Garden of Scandal

by Jennifer Blake

  The dog gave a halfhearted wag of his tail as he stared in the direction Alec Stanton had gone.

  She sighed and closed her eyes. “I thought so.”

  Her new hired hand was on time the next morning—Laurel had to give him that much. She had barely pulled on her old jeans and faded yellow T-shirt when she heard his bike turn in at the drive.

  Maisie Warfield, her housekeeper, hadn’t arrived yet, since she always had to get her “old man”—as she called her husband who was nearing retirement age—off to work before she could show up. Rather than waiting for Alec Stanton to come to the door and twist the old-fashioned doorbell, Laurel picked up her sneakers and moved in her sock feet toward the side entrance. At least she didn’t have to worry about Sticks. He had spent the night on the screened back veranda and was still shut up out there.

  Alec Stanton was not on the drive where his bright red Harley-Davidson leaned, looking as out of place in front of the old, late-Victorian house as a ladybug on the hem of an ancient lace dress. Nor was he in the tangled front garden. However, a ripping, shredding sound led her to the side of the house. He was already at work there, tearing a clinging green curtain of smilax and Virginia creeper away from the overlap siding.

  He looked around at her approach. His nod of greeting was brief before he spoke. “The whole place needs painting, though I can see at least a dozen boards that should be replaced first. You’ll lose more if you don’t protect them soon.”

  “I know,” she said shortly.

  “I could—”

  “I can take care of it,” she said, cutting off the offer he was about to make. “You’re here for the garden.”

  He yanked down a long streamer of smilax and let it fall, leaving it to be dug up by the roots later. Stripping off his gloves, he tucked them into the waistband of his jeans. He ran a critical eye over the house, which loomed above them, with its balustraded verandas that were rounded on each end in the style of a steamboat, its gingerbread work attached to the slender columns like ice-covered spiderwebs, and the conical tower set into the roofline. “It’s a grand old place,” he said. “It would be a shame to let it fall into ruin.”

  “I don’t intend to,” she answered tartly. “Now, if you’ll…”

  “Your husband’s old family home, I think Grannie said. How did you wind up with it?”

  “Nobody else wanted it.”

  That was the exact truth, she thought. The place had been the next thing to abandoned when she first saw it. Her husband’s mother, Sadie Bancroft, had moved out not long after her husband left her back in the sixties. His sister Zelda had no interest in it; she’d had more than enough of the big barn of a place as a child and couldn’t comprehend why Laurel had begged to buy it from the family after she and Howard were married. Even Howard had grumbled about the upkeep and often talked of trading it in for a small, neat ranch-style house during the fifteen years they were married. But that was all it had been—talk.

  “It’s mighty big for one person.”

  “I like big,” Laurel said and felt a sudden flush sweep over her face for no reason that made any sense. Or she hoped that it didn’t, although that seemed doubtful, considering the ghost of a smile hovering at one corner of Alec Stanton’s mouth.

  “Where shall I start?”

  “What?”

  He tilted his head. “You were going to tell me where to start to work.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” she said and spun around, leading the way toward the front garden.

  She had meant to help him, in part to be on hand to point out what she wanted to keep and what needed to go. She soon saw that it was unnecessary. He knew his plants and shrubs; his time as a yardman had been put to good use. He was also efficient. He didn’t start work until he had checked out the tools in the shed behind the detached garage, then oiled and sharpened them.

  “You could use a new pair of hedge shears,” he suggested as he ran a callused thumb along the edge of a wide blade. “It would make your job around here a lot easier.”

  He was right, and she knew it. “I’ll tell Maisie to pick them up next time she goes into town.”

  “You’re also out of gas for the lawn mower.”

  “She can get that, too.”

  He studied her for a moment, his eyes as dark and fathomless as obsidian. “You know you have a flat on your car? And the rest of the tires are so dry-rotted you’d be lucky to get out of the driveway on them.”

  “I don’t go out much,” she said, avoiding his gaze.

  “You don’t go at all, to hear Grannie tell it—haven’t left this place in ages. All you do is read and make clay pots in the shed out behind the garage. Why is that?”

  “No reason. I just prefer my own company.” She gave him a cool look before she turned away. “I’ll be in the house if you need anything.”

  To retreat was instinctive self-protection, that was all. She didn’t have to explain herself. Certainly it was none of this man’s business whether she went out or stayed home, worked with her pottery or flew to the moon on a broomstick. Nor did she need someone watching her, giving unasked-for advice, prying into her life. She would pay him for what he did today, regardless of what he had said, then send him on his way. She had gotten along without Alec Stanton before he came, and she could get along without him when he was gone.

  As the day advanced, however, it could not be denied that he was making progress. He cut away dozens of pine and sassafras saplings from the old fence enclosure, exposing the unpainted pickets almost all the way across the front of the garden. He rescued and pruned the Russell’s Cottage Rose in the corner, tearing out a head-high pile of honeysuckle vines in the process. An arbor and garden bench of weathered cypress were unearthed from a covering of wild grapevines. And the debris from his efforts was thrown into a pile that made a slow-burning green bonfire. The gray pall of smoke rose high enough to cross the face of the noonday sun.

  Laurel tried not to watch him. Yet against her best intentions it seemed everything she did took her near the front windows of the house. It was only natural to look out. A perfectly ordinary impulse. That was all.

  He had removed his shirt in the middle of the morning. A sheen of perspiration gilded the sun-bronzed expanse of his back, shimmering with his movements, while dust and bits of dried leaves stuck to the corded muscles of his arms. The soft hair on his chest glinted like damp velvet, making a conduit for the trickling sweat that crept down the washboard-like ridges of his abdomen to dampen the waist of his jeans. He was hot and sweaty and dirty and magnificent. And she disliked him intensely for making her aware of it.

  The last thing she wanted was to think about a man—any man. She had gotten along fine without being reminded of the male race; had hardly thought of love or sex since her husband had died. To be forced to return to all that now would not be helpful. She wouldn’t do it, she wouldn’t.

  “I’ve got cold roast chicken and fruit salad for lunch,” Maisie said from behind her. “You want I should serve it for you and Alec out on the veranda?”

  Laurel swung to face the housekeeper with guilty color flooding her face. Maisie Warfield, rotund and white-haired, stood in the doorway that led from the dining room to the parlor. She wiped her wet hands on a dish towel as she studied Laurel. There was a shrewd look in the snapping blue of her eyes, and faint amusement crinkled the tanned skin around them into shallow wrinkles.

  “No. No, I don’t think so,” Laurel replied. “You—can take him a sandwich and a cold drink.”

  Maisie’s smile faded and she set her hamlike fist that held the dishcloth on a padded hip. “Why? You got something against Alec?”

  “Of course not. I just prefer my privacy.” Laurel turned back to the window, ignoring the other woman’s stern gaze.

  “He’s not going to bite.”

  A wry smile curled Laurel’s lips. “How do you know?”

  “What?”

  She turned to give her housekeeper a straight glance.
“I said, yes, I know. But I still don’t intend to eat with him. Or anything else.”

  “You’d rather stay shut up in this house instead of keeping him company.”

  “That’s about it.”

  The housekeeper shrugged. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  Laurel made no reply. She was too afraid Maisie might be right.

  2

  Alec worked like a man possessed, slashing and hacking and piling brush without letting up. The sun burned down on his head. Sweat poured off him in streams. He tied a bandana around his forehead and kept working. His shirt grew soaked, clinging to him, confining his movements. He stripped it off and kept working. He could feel the sting of long scratches on his arms from his bout with forty-foot runners from an ancient dog rose. He ignored them and kept working.

  He didn’t care about any of it. It was good to use his muscles, to feel them heat up until they glided and contracted in endless rhythm, responding effortlessly to his need. He liked the heat of the sun on his back, enjoyed the smells of cut stems, disturbed earth and smoke. It gave him a sense of accomplishment to rescue antique shrubs and perennials, to watch some semblance of order emerge from what had been a confused mess.

  He had to prove himself to make sure he got this job, but there was more to it than that. He needed to show Laurel Bancroft that he was as good as any redneck at achieving what she needed done.

  He had thought from the way she was dressed this morning that she might work with him. He had been looking forward to the prospect. But she had gone inside the house and shut the door. He hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of her since.

  She was good at closing herself off, from all accounts. Grannie Callie had said she’d hardly left this old place since her husband had died. People seemed to think she had gone a little peculiar. Not crazy, exactly, but not your average grocery-shopping, soaps-watching, club-and-tennis young matron, either.

  The kind of work he was doing didn’t take a great deal of concentration, and his mind had a tendency to wander. If he let himself, he could see Laurel Bancroft as some kind of enchanted princess under a spell; she had that fragile look about her. She was trapped in her castle of an old house, drugged and sleeping while life passed her by. And he was a knight-of-old come to hack his way through the thorns and briers to save her.

  Jeez, he must be losing it.

  Some knight. No armor, for one thing. A pair of hedge clippers in his hands instead of a sword. Hardly perfect, either. And he was definitely not pure.

  A screen door slammed at the side of the house. Maisie rounded the corner and leaned over the railing.

  “Lunchtime, boy,” she called. “Sandwiches up here on the veranda. You want water or tea?”

  He stopped, wiping sweat from his eyes with his forearm before he frowned up at her. “‘Boy’?”

  She gave him a grin that put a thousand wrinkles in her face and made him feel good inside. “You don’t like that? I could have called you dummy for being out in this sun without a hat. Water or tea?”

  “Water.” He should have known better than to try intimidating a woman who claimed she had changed his diaper when he was a kid. “Where’s Mrs. Bancroft?”

  The elderly housekeeper’s gaze slid away from his. “She don’t eat lunch. You want to wash up, there’s a bathroom off the kitchen.”

  It looked as if Laurel Bancroft was avoiding him. He didn’t know whether that was good, because it was a sign that he disturbed her, or bad, because it meant she couldn’t stand him. Either way, he was going to have to do something about it.

  At least Maisie didn’t desert him. She brought her chicken salad and tea out to the table on the shady front veranda. While he ate, he teased her about her diet fare and how much her old man was going to miss her curves when they were gone. After a while, he got around to what he really wanted to say.

  “So what is it with the lady of the house? Is she a recluse or just stuck-up?” He leaned back in his chair, rubbing the condensation from the sides of his water glass with his thumb while he tried to look bored and a little disgusted.

  Maisie gave him a narrow look. “She doesn’t have too much for people, is all.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Her husband died, you know that?”

  He nodded as he massaged the biceps in his right arm that had begun to tighten on him.

  “Did you know she killed him?” she asked.

  Shock brought him upright. “You’re bullsh—I mean, there’s no way!”

  “She did it, God’s truth,” Maisie said with a shake of her head. “Not that she meant to. He stepped behind her car as she was backing out of the garage. But there were folks who claimed it was on purpose. The mother-in-law, for one.”

  “Nobody else believed it, though, right? I mean, just look at her. How could they?”

  “Some people will believe anything. Anyway, seems Laurel and Howard had been having problems. Then there was a big life-insurance policy.”

  “But nothing came of it?”

  “Nothing official, no investigation. Sadie Bancroft, the husband’s mother, said it was on account of Sheriff Tanning being Laurel’s old boyfriend. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. Anyway, it blew over.”

  “Except for the gossip?”

  “Yeah, well, there’s always that part.”

  He tilted his head. “So she’s hiding out. But why, if she really didn’t mean to do it?”

  “You want to know that, you’ll have to ask her.”

  Maisie was avoiding his gaze. Alec wondered why. “Think she’ll tell me?”

  “Might.” The older woman stood and began stacking dishes. “Depends maybe on how you go about it and why you want to know.” She walked off with her load, leaving him to himself.

  Alec sat on for a few minutes, drinking water as the ice melted in his glass, and gazing out over the garden at what he had done and what he still needed to do. From up here, he could see the outlines, barely, of what had been a typical front yard in the old days. It had been fenced with white pickets to keep out the cows that ranged freely back then, with a gate accessing the driveway, which passed in front of the house, then made a sharp right turn into the garage that was separate from the house. A straight brick sidewalk cut from the front gate to the steps, and curving walkways followed the oval ends of the house around toward the back.

  Planting had apparently been haphazard, except for the great treelike camellias and Cape jasmine at the fence corners and the roses along the pickets and over the arbors above the gates. He had found evidence of bulbs of all kinds everywhere, from daffodils and iris to licoris. Originally, the soil between the plantings would have been swept clean of every blade of grass and raked in patterns. Sometime in the forties or fifties, probably, Saint Augustine grass had been planted in the open spots. There were still patches of the thick sod here and there, although the rest was choked with weeds and briers and enough saplings to stock a small forest.

  And he had to get after it. He drained his glass, picked up his sweat-damp gloves and went back to work.

  Maisie left in the middle of the afternoon, flipping him a quick wave as she drove off in her old boat of a car. He dug up the tough tubers of a mass of saw briers that were trying to climb a column while he allowed a little time to pass. When he thought it might not look too much like he had waited for the housekeeper to leave before storming the house, he pulled his discarded shirt back on, then went and gave the antique brass doorbell a quick twist.

  The harsh, discordant sound rang through the house, and from around back, Laurel’s German shepherd, smart dog that he was, started barking immediately. Earlier, Alec had seen Sticks shut up on the porch. The two of them had eyed each other through the screen. Leaning against the doorjamb now, Alec wondered whether Laurel Bancroft was protecting him from the dog or the dog from him.

  Laurel didn’t want to answer the door. She felt threatened, almost beleaguered inside her own house. She wished she had never mentioned
the garden to Maisie, then this Alec Stanton would never have shown up. She could have gone on as she had been for nearly five years, in comfortable solitude with little contact with the outside world beyond her housekeeper, her grown children, and the man who drove the brown truck that brought her mail-order purchases.

  Catalogs had become her lifelines to the world. It was a catalog of antique roses from a place in Texas that had started her thinking about the garden again after all this time. Now look where it had gotten her.

  It was a strange blend of fear and irritation that made her snatch open the front door after the third ring. Her voice sounding distinctly tight and unwelcoming, she said, “Yes?”

  “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” the dark-haired man who leaned on the doorjamb said, “but I needed to ask a couple of questions.”

  He wasn’t sorry at all; she could see that. What she couldn’t see was why he couldn’t have come to the door before Maisie left. The urge to slam it in his face was so strong, a tremor ran down her arm. The main thing stopping her was the suspicion that he might prevent it if she tried.

  Through compressed lips, she asked, “What is it?”

  “I wondered if you could show me where you want your fountain? And it would help if I had some idea how you’d like to lay out the rose beds you mentioned. Plus, I’m not exactly sure what to save and what to get rid of.”

  She glanced at the yard beyond him with a doubtful frown. “Surely you haven’t got as far as all that? I thought you were just clearing and cleaning.”

  He smiled, a lazy movement of sensuously molded lips that made her breath catch in her throat. “It always helps to have a plan. Would you mind stepping out here just a minute to tell me a couple of things?”

  How could she refuse such a polite and reasonable request? It was obviously impossible. In any case, she was intrigued by the clear line of sight he had created by fighting back the growth along the sidewalk from the steps to the gate. It had seemed a great distance between the two points before, when trees and brush had choked the passage and obscured the view. Now it appeared to be only a few yards.