She paused.
She said, “I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry, Ellen. I thought he must have some arrangement with you.”
I said, “There is no arrangement.”
She said, “I see.”
She said, “What are you going to do?”
I said, “I’m going to be very patient and very deliberate.”
She said, “Good. That’s usually best.”
Three weeks after mounting the trail camera, I had photographs. Clear, timestamped photographs of Gary Hutchins on a step ladder leaning over my fence at 11:20 p.m. on a Tuesday night, harvesting peaches from my tree with a grocery bag.
I sat at my kitchen table and looked at those photographs for a long time.
Then I pulled up my browser and I typed “hottest peppers in the world.”
The pepper plan.
Carolina Reaper. Developed by a breeder named Ed Currie in South Carolina. Certified by Guinness World Records as the hottest pepper on Earth. Scoville heat units: approximately 2.2 million. For context, a jalapeño runs between 2,000 and 8,000 Scoville units. A habanero, which most people consider seriously hot, tops out around 350,000. The Carolina Reaper is roughly six times hotter than a habanero.
People who eat them on camera for entertainment generally spend the following twenty to forty minutes in visible agony.
They are red—deeply, richly, beautifully red when ripe. They are roughly the size and shape of a cherry tomato, perhaps slightly smaller. They have a characteristic wrinkled, bumpy skin and a distinctive little pointed tail at the bottom.
They look, from a distance, extremely similar to cherry tomatoes.
I ordered seeds online that evening.
Now I want to be very clear about something, because it matters both legally and morally. Carolina Reapers are not poisonous. They are not dangerous in the way that something actually toxic is dangerous. Eating one is an extremely unpleasant experience. There will be intense burning, sweating, potential nausea, what pepper enthusiasts call “the hiccups”—which are more like full-body spasms—and general misery lasting anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour.
But it is not medically harmful to a healthy adult. And Gary Hutchins, based on my observations, is a healthy adult who eats extremely large quantities of grilled meat with no apparent consequences.
I was not poisoning anyone. I was growing legal peppers on my property and letting nature take its course.
The seeds arrived in eight days. I started them indoors under grow lights. Carolina Reapers need a long growing season and warm temperatures, so starting them early is essential. I cleared a portion of my indoor seedling shelf that I normally use for tomato starts and devoted it entirely to the peppers.
I told no one except Frances.
Frances, when I explained the plan over tea one afternoon, looked at me for a long moment and then said, “Ellen, that is the most elegant thing I have ever heard.”