Chapter 7
“Start from the beginning,” Margaret said. “From the moment you, Gloria, and Lucy drove over to the township office to complain about the annoying plane.”
“The woman suggested I start a petition to present it to the township. She said it was the first step in requesting a noise ordinance be put in place.” Liz told them the trio had made their rounds, gathering signatures.
“My neighbor, Christi, mentioned a flight app to track the plane and get more information about the owner.”
“A man we now know is a real estate investor, Tristan Keller. He tried purchasing Liz and Floyd’s property,” Gloria added.
“After we found out he was the one dropping rotting tomatoes on our property and harassing us, Floyd left a message at his office telling him to stop.”
“Dropping rotting tomatoes?” Ruth interrupted.
“Bunches of them.”
“And maybe even water balloons.” Lucy reminded them about how they had found small bits of rubber near the road and in their driveway.
“Which is what Echo was also finding. Keller was dropping water balloons.”
“This guy sounds like a real nutjob,” Margaret said.
“With more than a few enemies, if I had to guess,” Liz said. “As I mentioned, Floyd left a message for Keller this morning basically telling him we knew he was the one flying around bombing our house with rotten produce and warning him to knock it off.”
“I’m confused.” Dot lifted a hand. “When exactly did the plane get shot down?”
“Early this morning, right after Keller flew over and dropped a bunch of tomatoes. In fact, I pulled it up on my flight app and know exactly when the plane went down,” Liz said.
“So, unbeknownst to you and Floyd, he went to work and left a message for Tristan Keller. By then, his plane was already on the ground.”
“Correct,” Liz confirmed.
“Well.” Ruth sucked in a breath. “It’s not looking good for you guys. Floyd had motive and opportunity.”
“More than enough,” Liz said miserably. “Which is why we need help in figuring out who pulled the trigger. I have no idea what kind of charges someone would face for shooting an aircraft.”
“Let’s find out.” Gloria grabbed her cell phone and began tapping the top. “Hmmm.”
“What?” Liz leaned in.
“Under federal law, shooting down an aircraft, private or otherwise, is a felony. The shooter could be sent to prison. This includes drones.”
“How awful,” Dot gasped. “Liz, you’ve turned white as a ghost.”
“I can’t even think about…” Liz clutched her throat. “I wish I had never contacted the township, never started a petition.”
“You’re not going to prison,” Gloria said.
“I hope not. You know how pale and pasty I look in neon orange.”
“Leave it to Liz.” Lucy laughed. “You have more to worry about than how you look in a prison uniform.”
“You’re right. The food. I’ve heard it’s awful.” Liz grimaced. “Although I could stand to lose a few pounds.”
Gloria rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t last five minutes behind bars.”
“I already have. Remember the time…”
Her sister cut her off. “We were in the Smoky Mountains and spent a few hours in a jail cell. How could I forget?”
“It was the worst day of my life, a low point I will never forget. I know I wouldn’t survive prison time again,” Liz said dramatically.
“We spent a few hours in jail,” Margaret reminded her. “And you whined about it the entire time.”
“I was traumatized.”
“We’ll start assembling the clues while everything is still fresh in your mind.” Gloria ran to the dining room, grabbed a notepad and pen, and set it on the table. “But first, we eat.”
Liz, although still deeply concerned over the possibility of facing time behind bars, filled her plate with a generous portion of the breakfast bake, crispy slices of bacon, Lucy’s loaded home fries and Margaret’s biscuits. She left just enough room to add a piece of Ruth’s cinnamon streusel.
During the meal, Gloria kept the conversation light, chatting about the upcoming holidays and plans to spend it with family and friends.
“The brunch was delicious.” Liz leaned back in her chair and patted her stomach. “This was the best meal I’ve had in days.”
“Poor Floyd,” Gloria tsk-tsked. “Maybe you should take cooking lessons.”
“And throw good money away on something I know I won’t enjoy?” Liz shook her head. “I’m hiring a cook to come in three days a week to prepare meals. I believe the name of the place is MOD—Meals on Demand. They’re highly reviewed on the internet.”
“Learning to cook isn’t hard,” Lucy said. “Maybe if you approached it with a positive attitude.”
“At my age, I’m not willing to waste time trying,” Liz sniffed. “I’ve tried cooking and cannot, for the life of me, get the hang of it.”
“Floyd is a gem,” Margaret said. “You better hang right onto him.”
“I have every intention of staying wed for the rest of my life, which is why it’s of utmost importance that we figure out who the gunman is.”
With everyone pitching in, the women made quick work of clearing the kitchen table. After finishing, they gathered in the dining room while Gloria settled in behind her computer, notepad and pen in hand. “First, we look at the clues, at what we have so far.”
She jotted Tristan Keller’s Plane Crash at the top of the blank page and drew a line beneath it. Working her way down, Gloria assembled a list of pertinent information:
Tristan Keller, Real Estate Investor. Pilot. Local.
Flying a plane over Liz and Floyd’s house.
Dropping possible water balloons and rotten tomatoes on the property.
Liz heard a loud pop. Plane was shot down.
Floyd left a message for Keller not long after the plane went down, telling him he knew he was harassing them and that he needed to stop.
Liz leaned in. “We know for a fact the rotten tomatoes belonged to Keller. The officer told me there were still some inside his plane.”
Gloria added the note about the rotten produce found inside the cockpit. “How long would you say he’s been flying over your house?”
“A few weeks. Maybe a month.” Liz tapped her chin thoughtfully. “It makes me wonder why, after all of this time, the guy decided to start harassing us.”
“Are you getting payments for the natural gas?” Dot asked. “Think about it. If this investor guy had an inkling about the gas and it was the reason for him wanting to purchase the property, if you actually started collecting cash, it might have been the trigger.”
“You’re right,” Liz said. “Honestly, I’m not sure about the financial end of it. I’ve been so wrapped up in renovations.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to find out.”
Liz tapped out a text to her husband and received a prompt reply. “I think you might be onto something. Floyd said our first check for the natural gas / mineral rights should be rolling in any day now.”
“Maybe Keller heard about it, got ticked and started harassing you,” Lucy said.
“By spying on us, targeting us with tomatoes and who knows what else,” Liz muttered. “Maybe his aim was off. He hit someone else’s house, and they shot his plane down.”
“It stands to reason if the pilot was harassing you and Floyd, he was harassing other neighbors as well,” Gloria said. “We need to assemble another list of the people who live nearby.”
With Liz’s help, Gloria started a second list of potential suspects. Finally, she finished and set her pen on the desk. “I’m trying to figure out what our next step should be.”
“Where it all began,” Ruth said. “At the airport.”
“I can tell you which airport using the handy dandy flight app.”
The friends gathered around, watching as Liz logged onto the flight tracker and showed them how to use it. She pulled up Keller’s route, displaying the exact time he’d started flying over that morning and where the flight abruptly ended.
“Do you know exactly where the plane went down?” Ruth squinted her eyes and studied the screen.
Liz zoomed in. “It’s hard to tell. It was close to the house. One minute I could hear the plane and the next it was gone.”
“What about the airport?” Lucy asked. “We could do some digging around there.”
“I say we stop by the crash site first and then follow up with a visit to the airport,” Ruth said.
“Sounds like a plan.” Liz logged out of the app and sprang to her feet. “I’m ready to roll.”
Ruth slowly stood. “I need to swing by my house and pick up some equipment.”
Gloria glanced at her watch. “Let’s meet at Liz’s place at noon.”
The friends parted ways, Liz being the last to leave. “Thanks for agreeing to help. This whole thing has me freaked out. I can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if Tristan Keller had been seriously injured, or worse.”
“With the Garden Girls on the case, I have no doubt we’ll figure this out.”
Feeling a sense of relief, Liz drove home to wait for the others to arrive. She swapped out her sneakers for a pair of Floyd’s barn boots and meandered around the property, where she found a few more tomatoes. She even found one in the corner of the pigpen, untouched by the occupants. “Even you guys don’t like these rotten, nasty tomatoes,” Liz sighed.
Gloria wasn’t far behind and caught up with her sister near the fence. “How are Pepper and Piper these days?”
“Stinky, like they are every other day.” Liz nudged the tomato with the tip of her boot. “And apparently pickier eaters than I thought. Neither of them touched the tomato.”
“I wonder why.” Gloria knelt next to it. “I thought pigs ate almost anything.”
“Me too. Wouldn’t that be something if Keller did something to them?” Liz grabbed a pair of Floyd’s work gloves hanging on the hook and slipped them on.
She returned to her sister’s side, plucked the tomato off the ground and gave it a tentative sniff. “It smells a little chemically.”
Gloria inched closer and hesitantly sniffed it. “You’re right.”
“Jerk. I’m going to be furious if I find out he was trying to poison Duchess, Teddy or our pigs.” Liz made a mental note to mention it to the police. “You’re Farmer Gloria. You should know what a rotting tomato smells like.”
“It’s close to the smell, although I try to pick them before they rot.” Gloria craned her neck, shifting her attention toward the driveway. “Ruth’s spymobile is pulling in. Lucy, Margaret and Dot are right behind her.”
The sisters caught up with the others in the driveway, where they found Ruth already rummaging around in the back of her van. She slipped a set of headphones around her neck and removed a long black wand.
“You bought a new metal detector?” Lucy asked.
“Yep. It’s an early Christmas present to myself. My old one was using too much juice. This one is much more efficient. It’s a hybrid model.” Ruth went into a long spiel about how the solar-powered metal detector stayed fully charged for at least an hour before automatically switching over to backup batteries.
“I won’t bore you with the specs,” she finally said.
The friends let out a collective groan.
“Please.” Gloria chuckled.
“Are you saying you want more information? Because this baby is the tool that I think everyone needs.”
Margaret made a timeout with her hands. “We get it. You love your new environmentally friendly gadget. What we need now is to have you put it to good use.”
“I’ll show you the general location where I think the plane went down.” With Liz in the lead, the women trekked to the end of the driveway and turned left, passing by Christi and Darren’s place before reaching an empty field.
“Hold up.” Lucy stopped them. “Check it out.”
“Check what out?” Liz squinted her eyes.
“I see a tree stand over there.”
Sure enough, perched several feet above the ground, near a row of trees and nestled between two large branches, was a three-sided tree stand.
“Maybe Keller’s plane was taken down by accident,” Gloria said. “Let’s keep going.”
Past the row of trees and the tree stand was another clearing where fresh tracks were clearly visible. The tracks continued all the way to a cluster of thick bushes surrounded by tall weeds.
Slowing their pace, the women waded through the weeds. On the other side was another field stretching out for as far as the eye could see.
“We should split up and start searching,” Lucy said.
“For what?” Liz asked.
“Pieces of the plane or signs of dirt being disturbed.”
“Sounds good.” Liz veered to the right. Lucy followed her and kept going while Ruth cut through the center.
Gloria, with Dot by her side, turned to go left, leaving Margaret standing still.
“What’s wrong? Aren’t you going to help search?”
Margaret lifted her quarter-inch black heel. “I was in such a hurry to get over here, I forgot to swap out my shoes.”
“No problem,” Dot said. “You stay here and be our lookout in case someone shows up.”
“Like the cops, who would wonder what we’re doing?”
“You know what to say if they do.” Gloria gave her a thumbs up.
“Yeah. We’re a bunch of women scouting out a new deer blind,” Margaret joked.
“Sounds good to me.” Gloria shifted her gaze, watching as her sister tiptoed along the edge of the field. She spun around, nearly colliding with Dot, who was right behind her. “Sorry, Dot.”
“Hold up. Liz is signaling to us.”
Liz threw her hands in the air, frantically motioning to the others. “I think I found something!”