The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery

by Ann Ripley

  Nora stopped in the middle of the path, pulling the others to a halt with her. “Tell me that isn’t so,” she whispered. “It’s what I have feared the most, and what has been intruding more and more on my subconscious.” Louise saw in the woman’s gray eyes the kind of dreamlike look that had been there when she predicted danger and death in the past.

  And Nora had always been right.

  “Who did it?” she demanded suddenly.

  “Oh, Nora, please,” said Louise. “They suspect Mark Post or Rod Gasparra, but it’s merely suspicion. Apparently both Mark and Rod had some sort of grudge against Jeffrey. But there’s nothing there, or the police would know about it.”

  “Would they?” Nora asked.

  Bill, ever practical, grabbed their arms again and hustled them forward. “Friends, do you realize how useless it is to speculate like this? Let’s just go for our walk. We can sleep on it and talk about it tomorrow morning. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Louise echoed. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  With Nora as the guide, they took one of the three flower-lined paths that led to the falls. It was the middle path that emerged where the twenty-five-foot-high waterfall plunged into a pool and rushed on across a tumble of rocks to become a lively downhill stream.

  The path turned, and they walked alongside a pristine pool so deep they could not see its bottom. It was fed by the constant flow of water from the falls above, which broke the mirrored surface with a pleasant chattering sound. The last rays of the sun peeked through the woods and caught the edges of the iron-gray rock, highlighting ferns and other bog plants tucked into the moist rocky crevasses by both nature’s hand and the hand of the inn’s groundskeeper.

  Momentarily, this beauty distracted their eyes from seeing what was so obvious, and so much more important than the plants and the flowers and the sound of falling water and the motion of small birds as they darted about, catching tiny bugs on the pool’s surface.

  It was the broken body lying at the edge of the deep pit, partly in and partly out of the water. The body in its wet lavender dress, thin and pathetic. Slim arms flung over a head cocked grotesquely back on the neck and resting below the surface. Wide-spaced blue eyes still open and staring up into a dusky sky. Rosy-colored strands of hair swaying in the cool water, like so many pale, slithering snakes.

  The body of Grace Cooley, a broken flower lying at the foot of the falls.

  Chapter 12

  “IT LOOKS LIKE A SUICIDE,” SAID SERGEANT Ed Drucker.

  “Suicide,” said Louise. She sat opposite him, legs crossed at the ankles in a most ladylike fashion, her hands placed serenely in her lap. “I suppose murder is something that never happens in Litchfield.”

  He chuckled. “You think nobody ever gets killed around here?”

  “I would have believed that when I first came here. Maybe it’s because this place is so beautiful, so … well-painted. Even the oldest barns and outbuildings, carefully preserved, cherished. I jumped to the conclusion that people would be just as careful with preserving lives. But all of a sudden everything appears much darker—” She stopped.

  “Darker?”

  “Yes.” Her hands twisted together for comfort. “Darker, and more dangerous. Two of us are dead, and another one survived an accident meant to do serious harm. Suppose someone has killed, and wants to kill again?”

  Drucker chuckled again, longer this time. She noticed that he had a groove on his forehead above the dark shock of hair pushed down by his gray felt trooper’s hat. He was a big man, probably six foot six, with an innocent-looking, boyish face, and laugh lines that fanned out from his eyes and down the sides of his cheeks. Women, probably his mother and later his wife, had told this man how special he was. He was unself-consciously assertive, but with an affectionate regard for his fellow human beings. And yet his dark, searching eyes told her how tough he was: Those eyes had scoped her out from the moment the two of them had sat down to talk.

  “You have some imagination, all right, Mrs. Eldridge,” he told her. “Anyway, there’s fifteen more of you to go. You don’t think someone’s trying to mow down the whole bunch?”

  She gave him a sheepish smile. “Maybe not everyone. But two are dead, and who knows what might happen next?”

  “Well, to answer your previous question, we have had murders in and around Litchfield, but don’t get the wrong impression. This is a quiet, law-abiding village. The people here do lots of good works, and are very generous in funding things like the boys’ home and a home for recovering alcoholics. But there is occasional violence. Why, we had a nasty little murder just last year. A son of a prominent local businessman shot the son of another longtime resident. The young fellow parked his pickup on a side street, walked up to the other man, and shot him clean through the head.”

  “Why?”

  “Drug deal gone wrong.”

  Louise shook her head. “Well, at least he didn’t kill someone on the town green: That would be more than anyone could bear.” To have that picture-perfect New England scene bloodied was unthinkable.

  “Yep. We also have the occasional domestic killing. Back a few years ago, there was a whole crime wave up-county. We had a killing, a run of burglaries, and a couple of house burnings in a short span of time, all by one individual. When we caught this individual, the county’s crime wave disappeared into thin air.” Sergeant Drucker smiled calmly at her.

  He must think this idle conversation would have an effect on her, perhaps win her over. He had asked her for this private meeting in the mansion library, so of course he was calling the shots. But what he didn’t understand was how determined she was not to get involved. Or not any more than she already was.

  “So, Mrs. Eldridge, suicide’s hard for you to believe? Me, too. It’s hard to believe people will actually destroy themselves. Indicates a lack of faith in the future, don’t you think?”

  Louise didn’t answer, staring out the many-paned window at the tall pines fronting the mansion. Yes, she told herself, it would indicate that Grace had no faith in poetry, or in the beauty of nature which she claimed to love so dearly, or in God … Tears came to her eyes and she wiped them away with the back of her hand, since she had no handkerchief.

  Suddenly, she felt a softness against her bare legs, and realized Hargrave the library cat had come over to get a pat— or was it to give comfort? Where have you been keeping yourself, old boy, Louise wondered. She reached down and stroked his soft, round head, and immediately felt better.

  When she tried to turn her attention back to the trooper, however, Hargrave would have no part of it. The instant she stopped petting him, he began weaving back and forth around her legs, bunting each time so there was no possibility of ignoring him. She suspected the animal was trying to tell her something. Probably hungry, and figured Louise for a soft touch. She was; she would rustle him up some food as soon as she and this policeman finished talking.

  Then she looked up, and caught Sergeant Drucker in the act. He was unashamedly staring at her, his eyes crinkling with his smile. Drucker’s eyes were his weapon, sometimes twinkling, sometimes sad as a puppy’s. The man was trying to pry opinions out of her much as he would pry sardines from a can: gently, one by one.

  But why, since she had known Grace Cooley for the space of only one day? As head of the state’s western district major crime squad, he had been called in by Litchfield’s resident trooper to investigate the death. The state troopers’ barracks were a half-mile from the inn, so the response time was fast. Yellow police tape was hurriedly strung up around a large section of the property, including the mansion itself.

  The fifteen guests and the staff members had waited dispiritedly in the sunroom until Drucker’s officers plucked them, one by one, and took them into an office for separate interviews. Louise had been impressed. The troopers were taking no chances, even if this did appear to be suicide. If it turned out otherwise, they were assuring that no evidence was disturbed. By ten, the interviews wer
e over, and Louise expected that she would be free to go like the others. That was when Drucker, after a polite word with Bill, had called her into the library.

  “I need you for a few more minutes,” he had told her.

  “I hope it’s just a few,” she had said, with a limp smile she had hoped would evoke pity.

  So now she sat here with everything under control, even her tears. There was no way she was going to be caught in the emotional maelstrom of grieving for Jeffrey or Grace. Two people, virtual strangers, dashed to pieces on Connecticut’s rocks. It was bad enough that death had reared up again in her path; this time she intended to shun it.

  But it was hard. The lump in her throat was palpable as she remembered the last time she saw them: Jeffrey, the dashing sportsman in loden shorts and hiking boots, rucksack on his back, the light of adventure in his green eyes. Not even disdaining a 2,300-foot peak because he loved climbing so much. And the night before, dancing with zest and grace, talking spiritedly about his work with plants.

  And Grace, the earnest learner, who brought the delight of a child to the garden tour today, even overcoming her shyness to recite her floral poems. She had seemed emotionally wasted after her row with Bebe. Contending with a raging headache, and the terrible news of Jeffrey’s fall, she had to be escorted off to bed, again like a child.

  Louise silently choked back more tears, and reached her hand out to her friend, the cat. None of it was her business, she firmly reminded herself, even if she had made a bond with both Jeffrey and Grace in the short time she had known them. The dynamic scientist. The romantic gardener.

  She sat stoically, staring at the fireplace, and felt herself sinking into a quiet depression. The room was dark and this, perhaps, was why the bookcases and the marble busts loomed so ominously. Near the fireplace, a dried bouquet made of silver-coined money plant and lavender statice was in perfect harmony with the gloomy surroundings.

  Cold hearth, dead flowers: Louise shuddered. But then an orange spark caught her eye—a sign of life in a dead room. She sat forward and took a closer look. The hearth was not cold. Wisps of smoke emerged from a few still-glowing embers that squirmed like a tiny nest of restless orange worms.

  Wasn’t it remarkable, she thought, that with all these terrible distractions, the staff had remembered to make a fire tonight?

  Drucker’s dark eyes were still pinned on her, as if he were trying to force his way through the shell she had built around herself.

  “I expect something of you, Mrs. Eldridge.”

  “You do? What?”

  He gave her a semblance of a smile, as if he could see right through her, even if he couldn’t get to her. “I bet you can figure as well as I can. When I heard about a dead woman at the foot of Litchfield Falls, I had just barely digested the report that came in on that professor’s death up at Bear Mountain. I bet you don’t know how treacherous that little mountain is, with a fifteen-foot pile of stones on top of the summit that everybody thinks they have to scramble up. Maybe he lost his balance up there, who knows? Now you”—and he leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees—“probably have the same kinds of thoughts running through your head—thinking the deaths of two of the inn’s guests within hours of each other is too strange to be a total coincidence. Then I heard about Barbara Seymour’s tumble down the stairs. Though you might not know this, that lady might have died or at least become an invalid from that fall. She has bones like porcelain.”

  “It was just a miracle that Chris and Janie were able to break her fall,” Louise said faintly.

  “As for what I want, I have to confess that I’ve heard about you, or read about you, can’t remember which came first. The garden lady who’s solved crimes.”

  Snapped back to attention, she gave him a dour look. Did he really think she was going to be flattered by being identified like that?

  “Sergeant Drucker, please—I don’t want to get involved.”

  He scratched his fulsome head of dark hair, puzzled. “Ma’am, does a smart lady like you think you’re not already involved? You’re all involved: your husband and your daughter, and your friend and your friend’s son. So is every guest at Litchfield Falls Inn—at least until we make a determination of cause of death. And you can be of special help.”

  “How?”

  He leaned back and retrieved a small notepad from his shirt pocket, resting it on his knee. This move evoked the memory of her Fairfax police detective friend Mike Geraghty so strongly that she could almost overlay the image of Geraghty’s big body, cheery Irish face, and bright, marble-like blue eyes onto Sergeant Drucker’s more prosaic countenance. “First of all, I want you to know I go by the book. Though this case looks like a cut-and-dried suicide, I preserved the scene and we’re going to great lengths not to miss any evidence that may be lying about. Arid our inquiries will not stop until we’re completely satisfied there was no foul play. Though the Freeling death is not in our jurisdiction, it is possibly related to this case, and so our inquiries will also extend in that direction, as well as touch on Miss Seymour’s fall, if necessary. Three potential crimes, you might say. Now, you and your family have had a kind of a catbird seat this weekend at the inn—I figured you, particularly, know everything about everybody.”

  Louise was quiet and he continued with his speech, shaking a big finger for emphasis: “Pure and simple, Mrs. Eldridge. I want you to help us rule out murder in the death of Grace Cooley. And if you have anything to offer on Barbara Seymour’s accident or Jeffrey Freeling’s fall, well, that would be gravy.”

  Seeing her eyebrows come down in a frown, he hastened to add: “Believe me, I hold your skills in high regard, or I wouldn’t be trying to enlist your aid. I’d like you to run through some of the things you’ve seen, things you’ve heard—or overheard. Anything that helps us get a better handle on the relationships between the people around here.”

  Satisfied that he had made his point, he scooped up his little notepad, leaned his arms on his sturdy legs, and turned his penetrating gaze upon her. “Now, let’s take the most recent event first. The husband, James Cooley, is not a suspect in Grace Cooley’s death—he wasn’t out of sight of the others since the time she left the veranda about five P.M. That sharply reduces the odds that it was foul play: You and I both know that the spouse is the likeliest candidate in a situation like this. What we’re looking at—and I know these people were strangers to you—is connections. What associations, not immediately apparent, there were between the guests.”

  Louise looked at the sergeant and saw in him what she saw in herself: a puzzle solver. He had tweaked at her and finally broken her shell, her firm resolve not to become involved in the investigation of these deaths. They were both driven by a desire to know what happened, how it happened, and why. And most important, they needed to know who could have committed murder.

  She held up a hand casually, feeling as if it were a white flag of surrender. “Okay, I’ll help. Connections. Sure. I have lots of things I can tell you about connections.”

  He smiled broadly. “That’s what I’d heard. You probably have a complete vitae on the whole bunch of ’em by now.”

  “Oh? From whom did you hear that?”

  He was embarrassed. “Actually, I made a call to Fairfax County. I, uh, didn’t want to enlist your help without checkin’ a little closer. Talked to a Detective Geraghty.”

  “I know him well.”

  “Yep, he said that, too. And he said if anyone can smell a skunk in the woodpile, it’s you.” He smiled encouragingly. “He thinks very highly of you.”

  “Doesn’t think I did it, does he?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am, absolutely not.”

  Once, the Fairfax police had put her on the list of suspects, in the death of Madeleine Doering. She guessed Sergeant Drucker hadn’t delved that deeply during his background check. “And how is Detective Geraghty?”

  “Oh, he sends you his best.” Drucker’s mundane features broke into a big grin, and she coul
dn’t resist smiling back. Flipping over a page in the little notepad and extricating a pen from his pocket, he said, “Let’s just go through the list, shall we? Better still, let’s walk and talk.”

  “Sure—I’ve been doing that all day. What’s a little more?”

  “I want to take you to the Cooleys’ room. There’s something there that you might be able to decipher for me. Poetry. Not exactly my specialty.”

  She sighed. “All right, Sergeant Drucker. And then I suppose you’ll want to hear about the bumps and thumps in the night.”

  His eyes lit up. “Would I ever.”

  The words were penned in a round, neat hand. The dots for the “i’s” were tiny, neat circles. They were written on a sheet of paper about nine inches long by six inches wide that was torn off a desk pad imprinted with the name of the Litchfield Falls Inn. Only in the fourth line was there disorder, as if the author was confused.

  “Is it supposed to be a suicide note?” asked Louise.

  “Read it and see what you think. I think it’s possible.”

  Sergeant Drucker and Louise were in the Cooleys’ bedroom suite, which Louise noted was much larger than the others: special family privilege, no doubt. A suite tucked around the corner at the end of the hallway, it was done in pale rose and green. An empty vase stood on the bedside table. Louise could imagine Grace removing the bouquet from her bedroom, since she was philosophically opposed to cut flowers.

  The faint residue of Grace’s perfume was still in the air, a light French variety that Louise recognized as L’Air du Temps. The bed was made, but the pink-and-green quilt that covered it bore the faint impression of a body, and someone had lain their head on the ruffled pillow sham. It gave Louise an eerie feeling: Grace’s imprint, there on the bed. On the nearby desk was a pen, with its cap off, lying on the sheet of ivory paper.

  Louise could visualize Grace, distracted, probably holding her head in her hand since it was aching, sitting at the desk and composing the lines.