"Do it," Kora said. "I'd rather someone sensible tell me what we're dealing with than make up an answer."
That afternoon Kora brought Walter's old notebooks down from the attic. The covers smelled of dust and dry paper, and some pages were filled with calculations in his narrow handwriting. She was looking for notes on turkey hatch timing when a line about heat tolerance caught her attention. Fifteen years earlier, Walter had supplied trial birds to a public breeding study seeking turkeys capable of thriving on outdoor pasture without the narrow environmental tolerances of industrial lines.
The old study had never become a commercial product while Walter lived. His entry mentioned a university coordinator, a preliminary name that was not Copper Crest, and a comment about a young breed program built around resilience rather than maximum size. Kora ran her finger beneath his words. "Good birds deserve good weather," Walter had written, "but good breeding gives them a chance when weather isn't good."
She copied the page and set it aside. She did not know whether Walter's birds had anything to do with V-17, and she refused to let herself connect the two merely because the idea comforted her. But it reminded her that serious breeding work often took years and involved many people who were never named on the label. The thought made the destruction of the eight hundred eggs feel less like waste and more like a question somebody did not want answered.
On day nine, Kora took a photograph for the farm's social media page. Her following was small, mostly neighbors, former customers, and people who liked pictures of young animals, but she hoped an experienced breeder might recognize the peculiar speckling and the faded Copper Crest label. She posted a careful question about heritage turkey lines, added two photographs, and went back to work. Only later did she notice that the V-17 stamp was clearly readable on the egg closest to the camera.
The message came after midnight. An unfamiliar number called twice, and on the third attempt Kora answered because she was already standing in the barn checking a fan. A man's voice asked whether she was the woman who had rescued a batch of discarded turkey eggs. He sounded younger than she expected and afraid enough to whisper.
"You need to take that photograph down," he said.
"Who is this?"
"Just take it down. Don't let anybody from Harrington see you've got V-17."
"How do you know what I've got?"
"Because the batch wasn't dead. It never was."
Kora gripped the phone. "Then why was it thrown away?"
There was a sound in the background, a door closing, perhaps someone entering the room where he stood. The caller said, "You don't understand what they'll do if they find it," and the line disconnected. She tried calling back, but the number no longer accepted calls.