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  “The group that tore up a graduate student’s cornfields before school started?” Save the Fields, I knew, opposed research on genetically engineered crops of any kind. Their preferred mode of protest was to destroy crop fields at night and threaten researchers. “I heard about that.” I shook my head. “The corn wasn’t even genetically altered.”

  “Virtually everything we eat is genetically altered in some way. Nature takes care of that.” Tess spoke with the patient deliberation one used when one had said something many times before in class. “The crops they tore up were humanly modified using conventional techniques, not genetic engineering, but, despite that fact,” Tess’s cheeks were turning a peony-like rose, “they’ve left a note full of threats to everyone working on GMOs.” Tess glanced at the crowd around us as if it might conceal suspects.

  Tess had reason to be concerned, for she herself worked on genetically modified soybeans. She had strong views about how genetic engineering continued the cross-breeding of plants that farmers had carried on for hundreds of years. Native Americans, she liked to point out, had produced corn by merging different grasses. Genetic engineering was an extension of that process. It frustrated Tess, who cared deeply about using new technologies to feed a hungry world, that people understood so little about the process of breeding plants, not to mention the challenges faced by farmers. She was so smart and so earnest that no one doubted her motives, her politics, or, least of all, her expertise, but not everyone agreed with her point of view. Feelings, I had learned at a panel on GMOs last spring, ran deep on all sides of the issue.

  Tess had argued passionately for the right of subsistence farmers to plant GMOs in combating world hunger, although she hadn’t been a fan of corporations that didn’t care a fig about the fact that subsistence farmers couldn’t afford to buy the seeds that biotechnology companies owned. Peter Elliott, with a smugness I found extremely irritating, had stoutly defended Syndicon and its practices with GMOs, while several of my colleagues had vehemently opposed Syndicon and GMOs both.

  But was it GMOs themselves or the policies of the corporations that produced them—the relentless focus on profit, the resistance to regulation, the absence of concern for harming, or even helping, others—that my colleagues had really objected to? Did the debate have less to do with GMO technology than with the values it was made to serve? Tess wanted to employ them for global good. Syndicon only cared about its bottom line. The same tension between communal and profit-driven motives had begun to play out all over campus. The threatened downsizing of smaller programs like my own was just one piece of evidence for that.

  “Would Save the Fields have actually tried to poison Peter?” I asked. It seemed a long shot to me.

  “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure I was followed home last night.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said, suddenly envisioning myself in my car at night being pursued by a threatening vehicle. I imagined a dark country road, shadowy fields, no houses in sight, and for a moment the rise and fall of conversation and the bustle of students around me disappeared.

  “Did you get a look at the car?”

  “It was a dark blue van.”

  “And you’ve told the police?”

  “I called them as soon as I got home.” Tess wasn’t someone who was easily intimidated, but I saw that this had scared her.

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’ve added security to the fields, instructed us to keep our offices and labs locked up, and told us to report suspicious-looking people hanging around our workplace. But that’s not going to help much if someone threatens us off campus.” Tess surveyed the crowd once more. “It’s awful to live like this.”

  “I can imagine.” Even without menacing notes, I felt uneasy about working evenings at Arbor State. The campus grounds were full of dark expanses; the office buildings, so busy during the day, were empty and dimly lit at night; and incidents of theft and assault had been reported. But what would it feel like to fear, and with plenty of reason, that someone might actually be lying in wait, hidden by shadows, perhaps parked alongside your car in a campus lot? Although there was little reason to think I myself would be singled out, it was deeply unsettling to hear that Tess apparently had. Despite the hot-as-Mojave day, I felt a chill.

  I was gazing vacantly at the student union, trying to get my overactive imagination back in line, when I noticed that every table in the union courtyard had been filled. A single bench remained unoccupied. Tess had agreed to moderate a panel on gender and “biodiversity,” part of my series on gender and the environment, and “biodiversity” was a concept that I had only begun to understand. If I was going to introduce this panel properly, I needed to know more.

  “I know this isn’t a good time, but can we sit on the bench for a moment and talk about the panel?”

  “Sure,” said Tess. “I refuse to stop my life because of threats.”

  Corn and Cherry Scones

  Makes 12–15 scones

  2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

  ½ teaspoon baking soda

  1 tablespoon baking powder

  ½ teaspoon kosher salt

  ⅔ plus ¼ cup sugar

  1½ cups medium-grind yellow cornmeal

  1 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch cubes

  ¾ cup dried sweet cherries

  1¼ cups buttermilk

  Preheat oven to 425°F.

  Place the rack in the center of the oven and line 1 or 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.

  Sift flour, baking soda, and baking powder into a large bowl. Add salt, ⅔ cup sugar, and the cornmeal, and stir until mixed.

  Add butter and cut in with a pastry cutter until the butter is the size of small peas. Mix in the cherries.

  Make a well in the center of the mixture and add buttermilk. Mix until ingredients just come together. There will be some loose flour left at the bottom of the bowl.

  Let the batter stand for 5 minutes.

  Gently shape the dough into balls about 2¼ inches in diameter and place them on the prepared pans about 2 inches apart. The balls should have a rocky exterior.

  Sprinkle the ¼ cup sugar on top of the scones. Place them on the middle rack of the oven and immediately turn the temperature down to 375°F.

  Bake 20–25 minutes or until the scones are golden. Transfer the scones to a wire rack to cool.

  Adapted by permission of the Cheese Board Collective at http://cheeseboardcollective.coop/. From The Cheese Board Collective Works (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2003.)

  Chapter 2

  A rush of smothering heat enveloped me—like one of the Santa Ana winds I’d grown up with in Southern California. By 3:00 p.m., the temperature in Arborville had shot into the higher nineties, not unusual in mid-October when Indian summer settled in, scorching the whole valley, but after emerging from the pleasant chill of my office in Haven Hall, the initial shock of desert air felt like an assault. Wilting and moving slowly, as if I were a forty-niner crossing Death Valley’s shimmering floor, I walked along the quad to Library Lane. It was time for my coffee date with Wilmer Crane, the man who’d answered my ad in the Valley Bee.

  As I passed a campus parking lot, the sun bouncing off the cars in a dazzling blaze of light, the harsh odor of heated asphalt assailing my nostrils, my thoughts turned to the even more uncomfortable matters of the Hog Barn, the poisoning, and the threatening note. By day, at least, Arbor State had always felt secure, but now, in full sunlight, something disquieting had entered into the atmosphere on campus. Despite the heat, which was further straightening, and surely now frizzing, my hair, I tried to sort it out.

  If the poisoning was deliberate, as Tess had feared, was the perpetrator a member of Save the Fields or was it someone on campus who hated Peter’s politics? Peter had infuriated a lot of people with his unyielding support of corporate control over GMOs. Some, I realized to my unease, were colleagues I liked and trusted. It was inconceivable to me that any of them had been involved,
but was it possible now that some of them might be open to suspicion? The question weighed upon me like the hot, dry air, and I was grateful to reach a row of large old maple trees that shielded me from the sun.

  To live in Arborville was to live among large trees. Because the early founders, in their wisdom, had given some thought to the valley heat, Arborville’s downtown was lined with large oaks, arching elms, tall cedars, and fragrant pines, giving it a quaint and leafy ambience. Students strolled along the sidewalks, bicyclists vied with slow-moving cars in the narrow streets, and dogs, tongues hanging, patiently waited for their owners in the shade.

  The buildings were a well-blended mix of old and new—a railroad station with graceful arches in Mission Revival style, dating from the early 1900s; a medium-sized hardware store; a couple of small bookshops; modest dress boutiques, one of which sold the silk underwear I favored; gift shops with iron kitchenware and teacups painted in sunflower designs, which I wasn’t partial to; and many casual restaurants. No pharmacist or grocery store, however. For that you had to drive to the outer sections of the town where larger stores were permitted. Arborville, unlike the university it would seem, was protective of its smaller businesses. Students jammed every café with their computers, and the movie house specialized in films for adolescent boys, but Arborville had a pleasant, leisurely pace. It was a college town through and through.

  As I turned the corner onto Poppy Lane, I began to wonder what my coffee date would be like. His letter had been well written and straightforward. I’d liked him on the basis of that alone, and now, as I descended a set of concrete stairs that led toward a sunken plaza—partially shaded by a feathery foothill pine—I saw a man with graying temples sitting at one of the white plastic tables. He had a friendly face with a slightly turned-up nose. There was something open and country-like about him. Good looking, I thought, but what will we say to each other? Having taken languages in college when math and language had been the two choices, I knew nothing of mathematics.

  “You must be Wilmer Crane.” He held out his hand and I took it. Nice grip, I thought. “I’m Emily Addams. I’ll get an iced latte and be back.”

  “No, let me get it for you.”

  “Okay, thanks, with nonfat milk, please.” Good manners, I observed, as he disappeared inside. There was something about him that reminded me of a country gentleman.

  When he returned, I asked, “So, what kind of math do you do?” I wanted to grasp something at least about what the man did. Work meant so much to my own life I couldn’t imagine anyone really knowing me without understanding it.

  “Chaos theory.” Wilmer sat a bit more upright in his chair. He seemed taken aback by my direct interest in his field of study.

  “I know almost nothing about math, but could you try to explain that to me in a simple way?”

  Wilmer tried, but the words “fractal,” “self-iteration,” “flows and folding” were unfamiliar to me, a completely foreign tongue. The one thing I did catch was “Butterfly Effect.” According to Wilmer, a mathematical talk in 1972 had borne the intriguing title “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Chaos theory maintained that, yes, it could.

  “What’s chaos theory used for?” I asked.

  “All sorts of things. Some people use it to understand the migration of birds and monarch butterflies.”

  That seemed entirely too difficult to understand. What did it say about a man, I wondered, that he worked on chaos theory? That he was comfortable with complexity? That he needed to control disorder? Both? Neither? Something else? While a slight breeze stirred the needles of the tree, dispersing their piney scent, I paused to consider what question I’d ask him next.

  “I had an unsettling experience this morning,” Wilmer interjected, turning his sloping blue eyes directly to my face.

  His eyes looked big behind his glasses, big in a good way. Definitely good looking, I thought, and smart and tall. I liked a tall man. I found them comforting.

  “I went to the Hog Barn this morning. It’s next to my office in the Institute for Analytical Dynamics. I was going to do photography for a couple of hours.”

  Ah, photography, that was something we could talk about.

  “I was trying to compose a shot when I saw a man’s body lying in the mud next to a pig’s pen.”

  “Peter Elliott?” I leaned across the table and Wilmer nodded. “I heard about him from one of my colleagues. So it was you who found him? He’d ingested poison or something? What’d you do?”

  “I jumped in, called for an ambulance, and did CPR. I got him to breathe, but he was still unconscious and he’d thrown up a lot. Then a student appeared out of nowhere and began sobbing like crazy. She was an intern at the Hog Barn, apparently.”

  “What was her relation to Peter?”

  “She fed his pigs.”

  “She fed his pigs? That’s all?”

  “It did strike me,” Wilmer narrowed his eyes behind his glasses, “that, given the nature of their connection, there was something a bit extreme about her grief.”

  It struck me that way too.

  “What happened next?”

  “The emergency workers and police arrived, and I pointed out something odd. He had a piece of corn bread in his hand.”

  “Corn bread?” I felt my head go light. “How strange. I made corn bread last night, and I took it to campus for a Native American Studies reception in Bauman Hall. That’s not far away from the barn. What a weird coincidence.” Had there been something wrong with my corn bread? A sudden darkness blossomed in my chest. “But I ate the bread and so did a lot of people,” I said, more to myself than to Wilmer. “No one got sick that I know of. I didn’t, and I always get ill if there’s something wrong with food. I didn’t see Peter at the reception, and, anyway, I doubt he’d even know about it.”

  “Well,” Wilmer bent toward me with a comforting look, “we don’t know that it was your corn bread. Lots of people make corn bread, and he could have bought some just about anywhere. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  “You’re right, but still, how curious.” I stared blankly for a moment at the gray and russet sparrows rustling and pecking at crumbs near our feet. Could my corn bread really have gotten mixed up in this mess? I tried for a moment to think of other yellow foods. Corn muffins? Corn scones? Corn pudding? Or wait, pigs ate corn too. Had his hand been full of feed for hogs?

  “Are you sure it was corn bread, not pig food or something else that was yellow?”

  “It wasn’t pig food, that’s for sure.”

  I glanced at the sparrows again, trying to recall details from the gathering I’d attended the night before, and when I raised my head, I saw that Wilmer was studying me.

  “What do you work on?”

  He seemed eager to put the Hog Barn and its memories behind us. Perhaps they cast me in a disturbing light? Some first meeting, now that I thought about it. His date turns out to be a suspect in an attempted poisoning! “Coincidentally enough, I’m writing about dishes made of corn, about their cultural meanings. I used to be in literature, but when I came to Arbor State, I decided to work on popular culture. Recently I decided to write some pieces on food.”

  Wilmer nodded.

  “And baking is part of your investigation?”

  “I wanted to write on a subject that would connect my work with my personal life, and I wanted to know my subject in different ways, not just through conventional research but through cooking and eating and ways I don’t even know about yet.” He was a mathematician. How was I going to explain the nature of my research? “Besides, I like to cook, and my daughter likes to cook with me. It’s something fun we can do together.” That was no better.

  I studied my hands resting on the table and adjusted one of my silver and turquoise rings. I was fond of turquoise. Then I looked straight at Wilmer. “I give a lot of food-based parties, and I guess you could say I’m obsessed with bringing food to gatherings and also with t
hinking about the role of food in building relationships and community.” I stopped short.

  Wilmer tilted his head and narrowed his eyes once more. Maybe I’d looked like that when he’d described the Butterfly Effect.

  “Given your work,” I said, “this must seem foreign to you.”

  “Not really.” He paused as if giving the matter some thought. “Chaos theory has relevance for ordinary, day-to-day life. It’s used in analyzing weed control, in setting the price of pigs—and even in growing corn.”

  I was pleased that Wilmer’s math had such down-to-earth and, potentially, community-minded applications, though I couldn’t imagine how they would work. Having never gotten beyond algebra and geometry, I found higher math a total mystery.

  The sun moved beyond the top of the Redbud Café, deepening the shade.

  “Have you been married?” I was keen on turning us away from the disturbing issue of my corn bread.

  “Yes.” Wilmer blushed. “Twice. And both times they left me. My last wife went off with someone else six months ago. How about you?”

  “It’s been a year since my marriage broke up,” I replied. Why had the wives left? Don’t ask, I told myself firmly, not at our first meeting. Instead, I inquired if he had children. He had two boys, both of them on their own. I told him about Polly, and then as the heat of the day broke, I glanced at my watch. “I have to pick up my daughter. I’ve enjoyed our time.”

  The tables had emptied and the plaza had fallen into shadow when Wilmer unfolded himself from his plastic chair.

  “Would you like to do this again?”

  “Sure.” I definitely did want to do this again.

  “Do you think we’ll have enough to talk about?” He watched me closely as I gathered my things.

  “I guess we’ll see.” I smiled with encouragement. I hoped that would be the case, and I was fairly certain we’d find things to talk about. But, then again, I’d never dated a man in mathematics.