Chapter 10 of 13Off the Standing Order

Arlen Prine said no before Thea Quinn had finished asking. "I can't take the standing order this week," he said. "Or the week after." She had a table reserved at the Cascade Ridge farmers' market, a menu card that leaned on his cream, and a tempering machine that ran badly on nothing at all.

"Can't, or won't?" she said.

"Does it make a difference?"

"It does to me. Your family has shipped to this address a long while."

"It's not the shop I'm worried about."

"Then say the rest of it."

She heard a cooler humming on his end, and a chair creak, and somebody in the creamery say something to somebody else and get an answer back.

"A man called Saturday night," Arlen said. "Said he was writing something up about the new owner. Asked questions I didn't have answers for."

"What questions?"

"Where you worked before. How you left it."

Thea wound the receiver cord once around her finger and let it unwind. "I was blamed for something I didn't do, and I left because there was nothing left to stay for."

"That isn't how he told it."

"No. It wouldn't be."

"He said the trade up there wouldn't have you back." A metal bucket knocked against something on his end. "I've got a wife and two kids on this farm, Thea. I can't carry a rumor into my invoices."

"You're not carrying it. You're believing it."

"I'm believing it isn't my fight."

He said he was sorry. Then he hung up, and the shop went back to being a room with a register in it and a fluorescent tube ticking overhead and a smell of cold butter that would not improve with age. Thea held the receiver a moment longer than the call required, set it in the cradle, and walked to the walk-in.

The last jug of Prine's cream sat on the second shelf of the walk-in, its cap dented where somebody had dropped it years ago and never bothered to replace it. She lifted it, felt the weight, put it back. Cream should smell of almost nothing—clean, cold, faintly sweet at the back of the throat—and this one did. It would carry her to Thursday. Saturday was another question entirely.

The front door banged and Fina Moss came in sideways with two coffees from the Daily Grind and a huckleberry scone, four dollars even, half of which she had eaten before she got the door shut. Rain darkened her pink hair. A streak of flour ran across one cheek. "You look like you lost an argument with a cake," she said.

"Prine's pulling my cream."

"What? Since when?"

"Since Saturday night, when somebody called him and told him I'm a thief."

Fina set the coffees down hard enough to slop one. "Okay. Okay. Other dairies."

"Cedarbrook won't drive this far out."

"What about the co-op?"

"The co-op sells eggs and propane, Fina." Thea tore a paper towel off the roll and dropped it on the spill.

"So what do we do?"

"Prine's a farmer. He doesn't want a phone call from a stranger. I'll drive out and stand in his barn until he looks at me."

"In this rain?"

"It's rain. It isn't the ocean."

The door opened again on a gust that carried the smell of wet canvas and hazelnut shells. Ben Coleman came in with one hand against the glass and a clipboard under his arm, water beading on his plaid shoulders. He set the clipboard on the counter, well away from the coffees, squared to the edge. "Morning, Thea."

"Ben. I owe you."

"You do."

"I'll have a figure for you once the county lets go of the accounts."

He let that sit. "That's not why I came."

"Then what?"

"Young fella came out to the farm Saturday. Tablet under his arm. Said he was doing a piece on the new shop." Ben tapped the clipboard twice with one knuckle. "He left a card."

He slid it across. White stock, heavy, with a small silver mark in the corner: the two interlocked R's Javier Rios stamped on every box that left his kitchen.

"Javier's people," Thea said.

"Figured you'd know it." He didn't look pleased to be right.

"What did he ask you?"

"What I'd charge to sell him the whole crop instead of you."

"Oh, wow," Fina said, from somewhere near the espresso machine.

"Did he ask about references?"

"Asked whether you had any in the trade. Asked who else supplied the shop." Ben straightened the clipboard until its edge lined up with the counter seam. "I told him my family has sold to this address longer than he's been alive, and I don't discuss customers."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Thank my wife. She's the one told me not to take his money."

Thea turned the card over. Nothing on the back but a cell number in thin gray type, and she set it by the register where she kept things she intended to hand back to people. "Where else has he been?"

"Prine's boy was in the co-op Saturday, talking to the old man. That's how these things travel." Ben picked his clipboard up again, tucked it under his arm, and stood there a moment, which for Ben was a speech. "Hard part isn't the card. Hard part is he's going down the list."

"Whose list?"

"Yours." He nodded toward the walk-in. "Every name on that order sheet behind the door. He's working it."

Thea looked at the sheet: Prine's cream, the co-op for eggs and butter, the flour broker in Wenatchee, the little cold-case dairy over the pass that had never once returned her calls. Names she had inherited along with the accounts, the ones Annelise had built over decades and let slide in the last years. She had spent a week making every one of them trust her, and the first of them had come undone in an afternoon of somebody else's phone calls.

"Then I'll get there before he does," she said.

"Which one?"

"All of them."

Ben made a sound that might have been a laugh and mostly wasn't, then pulled his collar up and went back into the rain. Through the window she watched him cross the lot to his truck, unhurried, hat brim shedding a line of rain, boots going around the same puddles he went around every morning.

Fina wiped the counter where the clipboard had rested, then wiped it again. "So somebody is calling your suppliers and telling them you're poison."

"Somebody is calling my suppliers and offering to buy their crop," Thea said. "That's a different phone call. That one comes with a check attached."

"Which is worse."

"Which is smarter."

She opened the drawer under the register for the phone book, the fat one with the yellow pages already curling at the corner from years of use, and dropped it on the counter between them. The card sat beside it, silver mark up.

"Fina. Get me every dairy between here and the pass."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight." Thea pulled the order sheet off the door and laid it flat. "We drive tomorrow. I'll take the north road first, and you call the ones that answer a phone."

"And if they've all heard the story already?"

"Then I'll bake something and stand in their yard until they taste it." She reached over and shut the phone book, and the card slid a little on the counter, and neither of them put it away.