After the President of the Garden Club’s face returned to normal, Gracie returned to the game. She was still a bit woozy from her liquid supper but was determined to make her 148 average. She missed by two points.
“Instead of drowning my sorrows, you know what would make me feel better?” she asked Ted.
“Food?”
“Almost. Let’s go take a look at that land across from Barbed Wire’s place.”
***
The flashlight illuminated an orange wheelbarrow with red splotches and missing one wooden handle.
“The body is missing though,” Gracie said.
“If there ever was a body. Let’s come back early in the morning and look around. I’m not on shift until nine.”
“I’m not even out of bed until nine!” Gracie suddenly stepped forward and ran her finger over the edge of the wheelbarrow. She sniffed her finger.
“This is blood, Ted. I’m fairly certain scarecrows don’t bleed.”
“Maybe the scarecrow walked home. It is odd though, that Miss Shire got this much of the information correct. I mean, this is a pretty distinctive wheelbarrow. It will be easy to trace the owner and if they are complicit in a murder, why bother to get rid of the body?” Ted mused. “Well, we’ll check it out in the morning.”
“Do you suppose scarecrows houses are made of straw?” Gracie asked as she continued to search around the wheelbarrow. She added, “Mind you, that would be kind of gross because when you think about it. Scarecrows are stuffed with straw so essentially they would be building a house out of their innards.”
Ted sighed. “How your mind works continually surprises me.”
***
As soon as Gracie unlocked her front door, two things happened. She let out a horrendous sneeze and her cell phone rang.
“Well?”
Gracie mopped up her face and answered, “I’m okay thanks. Who is this?”
“It’s Barb Shire. What did you find out?”
“Quite a number of things actually. Things like restraining orders…” Gracie said as she started turning on several lights. There was a suspicious fluffiness to the air. Zoey and Frank ran up to greet her and began curling around her ankles.
“What did you do?” she demanded of her cats.
There was a gasp on the other end of the line.
“That Anita is such a hag. Before she showed up, it was Barb and Barry, Barry and Barb. Don’t those names sound just perfect together?”
Gracie walked into her bedroom and spied a pile of unrolled toilet paper on the floor of the en-suite. She looked down at her cats, who were purring mightily.
“Making a nest, were you?” she asked them.
“Of course I was!” Barb said haughtily. “After all, Barry spent hours pruning my maple and hauling all the debris away. A man doesn’t do that for free unless he’s trying to impress somebody!”
“You have a point there,” Gracie said. Not a correct point, but a point nonetheless she thought.
“Did you find the wheelbarrow?”
“Yes we did. Exactly where you said it would be. We did not however, find a body inside of it.”
“Is that a problem?”
Gracie bent down to pat her cats. As usual, she was more amused by their antics than angry. In dulcet tones she said to them, “I’m not angry at what you did; we all make mistakes don’t we? Going forward, let’s not do this again shall we?”
Her caller was over the moon with happiness.
“I knew another woman would see it my way! Best one hundred dollars I’ve ever spent! Thanks for agreeing with me.” Barbed Wire hung up.
She didn’t know what she was agreeing to, and why Barb felt her money was well spent but Gracie was more convinced than ever that there was a dead body somewhere! In the meantime, a nightcap and a cuddle with the kitties was on the agenda.
***
Barb Shire put down her phone and walked to her linen closet. Her plan had come off without a hitch, so she deserved a celebration.
She was going to play dress-up.
Barb opened up her step stool, climbed up and reached for the very special white box on the highest shelf. Her short portly frame was stretched to its limit as she carefully inched the box closer. There! She had the edge of it, but an inopportune rumbling in her stomach began.
She tooted.
Out of habit, she said, “Oh excuse me,” as her hands flew to cover her bottom. As she was falling she fleetingly wondered why she had to be so damn polite when no one was around.
The box landed on top of her as she slid to a sitting position. Her arm had been scraped up and was bleeding slightly. What Barb really wanted to do she couldn’t. She didn’t dare risk soiling the white bridal gown lovingly wrapped in acid free tissue paper and preserved in the very pretty white box.
She sighed and walked to her living room where a robust Aloe Vera plant was growing and cut a piece from it with the shears she always kept handy to protect herself at a moment’s notice.
You never knew who might be snooping around! A girl had to defend herself after all. It was a good thing one of her foster families had trained her how to shoot a shotgun. Between the shears and the shotgun, she was ready to run off any intruders.
Sadly, they never intruded.
Well, Barry would be knocking at her door pretty soon when he learned what she had done for him. As she applied the aloe to her scrape, Barb thought of the effort she had expended two nights ago to get rid of that body for Barry.
She had been out walking, on her property but within visual range of Barry’s place, well, with the use of her binoculars, when she saw the ugly orange pushcart outside Barry’s front door. There was a body in it.
“He’s done it; he’s killed the hag!” she said aloud.
She climbed the fence that ran along the property line and crept up to the house. The motion detector flooded the yard with light, so she quickly grabbed a stick and knocked it down. Unfortunately, the light had revealed that the corpse was male. Anita was probably still alive in the house, dang the luck.
On the positive side, even though both cars were in the garage, no one came to the door.
Probably playing dominoes together Barb thought sourly. She couldn’t imagine that twig thin Anita could have the strength to kill anyone, so it must have been Barry. She shone the flashlight on the body as she lifted up the straw hat. Barb wasn’t a squeamish woman, but she really wished she hadn’t lifted the hat. Most of the damage was there.
She didn’t recognize the man, but he did look vaguely familiar. What to do? First, she had to protect her Barry. She had failed him in February when she couldn’t stop that hag from getting her hooks in him, but by golly, she was going to help him now! Barb rolled the garish wheelbarrow to the fence and attempted to lift the body. No dice. She tried to lift a leg but that only shifted the body enough to cause an arm to flop down.
“Now I know why it’s called dead weight,” she whispered as the body did not cooperate. Finally she hit upon an idea. She dumped the body out by tipping the wheelbarrow on its side. From there she rolled the body under the fence to her property. She gave it one great push and rolled it down the gentle slope to her garden pond.
It didn’t take much to push the corpse the final few inches into the pond. It sunk, but Barb was savvy enough to know that in a week or so, it would reappear. Well, she’d come up with a plan. For now, she retrieved the bloody straw hat, weighed it down with some of her smaller lawn ornaments and dumped it in the pond.
Then she headed back to Barry’s.
This time, she decided not to climb over the fence. Barb felt like an action hero now and threw herself to the ground. In her mind, she was going to roll under the fence and immediately hop up with lightning speed for the next phase of her plan.
She landed with a solid thump in the dirt and then struggled to squeeze under the fence. Even though gravity was doing most of the work as she was pushing the empty wheelbarrow down the driveway, Barb was wheezing like a fr
eight train.
It was the most physical work she had done in years. When she returned home that night she had a hot bath and reviewed her plan. If someone finds the wheelbarrow, they’ll easily trace it back to Barry. He’ll become unhinged because he’ll think the body was discovered as well. But, glory days! The body is in my pond! Won’t he be grateful when I tell him I moved it! Then, speaking of moving, he’ll move out the skinny chick and move me in!
Now it was Thursday night, and things were really clipping along at a good speed. New diet going well? Check. Figure out how to get someone to discover the wheelbarrow? Check.
Barb put a bandage on her arm. Actually, she thought, that Noseworthy broad wasn’t such a bad sort for a slim gal. She wasn’t skinny like Anita, and even though Gracie had somehow figured out that Barb had taken the body, she didn’t blame her.
Barb gently opened the box and carefully lifted up the wedding gown over her head. It fit snugly. As usual, it filled Barb with such a sense of hope that her fantasies would soon become realities, that she started to have a conversation with her new husband.
“You know Barry, I should be sad that someone died, but it paved the way for us to be together finally. And really, I should be scared that you killed someone, but I’m sure you had a good reason darling. Let’s dance.”
The little chubby woman, grinned and snuffled as she danced in front of her full-length mirror. She started to close her eyes in ecstasy, when she quickly opened them wide.
“It was Andrew Walters! That’s who it was!”
***
Gracie had driven her own car the next morning to rendezvous with Ted at the unholy hour of seven o’clock. Ted hadn’t arrived yet but fortunately, Gracie had a large travel mug full of strong coffee so she turned on the radio and settled in. In two minutes, she got bored.
“You snooze, you lose,” she said as she got out of her car. She grabbed a stick and started poking around the long grass determined to find a clue before Ted showed up.
After ten minutes, she failed to find a clue or a body for that matter.
“Now if I were a murderer, transporting a body in the dark, what would I not see, but a sharp investigator like Gracie Noseworthy would see in the day?”
She turned as she heard a car approaching, but it just drove by. Where was Ted? Gracie looked over at Barb Shire’s house. It was surprisingly a pleasant looking brick home, with an abundance of tidy gardens. At the bottom of the yard, close to the road, was a beautiful little pond, surrounded by ornamental grasses and lilies.
The house to the right of Barb’s was tidy as well but had a sad appearance.
“Sad? I must be down a quart.” Gracie took another large gulp of coffee and continued to stare at the house.
Now why do I think it looks sad? she thought. The color was a dark gray, but compared to Barb’s gorgeous red brick, it looked faded.
There were no flowers. Anywhere. While the house to the right of Barb’s had the same expanse of yard, there were no pots, no hanging baskets, nothing except three metal butterflies.
She shook her head and gave a cursory glance inside the wheelbarrow. Her mind started to drift towards Trudy-Faye’s’ complaint about the woman who planted bedposts and marigolds.
Gracie knew she had a bit of a unique way of looking at some things, but she also knew that her subconscious worked overtime to notify her when it captured a clue. She therefore pursued this latest tangent. There were no marigolds in the wheelbarrow, but, upon closer inspection, there were two tiny spots of yellow. She leaned forward to investigate, when she heard Ted yell.
“Don’t touch anything!”
Startled, Gracie backed away but advised, “There’s something in here you should look at. It might be important.”
“Didn’t mean to give you a fright, Gracie, but since we last spoke there have been some new developments.”
Gracie continued to point to the yellow spots with her stick but looked at Ted and raised her eyebrows.
“The Dispatcher received two calls last night. One she thought was a prank call, but she sent an officer out to investigate. The other was a wellness check. Turns out that Barb’s one neighbor was reported missing by his daughter while at the same time, Barb’s other neighbor phoned in a murder.”
“Say what?”
Ted pointed to Andrew Walter’s sad gray home.
“Apparently his daughter calls him every night at nine thirty and he didn’t answer so she waited and then called him again after an hour. He still didn’t answer so a car was sent for a wellness check. About thirty minutes later, a male called in confessing to murder.”
Gracie turned her head slightly, gave the mysterious yellow spots a quick poke with her stick and asked what the man said when he confessed.
“Relinquish the stick, madam, or I won’t tell you.”
Ted took the meekly offered stick and threw it behind him.
“The crime scene guys will be here shortly; I’ll have to explain why your fingerprint will be in the blood; I don’t need to have to further explain why you destroyed evidence.”
Gracie started to say something, but Ted frowned. She sighed deeply and motioned for him to continue.
“It was Barry Frederickson who phoned in around midnight. To quote, “Heah I see you guys at the house one over. Do you think you could come and see me? I’ve had the strangest dream for the past three nights. I think I killed somebody.”
“Well that actually fits with what Barbed Wire told me,” Gracie said as she glanced at Barb’s house. “But why did he think he was dreaming?”
“I got a call around twelve thirty this morning; the officer figured I should be there for the interview. When we arrived at the Frederickson home, Barry was snoring loudly on the couch and Anita was saying Barry had been hallucinating about seeing a body in a wheelbarrow on Tuesday night. He had been anxious ever since, so she was slipping him some of her Ativan.”
Gracie watched as Barb rolled a huge concrete planter into her pond.
“Well that’s unusual,” she said as she watched her client go up the hill and roll another planter down to the pond.
“Yes,” Ted said, oblivious to the events going on behind him. “What made it more unusual is how much Anita tried to downplay Barry’s confession. My spidy sense was tingling as soon as we drove up to the home. There was a busted motion detector light above the door, but more interesting was…” Ted stopped his tale and looked at Gracie.
“Do you have any of that coffee left?” he pleaded, “I’ve been up pretty much all night.”
“You can drink it all if you keep talking.”
Ted swallowed a large gulp and continued with the story, “There was a large blast mark on the siding and on the concrete steps, as though someone was using a power washer for the first time. Interestingly, there happened to be a power washer sitting right beside the door. So I’m talking to Anita, and she’s acting antsy. So I decide to pull an old Columbo trick. I pretend we’re going to leave, then I turn and scratch my head and ask her “Was it hard to use the power washer to wash the blood off?”
“And what did she say?”
“That’s the funny part. The Columbo trick worked. She says, “Of course it was, it was the first time I used the power washer thingy and I had to get the blood off before Barry came home. I broke my nails trying to stuff old Andrew in the wheelbarrow after I bashed him on the head, but I broke even more using the power washer.”
By this time, Gracie’s mouth was hanging open. “Did she even realize what she was saying?”
“No. She just kept going. Her plan was to kill Andrew and blame Barb, but because she broke her nails she decided to move the body over to Barb’s later on.”
Gracie rocked back and forth on her heels as she looked at her own sculpted nails.
“Prompt attention to any breakage is so important in proper care of one’s nails,” she intoned. Then she slapped her thigh and said with amazement, “I can’t believe it! She commits a murd
er then goes and files her nails! How cold hearted is that? So, where was the body and was it really the neighbor Andrew?”
Ted gulped some more coffee. “We may have a situation there,” he said. “At this time, we have no body. Or as Anita explained to us last night, no make it this morning, that she met Barry when he came home from a late shift and hustled him past the body. After she had filed her nails, she went out to take the body over to Barb’s, but it was gone. So, despite arresting her for murder, we have to come up with some evidence in order to make the charge stick.”
Gracie was distracted. She tapped one of her lovely high cheekbones and said slowly, “Well look at that. She did it again.”
Ted was confused. “Who did what again?”
Gracie focus snapped into place.
“Two questions Ted. One, what color nail polish was Anita wearing and two, would you like to know where Andrew’s body is?”
The Detective let out his breath slowly and shrugged.
“Not really, it’s been a long night. Perhaps I’ll just go home for a shower and a nap, except I can’t do that because you know.”
“You have a murderer to convict?” Gracie asked.
“No,” Ted said slowly, “It’s just that I hate to go to bed with bad breath.”
Gracie smiled and nodded. “I see. What you’re saying is you left your toothbrush at my house again. Well you know Zoey and Frank have probably used it by now.”
Ted smiled back. “Yellow. Her nail polish was yellow and yes I would like to know where the body is.”
His friend didn’t say anything but walked by him and picked up the stick he had discarded. She pointed at the wheelbarrow.
“At least two broken fingernails of the painted yellow variety are stuck in a pool of dried blood yonder.” Gracie then pointed forcefully at Barb’s house. “And speaking of pools, I believe Miss Barbara Shire has been desperately trying to weigh something down. Since you have arrived, she has rolled three huge planters into her pond. I suspect a dead body may be underneath them all.”
***
“He hasn’t shown up,” the clerk said to Barb later that morning at the courthouse.
It was 10:30. He was thirty minutes late.
Gore in the Garden Page 2