7. Money Problems

Sarah turned back to the skillet on the stove and stirred the potatoes and onions sizzling in butter she'd churned two weeks before.

And by churning, she meant dumping the cream into the stand mixer while she washed the eggs to sell at her farm stand out on the country highway.

She pushed the potatoes around the pan with a wooden spatula, glancing up to watch the dirt road through the window over the kitchen sink.

Just green corn and blue sky out there. No dirt cloud was swirling over the corn.

No cars.

No trucks.

No SUVs bearing Easterner mafia dudes sent to kill her.

She pulled her phone from her hip pocket.

Twenty message notifications begging for tarot readings filled the screen.

Sarah was known as encouraging and positive in her readings, and everyone needed some hope in their lives, even if it was from a fraudulent mystic.

She swiped them out and tapped the screen to dial a contact. "Abigail?"

"Yes, sweetie. How are you? Is your back doing okay?"

"Yeah, I'm feeling fine." Jesus and Mary, she was never going to live that down. "Has anyone seen any weirdos around today?"

"I would've called. Let me just check the group chat." The one that Sarah dared not open, lest her falling icon show she'd checked in. "Nope. Lots of chatter about seeing nothing strange at all."

"Okay, good. Just checking."

"What's really going on, Sarah? You seem jumpy, like you're expecting someone to attack you."

"No, I'm fine, but let me know immediately if anyone is skulking around, okay?"

"Of course."

Blaze returned just as she was scraping the crisped potatoes onto plates. He said, "Lots of strawberries out there."

She nodded. "About half of my bushes are June-bearing, so they crop heavily during the early summer. The rest of them are ever-bearing and produce all season long."

He huffed a chuckle. "That's a lot of berries for one person."

"I usually can preserves to last through the winter. The kitchen setup in your Chicago house looks like it would be amazing for canning. It gets a little crowded in here." She flipped her hand, gesturing to the meager counterspace in her L-shaped kitchen.

Blaze started washing the strawberries in the sink. "The farm is a lot of work, isn't it?"

Sarah handed him a clean dish towel. "You have no idea. Unless someone grows up on a farm, they don't know how much work it takes. They think we're just sitting on the porch in rocking chairs, whittling and watching the corn grow."

"And you've been out here by yourself for a while."

"Three years since my mom passed away."

It seemed longer.

Blaze tipped the strawberries into a bowl. "And you haven't had anyone out here to help?"

She shook her head. "There's no way I could afford hired hands. I scramble just to keep myself afloat. I should get a part-time job at the auction barn or one of the quilt shops to bring in some extra cash. The tarot-card reading thing doesn't pay enough since SnipSnap cut the creators' fund."

But it did pay something, especially when she hustled for readings.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, his blue eyes squinted with concern. "I thought farming was a job that earned money. Seems like all those senators have farms as tax dodges."

Sarah plucked the toast from the slots and picked up her butter dish. "Those are the emu or llama ranches. I can barely grow enough corn to keep Bow-Daniels-MidWest buying my crops. If my yields drop any, they're going to cancel their contract, and then the farm will fail."

Blaze picked up one of the plates and carried the bowl of strawberries over to the kitchen table. Sarah followed with her own plate. He said, "And with you running the operation alone, you said there's no way you could take the garden produce or dairy products down to the Kalona or Iowa City farmers markets."

At least he'd listened to her. "I cannot imagine dropping everything and leaving for six hours twice a week to sell my little bit of milk and butter and a few extra vegetables for pin money."

He forked into the potatoes and shoved them into his mouth, and then his eyebrows shot up and he loaded his fork for a second mouthful. "These are amazing."

"My homemade butter has less water in it than commercial butter. I really squeeze it out. It's more like Irish butter, like Kerrygold. Everything comes out crisper, and it bakes better, too."

Blaze twirled his fork at the raw beams of the farmhouse's ceiling. "Let's try a thought experiment. Let's say you had five hired hands working here with you. What would you do to maximize the revenue on the farm?"

"Buy three more cows, then plant more berries, herbs, and heirloom tomatoes to sell at the farmers markets. I've heard there are fancy restaurants in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, those farm-to-table types, that will pay good money for local organic produce. Not that I could get certified as organic. Having the inspectors out costs so much money."

Blaze chewed slowly and then swallowed before he reached over and plucked a strawberry out of the bowl by its leafy cap. "I'll bet there are even more restaurants in Chicago that would be interested. If you could buy anything you wanted for the farm, what would it be?"

"Horses."

He raised an eyebrow at her again. "That was quick."

Sarah chewed one of the sun-warmed strawberries, the juice filling her mouth, and swallowed, thinking about the beauty of a barn full of horses. "There are many other things I should buy that would return a positive ROI for the farm like cows or chickens, raised garden beds, and fancy heirloom vegetables, or big automated farm equipment, but you asked what I wanted. I love horses. I was one of the horse girls in 4-H, not the ones who raised a lamb or calf for slaughter."

"I didn't know they still had those competitions at state fairs."

"Oh, absolutely. I usually place in the Western riding divisions at the Iowa State Fair. And my pies have always done well, of course. My baking still usually places. My sewing isn't that good, but I usually enter something for fun."

Blaze nodded, like the city boy was contemplating the notion of competing at the state fair. "The state fair is big here, isn't it?"

"Iowa is the big state fair. It's the one that the movie musical State Fair is about. It's just fun, you know? It starts about five weeks from now. I just signed up for my entries last week."

"That's August. Huh. What kinds of pies?"

"Well, strawberry, of course. That's why I have so many heirloom alpine bushes in the garden. Grocery-store berries can't compete with homegrown. The lemon meringue category is cutthroat, though. I don't do that one."

"Interesting." He popped another strawberry in his mouth.

"The canning categories are fun. I can my produce for the winter anyway, so it's fun to enter some of my preserves. It's ten dollars to enter ten categories, and I usually get several prizes."

"Sounds like good ROI."

"The prizes can be big bags of flour or specialty things. My good stand mixer was first prize in the chocolate cake category. I never could have afforded one otherwise."

"But why horses?" Blaze asked.

Sarah stared out the back window at the empty country road outside and pondered, chewing, before she answered. "Because they're good for the soul, you know?"

Blaze nodded and ate another bite.

"Horses are good people. I mean, there are a few jerks, just like humans. But for the most part, they have good souls. They're like dogs, like that. And they're smart. Riding and taking care of them is soothing. Charlie really helped me get over my parents' passing. I cried with Muffintop, but Charlie showed me why I should go on and keep the farm."

Blaze was watching her while he held another strawberry, his blue eyes not wavering in his intensity. "Charlie sounds like a special horse."

"He's special to me, but most horses have empathy like that. A good horse will restore your faith in the world."

"Sounds like horses could help people," he said.

"They're not magic, and they're not a replacement for a good therapist, I'm sure. But there's nothing as good for the inside of a person as the outside of a horse, you know?"

Blaze chuckled two chuffs, a sound that still seemed alien to Sarah. "Interesting."

"Your Vets in Crisis people should pair your veterans up with horses. It would be good for them. Surely there are stables where your people live who need someone to comb their horses and muck out their stalls."

Blaze set down his fork, loaded with a massive chunk of potatoes. "Interesting that you put it that way."

Sarah chewed her bite of potatoes. She did have to admit, she was pretty darn good at making crispy potatoes. A lifetime of cooking what grows on the farm will do that. She had no idea how to cook rice or anything exotic like that. "But that's all just pie in the sky. There's no way I could afford even one hired hand, let alone five, let alone horses. Having a plan for that kind of scenario is a waste of time."

"Right," he mused, "Plans never survive first contact with the enemy, but planning is everything."

Sarah glanced out the screen door at the dirt road outside. No dust clouds were scuttling above the corn, so no one was driving out there. "How long do you think we have before someone comes looking for us?"

Blaze chewed and glanced at the road, too, and must have seen the same lack of evidence of anyone out there. He swallowed and said, "Twist may have been tracking my phone before I wiped it, when we were heading north and stayed overnight in Stony Point. That route looks like we were making a run for the Canadian border. Hopefully, they won't bother to fly someone out here to check for at least a few days."

"Hopefully?" she echoed him.

Blaze stabbed another potato with his fork. "Yeah."

Later, Sarah lugged a basket of eggs into the house with plans to bandage her wrist upstairs. Mavis the Chicken, usually so serene that she could have traveled with a stoner on a road trip, had pecked a chunk out of her arm.

While she was setting the eggs in a bowl in the sink to wash, Blaze came in from outside, still holding a hammer from where he'd been shoring up her long-neglected raised garden beds.

Shirtless.

The June summer heat must've gotten to him because Blaze Robinson was standing in her kitchen shirtless.

The heavy muscle wrapped around his body was chiseled perfection, solid and compact, rather than the overbuilt bodybuilder types in the movies who looked like their meat was well-marbled. Blaze's rounded shoulders and pecs narrowed to his tight waist, and the thin lines of blue-black tattoos looked like a net had been thrown over his skin.

Yeah, she'd like to throw a net over him and—

Oh, no. He was going to be leaving her farm soon, and Sarah did not need to be the horniest girl in the world when she should be getting her work done. After he left, there would be plenty of time to read G.I. Joe slashfics on the Internet and imagine what might have been.

He asked her, "Are the eggs a significant source of revenue? I saw you put the extra ones in your cooler by the road."

"A lot of people around here have chickens, but city people drive out to Kalona from Iowa City or even Cedar Rapids to get farm-fresh eggs and dairy."

"Is the limiting factor the number of eggs or the lack of customers?"

Sarah thought about it. "Eggs. Almost everybody who buys dairy also buys a half-dozen eggs until I run out about ten o'clock, and there's usually a lot more dairy customers in the afternoon."

Blaze nodded and mumbled, "Interesting," and then he went back outside to the garden to finish fixing her raised beds.

She'd been meaning to fix her garden beds for years. Having him around was a blessing she hadn't known she needed. He saw things and just . . . fixed them.

Things just got done.

While the eggs soaked, Sarah scanned the spreadsheets on the computer, analyzing what the corn needed for the coming week.

Because the corn always needed something, whether it was pesticide, fungicide, or weed killer. Corn was like a wide-mouthed baby bird always begging for something, and the something always cost money.

Sarah didn't have any more money.

Without her supplemental income from reading tarot cards on SnipSnap, the regular crop treatments and feed deliveries had depleted her bank account in only a week.

She should have taken the wad of cash that Blaze had given her and driven straight to the bank, but that fifteen thousand bucks in cash was long gone. Benny and his goons were probably tossing the bills at strippers.

Something had to change.

That afternoon, she drove her truck towing the horse trailer to Abigail Yoder's farm to clue her in on the situation.

When Sarah knocked on the screen door, Abigail ran so fast her apron strings flew out behind her back, and she grabbed Sarah around her neck, though gingerly. "Are you okay? The doctor said you would be in the hospital for a month!"

"I got better," Sarah said. "And thanks for taking care of the beasts for me. I can take them home now."

Abigail dragged Sarah right into her kitchen and turned around from the sideboard with two glasses of lemonade and a handwoven basket full of muffins. "Of course! I can have Matthew's brother Amos come around to your farm and help feed if your back isn't up to hauling hay bales. He's staying with us because they thought he was getting too worldly, working at the blacksmith's."

"No, I'm okay. I don't need help. Turns out that it was more dehydration than anything else."

Abigail nodded. "You have to drink your water. Filtered water, of course."

"Filtered, of course." Because Iowa well water was too contaminated with pesticides and fertilizers in many areas to drink safely. Pregnant women were cautioned not to shower for longer than three minutes. "But I'm okay now."

"Maybe you should get some of those electric-light packets from the feed store to put in your water for the dehydration."

Sarah paused. "Electrolytes?"

"Yeah, those."

"I'll look into it. But I need you to do me a favor."

With a long look, pity filled Abigail's brown eyes, and she asked, "What's up?"

Ah, yes. Abigail used that sad-puppy-eyed gaze whenever Sarah had problems, whether it was when Noah Williams hadn't known that she existed during their sophomore year of high school or when her mom had gotten sick. Abigail had been too sheltered to understand the former, but she understood family problems and dying all too well.

And she was kind.

Sarah said, "Nobody can know I'm home. Please, you can't tell anyone that I'm back. Absolutely no one. I need to drop off social media for a while, like Gordon Storr and Rich Weiss dropped off."

"Oh."Abigail's already round eyes turned even more circular with her eyebrows raised. "I mean, we Amish aren't on social media."

"Of course not." They totally were. Abigail was, at any rate. They all had cell phones because they used batteries, not electricity, and thus weren't cause for shunning.

Abigail asked, "But are you okay?"

"I saw some stuff while I was in the hospital," Sarah told her. "It made me a little paranoid."

Abigail leaned toward Sarah, her hands knotted together on her white apron. "Government things?"

"Some people were there who thought I saw something bad, but they're wrong."

"Oh," Abigail said. "Like that movie Witness. I saw that over at Ester Glick's house when I was fifteen. They're Mennonite, you know. Do you want to move in here? We'll just tell people you're my sister. The community will go along with it if my father vouches for you, and he will, I'm sure. Everybody liked your mother."

"I'll be okay, but you just can't mention that I'm home to anyone, especially online."

Abigail nodded solemnly. "We don't want a repeat of the Easter Dinner Incident of 2021."

"Exactly, and seeing as how your house is on the road to my place, if you see someone suspicious like outsiders driving up that road, would you give me a call? They might be driving black SUVs, but they might have rented any car from the airport."

"Of course. Outsiders stick out like sore thumbs around here. Heck, we can track the people from Iowa City who want to buy fresh eggs like we were bird dogs."

"And could you put out the word that some weirdos might be asking about me? Just release it onto the whisper network that some out-of-towners might be driving around and peering into people's houses or cars, or they might be asking questions. If anybody sees anything suspicious, could they call you, and then you let me know? But don't tell them I'm home. Just tell them to keep an eye out for weirdos."

"I'll do that."

"And call me on the phone, like a real call with your mouth, not texting, okay?"

Abigail pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and waggled it at Sarah. "Sure."

"Thanks, Abbi. You're the only one I can trust right now."

Abigail smiled at the news that she would be the information conduit for this operation. "Of course, and I'll have Amos load up HowNow and Charlie in the trailer for you." She turned and yelled into the house. "Amos! Get Muffintop and bring her down!"

From up the stairs, a teen boy's voice yelled, "No!"

"Amos!"

Sarah suppressed a chuckle. That kid was fifteen going on twenty-three. He was a handful.

Surely, Sarah could trust Abigail not to tell anyone that she was back.

She hoped she was right.