by Ann Ripley
“She visited there several times with Barbara, and she did love it, of course. I’ll check in with Drucker and then I’ll be ready to go. Thank you, Louise.”
She passed her husband, who was sitting in the sunroom talking on his cell phone; he must be completing his own calls. When she arrived in the dining room, most of the others already had settled in to eat. Quickly, she negotiated for her first cup of morning coffee. Barbara Seymour sat at a table with her niece Stephanie, and Louise was appalled at the inn proprietor’s appearance: The elderly woman looked somehow shrunken. Barbara must be bereft over the loss of her niece by marriage.
Mark Post was just sitting down at a neighboring table with his wife Sandy and the omnipresent Widow Hollowell. It was a sober little group, except for Mark. He stood at his chair, gesticulating in the air with a cigarette in his hand, as if to illustrate some point. Sandy had a sour expression on her pretty face; she was obviously not impressed with her new husband’s story.
Louise’s mind suddenly evoked an image of the two tall men she had seen embracing in Litchfield Falls Inn’s dark hallway early Saturday morning.
It was a stretch, and she wouldn’t even have thought of it had Janie not mentioned the man’s sexual aloofness toward his newlywed wife, a wife who appeared to be increasingly alienated as the weekend wore on. Could those have been the silhouettes of Mark Post and Jeffrey Freeling? Had they become entangled in a love affair that had gone wrong— and that Mark was anxious to conceal now that he had married an heiress?
Was that why Jeffrey had died?
Her eyes alight with excitement, Louise drank down her coffee and charted what to do next. Who at NYU was going to be forthcoming enough to verify or shoot down such a mad tale, which, as she thought about it, grew even madder: Beautiful blond Sandy, apparently tossed between two men, a professor and a senior student. But in reality a cover-up for their homosexual love affair. A love affair that blossomed again at a Connecticut country inn, shortly after the former student’s marriage to the girl.
Louise took a good look at Mark. There he was, MBA, entrepreneurial businessman, computer expert, with political connections and available money. But murdering Jeffrey Freeling to permanently get rid of his sexual past? A stretch, indeed.
But she couldn’t let go of the idea. She had to find out if Mark was gay. That would help sort this thing out. But what should she do? Go up to Sandy and say, How’s your love life? I hear your husband is a little less than heterosexual? Frantically, she tried to recall any connection she had at NYU. What she needed right now was a raging gossip who knew the sexual proclivities of people on campus. After all, people did not conduct their love lives in a vacuum. But Louise knew no one who could help her there.
Bill sat down and she leaned forward to touch his arm. “Bill, I’ve got a theory.”
“About what?” he asked warily.
“About Mark Post—”
A shadow fell across them and she looked up, startled. Jim Cooley had suddenly appeared at her side.
“Can I join you now?” he said.
“Of course, Jim.” She rubbed her fingers gently against her eyelids, trying to quell her impatience. Now she would have to mentally switch gears again, set aside her exciting new theory about Mark and Jeffrey’s past, and concentrate instead on the new widower. Bill was right: There were so many angles, so many things happening around this old inn, that it made it hard to concentrate on anything.
Jim Cooley looked around the room, and for a long moment his gaze rested on the unhappy-looking Sandy Post. Then he turned back to Louise and Bill. “Want to hear the latest?” His voice was deep and morose. “I talked to Sergeant Drucker; he’s already busy with his men on the grounds, as they say, ‘processing’ the scene. He says the coroner found her blood levels of antidepressants very high.”
“Did she normally take heavy doses?” asked Louise.
He shook his tired head. “Lord, no, Louise. One made her exceptionally woozy and took all the edge off that needed coming off. Two or more—why, that would have made her not care about anything.”
And that, in fact, was what Grace had looked like there in the pool at the bottom of the falls, a woman who no longer cared about anything: her husband, her community, her garden. A woman who could no longer relate to the planet on which she lived, and sought peace elsewhere.
So, there was one death accounted for. Maybe Louise shouldn’t even bother to call back Paul Warren at the botanical garden. What could he tell her, anyway?
How Do You Relate to Your Planet? The Garden As Therapy
PEOPLE ARE BEGINNING TO REALIZE the earth’s pain. There is no doubt about it when world leaders talk as seriously about global warming as they do about potential war in the Middle East. Closer to home, many others are becoming concerned, and are doing something about it. A growing movement in both therapy and religion focuses on earth-based spirituality and therapeutic healing.
Prestigious organizations such as Harvard, and religious icons such as Catholic bishops and certain priests and ministers, are taking up this issue, in spite of scattered critics intimating earth worship. But the movement is very grounded: At its heart is the belief that mankind is alienated from the earth and needs to return to its bosom. Both the psychologists and the theologians involved maintain that people can no longer “feel”—can no longer give and receive affection. Some cite this vacuum of meaning in people’s lives, shopping, frenetic activity, and a constant appetite for scandal as by-products of this condition.
The garden, the earth we touch, the bedrock on which we stand, the birds and animals, are all thought to help reconnect us to Mother Earth. Proponents talk about how mankind must include “land and the nonhuman community” in its concerns and its prayers. Catholic bishops have called for “environmental justice.” Citizens of communities threatened with environmental pollution are beginning to consider it a moral matter—not just a Superfund cleanup job.*
This concern for the ecology has become a part of the healing arts. Botanic gardens, of course, have long provided training in horticultural therapy, to help the physically and mentally handicapped. But the movement is becoming more widespread. A Harvard-associated institute, as well as several other American colleges, is now teaching “ecopsychology.” And child therapists are using actual gardens to help their clients recover from traumatic stress.
Psychotherapy usually focuses on the individual. Ecopsychology is different: It tries to connect patients with their fellow human beings and with their planet.
A client emerging from a session with an ecopsychologist may have some strange homework. Among the possible assignments: Choose a plant or tree or animal near your home, and study it for five minutes each day. Go out in your yard and find out what kind of soil is there, what kind of geological bedrock, what watershed you are in. The natural world, then, becomes part of the cure, and the disturbed person develops what is called an “ecological self,” or “holon,” something that is a whole in itself, as well as a part of a larger whole.
Ecopsychologists believe that we humans can hear the earth speaking through us. Thus, our individual symptoms of unhappiness are not only indicators of personal or family dysfunction, but signals of trouble in the environment in which we live.
“We feel the pain of the earth,” says Sarah Conn, a Harvard lecturer in psychology who teaches ecopsychology at Cambridge Hospital. “The news about environmental degradation is hard to avoid. Anyone who walks, breathes, looks, or listens knows that the air, the water, and the soil are being contaminated and that nonhuman species are disappearing at alarming rates. Yet the great majority of us, in this country and in much of the Western world, seem to be living our lives as if this were not so.”
She believes we are so cut off from our connection to the earth that “even though we are bleeding at the roots, we neither understand the problem nor know what we can do about it.” One such signal of grief is shopping. Conn calls it a “materialistic disorder” of such impor
tance that she would like to see it catalogued in the psychologists’ diagnostic manual. The need to consume, she believes, “is a graphic signal of our culture’s disconnection from the earth. Our only current way of hunting and gathering seems to be shopping and accumulating merchandise.”
Conn thinks many people are like those unfortunate plants that live in an impoverished monoculture. “The inner emptiness that results from the breakdown of community and the rise of consumerism leads people toward addictive behavior as they attempt to fill that emptiness with products, substances, celebrities, and activities.” Thus, there is need for not only growth in human relationships, but identification with the biosphere as a whole. And that can often start with a simple reconnection with the soil or plants.
Children’s affinity to nature was written about in the moving story The Secret Garden, in which three youngsters grow and heal while restoring a hidden garden landscape. A children’s medical center in Massachusetts is breaking new ground by using a specially designed garden to help children heal from traumatic events. It is a one-acre space filled with trees, small hills, a cave, water ponds, and streams. With their therapist, the young people explore the land. Some areas encourage risk-taking, while others appear as safe havens.
The theory is that sensations help unlock memories. By lying facedown on a mound in the garden, crouching within a “cave” made from an ancient yew tree, or crossing the cold river to explore an island in the middle, the children can unlock memories and feel the things that created their problems.
People over the millennia have known that gardens are good for the soul—although we can’t ignore the mixed results for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Four hundred years before Christ, the Persians brought gardens to perfection. They named these enclosed and irrigated refuges “pairidaeza,” or paradise parks. Today’s gardeners are just as wise as the Persians. They know full well that a few minutes a day spent weeding or hoeing the garden, or simply stretched out on a couch enjoying its beauty, can be as helpful as a therapy session and as spiritual as a church service. But for the benefit of those who have missed these simple truths, mental health professionals and religious leaders are bringing them into the doctor’s office and the church.
*The earth and its trees appear to be coming to man’s rescue in some of these cleanups. A species of poplar tree is now being used experimentally to purge pollution from the soil of nuclear and chemical sites, including the Rocky Flats Plant, Colorado, where warheads made for nuclear bombs left behind plutonium pollution. Poplars are thought to soak up and break down toxic organic compounds in soil.
Chapter 15
IT WAS A CHANGE OF SCENERY, AND everyone needed it. Even the three-mile ride in the Litchfield Falls Inn van to Wild Flower Farm was a pleasure. For a moment, they could almost forget the sad events that had taken place in the past day.
The beleaguered guests were getting the gold-plated tour of the farm from the horticulturalist himself, a man in his sixties. On the back of his sunburned head he wore an old work hat that had seen plenty of New England weather. He gathered the group together in the begonia greenhouse and patiently explained, probably for the thousandth time, how these lush beauties were propagated by cuttings. As he talked, his gentle hands fondled ‘Ninette,’ an apricot begonia from the Blackmore and Lang-dons strain of Bath, England. He was repeating what he had said for the WTBA-TV camera yesterday, so Louise fazed out the words and lost herself in the psychedelic beauty of the flower. She had already resolved to buy a ‘Ninette’ for her own shady garden.
She soon discovered she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t paying strict attention. Sandy and Mark Post were standing behind a half-wall, deep in their own conversation. She sidled over and tuned them in, pretending to study the begonias intently.
No, it was not a conversation. It was a quiet squabble. An upper-middle-class squabble. No yelling, crying, waving of arms, tipping over tables, or throwing a few dishes, which could vent some steam and possibly lead to a romantic reconciliation. This one was quiet and venomous, guaranteed to leave them both unhappier than when they started.
Sandy was a vibrant young woman, and Louise was almost embarrassed by the fact that she had read her so well. Sandy was dissatisfied sexually. There was no way to avoid that conclusion.
Louise watched the couple for a moment, and then walked slowly back to the cluster of listeners, so as not to be conspicuous. Their behavior only strengthened Louise’s far-out theory about Mark’s sexuality. Could Jeffrey Freeling have been his partner?
Even if Sandy Post knew this, a young woman with her background and pride would never divulge the information, probably not even to a close friend—probably not even to Louise’s seemingly guileless daughter, Janie, an expert at extracting confidences from people.
As her gaze wandered over the little crowd, Louise saw something even more upsetting than the quarrelsome newlyweds. The Gasparras were missing. She decided instantly to try to find them, ducking out of the huge shed and into a faint Connecticut drizzle.
It took just a few steps for both her clothes and her sneakers to become soaked by the rain. She ignored her damp state, for she wanted to find the Gasparras quickly. Something told her Rod was asking for trouble. The first place she looked was in the building that stood two structures down from the begonia greenhouse, its door ajar. She peeked through the crack. Inside, tables were filled with neatly packaged plants awaiting shipping. And Rod and Dorothy were standing just inside. Practical people, they wore yellow slickers, rain hats, and black-and-yellow rubber shoes; unlike her, they were probably dry as toast. Since Rod had shoved his raincoat aside, Louise could see a bulge in his sports jacket pocket, and wondered half seriously whether he was carrying a handgun. He was talking angrily to a third person, his words spouting out with bitter abandon.
By moving her head closer to the crack, she was able to see the third person: Wild Flower Farm’s owner, Fenimore Smith. “My dear sir,” Smith was saying, in his cultured voice, one aristocratic eyebrow moving upward in apparent shock, “I take umbrage at your attitude …”
Louise had met the suave Mr. Smith yesterday. He ran the successful nursery as a hobby, only appearing here on weekends—otherwise busy in New York running a large publishing company. He was a tall man in his fifties with fine features and thick, salt-and-pepper hair. He was wearing a gray translucent slicker over a sweatshirt and chinos. A rakish Tilley canvas hat was set well back on his head. Right now, he had his hands pushed confidently into his coat pockets, and he was rocking back and forth on his deck shoes. His hooded eyes never left Gasparra’s face. Yesterday, Louise had felt the effect of those hooded eyes locked on hers: She interpreted it as a power move, New York—style. A Washington mover and shaker, she thought, would not have been quite so “in-your-face.” He probably would have smiled a little, flattered a little, put a little spin on his words with the thought that someday he might run for office and would need the Gasparras’ vote.
Not Smith. “… and I can’t fathom what you are charging me with, since of course I have never obtained pollen illegally,” said the nursery owner, “any more than I would infringe on another grower’s patent, as you seem to be on mine.” His nose seemed to elevate a little, and Louise couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the disadvantaged Gasparras, shorter, homelier, and less well-spoken.
Smith was tough native stock, like a wild rose, while Gasparra had been hybridized many times through unions of many nationalities. Ironic, she thought, that while in the plant world the hybridized one was prized above the native one, just the opposite was true in some circles of human beings.
“The development of the Sacred Blood iris is very clearly documented,” Smith continued. “We paid almost three hundred thousand dollars for that work. We have records of every step in the genetic-engineering process, including all costs for the research, which were, as I said, enormous. It’s true that many others attempted to approach the red quality that was finally achieved through t
he wonderful work of Dr. Freeling.”
He took a step closer to Gasparra and his wife. “I talked to him only yesterday morning, and he mentioned your charges, Mr. Gasparra, and said he told you there was recourse for you if you think we’ve stolen one of your irises for our research. But to come here, the very day after that great scientist died!” Smith slammed his palm down on the plain board table piled with plants. “Jeffrey was a man of impeccable honesty—God rest his soul. What a terrible accident it was that took his life. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.”
The mention of Freeling’s accident gave her a chill, for Louise realized how easy it would have been for an angry individual like Rod Gasparra to shove Jeffrey off that mountain. After all, he had a twisted motive: revenge for fancied misdeeds on the part of the professor. And people with twisted motives sometimes did strange things. Maybe he had killed Jeffrey Freeling yesterday, and intended to complete his vengeance by killing Fenimore Smith today.
Smith made clear what Louise had always suspected. Gasparra didn’t have much of a case. At any rate, DNA tests could prove the matter, one way or another—so why would Freeling and Smith take a chance on stealing someone else’s plant material?
But Gasparra wasn’t finished. “My wife and I,” he said, “we’re the ones who spent years creating the bright red iris—genuine field-grown plants, not some fancy magic out of a laboratory. And then, someone came and stole our work from under our noses!”
“That’s true,” said Dorothy, in a strained voice.
“Improbable, my dear people. You were working with an iris similar, but not identical, to the Sacred Blood iris. My dear man, if you know iris, you know how profligate they are.” And he rolled his eyes, as if talking of a wanton woman.
“But now you will sell it for fifty dollars a plant, and receive royalties from anyone else who sells it!” Gasparra cried, desperation creeping into his voice.