Garden of Scandal

by Jennifer Blake

  “Lord, but what are you two up to out here in the dark?” she asked brightly. “Something scandalous, I hope.”

  “Good grief, Zelda,” Laurel said, easing from behind Alec. “Where did you come from?”

  “My usual parking place, down the road a piece. I’ve gotten good at making my way in the dark, if I do say so myself. But I’m getting sick and tired of it, so I’m going to quit.”

  Disgust edged Laurel’s tone as she spoke. “You mean you’re the one who has been spying on us?”

  “Among other things.” Zelda chuckled as she lifted her right fist. The pistol she held in her plump grasp caught the light with a deadly gleam. “But, as I said, I’m dead tired. So now I’m going to get rid of you, darling Laurel. Oh, yes, and your boy toy. I really think poor Alec is going to be so tormented by the death of his dear brother and your fickle behavior that he shoots you. Then he’ll turn the gun on himself. A terrible tragedy, but what a fitting end for such a doomed romance. I just love it. Don’t you?”

  22

  “That’s crazy.” Laurel’s reaction was quiet, for all its biting emphasis.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Zelda answered with amusement. “I’d say it’s brilliant, actually, the way I set things up. You’re the one who’s nuts for showing up at the funeral after you had been warned so many times. But I knew you would, I just knew it. You really can’t be trusted since darling Alec came to town.”

  Alec stirred beside Laurel, his gaze black and dangerous as it drilled into the other woman. Terrified by what he might do, Laurel put her hand on his arm. If Zelda thought she was so brilliant, maybe she could be persuaded to expound on it. That might give them time to think, time to do something to disarm her.

  “I could be trusted before?” Laurel said. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  Zelda’s smile was pitying. “Oh, honey. Before, you were Howard’s sweet little wife and he kept you in line. He watched you like a hawk—you couldn’t sneeze without him knowing it. I admit you gave us a problem when you began talking about redoing the old place, starting with the garden, but he was going to nip that in the bud. Then you killed him. But it was all right, because you were such a guilt-ridden little martyr it was fairly easy to control you. All we had to do was keep you shut up with that damned vicious dog for company.”

  “We?”

  “Oh, Howard and Mama and me to start, then just me and Mama, of course.”

  “Of course,” Laurel echoed, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. Another question formed in her mind, but Zelda continued blithely on.

  “Mama was really upset when Dan Tanning came sniffing around you, breathing heavy. I mean, the sheriff, of all people! Horrors!” Her smile turned complacent. “I fixed him, though. Jeez, what a dickhead, thinking I really wanted to climb into the back of his patrol car with him. Bumbling idiot. But he was so embarrassed at being found out, so put off by all the things Mama said, that he didn’t show his face at Ivywild again. Useful thing, talk, sometimes, when it’s about somebody else.”

  “I can see that.”

  The other woman’s face swelled with sudden anger. “Then you had to start again about that damned garden!”

  The muscle in Alec’s arm turned rock hard at the change in Zelda’s tone. Hastily, Laurel said, “I don’t understand what’s so wrong with that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t, and that’s the whole point, you stupid little fool. Why the hell else would I go to so much trouble? God, you nearly gave me a heart attack the day I came here and saw what you had done before I could get close enough to check on things. You might have already found—” She stopped abruptly, clamping her lips shut as she drew a deep, hissing breath through her nose.

  “Sticks.” It was Alec who spoke the dog’s name, the single word shaded with contempt. “You killed Sticks because he was keeping you from prowling around.”

  “Good riddance, too. The beast hated me and Mama.”

  Alec gave a short laugh. “I always knew he was a smart dog.”

  “You were worse than he was.” Zelda turned on Alec with her lips protruding and her solid bulk planted squarely on two well-shod feet. “You nearly caught me a couple of times, and might have if I hadn’t grown up playing hide-and-seek in the woods around Ivywild. But I’m faster than I look.”

  “You’d have to be. And smarter,” Alec added in dry wonder.

  He was trying to enrage Zelda, Laurel thought, to draw her attention away from her. He was succeeding. The other woman turned her pistol on him as she narrowed her eyes.

  Quickly, Laurel asked, “Just what was it I wasn’t supposed to find? I think I have a right to know what’s so important around here that I have to die for it.”

  “You have no rights,” Zelda said in wrathful contradiction as she spun back toward her. “You never did. I told Mama it was a mistake to sell the house to you and Howard, told her you’d outlive him, or else your dumb kids would go poking their noses where they didn’t belong one day when he wasn’t around. But would she listen? Oh, no! She couldn’t stand it. She had to turn over the responsibility before her nerves and heart failed her under the strain. Jesus H. Christ! When it was all that stupid cow’s fault in the first place.”

  “Genetics,” Alec said, “are pretty reliable. A stupid cow usually gives birth to a stupid—”

  “The cistern!” Laurel interrupted, overriding the deliberate insult Alec was intent on making to draw the gun’s barrel back in his direction. “That’s the place Howard used to go ballistic about when the kids played in the yard, or when I wanted to plant anything around it. Too dangerous, he always said. The sides might cave in. But you didn’t like the idea of having the weeds and briers cut from around it, either.”

  “Yeah, like maybe that’s where the body’s buried?” Alec suggested, his tone goading.

  Zelda drew a whistling breath. “How did you—” She stopped and her face twisted as she glared at him. “Smart-ass. You weren’t even guessing, were you? Just popping off. Well, I’ll tell you, anyway, since you’re not exactly going to spread the news. That’s where the body’s buried, all right. The body of my dear departed daddy.”

  Zelda’s father. Sadie Bancroft’s husband who was supposed to have walked out on her decades ago, when Howard was a teenager. Even as Laurel absorbed the idea and its implications, Alec tucked his thumbs into his jeans pockets and shook his head.

  “Unbelievable,” he said, patronizingly sarcastic. “Who put him there? You?”

  “We all did. Mama and Howard and me.” A shadow moved over her face.

  “But—why? What happened?” Laurel asked.

  “He was going to leave her on account of her being gone down to Leesville one time too often. But no man walked out on her, she told him, and to prove it, she picked up the pistol and—” Zelda shuddered and stopped abruptly. “It was awful.”

  “It must have been, because you loved him, didn’t you?” Laurel kept the words quiet, tentative.

  Zelda’s mouth twisted and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “I was his girl, his little princess. He took me everywhere with him—fishing, hunting, everywhere. He taught me to shoot a gun, drive a boat, fix a car. When I was up for basketball queen, he spent a hundred dollars buying votes at a penny apiece.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He was my daddy.”

  “You saw your mother shoot him?” Alec asked, tilting his head.

  “I saw her point the pistol at his back, yell at him, but he just kept walking. I grabbed her, wrestled her for the pistol. The thing went off and Daddy fell. Mama said—she said she wasn’t really going to shoot. She said she didn’t pull the trigger, didn’t mean to, wouldn’t have done anything except scare him if I hadn’t…”

  “She blamed you.” Laurel spoke the words with stunned compassion.

  “I did it. I think I did, at least I sort of remember…. But I didn’t mean it. Never, ever. I didn’t want my daddy to die.” The words were almost a plea for belief.

 
; “It was an accident. Surely the police would have understood. There was no need to put him—”

  “No!” Panic flared in Zelda’s pale eyes. “Mama said they wouldn’t believe us. Anyway, everyone would know. They would say mean and spiteful things behind our backs.”

  “Everything would have come out, wouldn’t it?” Laurel said. “How your mother had been picking up soldiers and taking money for sex. How their marriage had been on the rocks for years. Maybe how she poured hot grease in his ear once?”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Zelda screamed as she took a quick step toward Laurel.

  Alec tried to block her line of sight, but Laurel moved around him. “People know, anyway,” she said. “The old women always know. Maisie told me something about it, and she wanted me to go and ask Grannie Callie about the rest, only I misunderstood her.”

  Zelda gave an ugly laugh. “Oh, I know people have always whispered behind our backs. They’ve always talked about how I slept with half the football team before I was sixteen, and the rest of them after I got married. Not half of it was true. But Maisie was the worst to talk. She never liked me or my family, always took your side against us. I’m glad—glad that old bitch was in your car when it went off the road. Glad it happened that way even if you were the one meant to hit the ditch.”

  “Maisie didn’t mean anything. The talk had nothing to do with liking or disliking you personally,” Laurel said. “People are just interested in other people, what happens to them and why. I doubt she had any idea what you did to your dad.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I loved him, I really did, but I didn’t want to go to jail. Mama said I would, and so would she because I was a minor. The only thing to do was drag him out and—” Zelda trailed off, her eyes wide with remembered horror, before she drew breath and began again. “Oh, God, his legs and arms flopped every which way. And he hit his head when he fell in—I heard it. I used to dream that he wasn’t dead, that he was lying there bleeding, or else he was trying to claw his way out like some horror monster.”

  “What you’re planning for us won’t be any better,” Alec warned. “It will come back to you, even if you get away with it. Besides, it’s not likely to help matters if people like Grannie Callie begin to put two and two together.” He took a long step forward. “Why don’t you give me the weapon?”

  He had allowed Laurel to put distance between them, and now he was adding even more. Maybe he thought he could talk Zelda into abandoning her plan and maybe not; Laurel didn’t know. But if it didn’t work, then he meant to draw Zelda’s fire while making a play to overcome her.

  Laurel wanted to live; she knew that now. She longed to break free of the past holding her to Ivywild and explore the wide, wide world and whatever life had to offer. But not without Alec. Never without Alec.

  She had to do something, and do it now, or he was going to die. She couldn’t allow that, for if she couldn’t live, then she wanted desperately for him to live for her.

  She moved forward in slow determination. If she drew Zelda’s fire herself, then Alec would have his chance, a split second of time to launch whatever he had in mind.

  Her voice even, strong yet pensive, she used it as a weapon. “You don’t really remember killing your dad, do you, Zelda? Not like I remember killing Howard. That was an accident, too. It wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been so panicked by the thought that I was on my way to buy roses to plant around the cistern, hadn’t been so determined to stop me. But I’m still haunted by the sound of my car hitting him, still feel as if it was my flesh and bones that struck him instead of chrome and steel. His death will always lie on my conscience, even if it’s no longer on my heart. Just like ours will be on yours.”

  “This is different,” Zelda said, attempting a sneer. “I’m different now.”

  “Are you? But you’re haunted by the death of your dad, aren’t you? And not just because you may have fired the shot that killed him. Why? Did you have the chance to help him that night? Could it be you might have done something that would have let him live?”

  The last words had come to her on the spur of the moment as she saw Alec’s black gaze fixed on her. She prayed that he would understand them.

  Zelda gave a bark of near-hysterical laughter. “Don’t be silly! He was dead when he went in the cistern. Dead, you hear me? And don’t think I’m moron enough to fall for what you’re both doing. God, what a pair of idiots—so determined to take the bullet for each other.” Her voice turned ugly. “I’ve got enough for both of you, believe me.”

  “What you don’t have,” Alec said, speaking to Zelda although his eyes held Laurel’s in heated captivity, “is the grace to understand the impulse to save the person you love. You have no heart or vision, lack the intelligence that makes these things of value. No one has ever said to you that you are his lodestar and his hearth, the air he breathes and the spirit that is living’s only joy. No one has ever said that the long years have no meaning without you, that time will cease to exist unless you are there. No one has ever told you he loves you more than the least small breath of transient life, and will only love you more in death.”

  “Are you through?” Zelda asked with exaggerated contempt.

  He was. Laurel could see it in his eyes. Heart pounding, breath coming in gasps, tears rising to blur her vision, she searched for some way to stop what was coming, to stop him. There was nothing. Nothing. And so only one thing was left.

  “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, too.”

  He heard, for the sweet joy of it blazed in his eyes. But even then he was turning, whirling in hard, controlled strength. Muscles contracting, gliding in the swift attack taught by an old Chinese gardener, too fast to follow, too powerful to stop. The bend at the waist, the lashing kick at full extension.

  A heartbeat too late.

  The pistol Zelda held blasted, spurting a streak of flame in the gathering night. In the same fraction of a second, Alec’s hard, booted foot caught her midsection, driving her backward, jarring the weapon free. Its dark metal shone as it arched high, then clattered to the walk. Zelda screamed as she plunged into the tangled thorns of an old brier rose. The piercing sound almost covered the flat thud of a bullet striking flesh.

  A cry tore from Laurel’s throat. She lunged to catch Alec as he staggered, then collapsed. Her knees buckled under his weight. She let herself drop to the ground as she used her thighs to cushion his fall.

  He clutched his upper chest, his hand gleaming red in the dim light. “The weapon,” he said in hoarse warning. “Get the weapon.”

  Laurel lowered him to the walk. Glancing around in a wild search, she spotted the pistol. She lunged for it as Zelda began to kick and moan, struggling to release herself from the grasp of the old rose.

  As Laurel came up with the pistol in her hand, the other woman gave a strangled moan that became a harsh sob. She fell back, scratched and bloodied, amid the thorns.

  Laurel scarcely noticed. Scrambling back to Alec, she set the weapon beside him for safety while she took his hand away from the wound. It was a welter of wet, red-black cloth and blood-splattered silver lettering, though his face was calm as he gazed up at her. His eyes were clear. Deep in their darkness shone the bright joy of one who has sought and found his personal grail and can now let go of striving, forget lesser quests.

  For his dragon, when she pulled the soft T-shirt away, had a great, gaping hole in its side. It would need, desperately, whatever arts and magic of regeneration it could bring to save itself and the man who wore it.

  Alec moistened his lips. “I didn’t…fail?”

  Tears sprang, hot and fresh, to rim Laurel’s lower lashes. “No. Never.”

  “Good.” His mouth twisted in brief satisfaction.

  A single tear slid down her cheek to fall like a droplet of silver onto his chest. He did not see it. His eyes were closed, folded in their sockets, and, in the light of the moon just rising, his lips no longer smiled.

  The nurse
was young and attractive, with a cynical tilt to her mouth and an expansive notion of her power. As she stepped into the waiting room, she scanned those seated there, saying with crisp impatience, “Alec Stanton family?”

  Miss Callie rose, shoving herself up unsteadily with her hands on the chair arms. “I’m his grandmother.”

  “You can go in now.”

  “Is he…?” The elderly voice faltered.

  “The acting physician will explain when he has time.”

  As Mita rose to put her arm around her grandmother, Laurel moved quickly from the window where she had been standing to support her on the other side. Together, the three of them turned toward the door.

  The nurse stepped in front of Laurel. “Are you related?”

  “No.” It was the most Laurel could force through her set teeth.

  “Then you will have to remain here.”

  Grannie Callie paused. Laurel did the same while she took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I don’t believe so.”

  “I must insist,” the woman in uniform said.

  Laurel had been harassed and threatened and mocked in the past weeks. She had seen her pet and her property destroyed. Tonight she had faced down a killer and watched the man she loved be shot. She was in no mood for more impediments. Face hot but eyes cold, she replied, “Insist and be damned.”

  Marcia, gaining her feet, jerked her head at her brother in the chair beside her. The two of them sprang toward the nurse, each of them putting a detaining hand on one of her arms. “Alec Stanton saved my mother’s life this evening,” Marcia said in a hurried undertone, “and she tried her best to save his. I wouldn’t get in the way if I were you. It really might not be safe.”