"Yoly was happy," Felix said, in his rough translation. "She'd met a man. An older man she said had been good to her. He'd even taken her on a trip to Newport, Rhode Island. He said it reminded him of his home, the boats and the water. He wasn't from here, originally."
For the first time, a little smile crossed Celinda's face, and words passed between her and Felix.
"Yoly joked that they had something in common," Felix said. "He had an accent, too."
Celinda said something else to him.
"It wasn't in the letter, but Celinda believes Yoly was embarazada—pregnant." Another heartbreaking smile and more words.
Maybe that was the connection. Could Yoly have gone to the Peacocks for help? "What made her think that?" I asked.
"Yoly said she'd need a new rebozo soon."
"A shawl?" Lucy asked, phone to chest, obviously on hold.
"It's also used to carry a baby," I said, appreciating the shorthand between mother and daughter.
"She thinks Yoly didn't want to tell her until she and the man were married, but there was a difficulty. That's why she didn't give the man's name."
"Already married?"
"Perhaps. Perhaps an immigration issue," Felix suggested. He was thinking of Guido.
"Senora Rivera, where was Yoly working the last time you heard from her? Could she have met this man at work?" I asked in halting Spanish.
"She was a cleaning lady, at a big house near the water," Felix translated. "Live-in."
"Right in Springfield?"
"We think so. Most of her letters have a Springfield postmark."
Obsessed with where Yoly's letters had come from, I'd neglected to ask the obvious.
"Senora Rivera, when you wrote to Yoly, where did you send your letters?"
When Yoly worked as a nanny for the crew leader, letters were sent to her at that family's home. Once she switched jobs, her mail went to a post office box in Springfield. At the request of her new employers, mail should not be sent to their address. Celinda showed me the one letter that was returned to her as undeliverable— 2381 Hawthorne Lane. One bus stop away from the Peacocks. And the Fifields.
CHAPTER 47
The house on Hawthorne Lane had been torn down years ago, replaced by a newer, bigger, no doubt uglier model. The original residents were long gone, and judging by the FOR SALE sign and uninhabited look, the current own ers had already packed their bags. I did the next best thing.
"You're not really here about the landscaping, are you?" Dina Fifield had seen through me five minutes into my visit.
"No, ma'am. Not entirely."
"Please don't 'ma'am' me. Not unless you're from the South, which I suspect you aren't."
When I called Mrs. Fifield, she agreed to see me right away. It was only after I hung up that I realized she thought I was moving in on the gardening business recently vacated by Guido Chiaramonte. The guy hadn't been dead for forty-eight hours. Now I knew where Win got his ambition; these people wasted no time.
"Win does it all the time, of course. Ma'ams people. As I said, unless you're from the South, or running for office, it's unacceptable. After the age of forty, women hate it. You'll hate it in about four or five years, won't you, dear?" she said, with one glance, assessing my age, weight, and economic status.
And I'll hate you in about four or five minutes, I thought. Dina Fifield had to be sixty-five but looked forty-five. Very slim, spray-tanned, and highlighted by masters, she was dressed in a form-fitting tennis dress that would have done any of the current crop of tennis nymphets proud. Gossips claimed the Nalgene water bottle she was never seen without was filled with gin; if they were right, it didn't seem to be doing her any harm.
"So, at the risk of being rude, if you're not here about the garden, why are you here?"
"I'd be delighted to discuss your landscaping needs," I lied, "but you're right—there is something else I was hoping to speak with you about. Have you read any of the articles in the Springfield Bulletin about a missing girl named Yoly Rivera? She was last seen—"
"Yes, yes, I know . . . 'Where is my daughter?' So you're the one who lit a fire under Jon Chappell. Andrew Chappell's boy. Cute kid, but a classic under-achiever."
I kept talking. "Yoly Rivera worked as a cleaning lady in this neighborhood about thirty years ago. I thought you might remember her."
"Are you serious? I don't remember my cleaning lady from thirty days ago. They come and go. They make a little money and go back home to live like queens."
I'd thought the same thing myself, but cringed at hearing it from Dina Fifield. "Not this one. She wrote her family that she met a rich man who was going to take care of her."
"What was she supposed to write? 'I'm in a low-paying, boring job; my boyfriend slaps me around; and I cry myself to sleep every night?' Look, I get a name, a phone number, and a few references. That's it. I'm grateful if they show up and don't steal anything. I don't adopt them.
"Now let me ask you something," she said. "Why are you asking these questions and not the police?"
"I guess they've got their hands full with Guido's murder."
She softened the tiniest bit. "Yes, it's terrible. Guido was the best I've ever had," she said nostalgically. "Gardener, that is. I don't know what I'll do. It's so hard to find a good man."
Thank god I didn't really want this heartless bitch as a client.
"He worked here for over thirty years. He used to say it would take another twenty years to get the garden the way he wanted it. Of course, he was a terrible flirt."
The way she said it made me think Guido didn't always strike out.
"He just rang my doorbell one day, not unlike you. I'd seen him around town, of course. How could you miss him? I know what you're thinking. But thirty years ago he was quite dashing. Thick, dark hair; chiseled body; smooth as Carrara marble. Probably from lifting so much of it. Men around here don't lift anything heavier than a golf club, if they can pay someone else to do it. When you meet a man like that, that's the way he always looks to you—no matter how fat or banged-up he gets." The old softie sipped from her Nalgene bottle and led me through the French doors to her garden.
"We can walk around the property, and if you're seriously interested, we'll make a real appointment." She pointedly checked the time. "I have thirty-five minutes until my court time, so you have fifteen. Shall we?"
No wonder Guido said he needed another twenty years. A large square, it was bordered on all sides by mature trees and squared-off English yews. Between the yews and the enormous, high-maintenance lawn, useful for touch football photo ops, Guido probably guaranteed himself a weekly maintenance gig for life. And then there was the fountain.
That first summer, Guido sold Mrs. Fifield on the idea of an Italian marble fountain. Eager to see Guido with his shirt off, Dina agreed. That's how I came to be standing eyeball to marble penis with an oversized Roman god who, from a certain angle, looked like Guido and appeared to be ejaculating twenty feet into the air. No doubt one of his little jokes.
"What do you think?" she asked.
"It's remarkable," I said, failing to come up with any other word for the twenty-by-twenty-foot marble excrescence in front of me. Roman gods and sea monsters cavorted incongruously with wood nymphs, satyrs, and assorted animals. Four angels with long trumpets stood in each corner, and the entire fountain was surrounded by a collection of statues that seemed to be haphazardly assembled for a fire sale. Despite the occasional lapses into good taste, the end result was more Pizza Napoli than Piazza Navona.
"Guido designed it. I hated it, too, in the beginning," she said, admiring it as if for the first time. "There are twenty-seven separate statues. Guido just kept piling them on all that summer." She laughed.
He probably got a nice kickback from the marble supplier, I thought. "When was the fountain installed?" I asked politely, steering myself away from any conversation that might require me to comment on its beauty.
"Oh dear, it was so long ago." She too
k another swig from the water bottle, to refresh her memory.
"Let's see, it was the summer my late husband was away so much. In Washington, D.C., of all places . . . in the summer. He was an attorney, and something was going on. The Peacocks were having work done in their garden, and the street was a terrible mess—dust and trucks everywhere . . . it was chaos. Anyway, Guido and I decided we might as well do it. Put the fountain in, that is," she said coyly.
"Was that when Congressman Fifield got interested in politics?"
"Win? He's not even that interested now, other than getting reelected. He couldn't have been less interested back then. That was the year he graduated from prep school. He spent the whole summer chasing ass in Maine, at our summer house. Oh dear, I've shocked you."
"What year was that?" I said, ignoring her crude remark.
"Who remembers? They grow up so fast. Ask that mousy little thing who works for him. She's probably got all his old report cards filed."
Another stolen glance at her watch told me I'd exceeded my fifteen minutes.
"I can drop off some garden books if you like, to give you some ideas," I said, finishing up.
"Would you? I'd adore that. Just leave them with the house keeper if I'm not in. Any fresh ideas for the garden would be wonderful. There are just so many times you can redecorate the houses."
The lady of the manor dismissed me and I headed next door. Walking slowly, I stole a last glance back at the fountain and found myself thinking I should go for the job. It would be a service to the community to destroy such an atrocious thing.
CHAPTER 48
I walked back through the hemlocks, no smarter than I was before talking with Dina Fifield.
Halcyon's official opening was a few weeks away, but I had a hard time staying focused. Hurtful, decades-old secrets were in danger of coming out; Anna was distraught, confined to her bed, lighting candles and praying; and, most important, Hugo was still in jail, now facing even more serious charges. And I'd done nothing but stir things up needlessly.
Thinking of Hugo reminded me of his last, curious words before O'Malley led him away. I headed for the espaliered trees blanketing Richard Stapley's stone wall. I'd forgotten them in the days since Hugo's arrest.
Espaliered trees were fashionable in small Italianate gardens in the twenties and thirties. I was grateful Hugo had taken an interest, since I had no experience with either fruit trees or espaliers. The pear trees had already blossomed, and wouldn't need pruning until after the growing season, but Hugo said they needed some attention, so I went to check them out.
Over the course of many seasons, the trees had been pruned and trained to grow horizontally over the handsome stone wall using an intricate grid of wires and bamboo canes forced between the chinks in the stones. I resecured some of drooping branches, but nothing else seemed amiss, until I noticed a deep pile of mulch, sloppily shoved up against the bottom of the wall at the far end. I bent down to spread it around. As I did, I uncovered the top of a hand-hewn cornerstone. I dug farther, with only my gloved hands, and saw the date, as Hugo must have before shoving the mulch there to cover it: A.D. 1974, the same year Yoly Rivera vanished.
I pulled off my gloves and phoned Lucy and Felix, but I couldn't reach them. I tried Gerald Fraser, but his line was busy. When the phone rang, I assumed it was one of them calling me back, but it was O'Malley.
"I thought you'd like to know, we released Hugo Jurado early this morning. We found our two witnesses, a Mr. and Mrs. Galicia. They confirmed Hugo's whereabouts the morning Guido was killed. They shot plenty of video in the waiting room of the marriage bureau before tying the knot. You were right," he added grudgingly.
In the background of the Galicias' wedding pictures, only occasionally obscured by themselves, were Hugo and Anna, canoodling. And as if their testimony wasn't enough, there was an exonerating time code in the lower-right-hand corner of the frame.
"The Galicias went home to Guatemala for their honeymoon," Mike continued. "They didn't know we were looking for anyone until they returned yesterday."
I felt an adrenaline rush of success. "What about the fingerprints and the car?" I asked, pushing my luck.
"Felix's lawyer friend grilled the woman who saw Hugo's car, and she finally admitted she couldn't be sure of the time. As far as the fingerprints, the lawyer's investigator lifted them from a number of other items at Chiaramonte's. Hugo did work there for a time, so the fact that his prints were on the weapon, too, was inconclusive. We had to let him go."
At least for now. That was left unsaid and hanging in the air when O'Malley hung up. I reached Anna's daughter and she told me that Felix and Anna were already downtown picking up Hugo. The phone rang again.
"Hey, it's about time you called me back," Gerald Fraser said. He'd left me a message I must have accidentally erased with all the snotty ones from Lucy.
"What was it?" I asked.
"Probably just another false lead," he said. "I'll let you know if anything pans out. What's your big news?"
I told him about the witnesses and Hugo's release.
"That's terrific," he said. "You're a pretty good little detective once you get going."
"I knew it wasn't Hugo," I said, pleased with myself. " 'Take a look at the espaliers'? Does that sound like a man being dragged off to the gallows?" I told him about the date on the wall and the fountain. "That's the reason I called you, even before I heard from O'Malley."
"What do you think it means, kiddo?"
"Dina's fountain was installed the same year as the stone wall at Halcyon, 1974. That's a lot of digging in a one-block radius that we know our missing person frequented. What if Guido killed Yoly and buried her body in the fountain? That was the one thing he personally attended to at the Fifield home, other than the lady of the house. He designed the fountain, oversaw its construction, and had plenty of access day and night, thanks to Mrs. Fifield."
"It's a good guess, and you may even be right, but there is one small problem. You've got zero proof."
Gerald was right, of course. No one in his right mind was going to tear apart the family compound of a local politician on my gut feeling.
"I'll just have to check out that fountain myself," I said.
"How, pray tell?"
Dina's own words told me how. "There are just so many times you can redecorate the houses," I repeated.
The second time I rang the Fifields' doorbell that day, I was armed with half a dozen garden books fringed with pink Post-its, my sketch pad, and a digital camera. Dina was still at her club, but I managed to talk my way past the house keeper and into the garden.
The blank slate of her garden cried out for paths and separate garden rooms. Within thirty minutes, I'd sketched out a raised dining (or more likely drinking) pavilion close to the water; a cozy serenity garden nestled in the trees; and a cheery gazebo garden, right near the house for newspapers and morning coffee. All would be connected by a circular path. And each area would feature statuary harvested from Guido's marble monstrosity. I was shooting the fountain from every conceivable angle when Dina returned.
"I may have misjudged you," she said. "I like a go-getter."
I showed her my rough sketches, and she declared me a genius, a word I had a feeling came as easily to her as the word moron. She didn't ask what it would cost, and I hadn't a clue, but money would not be an issue for her.
"You won't really destroy the fountain, will you? I have such fond memories attached to it."
"Of course not, Mrs. Fifield. The plan is simply to remove some of the statues and repurpose them elsewhere in the garden."
And to see what, if anything, was underneath.
CHAPTER 49
"Just hold off on the sledgehammer until we shoot video," Lucy said, thinking ahead.
"I'm not razing it. Besides, I've got over a hundred stills."
"This isn't public television—I need video. I can't just zoom in and zoom out on the same damn pictures for twenty-seven minutes."
Jon Chappell's help was invaluable. Lucy had dangled a coexecutive producer credit as the carrot to keep him engaged, but he needed little incentive—being in the same room with Lucy seemed to be payment enough for him.
"If there were Kennedys involved, even distant ones, I could be looking at a Peabody Award," she'd said early on.
"Well, don't start writing your speech now," I'd said. "Not only aren't there Kennedys, we may not even have a Fifield." I replayed my visit with Dina.
"Something going on in Washington?" Lucy said. "In the summer . . . in the early seventies? She ever hear of Watergate? It must be dark, living your whole life with your head up your butt."
Evidently, the summer Yoly disappeared, both Mr. Fifields were out of state, otherwise engaged, and could prove it. Which left the amazingly well-preserved— some would say pickled—Mrs. Fifield with only her lusty Mediterranean gardener for company. She made do.
"That rascal," Lucy said. "I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day. But if Guido Chiaramonte was boffing the very rich, very worldly Dina Fifield, would he waste his time with poor, simple Yoly Rivera?"
"In a heartbeat," I said. "Dina might have made him feel like a Roman god in the sack, but once they were vertical she probably fell right back into character and reminded him that she was slumming with him. With Yoly, he'd be the worldly, upper-class partner."
By the time I had a realistic estimate and a signed contract with Dina, Felix and Hugo had assembled a workforce and we were ready to start as soon as the ink was dry. Not surprisingly, our first task was dismantling the fountain.
The marble pool and some of the statues would remain intact. The trumpeting angels would lead Dina to her gazebo; the cherubs would frolic in her serenity garden; the massive Roman god would preside over her waterfront pavilion. The rest I'd figure out along the way.
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