glared at her son. “Can’t you just peel the tomato, sweetie, without taking out most of it except the core?”
He grimaced. “Sorry,” he said, wielding the paring knife with more care as he went to work on what looked like a bushel of tomatoes, a gift from an organic gardener with a hothouse, that his mother was canning in her kitchen at home. Canning jars simmered in a huge tub of water, getting ready to be filled with fragrant tomato slices and then processed in the big pressure cooker. He glared at it.
“I hate those things,” he muttered. “Even the safest ones are dangerous.”
“Baloney,” she said inelegantly. “Give me those.”
She took the bowl of tomatoes and dunked them into a pot of boiling water. She left them there for a couple of minutes and fished them out in a colander. She put them in the sink in front of Rick. “There. Now they’ll skin. I keep telling you this is a more efficient way than trying to cut the skins off. But you don’t listen, my dear.”
“I like skinning them,” he said with a dark-eyed smile in her direction. “It’s an outlet for my frustrations.”
“Oh?” She didn’t look at him, deliberately. “What sort of frustrations?”
“There’s this new woman at work,” he said grimly.
“Gwen.” She nodded.
He dropped the knife, picked it back up and stared at her.
“You talk about her all the time.”
“I do?” It was news to him. He didn’t realize that.
She nodded as she skinned tomatoes. “She trips over things that she doesn’t see, she messes up crime scenes, she spills coffee, she can’t find her cell phone …” She glanced at him. He was still standing there, with the knife poised over a tomato. “Get busy, there, those tomatoes won’t peel themselves.”
He groaned.
“Just think how nice they’ll taste in one of my beef stew recipes,” she coaxed. “Go on, peel.”
“Why can’t we just get one of those things that sucks the air out of bags and freeze them instead?”
“What if we have a major power outage that lasts for days and days?” she returned.
He thought for a minute. “I’ll go buy twenty bags of ice and several of those foam coolers.”
She laughed. “Yes, but we can’t tell how the power grid is going to cope if we have one of those massive CMEs like the Carrington Event in 1859.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“There was a massive coronal mass ejection in 1859 called the Carrington Event,” she explained. “When it hit earth, all the electrics on the planet went crazy. Telegraph lines burned up and telegraph units caught fire.” She glanced at him. “There wasn’t much electricity back in those days—it was in its infancy. But imagine if such a thing happened today, with our dependence on electricity. Everything is connected to the grid these days, banks, communications corporations, pharmacies, government, military and the list goes on and on. Even our water and power are controlled by computers. Just imagine if we had no way to access our computers.”
He whistled. “I was in the grocery store one day when the computers went offline. They couldn’t process credit cards. Most people had to leave. I had enough cash for bread and milk. Then another time the computers in the pharmacy went down, when you had to have those antibiotics for the sinus infection last winter. I had to come home and get the checkbook and go back. People without credit cards had real problems.”
“See?” She went back to her tomatoes.
“I suppose it would be a pretty bad thing. Is it going to happen, you think?”
“Someday, certainly. The sun has eleven year cycles, you know, with a solar minimum and a solar maximum. The next solar maximum, some scientists say, is in 2012. If we’re going to get hit, that would have my vote for the timeline.”
“Twenty-twelve,” he groaned, rolling his eyes. “We had this guy come in the office and tell us we needed to put out a flyer.”
“What about?”
“The fact that the world is ending in 2012 and we have to have tin-foil hats to protect us from electromagnetic pulses.”
“Ah. EMPs,” she said knowledgeably. “Actually, I think you’d have to be in a modified and greatly enlarged version of a Leiden jar to be fully protected. So would any computer equipment you wanted to save.” She glanced at him. “They’re developing weapons like that, you know,” she added. “All it would take is one nicely placed EMP and our military computers would go down like tenpins.”
He put down the knife. “Where do you learn all this stuff?” he asked, exasperated.
“On the internet.” She pulled an iPod out of her pocket and showed it to him. “I have Wi-Fi in the house, you know. I just connect to all the appropriate websites.” She checked her bookmarks. “I have one for space weather, three radars for terrestrial weather and about ten covert sites that tell you all the stuff the government won’t tell you …”
“My mother, the conspiracy theorist,” he moaned.
“You won’t hear this stuff on the national news,” she said smartly. “The mainstream media is controlled by three major corporations. They decide what you’ll get to hear. And mostly it’s what entertainer got drunk, what television show is getting the ratings and what politician is patting himself on the back or running for reelection. In my day—” she warmed to her theme “—we had real news on television. It was local and we had real reporters out gathering it. Like the Jacobsville paper still does,” she added.
“I know about the Jacobsville paper,” he said with a sigh. “We hear that Cash Grier spends most of his time trying to protect the owner from getting assassinated. She knows all the drug distribution points and the drug lords by name, and she’s printing them.” He shook his head. “She’s going to be another statistic one day. They’ve killed plenty of newspaper publishers and reporters over the border for less. She’s rocking the boat.”
“Somebody needs to rock it,” Barbara muttered as she peeled another tomato skin off and tossed it into a green bag to be used for mulch in her garden. She never wasted any organic refuse. “People are dying so that another generation can become addicted to drugs.”
“I can’t argue that point,” he said. “The problem is that nothing law enforcement is doing is making much of a dent in drug trafficking. If there’s a market, there’s going to be a supply. That’s just the way things are.”
“They say Hayes Carson actually talked to Minette Raynor about it.”
That was real news. Minette owned the Jacobsville Times. She had two stepsiblings, Shane, who was twelve, and Julie, who was six. She’d loved her stepmother very much. Her stepmother and her father had died within weeks of each other, leaving a grieving Minette with two little children to raise, a newspaper to run and a ranch to manage. She had a manager to handle the ranch, and her great-aunt Sarah lived with her and took care of the kids after school so that Minette could keep working. Minette was twenty-five now and unmarried. She and Hayes Carson didn’t get along. Hayes blamed her, God knew why, for his younger brother’s drug-related death, even after Rachel Conley left a confession stating that she’d given Bobby Carson, Hayes’s brother, the drugs that killed him.
Rick chuckled. “If there’s ever a border war, Minette will stand in the street pointing a finger at Hayes so the invaders can get him first.”
“I wonder,” Barbara mused. “Sometimes I think where there’s antagonism, there’s also something deeper. I’ve seen people who hate each other end up married.”
“Cash Grier and his Tippy,” Rick mused.
“Yes,