Hillary Broome begins team teaching an ethnic studies class with her friend, Professor Grover Zale, expecting to deepen her understanding of systemic discrimination. But another professor’s lessons stir violent tendencies in a student with criminal ties, leading him to organize a series of hate crimes, escalating to target in on Zale and Hillary, trapped in a deadly pit.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2021
Nothing on this hot August Sunday suggested trouble in the orchard. It was opening day at Apple Acres, and Hillary craved the simple pleasure of strolling along rows of leafed-out trees and picking Red Delicious.
The meteorologists predicted today’s weather to hit over a hundred. Still, the cinnamon fragrance of hot apple pie à la mode had set many a mouth to watering. Hillary stepped up onto the wooden platform and guided her small group to a window to place their orders. Folk music from inside poured over the outdoor eating area while they watched for a free table.
Once seated, her teenaged daughter, Claire, and best friend, Keisha, began scarfing down their pie in a hurry as the ice cream started pooling into a milky sauce. Keisha’s grandmother, Stacy, was blowing on her coffee. Hillary’s yellow lab was panting from the heat.
She tipped water into the dog’s travel bowl, then took a long swig from her green squeeze bottle. No pie for her. Tracking calories on her Apple Watch was her latest tactic in trying to get back under 180 pounds.
Leaving them to finish up, Hillary went inside the shop, where a fiddler was scratching out “Down in the Valley.” She hummed along with the tune, one of her favorites, and waited in line to buy a frozen apple pie to take home and sturdy paper bags with handles. The price was set by the size of the bags purchased, assuming they would be filled to the top with apples.
Outside, Claire opened her bag. “This is so big! Too bad Dad had to work. He could carry more than I can.”
“You plenty strong, Champ,” teased Keisha, landing a soft punch on Claire’s arm. Hillary smiled at the girls, who had become like sisters since they met at basketball camp a few years ago. They had their hopes set on becoming professional players, Keisha at six foot, two inches, a talented basketball center, and her own Claire, a point guard who’d inched up to five-foot-four.
The girls danced around Hillary and Stacy as if practicing their dribbling. Darius tugged at his leash, eager to run free. Hillary decided to keep the frozen apple pie with her rather than walk back to the parked car. They took off on the orchard’s gravel road toward the section set aside for U-Pick.
As they passed a rotund, balding man, Hillary was startled to hear him say to his teens, “Them redskins never had it this good, stuck with bitter acorns, they was.” Redskins. Another offensive epithet to add to her list in preparation for the ethnic studies class.
She gestured for her group to turn in at the sign marked RED DELICIOUS, ROW G. A dirt pathway ran between two rows of trees, boughs heavy with fruit crowded among canopies of leaves.
The rows looked like they carried on forever. Hillary paused in the sunlight and took a deep breath, inhaling the dusty, sweet scent of the place. This was a good way to spend the day.
In front of them, a scrawny woman had stopped and was pointing to a tree. “Just love these apples! Can’t handle picking peaches anymore, since that Juan Corona story.” Her high, thin voice carried like a piccolo in the hot air.
“Didn’t he die a couple years back?” A stooped man Hillary assumed was the woman’s husband stood staring at the tree. “Messed up peach trees?”
“That’s what I mean, dear. You remember, in the seventies, he murdered all those poor farm workers and buried them in the orchard, went to prison for the rest of his miserable life.”
Keisha led the way around the elderly couple. “Let’s get past people taking the low-hanging fruit,” she said.
Hillary spotted a drip irrigation pipe running along the base of the trees. “Stay in the middle if you can, reach for apples from the path,” she said. “The dirt over on the sides might be muddy.”
Claire sped light-footed ahead of Keisha down the long path between the apple trees. Hillary lost sight of the girls but knew they would return sooner or later with their bags filled. If Ed hadn’t had to manage security near Sacramento’s downtown arena, he’d have been here, picking apples at a fast clip. Hillary felt lucky to be married to Ed, such a good team player.
She had engaged one of Ed’s friends, working as a private detective, to help look for Keisha’s mother, missing since Keisha was just a year old. Hillary had con!dence in him because a couple of years ago, he’d helped locate Hillary’s own mother, who’d abandoned her when she was ten.
Hillary and Stacy sauntered along in the heat, sun hats covering their heads, the ties of Stacy’s purple head wrap dangling alongside her neck. Hillary juggled the apple pie in one hand and Darius’s leash in the other, trying to control the dog while he snuffled back and forth in the dirt.
The warmth of the afternoon drained the tension from Hillary’s body, in high gear getting ready for the start of the fall semester. She was intent on making a success of the new class.
But today, it was time to relax, take it easy. Stacy slowed down, stepped over a shallow ditch, and moved toward a tree. “I’m going to lean against this fellow.” She scuffed her foot over a low patch of ground. “This looks funny here. See? It’s kind of caved in.”
Darius pulled in Stacy’s direction, and Hillary followed to where her friend stood. The dog started to whine and paw at the ground. “I don’t want him messing with any of these irrigation pipes,” she said. With a quick flip, she wrapped the leather leash twice around her wrist and tried to tug him away. “Come on, boy. Leave it.”
The dog worked at the dirt. Hillary yanked on the leash. “What’s come over him? He must think a bone is buried out here.” As the dog dug deeper, the earth got darker and damper. He bit at something. Hillary squinted at what looked like a rope buried in the soil.
She bent to take a closer look and lost control of the pie. The box fell, its lid flying open, the pie sliding out, its domed crust crumbling. A few frozen apple slices stuck together in chunks and fell onto the soil.
Hillary ignored the pie and struggled to take the rope from Darius, but he held it clenched in his teeth, growling softly and shaking it back and forth. Suddenly, his head snapped back as the rope broke loose and dangled from his jaws. He flung the piece of rope to the side and dug into where it had come from.
“What’s he found?” whispered Stacy, wide-eyed.
Hillary studied the half-rotted fiber lying on the dirt, her stomach starting to knot up.
Something was twisted around the rope. She narrowed her eyes and peered at it. Was that a tiny piece of chain, clogged with dirt?
Just then, Claire and Keisha came back down the road, lugging bags heavy with apples, shouting out their return.
“What’s our big boy doing?” Claire yelled as she ran near.
Keisha stood motionless, staring at the ground, her bag falling open, apples rolling into the shallow ditch.
“Stay back,” Hillary said. “Let’s go notify Apple Acres. Darius has dug up something in the orchard that needs to be investigated.”