The Clue at Black Creek Farm (Nancy Drew Diaries #9)(14)

“She’s better,” I explained. “It looks like she had E. coli poisoning.”

“E. coli?” Lori asked, her voice as incredulous as if I’d just said that Julie had bubonic plague. “Julie got E. coli from Sam’s produce?”

“Yep,” I said, watching Lori’s eyes carefully. She looked completely stunned.

“How?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” I said honestly. “Do you?”

She shook her head, then brought her hand to her mouth. “It just . . . it doesn’t make sense.”

Bess glanced at me, then back at Lori. “Is there any chance,” she said, “that the food was contaminated at the community center?”

Lori’s eyes looked unfocused as she thought. “I guess it’s possible,” she said finally, “but not on my watch. Holly and I were really careful. I worked in a restaurant last summer; I know about safe food preparation.” She paused. “Really, this just doesn’t make sense.”

“Do you think that maybe the produce was contaminated on the farm?” I suggested.

Lori frowned, looking back at me. “I guess,” she said, “but how? Sam runs a clean farm. It would be really weird for any bacteria to show up on his produce, much less E. coli. You know E. coli comes from animals, right? And Sam only keeps a few chickens.”

I nodded, looking down at the ground, and when I did so I noticed a smartphone peeking out of the top of Lori’s jeans pocket. It shouldn’t have surprised me; every kid our age carried his or her smartphone everywhere, all the time. Even working on a farm. But it did give me an idea.

“Oh, gosh,” I said, trying to look like I’d just remembered something. “I totally forgot that I need to call my dad and tell him I won’t be able to meet him for lunch in half an hour. But I left my phone back at Sam’s. Does anyone have one I can borrow?”

Bess looked at me, amused. I knew her phone was in her purse, but she’d seen me pull the “borrow your phone” maneuver enough times to know that she should not offer it to me. Lori looked from me to Bess, then reached into her pocket with an easy shrug.

“Sure, here’s mine,” she said, handing her smartphone over. Success! “Let me just type in the pass code . . . there.”

“Thanks,” I said sincerely. “I’m just going to, um, take this over there”—I gestured to a picnic table behind a small copse of trees—“so you don’t hear him lecture me about changing plans at the last minute. Soooo embarrassing!”

Lori and Bess nodded understandingly as I took the phone and darted over to the tables, out of sight. I heard Bess asking Lori a question about her school’s football team as I made my escape. That’s it, Bess, cover for me, I thought as I sat down and looked at the phone. As much as Bess hadn’t wanted to come along on this interview mission, she was doing an amazing job of cozying up to Lori and getting information.

I went to the phone’s history first: recent calls and voice mails. There was one voice mail from yesterday, but when I listened to it, it was just a classmate asking Lori for the algebra homework assignment. None of the placed calls looked unusual—all local, within our area code. No familiar names in her contact list aside from Sam Heyworth.

So I went to texts. There were several from the day before, setting up a meeting with her friend Haley at the library to study after she finished at Black Creek Farm. A couple of texts to her mother, updating her on where Lori was. Nothing seemed unusual, and nothing seemed to contradict Lori’s story that she’d left the greenhouse looking fine—but unlocked. A quick search through her personal e-mails turned up a crush on a classmate named Jason, but no useful information having to do with Black Creek.

So far there was no proof that anyone at Sunshine Farm had sabotaged Black Creek Farm.

I hid any signs of my snooping and walked back to Lori and Bess, holding out the phone.

“. . . I don’t know,” Lori was saying with a shy smile, “maybe he likes me? But it’s so hard to tell. I’ve known him since I was, like, in diapers.”

“If only boys would tell us what they were thinking, huh?” Bess replied sympathetically. “But maybe that would make it too easy.”

“Easy is good for me. I like easy,” Lori said. She looked up as I approached. “Did you get your dad?”

I nodded. “Yeah, he was actually fine with it. Thank goodness!”

Lori took the phone from my hand with a smile and tucked it back into her pocket. I glanced at Bess and raised an eyebrow, trying to send the message: Did you find out anything suspicious?

Bess gave a very tiny shake of her head and widened her eyes. No, she seems totally normal. I don’t know what to do.

I cleared my throat. “Listen, Lori,” I said, “something actually happened at Black Creek Farm yesterday that has Sam kind of rattled.”

“Really?” Lori looked surprised. “More than just Julie being sick?”

“Yeah.” I let out a breath. “The thing is, someone vandalized the greenhouse yesterday. Probably sometime after you left. Which was?”

Lori blinked at me, surprised. “Ah . . . about noon, maybe? Wait, what do you mean, vandalized?”

“Someone went in there and knocked over all the plants,” Bess explained. “Really tore them up, left a huge mess of broken pots and dirt all over the floor. And he or she left a message,” she added, raising her eyebrows.