The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery

by Ann Ripley

  “The sheriff still thinks—”

  “Yes,” she rasped, and Louise felt the noise rebound through her ear canals. “He has tests still out at some lab, trying to prove I murdered Ernie. When he hears about what happened down here in Litchfield, who knows what they’ll do …” The woman was crying. Finally she removed her grip from around Louise and sat back on the bench.

  Louise exhaled in relief, then rubbed her arms where the woman had held her. She was perplexed. Was this a ruse to cover up her guilt in another murder, or was the woman simply half crazy over the thought of being falsely suspected for a second time?

  Bebe snuffled.

  “Shah,” said Louise, “listen.” They could sense, more than hear, the presence of other people.

  Bebe leaned over and whispered in her ear. “There’s bad things going on around here, Louise.”

  “Oh, God, do I need you to tell me that, too?” She scrambled to her feet. “I’m going to bed. There must be a good night’s sleep left in this weekend for me. I suggest you do the same.”

  But fear was catching. On her way back to her room, the sense of something evil in this dark old hall began to take hold of Louise’s mind. By the time she reached the door, she was clammy with sweat and nearly running. She clawed the door open, and closed and locked it behind her. Then she leaned against it, exhaling a great breath, as if she hadn’t dared to breathe for several minutes. Bebe was no phantom in the night—she was a flesh-and-blood person, or Louise wouldn’t still feel the pain of her unwelcome embrace. But who else was out there?

  More than anything else, those bumps in the night convinced Louise that murder had been committed in Litchfield County. Last night was like the prelude, and tonight, the reprise.

  Chapter 14

  LOUISE DOVE INTO THE DEEP END OF the rocky pool and came up shivering. A dozen vigorous strokes brought her back to where Bill and Nora were still inching their bodies into the shallow end. She could see the goose bumps on their upper legs. “Very cold,” she said, “but you’ll love it once you get in.”

  “That’s what people like you always say,” grumbled Bill. He liked his pools or oceans warm, preferring the Pacific to the Atlantic, a hot springs pool to the YMCA’s. There was no sun this morn-and a faint drizzle of rain was coming down, reducing the water temperature below his comfort level. It hadn’t deterred Janie and Chris: They were already diving and playing together like two porpoises, delighted with this pool adjacent to the river. It was another natural cavity in the land, like the watery pit at the base of the falls where Grace had been found dead.

  Finally, Bill and Nora immersed themselves and swam enough to at least warm up. It was time to call their clandestine meeting to order. After all, who would bother them, in an isolated pool near the river’s bend, in a drizzle, at eight in the morning?

  “This better be fast,” said Bill, shivering. “I’m turning blue.”

  “Then let’s decide what to do,” said Louise. “First, concerning Jeffrey. Any ideas?”

  Janie raised a dripping finger. She looked at the woods surrounding them, possibly fearing that Mark Post would pop from behind a tree. “Just remember what I said about certain suspicious dudes.” She splashed Chris and the two of them dove off in a wild race to the edge of the pool.

  “I have sources,” said Bill, and Louise recognized this as an understatement. He could use the resources of both the State Department and the CIA. “I’ll check on Mark and Sandy Post. Mark, I gather, is the one with a possible grudge against Jeffrey. Tom Paschen will know Sandy’s dad, since he’s big in politics.” Louise had never even thought of reaching back into Washington and asking their friend Paschen, the President’s chief of staff, for help. He had played a part in Louise and Bill’s investigations before. A strange, uptight sort of man, he always was helpful when they needed him. “The police will be running a check on the Gasparras,” Bill continued. “Maybe I’ll run a separate one, just for luck.”

  “Good,” said Louise. “As long as you’re doing that, why don’t you include Bebe Hollowell and Neil Landry.” She had not told them about her encounter with Bebe in the hall last night; she would rather leave it out for now, in fairness to Bebe. She said this much: “We know that Bebe despised Grace by the end of that garden tour. And Neil—we’re pretty sure of what he did to Barbara Seymour.”

  Bill plunged himself up and down in the water a few times for warmth, then hugged himself. “Okay, Louise, let’s see if I have this straight: We’re trying to find out if Jeffrey’s death was murder or an accident; whether Grace’s death was murder or suicide; and whether or not Neil Landry engineered Barbara’s fall. That’s it, huh?”

  “Yes, darling,” she said airily, making little bicycle exercise motions with her legs in the water.

  “That’s a lot of things to look into,” he said. “I thought we had pretty much agreed Grace self-destructed—”

  “Bill, really, what a way to put it. We did. But we might as well check everybody out while we’re checking. So many things have happened. They might be connected. And if they aren’t involved in one thing, they might be involved in another.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Bill glumly, “is there anyone here we consider innocent, except possibly me?”

  “Not until we prove them so,” she said, laughing.

  “And the police? You’re sure we’re not like the circus horse, stepping into the doo-doo …”

  “No,” she said. “We’re just doing what Sergeant Drucker asked me to do—remember, he invited me into this mess, I didn’t just barge my way in.”

  Bill raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t say, “As you usually do.” Instead, he said, “All right. We have three assignments, then.”

  Louise said, “First, let’s talk about Grace. Nora, you said she took a class from a New York poet that you knew. Can you call him—or her?”

  “Him. Yes.” Nora swirled her hands back and forth in the water in large, graceful circles. “I’ll do that. At least it might tell us how she was feeling—since poetry is so reflective of one’s inner state.”

  Louise was happy to note that Nora was less sad this morning, and hoped she continued to improve. She said, “And we’ve taped a Gardening with Nature program at the New York Botanical Garden, so for what it’s worth, I know the director of horticulture, Paul Warren. Grace talked a lot about visiting there. I’ll phone him; he might have something to offer us.”

  Janie and Chris had returned, out of breath, to listen. Janie said, “How about those Higher Directions people? The Storms, and, for that matter, Jim Cooley himself?”

  “Jim Cooley’s off the hook,” said Bill. “Don’t know why we would bother with him.”

  “But there’s Fiona,” said Louise, reminding them that she left the dinner table early. “Yet the sergeant insists she didn’t have time to do anything. You know who could find out about Cooley and the Storms for us? Charlie Hurd. Why don’t I call him?”

  “Louise,” cautioned Bill.

  “Yes?”

  “What we have to keep in mind is that Charles Hurd is a cocky, unscrupulous little son of a bitch.”

  “But Bill, we need him.” Charlie had catapulted to fame as a result of a political expose written by someone else. The young reporter, a slight, sharp-nosed blond man with a giant ego and the conscience of a gnat, had taken too much credit for the story, and Louise had known it. But she’d been helpless to stop it, partly because the story was important and partly because a political exposé that big needed a name attached to it—even the wrong one. In the wake of the story, Charlie had been hired on by The Washington Post. At least now Louise could extract some repayment from the arrogant young twerp.

  Thinking about him, her lips curled in a smile. She could just imagine him hurtling around the nation’s capital in his avant-garde sports car in pursuit of the next big story. He probably dreamed of exposes at night.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Bill, teeth chattering.

  “Cha
rlie will think this is boring, after the last time.”

  “Bet he’ll be impressed if we find out some of these dead people didn’t get dead on their own,” muttered Bill.

  “God,” said Janie plaintively, “we bring up Higher Directions, and you have a reporter friend of yours checking on it. So what are Chris and I supposed to do?”

  “Let’s see …” Louise thought about it, still treading water.

  “Hurry up, honey,” urged Bill. “What can they do? How about checking out staff people—Teddy, for example?”

  “Great,” said Janie, “we’ll talk to Teddy. I bet he sees lots of stuff going on. He might not even realize the significance of something he’s picked up just from watching the guests.”

  “If you’re checking him out, I’m doing it with you,” said Chris, grabbing Janie’s shoulders and threatening to dunk her. She escaped him by diving underwater and the pair started splashing each other again.

  Bill turned to Louise and Nora. “Our battle plan is laid. That’s about the best we can do, folks. Now, can I get out of this arctic pool before rigor mortis sets in?”

  “Sure,” said Louise. She nuzzled under the surface in a smooth breaststroke, raising her head long enough to tell them, “I need to do a few more lengths.” In the solitude of the velvet-soft water, she stroked firmly across the pool and back a few times, then around its circumference, diving under and surveying the rocky kingdom below. She reveled in the silky sensuality of swimming, the strong unity of muscles working together, and knew the joy of the amphibian.

  Leaping out of the pool, Louise had more energy than when she had climbed in. To her dismay, she saw that the sky was glowering with black clouds. More rain might interfere with their return visit to Wild Flower Farm today. Sergeant Drucker had said that they could leave the inn briefly as long as they stayed together and came back for some final questioning around noon.

  Bill stood near the pool’s edge and handed Louise a beach towel, while Nora waited quietly on a rustic bench nearby. It was an idyllic scene, the red horse barn and dirt road in the background, the hills rising beyond it. As she gave herself a quick rubdown, Louise glanced enviously at Nora’s sumptuous figure so visible in her bathing suit; hormone pills, taken to relieve menopausal symptoms, were increasing Nora’s curves, though her weight now was on the cusp. Five more pounds and someone might call her chubby. Louise herself was gaunt by comparison, with her long lean legs. She slung on her robe, gathered up her duffel bag, and decided to forget figures. “My gosh, it’s almost nine, folks. We don’t have much time for detecting before we’re off to Wild Flower Farm.”

  As the three of them left Janie and Chris frolicking in the water and walked quickly up the long hill to the inn, a sense of hopelessness sneaked up on Louise. “I wonder if we can do it.”

  “Do it?” asked Bill. “Do what—our investigating?”

  “Yes. What can we learn on a Sunday morning on a rainy summer weekend when most normal folks are doing things like eating breakfast, reading the newspaper, or going to church? Will we be able to get through to anyone? They’re not clucking around, like we are, trying to uncover phantom murderers who probably don’t even exist.”

  Bill shrugged. “Look, maybe we’ll get lucky; maybe we won’t. Whatever happens, let’s agree to meet at noon in the library to compare notes.”

  Nora caught stride with Louise. So only Louise could hear, she said, “We can only do our best, and keep ourselves tuned in to what’s really going on around here.”

  Sure, thought Louise skeptically. But not at the price of more testy confrontations between Nora and her husband. He refused to take life as seriously as their neighbor did. And yet she couldn’t forget: Nora had always been right about her dark predictions of danger in the past. Louise had ignored her before. She had the scars to prove it.

  Once back in her and Janie’s room, Louise dressed in her favorite, many-pocketed shorts and a plaid sports shirt. She put through a phone call to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx and finally wangled the home phone number of Paul Warren from the reluctant operator by telling her she was with the Connecticut State Police. The director of horticulture must have been doing some of those normal things that people do on Sundays; she left a message for him and said she would call back in one hour. Her tension level grew. She would have to do better than this if she was to help Drucker get to the bottom of these two “accidental” deaths.

  Next, Louise called Charlie Hurd, got his answering machine, and started biting a fingernail in frustration. Her message was terse: She told him she needed his help urgently. She heard back from him in ten minutes, and that told her more about Charlie—he was a type A personality who constantly monitored his home messages. Though he was not her favorite person, he couldn’t be all bad. He had responded immediately when she said she needed a favor.

  “Louise,” said Charlie, “what are you into now—anything I can get my teeth into?” It was his usual tone, pushy and self-centered.

  Sprawled barefoot on the bed with the phone, she plopped her head back on the pillow and tried to relax. This could be a lengthy conversation. “Oh, I don’t know—what would you think of double murder and an attempted murder, with two or maybe three perps?”

  Charlie sounded disgusted. “Louise, you should remember who you are. Perps? That’s no language for a housewife and mother to use—”

  She’d raised his hackles—good!—while he’d also raised hers, of course. “Charlie, you’re not the only one who can cut a swath through the world using inappropriate gangsta slang.”

  “At least get it right, Louise. To you it may be ‘gangsta’ slang, but actually it’s ‘policespeak.’ Cops use it constantly.”

  “Yeah, I know. Cops. Gangsters. And cocky P.I.’s in detective stories.” She sat up on the bed. “I’m not just a housewife anymore. Think of me as an on-camera talent, because that’s what I am.”

  Had she shut him up yet?

  “Okay, Louise, point taken. Except I hear they don’t pay much at WTBA-TV—like maybe slave wages.”

  “Maybe,” she answered smoothly. “But it’s those extra perks—the voice-over jobs. Very, very lucrative.”

  That was enough—in fact, two “verys” was one too many. She had his attention.

  “Seriously, Charlie,” she said in a more conciliatory voice, “we have some problems here at Litchfield Falls Inn. I need your excellent, um, investigative skills.” There, that would certainly appeal to his ego. Briefly, she ran through the events of the past two days.

  “Whew!” he said. “It could be a helluva story, Louise. And then, it could be, well, just dull as dishwater.” His voice perked up again. “Yet, even an accidental fall off a mountain by an absentminded science prof, plus a tragic leap by a young maiden is good, very good—”

  “Matron. Young matron.”

  “Young matron off a boiling, roiling, rural Connecticut waterfall … all right! She wasn’t a little bit pregnant, was she?”

  Down to business at last. “I don’t think so, Charlie. So here’s what I need, if you can find out fast …” She told him about Higher Directions and about Jim Cooley and the Storms. He would get back to Louise as soon as possible, he said.

  She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. Dealing with Charlie had given her a mild headache. He seemed to bring out the worst in her. If she didn’t have coffee and food soon, she would perish. She packed her belongings in the space of two minutes, not in the pristine way that Bill would have packed, which would have taken five times as long, but surely good enough for the short trip from New York back to Washington, D.C. Carefully, she retrieved Puny off the bed and tucked it safely in with her clothes. Should the maid decide to clean while they were gone at Wild Flower Farm, Louise didn’t want her peerless pillow misplaced among the inn’s polyurethane neck-breakers.

  She hurried into the hall, remembering with a little shudder her eerie experiences there. Only those fuddy-duddy Seymour ancestors rendered in
oil on the wall knew what really had happened.

  She stopped in her tracks and sniffed. Breakfast and coffee smells wafted enticingly up to her, but suddenly she remembered she had to tell Sergeant Drucker of last night’s adventures. This time she was sure they were not just figments of her imagination. Back in her room, she quickly dialed the number he had given her, listening to her stomach growl.

  But Sergeant Drucker was at the morgue. Another trooper took the details. In the end, her little story did not move him—the darkened hall, Bebe’s pleas, people moving around, doors opening, whispers.

  “So that’s it?” he said indifferently. “Sergeant Drucker will be at the inn as soon as he can; I think it’s safe to wait until you see him to tell him about this.”

  Fine, Louise thought. She’d wait.

  In the lobby Louise found Jim Cooley, looking for all the world as if he were hung over. He had not shaved, and that alone dramatically changed his usual bandbox appearance. Even his smooth, dark blond hair seemed slightly askew in a boyish sort of way, as if a comb had not gone through it at all today. His olive sports shirt matched the color of his hazel eyes, giving him a melancholy, monochromatic appearance.

  Her heart went out to him. “Jim.” She came over and touched him on the shoulder.

  “Hi, Louise.”

  “Why don’t you come with us this morning? We’re going to Wild Flower Farm. At least it will be a diversion while you wait …”

  What was he waiting for? To be dismissed so he could go back to his Brooklyn home, alone, just a few hours away?

  As if reading her mind, he said, “They’re finishing the autopsy; it got delayed last night.” A grim smile. “People insist on getting their sleep.” A long sigh. “Maybe I will go with you—it would take my mind off things for an hour or so. And it would be a fitting tribute to Grace.”

  “She must have loved Wild Flower Farm.” Louise could feel her eyes dampening as she thought of Grace, lost in the beauty of the gardens yesterday.