Death of a Gardener (Book 3 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  “Yes, Jasper, I am going to call your father.” He sagged with my words, and I tried to disguise how bad I felt for him as I continued, “But I can guarantee you this: you are going to live through this experience. Let’s hope you learn from it, as well. And please remove your shoes before you take one more step.”

  After calling Tommy, I ripped off the cardboard backing from a packet of construction paper and fastened that over the broken pane with masking tape. Then, having decided to make this as unsocial a visit as possible, I had Jasper sit at the dining-room table with me to await his father while I paid my bills.

  It was at least half an hour before a solemn-faced Tommy Newton arrived in his squad car. His only words to his son were, “Get in the backseat. We’ll talk later.”

  Jasper silently brushed past us, retrieving his messy shoes en route. Once Jasper was safely in the car with the door closed behind him, Tommy blew out a disheartened sigh. “Sorry I took so long gettin’ here. Been looking for Joey. Still no sign of him.”

  I handed Tommy the gun. “There’s a good place for kids to hide where the roof of your garage meets up with the roof of your house. Lauren and I used to hide up there as kids. You can climb the maple tree in back to get to it, and there are only a couple of vantage points where you can spot someone up there.”

  “Uh-huh. Worth a try.” He headed down the porch steps. “Sorry ‘bout all of this. Your mom okay?”

  “Yeah. The only casualty was a window and a pumpkin plant.”

  “The boys’ll cover your expenses. Just let me know how much it comes to. Tack on a few bucks for punitive damages, as well.”

  “Tommy,” I said, just as he’d started down the walkway, “what’s happening with those hunters you’ve got in custody?”

  “To be honest, I got some doubts. They still swear up ‘n’ down they hadn’t fired a shot since the night before and were nowhere near your property.”

  “What about footprints? There are marshes and bogs all over the place. Someone trekking through the woods off of the path would have to have left some.”

  Tommy shrugged. “That’s certainly what you’d expect to find, all right. Only trouble is, there weren’t any.”

  When I arrived, the children were seated on either side of my mother on her antique couch. My parents had bought that couch and restored it years ago. The fabric was gold, as smooth as silk, accented by the dark wood carved in an ornate pattern of leaves that ran along the base and up the front of the armrests. It made me nervous to see that the guinea pigs—and especially the notorious Spots—were on Karen’s and Nathan’s laps, a mere hop away from the seat cushions. They were making quite a racket with their squeaky purrs.

  Mom straightened as I entered the room. “Well,” she said, smiling. “Karen, Nathan, aren’t your cartoon shows on right about now?”

  I swallowed a groan. Her intent was to get them out of the room so she could grill me.

  Karen looked from Mom to me, then, sensing something interesting was up, said, “I think I’ll take a day off from cartoons today.”

  “Me, too,” Nathan promptly chimed in.

  Mom sighed, then looked to me for support, but I pretended not to notice and sat down on the love seat opposite them. I was in no hurry to explain why it was that Tommy’s son knew Helen Raleigh was a man, but my mother didn’t. Instead, I did my best to learn how school went for the kids today. As usual, their answers were all one word apiece, no matter how inventive my question.

  Finally Mom said, “So. That was quite an interesting cat that Jasper Newton let out of the bag. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, well, Tommy asked me to keep some things confidential.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean for you to keep secrets from your own mother,” she sniffed.

  “What secret?” Nathan asked.

  With Tiger gently held against her chest, Karen scooted off the couch to the floor and said casually, “That the woman who got shot in our yard was really a man.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Mom and I asked simultaneously.

  “At school today,” Karen said happily. “Everyone knows.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Mother said, sounding more hurt than ever. She pursed her lips, picked up an emery board, and began to file her nails.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I was just following Sergeant Newton’s instructions.”

  She ignored me.

  “Someone’s coming out to replace the broken glass the day after tomorrow. Tommy said his sons would reimburse me.”

  “That’s nice.” Mom’s tone was frosty.

  “Somebody broke their glasses?” Nathan asked.

  “Sergeant Newton’s son broke my window by mistake,” Karen explained. She noticed my puzzled expression and added, “Grandma told me.”

  “Is Peter okay?” Nathan asked.

  “No, I’m sorry, sweetie. Peter didn’t make it. How about you and I go out together next week and pick out Peter the Second?” Actually, Peter the Third, but no sense going into that now.

  Nathan’s expression fell, but he nodded.

  “Nathan?” Karen said. “If I were you, I’d have Dad take you to the plant store, not Mom. Peter might live longer.”

  On that note, Karen let her guinea pig run around, then Nathan lost his grip on Spots, who leapt to the floor. Immediately the two furry animals started to do a mating dance around each other. They’d had ample opportunity to discover that they were of the same sex, but hope springs eternal in males of all species, including guinea pigs.

  “Look! They’re playing ring around the rosie!” Nathan shouted with glee.

  “What are they doing, Mom?” Karen asked.

  “They’re each hoping the other guinea pig is a female,” I tactfully explained.

  “The guinea pigs have been living on your cul-de-sac for too long,” my mother muttered under her breath, filing furiously away at her nails. Shaping them into points, perhaps.

  “Do they want to get married?” Nathan asked.

  “Yes, though that’s called mating for animals.” The two little cavies were still purring at each other, but were now, to put it in euphemistic terms, playing an unsuccessful game of leap frog.

  “Let’s separate the two of them so they don’t develop some sort of identity crisis, shall we?”

  We got the squeaking guinea pigs back into their own cages, and now I insisted the children watch their hour of cartoons. In the meantime, I had a heart-to-heart with my mother. She admitted she couldn’t fault me for following police instructions, and I told her about the hunters Tommy had arrested. We agreed that if hunters were truly venturing this close to the Sherwood Forest subdivision, things were very amiss indeed.

  I decided to take some action, but the only immediate “action” I could come up with was to find out who was in charge of guarding those woods against hunting. That led to my calling the Fish and Wildlife division, which eventually got me only as far as having a phone conversation with a park ranger. The ranger assured me they were well aware of the shooting that had taken place on my property and were going to step up security to prevent anyone bringing a firearm into those woods.

  While this was better than nothing, it wasn’t much better. It occurred to me, after I’d hung up and brooded over the phone for a while, that Mom had connections with some sort of nature group that regularly met in those troublesome woods. If I asked about the group now she’d know my ulterior motives. I could get the name during dinner.

  In the meantime, I went downstairs to my temporary office. Needing an outlet to vent my frustrations, I drew a teacher in her classroom, hands on hips as she locks eyes with a student who looked suspiciously like Jasper Newton. The teacher says, “Well, Billy, for twenty years now I’ve told my classes there’s no such thing as a stupid question. But your question has just proved me wrong.”

  Jim seemed tired and a bit cranky when he arrived home that evening. During dinner, after the children had excused themselves and raced upstairs to play, I a
sked Mom about the group. They were a group of botany enthusiasts called “Fond of Floras.”

  “Oh, that sounds fascinating,” I lied, resting my elbows on the cherry-wood table. “Maybe I should join them, on a trial basis.”

  Both my mother and Jim looked at me as if I’d just suggested I intended to flap my arms and fly to the moon. “How would I go about joining?” I pressed on, undaunted.

  “They meet at the west entrance to the park at noon on weekdays,” Mom said slowly. “They hike for half an hour, recording the types of vegetation they spot, then they stop for a picnic lunch, and hike out afterward. But I dropped out of the group because they were so boring.”

  Jim set down his fork and stared across the table at me. “You want to join a group of amateur botanists? Molly, who do you think you’ re kidding?”

  “Whom,” I corrected.

  “You think this group of wildflower enthusiasts may be packing rifles?”

  “No. But the shooting occurred in the early afternoon. They might have seen someone.”

  “And, of course, it wouldn’t occur to you to leave this matter to the police.”

  “I’ve heard officer after officer on TV say they can’t do the job alone, that they need responsible citizens to help police their community. So I think—”

  “I’m free for lunch tomorrow,” Jim interrupted. “I’ll go with you.”

  My mother looked at him in surprise. He shrugged. “Molly fancies herself as the friendly neighborhood sleuth, and I figure, if ya can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

  Chapter 9

  Put Those Back Where You Found Them!

  “Grandma’s” school bus stop was just two driveways down from Lauren’s house. The next morning, since the weather was so nice, I ignored my children’s groans that being seen at the bus stop with their mother was “so-o-o embarrassing” and waited with them. To my pleasant surprise, Lauren came out with Rachel just as the bus arrived. Lauren looked a little under the weather and was wearing a plain purple T-shirt and jeans instead of the usual attractive, semiformal attire she wore to the office.

  “Heading out to work soon?” I asked her as we waved goodbye to our children.

  She shook her head. “Remember how I called in sick yesterday when I wasn’t?” Her voice sounded awful and her nose was red and sore looking.

  “Uh-oh. You actually came down with something?”

  She nodded, rolling her eyes. “Instant karma got me but good.” She coughed into the crook of her arm. “But, on the positive side, I managed to turn this into a life’s lesson for Rachel. ‘See how Mommy’s suffering?’” Lauren said in a Mister Roger’s voice, wagging her finger at me as if I were her nine-year-old. “’Mommy told a lie yesterday. See what happens when people tell lies?’”

  I laughed at Lauren’s embellishment. She sneezed and blew her nose. She had what looked like half a box of tissues in her hand. We began to walk slowly toward our homes.

  “When I called in, the principal told me the other part-time secretary wanted more hours on her paycheck anyway.” She paused at the base of her driveway. “I’d invite you in for a cup of coffee, but I’m so germ-ridden you’d be safer keeping your distance.”

  Despite this sound logic, I so wanted to spend some time with my friend that I replied, “Oh, I like living on the edge. Besides, if I’m going to catch it from you, you were more contagious yesterday when we were together than you are today.”

  “True.” She sneezed again. “But I’m more pathetic and miserable today,” she said in a froggy voice. “Then again, you know what they say about misery loving company.” She wiggled her eyebrows.

  Lauren led me inside her house and poured me a cup of coffee, which I drank while we sat on the padded bar stools at her kitchen counter and chatted. Tommy had found Joey hiding on the roof, precisely where I suggested he look. I mentioned to her that it was reassuring that teenagers of a different sex and generation could still follow the same patterns she and I did when we were teenagers. That reassurance was short-lived, as Lauren promptly reminded me of some of the stunts we pulled as teens. She went on to tell me that Tommy had been so angry, he’d grounded his sons till further notice. He’d told them he didn’t feel

  they had the maturity to be trusted alone and wouldn’t burden Lauren with their guardianship, so he’d taken them to their house and said he was going to hire an afterschool baby-sitter.

  I winced. “A baby-sitter for a thirteen- and fourteen-year old? That must have humiliated them to the core. Do you think he’ll actually go through with it?”

  “Not for long,” Lauren replied. “He has an elderly neighbor who used to watch the boys when they were younger. Tommy will probably insist they help her around the house till school’s out at the end of the week. They’re counselors at summer camp, which starts in two weeks. I doubt he’ll make them miss that, unless they screw up a second time.”

  Lauren had a painful-sounding coughing attack. She really did look miserable. Unlike my daily routine, she put on light touches of makeup that flattered her pretty, round face. But her only remarkable features this morning were her sore nose and parched, cracked lips. Even her brown hair had lost its normal sheen, its shoulder-length cut now looking as though it had a permanent case of static electricity. She cleared her throat, then asked, “How are your kids handling all of this?”

  “We’ve done a pretty good job of answering their questions as they come up, while making sure they know we’ve got everything under control. Which, of course, is a crock. I aged two years yesterday when I thought my mom had been shot. Nathan has been more concerned about the loss of his pumpkin plant than anything else. Child psychologists would probably tell me he’s redirecting deep-seated fears.”

  I reflected momentarily on my mental image of the two children as they headed to the bus stop this morning. “They’re such opposites.”

  “Karen and Nathan?”

  “Nathan’s afraid to take risks. Sometimes his posture is so forlorn...shoulders slumped, head down, as if he’s walking through a never-ending storm, and there’s nothing I can do to shield him. And Karen’s essentially skipping along joyously through life. She’s like the heroine in a Disney cartoon, all goodness and light, friend to all the wounded forest creatures. I’m afraid she’s developed the perfect-child syndrome...that she’ll develop an eating disorder or run off with a drug addict on a motorcycle when she’s in her teens.”

  Lauren gave me a sad smile. “That’s one of my worst nightmares, too.” She refilled my cup. “I’m so glad I invited you over this morning,” Lauren said, blowing her nose. “Now I’m not only sick, I’m depressed.”

  I chuckled. “Solving a murder is so much easier and better defined than parenting. That’s why I can’t force myself to keep out of Helen Raleigh’s murder. The thing is,” I said, resting my head on my hand, “Tommy said there were no footprints from the main footpath to my property line, where our man Helen was shot from.”

  “Which tells you what?”

  “The killer had to have approached from our end of the woods, where there’s that hill to the left and the ground stays firm. He or she got into the woods directly from our cul-de-sac itself, or, more likely, to escape being seen carrying a rifle, the person parked alongside that road on top of the hill.”

  “Kings Way? The one that dead-ends into the west entrance of the park?”

  “Right. The killer would have had only a short distance to travel to reach my property line through the woods.”

  “But how would someone have known Helen was going to be in your yard?”

  “Helen’s car was parked right outside my house. Anyone in the neighborhood would have known.”

  “Especially Simon the Schizophrenic Snoop,” Lauren added.

  “He supposedly wasn’t home. Unless ....” Thinking out loud, I continued, “He claims he was called out on a bogus errand. Helen taped up his camera lenses, and he’s supposedly got it all on video, so that part of his story must be true.
But he could have gone into the woods from his backyard, and nobody would have seen him.”

  “But wouldn’t you have seen him drive away afterward, since his alibi was that he wasn’t home?”

  “Oh. That’s right,” I said, thinking. “He could have driven around the corner earlier and parked back on Kings Way. In fact, the more I think about it, that almost has to have been the escape route. I’ve got to build myself a map here, so I can figure this out.”

  I built a simplistic relief map of the surrounding area, using an upside-down saucer as the hill to the west of my subdivision with a butter knife alongside it as Kings Way, a place mat as our entire Sherwood Forest housing development, a napkin as my property, a spoon as the cul-de-sac, and a fork as the footpath in the woods. Then I used a salt shaker as Helen and a pepper shaker as the killer. Moving the shakers through my map, I could still see no other scenario. Somebody would have seen the killer run through their yard after the shooting if he’d come out of the woods into the development, and there would have been footprints if he’d escaped via the footpath that led deeper into the woods.

  “There are only two possibilities,” I said. “Either someone from my immediate neighborhood spotted Helen or her car, drove over to the butter knife and parked, trekked down the saucer, shot him, then trekked back up the saucer and drove off, or someone in the woods had been watching my napkin, waiting for the opportunity to shoot the salt shaker.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t a hunter who parked along the knife and didn’t realize they’d ventured right onto the edge of the napkin?”

  “It’s remotely possible, but Helen was wearing bright clothing and was right next to the house.” I moved my cup onto the napkin beside the Helen salt shaker to serve as my house. “It would’ve had to be a moronic and blind hunter.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. At the mention of Helen’s clothing, the murder scene had become all too real to me again...the gunshot ringing out, the blood. I shuddered at the memory of Helen’s wig and lifeless face suddenly appearing on my window-well cover. Lauren said, “I’m going to ask Tommy, casually, of course, if he’s talked to anyone who lives on Kings Way about cars parked there.”