Page 32 of The Hard Way

“I’m sorry that’s not what you want to hear,” Andy said. “That cooler of cheese represented weeks of work. It’s not like whichever one of them switched the cheese was being malicious. They’re not bad people. Losing power to the cooler like that—you know those regulations are redundant. If the cheese is well made and you’ve kept shit clean, cheese getting warmed up shouldn’t be a problem. And we really keep shit clean in there. So there was a moment where we were all looking at that brie, thinking, ‘This cheese is probably fine, and nothing would happen if we shipped it.’ Just standing there thinking about that cheese. Candy crying.”

I gritted my teeth. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that my sisters would never ship warmed brie, even if they were sure it was good.

“It was a big issue because they were planning a vacation to Mexico this year. Vanessa developed this farm co-op ring between us and them and these other neighbors, the Schneiders, where we handle a week per winter on each other’s farms. But you toss that amount of cheese out, and your vacation plans are pretty much toast at that point. We’re standing there looking at it, and Vanessa goes, ‘We have to toss it.’ So I tossed it and went out to the barn.”

“So it’s your theory that Vanessa switched in the bad cheese?”

“She was the only one there the whole time. Anyway, one of them had to because I didn’t load it in from the garbage. That would not happen. Period.” He swept his hands against each other as if to say,I wipe my hands.“I don’t know how it got in there, but there were three other people who knew it was tossed.”

I looked from Thor to Zeus to Odin. I couldn’t read them. I couldn’t read Andy, either.

“You have a theory,” Odin said. “Let’s hear it.”

“It wasn’t Vanessa,” Andy said. “But Kaitlin…she’s just a kid.”

I stared down at the ground, heart pounding. Kaitlin was seventeen—she knew better. Shewouldn’t.

Five minutes later, we were back in the car, bumping out of the Miller’s Acres gate.

“I didn’t like him,” Odin said.

“But did you think he was lying?” Zeus asked.

Odin looked back at me. “Ice?”

“Fuck yeah, he’s lying.”

“What about his theory? Candy or Kaitlin?”

“No way. Vanessa would know if one of my sisters was lying, and she’d make it right.”

“Could their lawyer be advising them to deny, deny, deny? Could Vanessa be willing to take the fall for a sister?”

My heart pounded. Good people did stupid things all the time. Did one of them fuck up and Vanessa was protecting her? But then I remembered the newsletter. “No. In the newsletter, Vanessa said an employee lied. She said it to you. She wouldn’t slag somebody like that if she suspected it was Kaitlin or Candace. No, it had to be Andy. Or maybe Andy was working with somebody. Something happened there. It wasn’t my sisters.”

Thor studied my eyes.

“You have to believe me,” I said.

Chapter 6

Back at the B&B, Zeus put together a plate of milk and cookies from the snack kitchen, and we took it upstairs even though we probably weren’t supposed to. Even though classical music was invitingly playing in the empty living room. But the dirty-minded criminal God Pack couldn’t hang around in a living room full of cupids where classical music was playing from an unseen source. It was too much. A bridge too far.

“Well?” I flopped down on our bed. “Maybe we should make a diagram or something. Or maybe we should steal Andy’s phone and see who he alerted.”

“Come here.” Zeus held out his arm. He wanted me to snuggle closer to him, which was something I typically loved to do, but I wasn’t liking his attitude. I sensed that he wanted to comfort me.

“You think my sisters are guilty,” I said.

“I’m not saying that.”

“You’re suspecting it.”

“Here’s what I know—Andy isn’t your man,” Odin said.

I jumped up. “How do you know? Did you give him a lie detector? And seriously! Maybe he called somebody and told them about the cheese, and they snuck it into the cooler when my sisters weren’t watching, or…”

“In that short of time? The time it takes to change a barn light bulb?”

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