In Farm's Way: Farm to Table Mysteries Series, Book 3


 
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright © 2023 by Amanda Flower
 Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks
 Cover design by Patrick Knowles
 Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
 The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
 Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
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 Contents
 Front Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Chapter One
 Chapter Two
 Chapter Three
 Chapter Four
 Chapter Five
 Chapter Six
 Chapter Seven
 Chapter Eight
 Chapter Nine
 Chapter Ten
 Chapter Eleven
 Chapter Twelve
 Chapter Thirteen
 Chapter Fourteen
 Chapter Fifteen
 Chapter Sixteen
 Chapter Seventeen
 Chapter Eighteen
 Chapter Nineteen
 Chapter Twenty
 Chapter Twenty-One
 Chapter Twenty-Two
 Chapter Twenty-Three
 Chapter Twenty-Four
 Chapter Twenty-Five
 Chapter Twenty-Six
 Chapter Twenty-Seven
 Chapter Twenty-Eight
 Chapter Twenty-Nine
 Chapter Thirty
 Chapter Thirty-One
 Chapter Thirty-Two
 Chapter Thirty-Three
 Chapter Thirty-Four
 Chapter Thirty-Five
 Epilogue
 Shiloh’s Quick Farm Tips
 Excerpt from Put Out to Pasture
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Back Cover
 
 
 For my favorite farmer, David
 
 
 Chapter One
 A Michigander knows snow—or at least she should. The northwest corner of the Mitten gets ten to twelve feet of snow a year. In a ranch home, that’s snow up to the roof. Snow was something Michiganders understood most of the time. But that wasn’t the case when a Michigander moved to LA and came back.
 I knew this because I was sitting in my father’s old pickup truck in a ditch. The front end of the truck was half buried in the snowdrift on a dark January night on a lonely country road.
 I gripped the steering wheel and let out a breath. My tires had lost traction on some black ice. My saving grace had been the lack of other vehicles on the country road and the fields on either side, so there weren’t any trees or large brush to hit.
 The problem was the ditch and four feet of ice-cold Michigan snow.
 Huckleberry, my beloved pug, was on the floorboards of the car, having rolled off the passenger seat when I lost control of the truck. Luckily, his dog bed on the floor had broken his fall. If Huckleberry had been hurt, I would have never forgiven myself.
 He shook his head and the metal tags on his collar clacked together. I reached down and scratched him on the head. “You okay, buddy?”
 He snuffled at me. Snuffle was the pug answer to everything.
 I rested my forehead on the steering wheel. “I’m so sorry, Huckleberry. I thought driving in the snow was like riding a bike. Clearly, it’s not.” I straightened up. This was no time for a pity party. I might have gotten into a jam, but I was okay. Huckleberry was okay. It could have been so much worse. I knew that better than most. A car accident snatched my fiancé, Logan Graham, from my life nearly sixteen years before when I was twenty-three years old.
 I cleared my throat, refusing to allow myself to dwell on what might have happened and what had happened in the past. “I just have to find my phone and we’ll call for help. The truck has plenty of gas. We’ll be toasty warm until someone can come and get us. That’s what AAA is for, right?” I knew my singsong voice was more to calm myself than the pug.
 Huckleberry hopped back on the passenger seat and licked my hand.
 I unbuckled my seat belt and started looking for my phone. Of course, it wasn’t on the console where it had been when I hit the snowbank. Most likely, it was under one of the seats. I reached under my seat and then Huckleberry’s, running my hand back and forth over the rubber mats. Nothing.
 “I hope all those yoga and Pilates classes I took in LA made me as limber as they promised,” I told Huckleberry as I contorted my body to reach under the seat again. I swiped my hand back and forth like a metal detector on the beach. I reached under as far as I could, and on the second pass, I hit what I thought was my phone. Except instead of grabbing it, I knocked it deeper under the seat. I groaned.
 Huckleberry tipped his head back and let out a high-pitched howl. Usually a pug only howled when it was stressed.
 “Oh Huck. It’s going to be okay.” I righted myself and lifted the dog from his seat into my lap to hold him close. “As soon as I find my phone, we’ll get out of here. I know it’s under there. Don’t worry, buddy.”
 He whimpered.
 Headlights bobbed in my rearview mirror and came to a stop right behind us. It was either a Good Samaritan or a killer. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anything in between. As a television producer of true crime for over a decade, I had a chronic inability to believe it was ever the former. I set Huckleberry back on his seat, confirmed the doors were locked, and grabbed the ice scraper from the small back seat. It wasn’t much of a weapon.
 Someone knocked on the driver’s-side window.
 I jumped, and Huckleberry yipped in excitement. He’d been frightened just a moment ago, and now he seemed perfectly at ease. He wagged his curled tail back and forth. This told me it was friend not foe at the window.
 I dared to look. A man stood there holding a flashlight. He wore a navy-blue paramedic ski jacket and a matching navy-blue stocking cap