Chapter Eight
“Where are we going?” Judy asked, worried.
“Mike’s Exotics, where Iris worked. I want to see if she went in today. I want to find out what happened.”
“Do you really feel up to that, right now?”
“Yes, and I don’t want to let it wait.” Aunt Barb stowed her Kleenex in her pocket and straightened in the passenger seat. “She would still be on shift, so they should be there. I want to talk to her boss. His name is Julio, and I met him once when I dropped her off, because her car was in the shop.” Aunt Barb pointed to the left. “This is the turn, up ahead.”
“But you’re tired. Maybe we should go home.” Judy spotted the break in the cornfield on the left, but there was no street sign.
“No, I’m fine, and what’s the point of putting it off?”
“You could sleep and get your feet under you, emotionally. You just got blindsided in the worst possible way.”
“But I only have the weekend. The mastectomy is Monday.”
“We can go tomorrow.”
“Julio might not be on the job tomorrow and he’s the one I want to talk to. I won’t sleep if I don’t understand what happened to her.” Aunt Barb turned her face to the window, but there was nothing to see in the dark.
“What is it you think happened?” Judy turned left onto another long country road. Bugs flew from the gloom into their headlights, making tink tink sounds when they hit the glass.
“I don’t know. I only know that what I’m hearing doesn’t make sense. She didn’t have any heart issues.”
“What’s the LCD you keep mentioning?”
“It’s the health service in Kennett Square, that the undocumented use.”
“So it can’t be the best medical care, can it? She could have had heart issues and not known it.”
“But she was strong, and able, and hard-working. And what about the car window? And the nails? And that phone call, the way she acted afterwards?”
“Those are strange little details, but they don’t necessarily mean anything.” Judy regretted having brought any of it up. “It’s not as if there was any sign of foul play.”
“I know that. I’m not saying that.”
“Then what are you saying?” Judy asked, her tone gentle as they drove into the dark.
“I’m just saying that if I can ask a few more questions, so that I have answers when I put my head down on the pillow tonight, I think it makes sense to do so.”
“I agree, but I think Detective Boone will follow up. It’s police business, and he seemed pretty good.”
“I think he will, too, but I’m not about to sit on my hands. Besides, since when do you care if something is police business? That never stopped you or Mary.”
“Except that she’s getting married.” Judy thought back to the day, when she’d felt like Debbie Downer at the bridal shop. “Our days of excellent adventures might be over. She’s a partner now, too.”
“Don’t worry, you two are thick as thieves. By the way, how are you and Frank doing?”
“Great, fine.” Judy usually confided in her aunt, but didn’t want to burden her any further, with so much already on her plate.
“Thinking about getting married?”
“Maybe.”
“Take your time, there’s no rush. Sometimes when your friends get married, it puts pressure, but it shouldn’t.” Aunt Barb paused, musing. “Though I hated it when your mother got married before me. Everybody knows I’m nicer.”
Judy smiled as they passed a dark barn with a tall blue silo. “But she’s older than you. She would have hated it if you got married before her, wouldn’t she have?”
“Honey, let me tell you. Marriage was not on that girl’s mind. She liked the bad boys in high school. You wouldn’t know it to look at her now, but she’s where you get your wild side.”
Judy chuckled, then thought of her mother, waiting for them at home. “Aunt Barb, how long do you expect this will take? I’m trying to decide if we should let her know we’ll be late.”
“Good point, I’ll text her.” Aunt Barb reached for her purse and got the phone.
“What are you going to say?”
“I’ll tell her we’re running late and not to worry, is all.” Aunt Barb texted away, as the light from the phone screen shone upward, illuminating her laugh lines, which bracketed a sly smile. “I can get you out of anything, even ballet lessons. Remember?”
“Of course.” Judy chuckled at the memory, from when she was only six years old. Her mother had decided that her tomboy daughter needed some civilizing and signed her up for ballet lessons, but Judy hated every minute of them. She’d begged to quit after the first recital, in which she starred as a dancing poodle in tiara-kid makeup, a pink tutu, and a puffy pink tail. Her mother had relented and let her quit only because Aunt Barb had prevailed upon her to let Judy take drawing lessons instead, which had led to her lifelong love of art and painting.
Aunt Barb looked over. “I still remember the song from the recital. Isn’t that crazy?”
“I remember it, too.” Judy decided to sing it, to cheer her aunt up. “‘We are little dancing poodles, and we are here to say…’”
Aunt Barb joined in, “‘We come from France, to do our dance…’”
“‘But we only do ballet!’” they sang together, then laughed. Judy’s throat thickened. She loved her aunt and couldn’t imagine losing her, not now or ever. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
“Are you kidding? I still have PTSD.”
Judy chuckled, then turned right and left, following her aunt’s directions through corn and soybean fields and past horses grazing in rolling pastures, their outlines indistinct in the darkness and their whinnying cutting through the night air. The fields gave way to farmhouses and barns, then to trailers and smaller homes, until they spotted a small cast-iron sign that read, WELCOME TO EAST GROVE. The town was of colonial vintage like Kennett Square, and quaint brick and clapboard houses lined the road, their wooden porches just steps from the curb. Judy headed for the outskirts of town, past a check-cashing storefront and a shabby Mexican tacqueria.
Finally they came upon a long, low series of square buildings, only one story high, mere cinderblock boxes attached in a row, like railroad cars. They had no windows, so there was no way to tell if anyone was inside, and the only light came from flickering fixtures on the roofs of the buildings, which cast jittery cones of light on the worn asphalt lot.
“Here’s Mike’s.” Aunt Barb gestured at a driveway that had no sign, except for PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO THRU TRAFFIC. “That’s the parking lot.”
“Why no sign?” Judy steered into the lot, where there were a few old cars parked in a row.
“Everybody knows where Mike’s is, he’s one of the tiny, independent growers. He owns about ten other growers, all independent. He produces exotics.”
“What’s ‘exotics’?” Judy turned off the ignition and put on the emergency brake, looking through the windshield and noticing for the first time that the buildings had large numbers painted on the cinderblock, in black. The building on the end, closest to them, was number seven.
“Fancier mushrooms. Portabella, mitake, shitake, cremini. But he hires the undocumented.”
“How does he get away with it? What about Immigration?”
“The way the system works is that Immigration stages a raid only if there’s a significant number of complaints, in relation to the size of the workforce. Bottom line, nobody complains.” Aunt Barb picked up her water bottle and took a sip of water. “Immigration isn’t the real problem, anyway, the IRS is. If a grower submits a list of social security numbers and they’re not good, it takes the IRS three months to figure that out. So in three months, after the grower gets the IRS notice, he fires the employees and they go to another grower, or another location of the same grower, like Mike’s.”
“Really?”
“That’s how it worked with Iris. She’s worked at all of his locations for about a year now.” Aunt Barb eyed the buildings. “It’s like a shell game, because even workers with legitimate green cards have only six months in the country, then they have to go back. They worry they can’t get back in, but plenty of them do, and they end up at one of the shadier growers.”
“Was Iris afraid of being caught?”
“She worried about it constantly. She lived in fear of being deported, always looking over her shoulder. You saw her, she was so quiet, she learned to be invisible.” Aunt Barb paused, and her eyes glistened anew. “There are so many undocumented workers here, and everywhere.”
“But that doesn’t make it right.” Judy believed in the law, even if it meant siding with her mother.
“I know, but they’re here, living in a parallel universe. They’re an open secret.”
Judy thought of the undocumented workers she’d seen in the city, the busboys smoking outside the back door of the restaurants, or the men who delivered her takeout pizza by bicycle. “We know and we-don’t-know.”
“Yes, and the interesting thing about an open secret is that people look the other way, literally. Iris became the kind of woman whom people looked away from. Unmemorable and marginalized, even more than the average middle-aged woman.”
Judy could hear the resentment in her aunt’s voice. “Where did she work before Mike’s?”
“She cleaned houses for that service, which is when I met her, as I told you. She also did yard work, and she washed and mended horse blankets. At one point, she worked three jobs.”
Judy slid the keys from the ignition. “Okay. So why are we here?”
“You’ll see. I have a plan. Just follow my lead.” Aunt Barb reached for the door handle.
And Judy wondered when it got to be so hard to keep up with someone almost twice her age.