The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery

by Ann Ripley

  The peony needs a special word. It is one plant that is as good in flower as it is afterwards. It is tough, and its beautiful foliage remains intact through the hardest northern frost. Two exceptional variations of the plant are the delicate-leaved dwarf variety with red flowers; and the tree peony, about which too much cannot be said. It has flowers like pale colored tissue paper, that are nevertheless strong and fairly long-lasting. Its cut foliage rises out of the garden on three- or four-foot stems, to make any garden look as if Gertrude Jekyll had been there, planning things. Delicate, beautiful—but also very tough.

  Chapter 25

  LOUISE SHOVED THE KEY IN THE ignition and turned it. Silence greeted her, and she felt a moment of utter panic.

  What kind of horrible luck was this? Her eye was caught by something—someone—outside the car. Standing there in the fading light was Sheriff Earl Tatum, stomach protruding insolently, but otherwise looking neat as a bandbox in a fresh outfit and his trademark black hat. He was holding a pistol in his hand, which he didn’t even bother to aim at her. This was the final ignominy. He didn’t even respect her ability to save herself.

  “Miz Eldridge.” It was that same slightly sneering voice, one she had hoped she never had to hear again. “Went to Frank Porter’s, and figured out where you must have gone. I thought I told you it wasn’t safe to come up here.”

  Louise bowed her head onto the steering wheel; she could hear the violent thumping of her overworked heart. If the man wanted to shoot her, let him. She was too tired to care.

  Then a new wave of strength slowly moved through her, and she raised her head. “The thing about you, Sheriff, is that you can’t afford to let people know you’ve covered up at least four murders up here on Porter Ranch. It would send you to jail for life. Manipulating a crazy old woman, who has handily killed the people in the way of your big land deals. Why, I can even believe you put the idea in her head. What kind of a lawman are you? How many people do you blackmail, besides her?”

  “Whoa, there,” he protested.

  She leaned out the window and kept up her diatribe. “And you’ve practically stolen her most valuable land—”

  He was shuffling anxiously from foot to foot, but the gun was still steady in his hand. “She sold me that land, damn it!”

  “For a pittance, I’ll bet,” retorted Louise. “And in return, you kept her dark secrets. How does it feel to become rich by bilking a sick woman?”

  He tried to laugh. “Harriet, sick? You just don’t know—”

  “And now this,” she scolded, giving the steering wheel a good whack with the palm of her hand. She decided it was time to stage a hysterical scene, which would fit right into this man’s stereotypical view of women. “What did you do, take off my distributor cap?” She opened the car door, jumped out, and shoved him in the stomach so that he stumbled back a step.

  The son of a bitch was laughing. “This car don’t have a distributor cap, dimwit.”

  She poked a finger in his chest and screamed, “Don’t you know this is a rental car and I am responsible? Do you know they charge for this kind of thing? So what the hell did you do to it?”

  “Are you crazy?” he snarled, and looked around to see who might be listening as his good-old-boy dignity melted in the face of her temper. “What do you care about a few loose wires? This car’s goin’ t’ be your casket, so don’t worry about it, or anything else. We’re going t’ arrange a little accident.”

  Her hands were on her hips. “Who, you and Harriet?”

  Then, out of the darkness came what seemed like an apparition—a figure on horseback with a dark hat, galloping up the road toward them. Harriet, shotgun at the ready, like an avenging angel. This was her chance! Louise bolted for the woods, reached the stony yard, then ran to the side of Harriet’s house and grabbed the old pitchfork. While she dodged behind the back corner of the house, she could hear the sheriff’s noisy approach. He rushed by, breathing roughly. In the distance, she heard horse’s hooves as Harriet searched for her on the other side of the yard.

  The sheriff stopped and bellowed at Harriet, who hardly could have heard him over the horse’s hoofbeats. Nor could he hear Louise sneaking up behind him. “Jesus, you old crow, did you have to get us fouled up like this? You’ve blown it!”

  Then he did hear something and turned around, gun drawn. He only had time to say “Whoa!” before she slammed the fork down against his head, and he tripped backward as his gun discharged.

  The sound brought Harriet at a gallop. Tatum appeared to be unconscious. Quickly, Louise stooped down and took the gun from the ground next to his body. It was heavy in her hand. Harriet was not going to kill again, not if she could help it.

  Louise shouted, “I have you now, Harriet.” She felt like a gunslinger in a bad western. But the tremble in her voice belied her tough words.

  Harriet stopped her horse. Louise saw with wonder that she sat as tall in her saddle as the day she had first met her. What was keeping this woman going? It must be adrenaline alone, for Louise believed Harriet was truly very frail. It was adrenaline or the powerful urge to destroy her latest enemy—Louise.

  Then the woman laughed, and Louise’s courage failed. She would not shoot Harriet. Instead, she would be shot dead herself. In terror, she made a run around Harriet’s flank toward the edge of the yard. A grave mistake. Louise was trapped on the outside, with Harriet holding the inside position. To the left was the long car shed. On the right were those snaggly barbed-wire fences guarding the family graveyards. Otherwise, she might have used the tombstones of dear Baby Henry or the other dead mountainfolk to deflect Harriet’s shots.

  The only way out was down—down the rock cliff. Louise shoved Tatum’s pistol into the waistband of her jeans. She counted on the heavy leather belt to hold it in place, and hoped it didn’t fire and shoot off any of her body parts. The image of Ann Evans climbing her backyard cliff fresh in her mind, Louise swung her legs over the caprock and began to climb down. It only took a moment for her to learn why Ann called this “trash” rock, as she dislodged stones with each clumsy move she made. Terror began to grip her as the rock seemed to dissolve under her feet, and the heavy gun weighed down her backside, pulling her weight perilously away from the safety of the rock face.

  Panicking, she saved herself by thrusting either hand into a fissure in the rock, as if her limbs were pitons. Her feet had no purchase, hanging in the air fifty feet above solid ground. Death by falling. It would be just another story of a flatlander who had ventured too boldly—and a handy solution for the woman who was trying to kill her.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the Permian sandstone. It was cool and comforting. To think this stone had stood in this place for almost three hundred million years, silent witness to the affairs of mankind. Louise allowed herself to slide down another inch or two, and gratefully found rock on which to place her feet. Her left arm hurt again, but she couldn’t afford to stop and investigate.

  In the gathering darkness, Louise had to go by the feel as well as the look of the rock; her hands searched and found the cracks, knobs, and ridges she needed to make her journey. She had descended almost fifteen feet when Harriet discovered where she had gone. She announced her find with a raucous laugh. “So there y’are. This is gonna be about as easy as shootin’ fish in a barrel.” The words dropped down on Louise like shotgun pellets. Helpless now, she stared upward as the old woman brought the gun to her shoulder and pointed it straight at her.

  Louise let go. Her fingers and booted feet scuttled over the outward-bellied cliff as she fell. It worked—Harriet was too stunned to shoot. But now Louise was falling to her death. To herself, she whispered Ann’s dictum: “Dig the tiny nodules of the rock into the sole of your boot…”

  Her heart rejoiced when her feet were brought up hard against a narrow, flat surface. Almost directly in front of her was a small mine opening. She pitched forward into it, just as a load of shot splattered on the rock ledge behind
her.

  The cave was actually a dark little room where some hopeful miner had once scooped out rock to a depth of about ten feet, then found it worthless and quit digging. Louise ran her hands carefully over the rough walls, but there was no magic passage to lead her away from the danger outside. And yet she blessed that miner for his efforts, for this little gouge in the rock had saved her life. She returned to the entrance and stood for several moments in complete silence, gazing out at the overlaid silhouettes of distant mountains fading in the dusk. She listened for a sound, any sound. Crazy laughter, shots, horse’s hooves.

  What had happened to Sergeant Rafferty? She longed to hear police sirens, but she was beginning to doubt she ever would. Carefully, she stuck her head out of the mine and looked up. There was no one there. Then she peered down. Below her was a rubbly wall of trash rock. She shut her eyes momentarily, to blot out the reality of the problem. She would never make it down that treacherous pile of sandstone.

  Suddenly, it occurred to her that she wasn’t the first one to be stuck on this cliff. How on earth had the miner gotten down? She stuck her head out of the opening and looked to her right, sobbing in relief. A century or so ago, that hardscrabble dreamer had carved a narrow, gently ascending path across the cliff face to carry his ore back up to the top. It was badly eroded now, but still passable. She had not seen it at first, because of the bulge in the cliff wall. Now she traversed it slowly, hugging the rock so closely that it scratched her face. Relief swept over her as she realized she might make it after all.

  The protruding rock at body level was an encumbrance, but a defense against more shots from above. Every few feet, she stopped to listen, and was heartened by the silence. Either Harriet was holding her fire until Louise reached the top, or else she had given up the fight.

  Louise realized she was going to end up far from her point of origin, somewhere on the Porter Ranch property. When she was near the top, she raised her head cautiously over the caprock, almost able to feel a shot whining her way. When she saw no one, she scrambled onto solid ground and lay there for a minute to regain her breath. She was in the cemetery, surrounded by ghostly white gravestones gleaming at her in the darkening twilight. Nearby were mounds of dirt encircling the freshly-dug graves that soon would receive the bodies of the rancher and his daughter.

  The sight might have frightened her, but did not. Instead, it put fire in her heart. For she was about to bring Harriet to justice for killing two of the innocents lying beneath those headstones, and the two more soon to join them.

  Louise withdrew the pistol from her waistband and held it in front of her. After what she had been through, the weapon no longer seemed formidable or even heavy. Nor did it seem out of the question to shoot Harriet.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the light and shadows. She clambered over the fence that bounded the Porter Ranch and walked cautiously onto Harriet’s property, squinting to make out the forms of the trees and the ranch house. With a jolt, she picked out a large, motionless object in the center of the backyard. It was Harriet, still sitting on her horse. Because of the falling darkness, Louise could not see her face, but there was still the pioneer-woman look in her dark silhouette—a pioneer woman with a slumped, weary back and bent head. Fleetingly, Louise was reminded of a Remington statue of a tired cowboy in the saddle.

  “Harriet,” said Louise in a resigned voice, “I’m not frightened of you any more. I’ll shoot you if you damned well don’t get down off that horse.”

  The shape did not move. “Get down, Harriet,” she insisted loudly, “right now!”

  Harriet still did not obey. Instead, there was the leathery sound of the old woman’s boots kicking her horse, and the silhouette suddenly whirled about and moved past Louise. Straight toward the cliff.

  “Stop!” Louise yelled, and ran after her. Though Harriet urged the beast forward with rapid kicks to its flanks, the horse balked. Harriet sailed off and over the sandstone cliff, down into the valley below.

  The horse danced on the edge of the cliff, snorting and confused. What did its rider want from it next? Louise stared over the edge of the precipice. She could barely make out the figure lying far below. She watched it for a few minutes to be quite sure Harriet did not get up, and finally lowered her gun.

  Chapter 26

  LOUISE WAS TOO TIRED TO move. After a time, she heard the sirens. Then a car door slammed. Pete and Ann were calling to her from the front of the ranch house, but she couldn’t seem to call back. Eventually they followed the sound of the whinnying horse to Harriet’s backyard. They found Louise standing at the edge of the cliff, looking stunned.

  “Ann,” she said, “friction saved me. I pressed the tiny nodules of rock into the soles of my boots.” And then she sank to the ground in a faint.

  Louise woke Sunday morning feeling euphoric and light-hearted. She put on simple, loose clothing—a big rough shirt to cover her bandaged arm, comfortable Japanese farmer pants, and sandals, and she wandered from room to room in the empty house, appreciating the way the sun painted patterns on the furniture and floor, savoring the look and even the dry, clean smell of her borrowed western home. It was delightful to be alive.

  Before she had a chance to eat, her neighbors, Dr. Rostov and Herb, called on her, the farmer bearing a plate of his wife’s cookies. He had been concerned when cars and trucks kept driving up to her place in the early morning hours, “especially since I knew you’d had a spotta trouble.” She explained that two of the cars had been Pete and Ann in separate vehicles, for her two friends had gone to the hospital with her and then accompanied her home. Sheriff Tatum had also been at the hospital, but he would recover from his head injury, and leave under a much different escort. Louise had also confessed her vandalism and theft to Sergeant Rafferty, who’d pardoned her after retrieving Reingold’s gun from Harriet’s yard.

  After discovering that she was all right, Herb left, still urging Louise to borrow one of his shotguns for her last days in Boulder County. Gary Rostov stayed to talk, and willingly accepted her offer of tea.

  Listening to Louise recap last night’s events, he nodded vigorously. In a careful, professorial way, as if everything were now clear to him, he said, “It seems quite likely that Harriet Bingham was experiencing survivor guilt. And survivor guilt can lead to madness of sorts—an unconscious madness. The woman undoubtedly functioned day to day, and thought of herself as quite sane, and so did others. Yet, when your existence causes the death of someone else, you feel tremendous guilt. Harriet may have believed that she killed her own mother—and didn’t her father’s dislike of her affirm that? Kill or be killed became her road to survival.”

  Louise remembered Harriet’s terrible, nightmarish story of the killer baby being born, and shuddered. She said, “Harriet couldn’t have understood what was happening to her.”

  “I’m certain neither parent nor child understood,” he said. “That generation didn’t understand birth trauma. There was no help for that father or that little girl.”

  “And that’s why it made sense to Harriet to kill Bonnie Porter. Bonnie stood in the way of Harriet’s plan to get Jimmy Porter to marry her and be a father to her child.”

  He nodded again. “Quite likely.” This man never gave a simple “yes” to any question. Now, in a classic, absent-minded professor gesture, he scratched his head. “Now, refresh my memory, Louise—did you say that she also killed her own baby?”

  “Oh, yes. She told me straight out that she smothered the child with a pillow.”

  “Ah,” said the professor, and his eyes Ht up over his half-glasses, as if he’d discovered a new wrinkle in the case. “Harriet viewed this as a choice to be made. In her troubled mind, if both she and the baby were in trouble, only one could survive. That, then, was a reverse position. Not mother dying and baby living, but just the opposite. Then, recently, she was threatened again. And doesn’t it make sense that when Jimmy Porter told her he was abandoning her, that she would act?”


  “Yes. Then Sally Porter…”

  “Ah, Sally. Another cherished neighbor was leaving her.”

  “She was a very dangerous woman, Dr. Rostov.”

  “Indeed she was. It is important to understand that survivor guilt is one of the most lethal products of our society. And it has been with us since the dawn of time. It’s rampant in war zones.”

  Although wilting by the minute, Louise was fascinated with the unraveling of Harriet’s soul.

  “Now, Louise,” he said, “what of that other case you mentioned—the man who is violent with women, and who actually may have killed his ex-wife? I wonder if this man, too, isn’t suffering from the unresolved issues that surround trauma. From the story you told me of last night’s events, I understand he turned out not to be involved in these murders?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” she said. “Sheriff Tatum could still implicate him. Mark was close to his great-aunt Harriet, because he wanted her land. But these murders may have been a dirty secret just between her and the sheriff.”

  Rostov looked at his watch and said, “I must go, Louise. I hope someone is coming soon to take care of you—and that you can relieve yourself of the trauma of this experience.”

  She smiled faintly, thinking of other wounds she had suffered, and how she had worked through the trauma by spilling it all out to Bill, sometimes not in a day, but over weeks. As she bid the professor good-bye, she wondered when her husband would finally show up. She hoped the criminals he had been chasing were not still loose upon the world.