Page 17 of The Hard Way

As much as I loved my life with my guys—my husbands now—I missed my sisters something fierce.

My guys and I had had to fake my death over a year back. It was the only way to keep my sisters safe. We had powerful enemies, not just the police, but the spy agency ZOX. If ZOX ever figured out that I was Melinda Prescott from Baylortown, Wisconsin, they could smoke me out by threatening my sisters.

And then they’d have my guys by the balls. Nobody could ever know.

The header showed an old picture of the four of us as girls. I loved that picture so much. Back then it was a shearing operation, but after my parents died, we’d gotten entrepreneurial and started to make cheese, too, and products like pillows and comforters.

Usually Vanessa opened the newsletter with a greeting like,Friends! I have so much good news!She was positive like that. Today the newsletter was set off by a quietly stark sentence, standing all by itself:The news isn’t good.

I sat up. “Shit.”

“You okay?” Zeus said.

“I’m okay, but…” I read on. There’d been a salmonella outbreak. A group of people had gotten seriously ill from one of their artisan sheep cheeses. One person had died. “No!”

“What?”

“My sisters…shit. A man died, and they say it’s our cheese. They’re being sued.”

“What?”

“There was a salmonella outbreak originating at their farm, and a man died. They don’t name him. Oh my god.” I read on. A farmhand had accused the sisters of knowingly selling tainted cheese. “My sisters would never do that! Who the hell is this farmhand?”

I read parts out loud to Zeus:

Our hearts are broken for the family of the man who passed away, for the people who got so sick. Our customers mean everything to us. We would never sell cheese we knew to be contaminated or instruct an employee to ignore health codes. We’re truly bewildered about these accusations, and we’re working with health authorities to uncover the truth.

There was a GoFundMe site for their legal defense.

“You think it’s foul play?” Zeus asked.

“Iknowit’s foul play. My sisters are nerds about food safety and cleanliness.” I clicked over to theBaylortown Reporterand read more about it there. The man who died was Tim Zietlow. A really nice man. He was older than me, but I remembered him playing the accordion. Finally I got the name of the farmhand—Andy Miller. “What the fuck!” I said.

“What?” Zeus asked.

“The farmhand, Andy Miller. It makes no sense.” Andy had grown up on the farm that abutted ours. He’d been a grade ahead of me in high school—we’d even dated briefly. “He was a man whore, but not devious.”

“We should give to the fund,” he suggested. “We send a crapload of small donations.” He pulled his own computer out and started researching on his own. “Look at this write-up,” he said after a while. “They have a lawyer, but he’s a real estate lawyer.”

“What?” I got up and looked over his shoulder, wincing at the pain in my rib, which I’d forgotten all about. “Oh, no, I went to school with that guy. He’s probably representing them free. He’s not very smart.”

“I’m no lawyer, but I know you need somebody specialized in a case like this,” Zeus said. “Maybe we could hire a better lawyer. Somebody who deals with food production. Make them pretend it’s pro bono.”

I pressed my palms to my eyes. “Fuck!” When I pulled them away, Zeus was eyeing me warily from his chair, as though he was deciding whether I could handle even more bad news.

“What?”

“Vanessa is up on manslaughter charges.”

“What?”

“According to the charges, she knew the cheese was bad, and she sold it anyway.”

“No!”

Zeus handed me the tablet. I read the words over and over until they started swimming in front of my eyes. “She can’t go to jail!”

He stood up and rubbed circles on my back. “She’s not going to jail.”

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