Read Online Sour Apples by Sheila Connolly - Free Book Online

you want. I probably won’t even notice those three acres—that section isn’t visible from my house or my mother’s anyway. Go for it.”
    “Great! So I can tell Bree to move forward? She’s itching to get started, and we’ll have to plant soon if we’re going to do it this year. Oh, and do you have a recent survey of the land? And we should draw up a lease agreement—I can’t afford to buy it right now, not if I’m going to improve it.”
    Seth smiled at her. “Fine, if it makes you happy, although I wouldn’t insist on it.”
    “I’m running a business, and I appreciate your trust, but I want to keep this on a business footing.”
    “No problem.”
    “Thanks, Seth.”
    “My pleasure.”
    Meg smiled at him. “Speaking of land, can you tell me more about this land arrangement with the Truesdells? If you don’t mind talking about it, that is.”
    “I’ll tell you what I know,” Seth said. “You only met Joyce once, right?”
    “Yes, that time she was here.”
    Seth went on, “Joyce was the driving force behind the dairy business, and Ethan seems to have gone along with whatever she wanted. But Joyce wasn’t all starry-eyed about it, and she knew how to run a business. They’ve done reasonably well, enough so that she wanted to buy or lease the property that adjoins her farm as grazing land—all her cows are grass fed. So she came to the assemblymen and asked. The town owns that land and we didn’t have a problem with that, and we worked out a lease arrangement. We didn’t go into the whole history of that piece of land, but there was definitely a title search in the file. There was an implied promise that she could buy it sometime in the future, but Joyce was happy enough with the leasearrangement. So last year she started improving the land for grazing.”
    “What do you mean, ‘improving’? I didn’t know you had to do anything beyond growing grass,” Meg said.
    “It’s a little more complicated than that, though I don’t really know the details. Plus she had to put up fencing and clear out some brush. Nothing major. But then this spring she let the cows out to graze—and they started getting sick.”
    “That’s what she was so upset about the other day, right?”
    “Exactly. Of course, after the first couple of cows started looking bad, she pulled all of them off the field, but one died anyway. That’s when she came to me, because she thought the problem had to have something to do with the land.”
    “I don’t know anything about cattle or grazing. What can make them sick?”
    “Me either, but I gather there are a lot of possibilities. It could be a disease. Or it could be something in the soil. There are plants that can be toxic, or even eating too much too fast. Joyce was careful and well-informed. When she was here the other day, she told me she had sent blood and soil samples off to the appropriate labs. Apparently whoever did the blood work owed her a favor, and she received the report fast—and then she came straight to me.”
    “So the lab found something?”
    Seth nodded. “Lead poisoning. Apparently cows are particularly susceptible to lead.”
    “Where on earth would they have gotten into lead?”
    “We don’t know—yet. It could be something as simple as someone dumping an old car battery in the field—cows are sometimes dumb enough to lick them, believe it or not. But I would think that Joyce was pretty thorough about checking for things like that when she cleaned up the land.”
    “What do you know about that property?”
    “Not a lot. I guess I’m going to have to find out.”
    “Anything I can do to help?”
    “I doubt it. If there’s any possibility that this might involve a legal action, then the town attorney should handle it. I don’t even know what kind of liability we have under the lease, but he helped draw it up.”
    “So what did Ethan want today?”
    “I’m not sure. It seemed like he just wanted to vent. I don’t think he and Joyce