden and knelt down. With one hand, he began jerking up a perfectly healthy tomato vine by its roots, the careful framework of stakes tumbling to the ground.

Becca gasped. “What are you doing?”

He shoved it at her. “Pick off the tomatoes—ripe and green. Throw the vine down way over yonder—don’t put it down near the garden. I need to check the rest of these plants.”

Bemused, she did as he ordered, stacking the round red fruit on the seat of the four-wheeler. It was only as she turned the vine over in her hands that she saw what had made him yank up the bush.

Wrapped around the base of the tomato plant, as thin as a garden snake, was a young dodder vine.

CHAPTER FIVE

BECCA’S HAND INSTANTLY recoiled from the vine, though she told herself she was being silly. The plant, no matter how serpentine it looked, wasn’t dangerous to anything but a hapless plant unlucky enough to be its target.

Behind her, Ryan let loose a string of expletives, half muttered under his breath. She turned from plucking the last of the green tomatoes off the bush to see him yanking up still more plants by their roots.

The investigator in her noted the placement of those plants. The vine had grown on host plants in a checkerboardlike pattern all over the garden. She’d been around farming all her life, and she knew that what she was seeing was not natural.

No, if this had been a natural invasion of a parasitic plant, the vine would have attacked one spot and spread outward in a radius.

How had it traveled all the way from the cotton field—far enough that it took a four-wheeler to get there—to the kitchen garden so close to the house?

Squash plants, pea plants, okra, cucumber—one or two each joined the tomato plant Becca had discarded well away from the garden. Ryan crossed over to a shed, came back with a handful of kindling and a box of matches. He knelt, building a quick funeral pyre for the plants and tossed in a lit match.

“You’re not playing around.” Becca studied him for a long moment. Was his reaction normal frustration or a little too vehement?

For now, Becca was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt…but knowing her dad wouldn’t do the same ate at her.

“If there’s even a scrap of these left, the vine can spread. Mee-Maw’s worked too hard on this garden for her to lose it now.” His features were grim as he watched to be sure the plants caught.

The flames shot up higher and smoke billowed, hanging low in the twilight. Becca said nothing, still just observing, wanting to believe in Ryan. Abruptly, he turned and started back for the shed.

“Watch that for me,” he said. “I need some old bricks to surround the fire. All I need is for this fire to get out of control. It’s dry enough that it would spread. There’s a water hose coiled up near the back porch if it spreads.”

He was back again in a few moments, laden down with chipped and broken bricks. By the time Ryan had made a ring around the fire, the green plants had decided to succumb. Becca noted that the thicker dodder vines were more resistant to the flames than the tender green leaves of the vegetable plants.

Ryan seemed to read her thoughts. “First time I spotted this stuff in the cotton field, I thought that the best way to handle it was to burn it. So I doused a pile of cotton plants and vines with a little lighter fluid and tried to do just that. A day or so later I noticed that not all the vine had been destroyed and that it had latched on to whatever thick, bushy plant it found near enough to grab hold of. It’s downright creepy, if you ask me.”

The heat of the fire was suffocating in the muggy August evening, but Becca was still mesmerized. She pulled her eyes from the hypnotic flames. “So, you have to build this big a fire?”

Sweat had beaded up on Ryan’s brow, and his T-shirt clung to him. “All I can figure is the vines have sucked so much water out of host plants that killing the vine itself is that much harder. You have to burn it a long time…kind of like getting seaweed started for an oyster bake. For a whole field of cotton, that’s not so easy…but at least I know what to do to save Mee-Maw’s tomatoes.”

Mentioning Mee-Maw seemed to summon her. His grandmother swung open the back door and stepped out onto the porch. “Ryan? What in tarnation are you up to? It’s too dry and too late for a bonfire—not to mention it’s got to be eighty degrees out here even at this time of night!”

Ryan sighed. “Help me carry these tomatoes to her, will you?”

Becca gathered up an armload of tomatoes and followed him to the back porch.

“Mee-Maw…I’m afraid that vine’s spread to your garden. I had to destroy some of your plants, okay? I’m sorry, but if you want a chance at salvaging the rest of it, the host plants had to be burned.”

Mee-Maw’s face sagged, and suddenly Becca could see the woman’s years. “Here, let me get a pan to put ’em in. We’ll fry the green tomatoes, and the ripe ones needed picking anyway.” She cast a nervous glance at Ryan. “You keep an eye on that fire. Should have got an old barrel out of the—”

“Yes, ma’am, Mee-Maw. I know. I should have.”

The old lady hustled into the kitchen for a pan, shooing Ryan away as soon as he’d dumped his cargo. “You go on back to the fire.”

Becca, though, followed her into the house, the dog at her heels. “Is it okay? The dog, I mean?” she asked. She piled the green tomatoes down atop the red ones. “They’re beautiful tomatoes. It’s a shame.”

“Wilbur’s fine. He likes to loaf, but he stays inside mostly. Thank you, ma’am, ’bout my tomatoes. Some of ’em are turning, looks like. You like fried green tomatoes?”

Becca nodded, gazing out the window over the sink at Ryan as he poked at the fire with an iron rake. When she turned her attention back toward Mee-Maw, she saw the woman was looking out the window, as well. “Yes, ma’am. My grandmother sure could make a mean fried green tomato.”

Mee-Maw sank into her chair at the kitchen table and buried her head in her hands. “First I lose Mac, and then J.T. has to leave the day after Mac’s funeral…then that blamed vine starts springing up. Bad enough it got into the cotton, but now the vegetables? And with money so tight!”

“Mac?”

“My husband. Ryan’s grandfather. Mac’s daddy gave us this little corner of land to build the house on. He was in the Pacific, Mac was, during World War II. Spent the whole entire war surrounded by water. Swore if he could ever make it back on dry land, he’d nail his feet to the ground, and he just about did. Don’t get me wrong—we battled hail and sleet and drought and floods and just about everything the Lord could hand us…but I never thought I’d see anything like this…this blamed vine.”

“Is J.T. one of your sons?”

“J.T.?” For a moment, Mee-Maw looked a little startled. Her face resembled Ryan’s as it closed down, defensive and wary. “No. J.T. helped us out around the farm. Me and Mac, we were no spring chickens, you know, and we needed someone with a strong back. Ryan was on the road with that chemical company back then, and Jack’s always so busy with his insurance agency.”

“So your children…”

“Jack’s dad got killed in a wreck, oh, ten years ago. And Marshall, Ryan’s dad—he’s my youngest—he’s teaching at the agricultural college. That’s a good three hours away.”

Mee-Maw sighed again. “I didn’t know what I’d do when J.T. had to leave. I thought for sure I’d have to give up this place. But then Ryan came back and helped me keep the farm going. He’d been itching to for years, but he kept putting it off. Besides, he didn’t want to seem like he was pushing his gramps out of the tractor seat.” She snorted. “As if anyone could have, even if he’d wanted to.”

“Why did J.T.—”

But before Becca could get the question out, Mee-Maw had pushed up from the table and crossed to stand beside Becca at the white enamel sink and drainboard, muttering something about Ryan and the fire.

“Ma’am?”

“Fire. Hate the stuff. Lost everything we had to a fire when I was a kid. An old cookstove messed up—ain’t nothing sadder than to stand outside in the middle of the night and see every stick of furniture, every scrap you own, everything you worked for…gone. Makes me the pack rat I am, I guess.

“Go on out there, will you? Make sure he banks that fire. I know he will, mind you, but just humor a silly old woman.”

Becca crossed the backyard to the bonfire—and stopped in her tracks.

Ryan had stripped off his T-shirt and laid it aside. The fire lit the planes of his chest, highlighting well-developed pecs and a firm, flat abdomen.

His skin was damp from his exertion and the heat of the flames licking over the dodder vine at his feet. Ryan seemed intense, focused, apparently unfazed by the smoke and the crackle of sparks that shot up from the wood into the dark night sky.

The sight made Becca’s belly flutter. She tried to quench the butterflies with a good dose of common sense.

First she’d mooned over his scent and now she was ogling him? Her dad would yank her off this case so fast…She knew better than to get involved with the target of an investigation.

But you’re already involved.

“Mee-Maw said to be sure to bank the fire.”

Ryan jumped. “Damn. You scared me. I figured you’d gone by now.”

“No. You know, I should have gotten pictures of the vine before you burned the plants.”

“Yeah, well, chalk that up to my thinking it was more important to get a harvest than an insurance settlement.”

Or was it to cover something up? She silenced her dad’s whisper in her head, but it was there for a reason. While she’d always prided herself on being objective and open-minded, she had enough of her father in her to avoid being led down many a primrose path.

“Ryan…” Becca fought the urge to touch him. It was so hard to act as though she’d only just met him. “Before I close out this investigation, I’m going to need detailed time lines, to establish where this vine first popped up, how it spread. Your claim forms are pretty scant on details like that.”

“You see how it spreads!” He scowled and gave the fire a jab with his rake, sending off an explosion of sparks. “It’s like damn toadstools—one day it’s not there, the next, it’s strangling half a garden. Fill out all the blanks and check all the boxes you want to on your forms, but it all comes down to the same thing—I don’t know how it got here. I can speculate, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m fighting something here—we’re all fighting something—that could wreck agriculture in this part of the state.”

“Whoa. A bit of hyperbole, isn’t it?”

“No. Another farmer who has this stuff in his fields says it’s resistant to the one herbicide that ought to kill it.”

“I thought you said if you kill the host plant—”

“If you starve it out, sure. But in his case, the vine just found something else to latch on to. Look—I know insurance companies don’t want to pay out claims. Hell, they’ve got shareholders, and I know whose tune those insurance execs are marching to. But rather than send us someone to investigate us—” this he made sound like the basest of insults “—why not send us someone to solve the problem?”

“And who might that be? What experts have you called in?”

Again, Ryan gave her a look that screamed his discomfiture.

“Well? Surely you—”

“I’ve put in calls to every expert that might have the faintest clue of how to get rid of this vine. They all say the same thing—drag a firebreak around the affected acreage, throw in a match and watch what little profit you have left go up in smoke. Believe me, I’ve been tempted. And tonight…tonight I’m past temptation.”