Fatal Harvest. Catherine Palmer

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СКАЧАТЬ “So where is Matt, anyhow? We were gonna meet after school and go to Dairy Queen to talk about the mission trip to Guatemala. My dad doesn’t want me to go. I waited for Matt, but he never showed.”

      Cole glanced down the long hall in the direction of his son’s bedroom. It was unlike Matt to back out on anything he’d planned with Billy. The two sixteen-year-olds had been best friends since kindergarten, and nothing could separate them—not peer pressure, girls, sports or even their increasingly divergent interests in life.

      “Hey, Matt!” Cole barked down the hall. “Billy’s here. You better come get a tamale—they’re going fast.”

      Billy paused in wolfing down his snack and gave a wide grin. “Yeah, Matt,” he shouted, his mouth full, “you stood me up, dude! What’s with that?”

      When his son didn’t answer, Cole headed toward the bedroom. In the rambling adobe house that sat at the center of his large ranching and farming operation, terra-cotta Saltillo tiles kept the floors cool in summer and warm in winter. He trailed one hand along the undulating whitewashed wall.

      “Matthew?” The door was open, and Cole stuck his head in. As always, his eyes took in a jumble of comic books, telescopes, computer equipment, dirty clothes, athletic shoes and empty pizza boxes spread over every square inch of his son’s large bedroom. Matt claimed that he alone fueled the orange soda industry. As evidence, empty cans lay scattered around the room. Trails of ants scurried into and out of the open tab holes.

      Josefina had flatly refused to continue cleaning Matt’s room. She even made a half-serious vow to quit her job if Cole ordered her to set foot in his son’s domain. She adored the boy and had worked for Cole since his wife died eight years earlier. But as she liked to say, “I got my limits, Mr. Strong.”

      Scanning the room to make sure he could distinguish boy from junk, Cole shook his head. “He’s not here, Billy,” he called. “You sure you just didn’t miss him at school?”

      “No, sir, he was not there. I waited fifteen minutes.” Billy joined Cole in the doorway. “I figured those college recruiters messed with his head. You know how Matt gets rattled by stuff like that. And he’s been so weird lately anyway, with that research paper he’s doing. Weirder than usual, I mean.”

      From anyone but Billy Younger, this statement would have made Cole bristle. He realized his son was different, but he wished others weren’t so aware of it. Reading easily by age three, Matthew had also excelled in math and science. But the boy’s social skills were worse than poor. Shy, gawky, nervous, Matt didn’t help himself by regularly obsessing over one thing or another. Though he was a good-looking kid, with his mother’s dark hair and his father’s blue eyes, he had never been on a date and could claim only one close friend.

      “What’s the paper about?” Cole asked.

      “You haven’t heard him talking about it?”

      “I don’t think so.”

      Cole felt uncomfortable not knowing his son’s activities, but he had a ranch to run. Taking control after his own father’s death, Cole had barely saved the operation from bankruptcy. Now profitable, it had been cited by journalists and lawmakers as one of the finest examples of a family-owned ranch in the state of New Mexico. But the hard work had taken its toll on Cole’s relationship with Matt—not that there had ever been much to build on.

      Cole had acknowledged long ago that he and the boy had little in common. When they ate together, dinner was a mostly silent affair. When they went on a road trip, Matt hid behind a pair of sunglasses and the headphones of his portable MP3 player. In church these days, Matt sat with Billy and the rest of the youth group. Summers were no better. Matt spent all his free time parked in front of his computer, and unless it related to ranching, such current technology bewildered Cole. There had never been a strong relationship between father and son, and now it was almost nonexistent.

      “He’s writing about food or something,” Billy said, wading into Matt’s bedroom—as if walking across old issues of MacWorld and PC Gamer were perfectly ordinary. He approached the tangle of cords and computer equipment piled on his friend’s desk. “It’s like world hunger, you know? The term paper is for English, but we get to choose any subject we want. So Matt gets this idea from Miss Pruitt, who’s like his guru. She teaches computers. Miss Pruitt is cool, though. She goes on all these mission trips with her church. And she really feeds the hungry.”

      “I haven’t met Miss Pruitt.”

      “She’s intense.” He leaned over Matt’s computer and pressed a key. The screen switched from a pattern of morphing colored shapes into a field of text. “You don’t want to take her classes unless you like to work. She expects a lot out of you, but Matt’s into that kind of thing. He’s always going in there and talking to her.”

      “Does he have a crush on her?”

      “A crush!” Billy laughed, and Cole realized the term was a little out of date. “No, sir, you don’t get a crush on Miss Pruitt. I mean, it’s not that she’s ugly, okay? She’s just—wow, she’s intense. That’s all I can tell you.”

      He peered at the screen. “This is it. This is the first draft of Matt’s term paper for English. It’s about how these huge food companies are controlling the world.”

      “What?” Cole frowned. “Food companies doing what?”

      “Come on, Mr. Strong—you sell all your beef to Agrimax, don’t you? And your chile goes to Selena Foods, which is owned by Agrimax. Your alfalfa? Who gets that?”

      “Homestead. Agrimax owns it.”

      “Okay, Mr. S, you’re with me now.” Billy was scrolling through text as he spoke. “I wonder where Matt’s laptop is.”

      Cole recalled the minicomputer that his son lugged around along with a graphing calculator and several other gadgets whose names and functions were a mystery to Cole. As with all of Matt’s equipment, the laptop was in a constant state of being “upgraded”—which, as far as Cole understood, meant he wrote countless checks, and then Matt bought and installed various circuit boards of all shapes and sizes. “Matt always has it with him,” Cole told Billy.

      “It’s probably in his truck,” Billy said. “It has a newer version of his term paper on it. Matt was showing me yesterday. He learned all about these food companies on the Internet, you know? And he went to see that guy who ranches near Hope—what’s his name? Who retired from Agrimax?”

      “Jim Banyon?”

      “Yeah, him. And Matt interviewed Miss Pruitt about her work with famine relief.”

      “What does famine relief have to do with Agrimax?”

      “See, what happened is this. Matt’s doing his research, and he gets this big idea that his term paper can be more than just a school assignment. It’s a plan for Agrimax to help feed the hungry. So he starts crunching all these numbers on his computer, and he’s e-mailing everybody—completely obsessed, you know? He can’t talk about anything else. Anyway, the other day he tells me he was wrong about Agrimax helping feed the hungry. He says they’re only gonna sell their food to the highest bidders, and they don’t even want to hear his ideas. Basically they told him to back off.”

      A prickle ran down Cole’s spine. “Back off? What was Matt doing?”

      “Writing СКАЧАТЬ