She obviously was, though.
“You should both be afraid,” Jeremy said bluntly. Daniel stared at him, surprised, so he went on to explain. “I don’t mean hiding-under-a-table afraid. I mean aware and careful. One woman is dead. Another is missing. I hope there’s not a panic, but you should be extra vigilant, yes.”
Rowenna was staring at him with a frown puckering her brow.
“Rowenna, where is your car now?” Jeremy asked.
“At the police station,” she said, her gaze absent. She was concerned for Eve, he could see.
“What are your plans for the afternoon?” Jeremy asked her.
“I was going to go back to the museum with Dan and do some more reading,” she said.
“Good, stay there until I come for you, all right?” Jeremy asked.
“Hey, you said you’d stop by the shop,” Eve said, hurt.
“Fine, I’ll stop by the shop, and then I’ll go back to the museum,” Rowenna said. “Why? Where are you going?” she asked Jeremy.
“I have a few errands to run, and I want to check on Brad,” he told her.
The sushi arrived, but Eve, who had been starving earlier, seemed to be having a problem swallowing.
Conversation petered out.
Daniel tried to get it moving again. “Hey, I just remembered, we’re sitting in the company of a queen.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Eve said, smiling. “Rowenna is this year’s harvest queen.”
“Just what does it mean, being the harvest queen?” Jeremy asked.
“We have a parade on Thanksgiving day,” Daniel explained. “It’s kind of a silly thing. A lot of the local businesses create floats. It’s kind of cool—art majors from the local colleges get involved. They get extra credit, and sometimes they even wind up on TV. We usually end up with about twenty floats. It’s not like the Macy’s parade or anything, but it’s fun. It starts out—”
He broke off abruptly, staring at the women across the table.
“It starts out in the cornfields,” Rowenna said with forced brightness. “The queen rides on a big fixed-up hay wagon drawn by four horses. The route is only a few miles long. The harvest starts right after. Or it used to. Now, sometimes, it’s already started. It’s just for fun these days, though I guess it had more significance years ago.”
“It’s part of a pagan ritual,” Eve said.
“There’s nothing pagan about it,” Daniel protested.
“Yes, there is,” Eve insisted. “It’s a way of giving thanks for the harvest. According to pagan belief, the harvest queen was like the goddess, Mother Earth, the one who shares her bounty with those around her.”
“Well whatever it used to be, all it is now is a good time,” Rowenna said, stepping in to end the argument. “Local farmers—and just people who have houses along the route—set up fruit stands, they serve hot apple cider, and there’s a dinner-dance at one of the colleges that night. You’ll enjoy it,” she assured Jeremy.
He smiled, but he wasn’t as sure as he was pretending to be. Anything with the word harvest connected to it was suspect in his book these days, as if the very word carried an aura of evil.
“So there’s no harvest king?” he asked.
“The harvest king is chosen at the dinner,” Eve told him. “Think of Rowenna as Queen Elizabeth the First, choosing her king from among her courtiers. And the dinner will be really nice, I promise. I’m on the decorating committee.”
“Am I invited?” he asked Rowenna.
“Of course. Anyone can come.” She smiled then, as if to let him know he would have been invited anyway.
Jeremy looked at his watch and stood. “I’ll catch up with you at the museum, then,” he told Rowenna. “I need to get going.”
She nodded. “Sounds good.”
As he headed to the front, he saw the waiter bringing Eve her to-go order. He wondered what she and Adam had been fighting about. Married couples squabbled, he told himself. That was life. Still, there seemed to be something off about the way they’d tried to cover for their fight. Maybe there marriage was in real trouble and they just didn’t want anyone to know.
He found the hostess and paid the bill, then hurried out.
He was sure Joe would call him as soon as he had any information to share, but meanwhile, he had a few stops he needed to make, and he was anxious to get moving.
He wanted to stop by the MacElroy farmhouse at some point, for one thing.
The farmhouse by the cornfield.
The MacElroys were Rowenna’s next-door neighbors—even if “next door” meant something different out in the country than it did in town—and they owned the cornfield where the body had been found. The police had undoubtedly already contacted them and asked every imaginable question.
But he wanted to get a few answers himself.
However, he now had a new plan. He wanted to find Eric Rolfe.
He had only gone a few steps down the sidewalk when he heard his name called. He turned around and saw that Rowenna had come running out of the restaurant after him.