Free Death Will Extend Your Vacation by Elizabeth Zelvin

toilet won’t flush or a squirrel gets into the house. He also does the yard work. We might as well establish relations.”
    “Don’t expect them to fall on your neck,” Jimmy warned. “The locals here need the summer people, but they don’t like them much. City folks in the Hamptons have so much money and such a different agenda.”
    “I’m glad to hear that nobody expects me to plunge the toilet or catch the squirrel,” I said.
    “Karen says it’s hard for locals like them to make a living these days,” Barbara said. “Up island, she says, developers are buying up land that nine or ten generations of a family like the Dowlings has farmed and putting up McMansions. If they don’t watch out, in twenty years the whole East End could be suburbs.”
    “Get uprooted or go broke, huh? Tough for them.”
    “Oh, look, Jimmy.” Barbara took a couple of skipping steps and waved her hand at a field of low, bunchy plants studded with dull white flowers. “Are those potatoes?”
    “How should I know? I’m a city boy, remember?”
    Barbara grinned at him.
    “I don’t know— by the pounding of your ancestral Irish heart, maybe. I’m sure I’m right, though. Long Island grows potatoes and corn, and those plants don’t look like they could be as high as an elephant’s eye by the middle of the summer. Anyhow, I know what a cornfield looks like. Oooh, I’ve never dug a potato, could we try?”
    “If you want to start off on the right foot with the Dowlings,” Jimmy said, “don’t begin by stealing their potatoes.”
    “I guess you’re right. I was thinking they’re in the ground— the potatoes, not the Dowlings— waiting for us to dig in and pull them out.” She waggled her fingers. “It’s hard to think of dirt as property.”
    “It’s called land, pumpkin,” Jimmy said.
    “It might not even be time for new potatoes, anyway,” Barbara consoled herself.
    “If it is, they’ll have them at the farm stand,” Jimmy consoled her. “Or maybe there’s a pick-your-own-potatoes season.”
    “It doesn’t turn you on even a little?” she asked. “Plunging your fingers in the soil, feeling the weight of this smooth, round, mealy miracle of nutrition that fed your grandparents?”
    “My grandparents left Ireland so their descendants wouldn’t have to do that,” Jimmy said.
    The cough and growl of a motor broke the quiet. I saw a tractor on the far side of the field. John Deere green with yellow wheels. I’d had a toy one just like it as a kid.
    “There goes Dowling,” I said.
    “And there’s the stand. Good morning!” Barbara called.
    Mrs. Dowling nodded as she lifted baskets of strawberries from the bed of a pickup truck and set them on the shelves. She was tall and angular, with a high forehead and dull brown hair pulled back into a wispy bun. The frown stamped on her brow and mouth looked like it didn’t come off easily.
    “What beautiful strawberries!” Barbara exclaimed as we neared the stand. “Did you grow them yourself?”
    Mrs. Dowling glanced at the field that stretched away behind the stand. I made a sound that was one nostril short of a snort. A corner of Jimmy’s mouth quirked. Barbara babbles when she’s ill at ease and a lot of the time when she’s not.
    “I hope you’ve got plenty left for us to pick ourselves. Oh, what gorgeous petunias! I’d love to get some for the deck if you’ve got some planters we could buy.”
    “Planters in the back,” Mrs. Dowling said. “Strawberry baskets too. Three dollars a pound, weigh when you’re through. You can eat ’em, but don’t pick the green ones.”
    “Thank you.” Barbara retreated to the back of the stand. “Oh, look, guys, the planters are old whiskey barrels! Aren’t they cute? Let’s get a couple and put flowers on the deck.”
    Jimmy and I followed her around the stand. The old wooden barrels would look kind of perky filled with the bright orange marigolds and pink and purple petunias arrayed in flats to one