Summerlin Groves

Chapter 1

Chapter One

“ T here’s a dead body in the west field,” Hemingway said.

Jenny Summerlin straightened her spine and brushed the grit from her hands, squinting from the sunshine filtering through the orange grove to see if Hemingway was joking . . . although nothing that happened in the west field was a joking matter these days. Her field hand had just returned from dumping another load of stumps, and maybe he’d come across a dead possum or raccoon.

“What do you mean, a dead body?” she asked. English wasn’t Hemingway’s first language, so maybe he didn’t understand the difference between a dead body and an animal carcass.

“A dead person,” Hemingway clarified. “Human.”

She stood motionless, unable to believe this latest catastrophe. “Are you sure he’s dead?” It would probably be best to call an ambulance to be on the safe side.

“I’m sure,” Hemingway said. “It’s a skeleton, inside the hollow of a cypress tree down by the river.”

Jenny took a steadying breath as she gazed toward the river. This stretch of land was so immensely beautiful, and yet, some unknown stranger met a terrible fate right here on her property. Hopefully whoever that person was could be at peace now.

A skeletonized body wasn’t an emergency, merely another blow in a string of disasters over the past eighteen months.

Eighteen months ago, she and her brother shared ownership of a spectacular orange grove in the middle of Florida. They were flush with cash. She was in love with a war hero who was ready to lay the world at her feet, and the future was alive with hope.

Now her brother was dead, she was broke, the grove was dying, and the war hero hated her. It seemed like each time she regained a hint of equilibrium, something rose up from the deep to smack her back down.

At least Hemingway had stuck with her. He was her last remaining field hand and always good for a laugh, even if he rarely buttoned his shirt or ran a comb through his white-blond hair.

She rubbed the small of her back where it ached from pulling stumps. The wind was picking up and the January morning was unusually chilly, penetrating her denim jacket.

“Aren’t you freezing?” she asked Hemingway, who wasn’t even wearing a shirt.

Hemingway scratched the tanned skin on his shoulder and sent her a lazy smile. “Sunshine Girl, you don’t know what it is to freeze.”

True, when a man was born and raised in Iceland, cold was a relative term. Hemingway had fled Iceland as soon as he finished his Ph.D. in English Literature and came to Florida in search of an outdoorsman’s life like his hero, Ernest Hemingway. No one in Florida could pronounce his real name, so he simply went by “Hemingway.” Jenny was probably the only citrus grower in Florida who had a former college professor working her land, but the arrangement suited them both.

“Show me the skeleton,” she said, then climbed onto the back of the all-terrain vehicle they used for hauling stumps. Hemingway started the engine and drove them slowly through the torn-up acre of land that once had over a hundred orange trees growing on it. After they’d burned them down last week, all that remained was a barren, depressing mess of charred stumps and acrid cinders, but they’d have it cleaned up soon.

Hemingway drove faster once they reached the gravel path at the end of the row. They passed the farmhouse where she’d been born and raised, then the freestanding garage, then through the back ten acres where the trees were still healthy. At this time of year her oranges were still green and needed a few more months of sunshine before they would mature into heavy orange fruit ready for harvest.

Hemingway slowed the ATV as they approached the river, where a line of ancient cypress trees had been left standing as a windbreak.

“The skeleton is in the split cypress,” Hemingway said as they both dismounted. The enormous tree had taken a lightning strike last summer, causing the trunk to split. Over the subsequent months, the split had widened as gravity pulled the dying tree in two, slowly exposing the hollow inside. The tree was over a hundred feet tall and fifteen feet wide at its base. It ought to have been cut down, but it would cost a fortune and Jenny didn’t have that kind of money.

Besides, Jenny had good reasons for not wanting strangers in the west field.

Their boots sliced through the wiregrass as they neared the line of old trees. Spanish moss draped the tree limbs in a ghostly veil and knobby roots protruded from the soil. Her grandfather called them “cypress knees.” They jutted straight up from the dirt like spokes guarding the mother tree. Some were only a few inches tall, but others reached three or four feet high. She and her brother, Jack, used to climb on them when they were kids, even though it drove her grandfather nuts. He thought the crooked roots were dangerous, but climbing on them was an irresistible temptation for two lonely kids growing up on an isolated orange grove.

“How long does it take for a body to become a skeleton?” she asked Hemingway.

“I don’t know. My degree was in English.”

And Jenny’s had been in agricultural sciences with a minor in history. She chose the major for practicality, but the minor in history was for love.

The boggy soil sucked at her boots as she trudged closer to the tree. Everything smelled normal, just a piney green scent mingled with musty smells from the slow-moving river. She held her breath, bracing a foot on a knobby root to get high enough to peer down into the cavity of the tree. The bark was dry and crumbly as she grasped the rim, pulling herself higher to look into the exposed hollow below.

The skeleton lay curled in the hollow, its leg bones drawn close to its ribcage. She heaved a sigh of relief and hopped down.

“I think it’s pretty old,” she said.

“A lot older than eighteen months,” Hemingway pointed out.

Now that she was thinking clearly, there was no way the skeleton could be associated with what happened eighteen months ago. For a week the grove had been crawling with law enforcement officers, and turkey vultures would have alerted them to another body.

“Who do you think it is?” Hemingway asked.

She and Hemingway were the only people living on the grove since Jack died. A work crew came through each April to pick oranges, but she rarely knew them well. Could the skeleton have been a migrant laborer from a past harvest? Or a homeless person who took shelter in the hollow of a tree and died?

An arborist once told her these trees were around six hundred years old. As cypress trees aged, their trunks eroded and hollowed out, gradually filling with decaying leaves and bark. It could be a tempting place to seek shelter or stash a dead body.

She climbed up for another look at the skeleton. It was in the fetal position, its chest cavity packed with dirt. The detached skull lay near its elbow. There was no sign of the lower jaw. This skeleton could have been here for decades. Maybe even centuries .

Hemingway climbed up on the opposite side of the hollow. “Do you see any sign of clothing?” he asked. Clothes would at least let them know if the body was male or female, a child or an adult.

She leaned in closer, holding her breath to avoid the grit swirling in the air. No sign of clothes that she could see, but clothing would rot quickly in the heat and humidity of central Florida.

She couldn’t bear to look any longer and hopped back down to the ground. What a disaster. As soon as she reported this, there would be sheriff’s deputies and investigators crawling all over the grove again, nosing into her business. Of all places, why did this have to happen in the west field?

“I think I found something,” Hemingway said, one arm in the hollow of the tree. “It’s hard and smooth. It seems manmade.”

Curiosity got the better of her, and she climbed back up for a peek as Hemingway continued pawing at a small lump. He swiped away leaves and twigs, then something sparkled.

She gasped. Blue sparkles glinted from the lump near the skeleton’s disarticulated hand. “Be careful,” she cautioned as Hemingway angled to reach deeper into the hollow. The tree creaked, releasing a scent of damp, rotting wood.

“Don’t touch it,” she said. “Hem, this might be a crime scene.”

“The entire west field is a crime scene,” he said lightly.

Jenny wasn’t sure if the fire she set last week was a crime or not. She was probably allowed to burn down whatever she wanted on her own land, but she couldn’t risk consulting a lawyer to find out.

“Hemingway, please stop,” she implored. “I’m going to call the sheriff’s office, and we shouldn’t be poking around in there.”

“You sure?” Most of Hemingway’s upper body now dangled into the interior of the hollowed-out tree, blocking her view. The loamy smell of damp wood and tree sap intensified as he pawed through the interior of the tree.

He finally began wiggling back up, struggling to hold something in his right hand. It was about the size of an apple and covered in dirt. He passed it over to her, then hopped out back onto the ground.

She swiped mud from the grimy ball, revealing smooth blue enamel threaded with traces of golden vines and flashing gemstones. Diamonds? She held her breath as she rotated the lump to clear away more grit and mud, barely able to believe her eyes as beauty emerged from the mud. She cradled it in her palms and looked up at Hemingway in amazement.

It seemed unbelievable, but . . . had they just found a Fabergé egg?

They took the egg back to the farmhouse kitchen, where Jenny held it beneath a trickle of warm water to gently rinse the rest of the grime away, revealing peacock-blue enamel encircled by golden vines. This was probably a cheap knockoff and not actually a real Fabergé egg, though the craftmanship was beautiful and extraordinary even to her untrained eye.

Jenny knew very little about flashy gemstones. The only jewelry she owned was her parents’ matching gold wedding bands she inherited after a car accident killed them both when she was eight years old. Her typical daily attire was a simple pair of blue jeans, a tank top, and work boots. During the summer, her long blond hair was almost as light as Hemingway’s.

Hemingway stood beside her at the oversized kitchen sink as the magnificence of the egg came into view. Twining gold filigree looked like the branches of a tree encircling the luminous blue enamel. What looked like pear-shaped sapphires and rubies decorated the limbs like budding leaves. A thin band of diamonds circled the long edge of the egg. At the top were two tiny, entwined golden twigs.

“I think that’s a clasp and the egg can probably open,” Hemingway said. “Should we try?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to risk breaking it.” She was afraid to even set it down. Hemingway lined a cereal bowl with a terrycloth dishrag, and she placed the egg inside as carefully as if it were a grenade with its pin pulled out. The still-damp egg glistened in the sunlight streaming in from the window, exuding a near-magical aura.

“Do you think it’s real?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he said just as softly. Why were they whispering? Their voices wouldn’t damage it, but somehow this moment deserved complete reverence. The unearthly beauty of the egg was a masterpiece.

Jenny had a solid understanding of Russian history, having grown up paging through her grandfather’s old books about the mighty empire. Her favorites had been the books with pictures of the spectacular Russian landscapes, though there had been plenty about the revolution, featuring pictures of the last Russian czar and his beautiful daughters. He had a wife and a young son too, but Jenny had always been haunted by the photos of those four girls, dressed in matching white gowns with broad-brimmed hats, looking ghostly and lovely in those long-ago photographs. The entire family had been executed in a hail of gunfire, forever casting a shadow over their memory.

The books inevitably described the wealth of the Russian aristocracy, epitomized by the extravagant Fabergé eggs. Every year, the czar gave his mother and his wife a unique egg crafted by the famous House of Fabergé. Many of the eggs survived the Russian Revolution of 1917, but not all.

“Let’s see if we can learn anything online,” Hemingway said and headed toward the office.

The office was Jenny’s favorite room in the hundred-year-old farmhouse. After her grandfather died, she and her brother decided they’d rather have a modern office instead of a formal dining room. They took out the dining table and ripped up the shag carpet to expose the original hardwood floor below. Jack installed cables and wiring for the computers and new overhead pendant lighting.

The only part of the dining room Jenny couldn’t bear to part with was the old farmhouse table. The massive slab of walnut held ninety years of family history in its weathered planks. Generations of Summerlins took their meals around this table, propped their elbows on it, played cards on it, and talked long into the night. A few cigarette burns were mementos from the era when people still smoked, and the cracked leg happened after a hog got loose in the house when her dad was a kid.

Jenny sanded and sealed the wood with a coat of new varnish. She repaired the cracked leg instead of replacing it because the split made for a good story. Someday she’d have kids who would want to know about the family’s brief, failed attempt to diversify into hogs. The dings and the scars were vestiges of her family’s long history. An antique collector had once offered her $6,000 for the table, but Jenny wasn’t interested. Her family’s heritage wasn’t for sale.

Now the table held two computers, a printer, and a weather monitoring system. Gone were the days when farmers stuck a hand into the wind to judge the climate. Jenny had access to weather alert systems, commodity prices, and online forums to trade information with fellow citrus growers. One monitor displayed live video feeds from security cameras posted at various spots throughout the grove.

Jenny set the cereal bowl with its treasure on the table and fired up her desktop. Hemingway already brought his laptop from the trailer where he lived on the edge of the grove, and they both started prowling for information on Fabergé eggs.

Jenny learned the House of Fabergé made fifty eggs that had been commissioned by the doomed Nicholas II. These were known as “imperial eggs” and were the most valuable of all the Fabergé eggs. Each egg opened to reveal a charming surprise inside. Some contained miniature portraits, or working clocks, or tiny replicas of palaces where the czar lived.

After the revolution in 1917, the czar’s mother escaped to Copenhagen, carrying one of the imperial eggs with her. Other members of the royal family smuggled out a few as well, but most of the Fabergé eggs had been abandoned in Russia. As Bolsheviks plundered the Romanov palaces, those eggs were seized, stolen, or disappeared.

Several websites confirmed that forty-two of the imperial eggs had been located. Those eggs were heavily documented and photographed from every angle, but none of them looked anything like what sat on her table.

Eight imperial eggs remained lost to history. Had one of them just been found?

Another hour of searching the internet turned up written descriptions of the lost eggs, and one of them sounded exactly like the egg sitting on her terrycloth-lined cereal bowl.

Dubbed the Firebird Egg, it had been a gift from Nicholas to his then-fiancée, the princess Alexandra of Hesse, in 1893. After the wedding, Alexandra kept the Firebird Egg on a bookshelf in her private chambers for the rest of her life. It was one of the eggs that disappeared after the revolution.

Hemingway began to pace. “We need to call someone about that skeleton,” he said. “The egg probably belongs to whoever that person is.”

“Unless he stole it,” Jenny said. “What kind of person walks around with a Fabergé egg in the middle of nowhere unless they are on the run?”

“ If it’s a real Fabergé,” Hemingway pointed out, but its craftsmanship was too fine to be a cheap knockoff. A real Fabergé egg would be worth millions. Owning the property on which it had been found might entitle her to keep it.

And she could use the money. Last month she had to write a check for $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit. Though the grove was worth a little over two million, most of it was tied up in the value of the land, the buildings, and the equipment. The McAllister family sued her for every dime of her brother’s estate. Jenny either had to sell the grove or take out a huge loan to pay the McAllisters for Jack’s half. Rather than waste money and heartache on lawyers, she took out a $1.2 million loan and paid the McAllisters outright. Paying them had left Jenny with a debt she’d probably be stuck with until her dying day, but at least the matter was settled and done.

The rim of diamonds on the egg gleamed in the late-afternoon sun slanting through the window blinds. Hemingway looked mesmerized as he gazed at it.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

“Probably,” he said. “We could sell this on the black market and be millionaires.”

“Yup.”

Selling the egg on the black market would avoid a snarl of court cases from potential claimants, but it would have a stink on it. She had no idea how the egg ended up in that old cypress tree, although it was surely quite a story. If the egg disappeared into the underground antiquities market, its story would be lost to history forever.

Sometimes it was terrible to have a conscience. Jenny smiled a little wistfully at the egg resting on its bed of terrycloth. If this truly was the Firebird, the world deserved to know how this egg got from Empress Alexandra’s bookshelf, out of war-torn Russia, and onto an orange grove in rural Florida.

“I’d rather keep it legal,” she finally said, and Hemingway flashed her a wink in agreement. He went back to his laptop, fingers flying across the keyboard as he dug up more research. It was getting late now, and she put together a couple of ham sandwiches while he continued working.

“Look at this,” he said, turning the laptop for her to see. It was an article from a lawyer’s website outlining the laws governing lost-and-found property in the state of Florida.

“According to this, if you find something valuable on your land, you need to make a public announcement, then give people ninety days to come forward with a claim.”

She thrummed her fingers on the table. A find like this would garner media attention and provoke a stampede of people wanting to file claims.

It didn’t matter. Telling the world was the right thing to do. She drew a fortifying breath and met Hemingway’s gaze.

“I think we make that announcement,” she said. “Maybe nobody else will be able to prove ownership, which means we get to keep it.”

“We?” Hemingway asked.

“You found it. I’ll split it with you.”

Hemingway’s eyes widened in astonishment. For the first time in the six years since she’d known him, he looked speechless, but splitting the proceeds with the man who found the egg was fitting.

A slow smile spread across his face. “You’re a good friend, Jenny.”

She smiled back, because they were good friends. Hemingway was possibly the best friend she’d ever had. People sometimes assumed she and Hemingway were a couple because he was drop-dead gorgeous, but she’d never been tempted by him. He reminded her too much of her brother, which was an instant turn-off. Jack and Hemingway both had a charming and irreverent outlook on life tinged with a huge dash of irresponsibility.

After Jack died, it was Hemingway who kept the grove operating when she’d been too devastated to get out of bed. He handled the flurry of initial paperwork and dealing with the sheriff’s office. When it could no longer be delayed, it was Hemingway who dragged her out of bed, forced her to get dressed and confront the world again. It was Hemingway who stuck by her side when she first ventured into town to brave the cold looks and snide comments. One lady literally spat at her. Hemingway gave the lady a courtly bow, then the middle finger.

The entire town still reviled Jack, and some resented Jenny, too. The skeleton was bound to stir up a new bout of suspicious hostility.

She’d let the sheriff worry about the skeleton, but the egg needed more care. Turning it over to the sheriff’s department was a risk. For a prize this big, she wanted everything documented in triplicate.

First they photographed the egg alongside a copy of the morning newspaper to verify the date of the find. Then they took videos of each of them holding the dishtowel-lined cereal bowl with the egg inside. They stated where they found it, and their intention to report it to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. If anyone at the sheriff’s department tried to steal the egg for themselves, these videos would prove who had it first.

They downloaded the videos to Jenny’s desktop and uploaded them into a secure photo-storing site in the clouds. There must be no doubt about who found this egg first.

The sun was setting by the time they finished documenting their find. It was too late to call the authorities about the skeleton tonight, but that would happen tomorrow morning.

Then the high-stakes game to claim ownership of the egg would begin.