Cynthia Reese - Where Love Grows

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.

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.