by Justin Scott
Billy’s coffin looked fabulously expensive. It was made of bronze and brushed bronze fittings and was closed tighter than the time-locked vault at Newbury Savings and Loan. Closed or open hardly mattered, as I was the only person there other than six hired pallbearers lined up to carry him out to the hearse.
A single flower lay on the casket, a peony of an old, single variety with yellow petals pale as ghosts and a thick cluster of gold stamens in the center. Whoever had left it had not signed the visitors’ book. No one had, except for me.
Don Brooks, a tranquil gray-haired man, whose father had buried my father and whose grandfather had buried my grandfather, walked in, shook my hand and called to the pallbearers, “Shall we go, Señors?”
Until recently, there was never a shortage of pallbearers in Newbury. Most people, but for the very, very old, could count on their church congregation or friends from high school if they hadn’t enough family left to hoist their casket into the hearse and up the slope of the cemetery. With so many new and unconnected people in town, it wasn’t always possible to raise a quorum of pallbearers, so Don Brooks, who was not the sort to install mechanical devices, drove down to Kohl’s for the spring sale and bought blue suits for six strong immigrant Guatemalan landscapers who routinely worked seven days a week and were glad to pick up extra cash to send home. Being country people and devout they brought dignity to the task, got the heavy bronze container loaded with the quiet efficiency of a team used to working together, and piled into a van behind the hearse. Don Brooks drove the short distance to the cemetery, which climbed the hill behind the Ram Pasture.
I followed and parked a distance from the raw earth that Sherman had dug out of the ground with Donny Butler, who was sneaking a smoke behind the MacKay family mausoleum, which jutted from the hillside like a misplaced walk-in closet. I looked everywhere for a grieving woman, but no one else had come. My gaze drifted down the hill toward the old part, which was heavily sprinkled with weathered Abbott headstones, and my father’s grave.
As the blue-suited Guatemalans pulled the casket out of the hearse, I was surprised to feel an immense sadness. My thoughts jumbled about as I inquired of myself what was going on in my head.
Certainly I didn’t mourn Billy Tiller. Of course, all deaths are sad. And some, as Georgie Stephanopoulos said so passionately, were terrible. But there was no denying that Billy’s lifted a black cloud from the town’s future; new houses would still be built, but not so many, and not so ugly, and not spreading destruction as far. So I was not mourning Billy. This was not like my father’s funeral, when everyone crowding around the grave knew that Newbury had lost its champion. Yet the sadness was real, and when I finally grasped the cause, I knew that only action would ease the sting. I stepped forward and spoke to the lead pallbearer.
“Excuse me, may I take this end?”
Don Brooks nodded permission, and I grabbed the sturdy swing handle closest to the front. The sun went behind a cloud and the breeze that followed it threatened the peony, which had stayed in place through the loading and short drive. The man whose place I had taken crouched down, picked up a stone, and placed it gently over the stem so it wouldn’t blow away.
We lifted on Mr. Brooks’ quiet count to tres. It felt as light as Sherman Chevalley had predicted. Maybe it was because the small men lifting with me were unusually strong, but I flashed, of course, on the D4 spinning mad circles on top of Billy, and thought again of the “no-blooded” hands on the controls.
Just then a medium-size Lexus came crunching up the gravel. The door flew open and E. Eddie Edwards ran from it, hauling on his jacket, straightening his necktie, and calling, “Hang on! Sorry I’m late—Ben? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Too many strangers,” I said.
Edwards brusquely shouldered aside the man gripping the handle opposite, and we started for the grave. A tall man, he looked down at me over the coffin and muttered, “I always figured you were sentimental.”
“Why do you think I complained about his cheesy developments?”
“My great-grandmother used to say, ‘We reap what we sow.’”
The fabled Samantha. I thought he was talking about Billy, but I wasn’t sure. I left it at that. It seemed enough conversation over a man’s coffin. Edwards was not through, however. “By that, I mean,” he added, “that if we alienate enough people we will die alone.”
A grotesque thought wormed into my head: Murdered people never die alone.
E. Eddie Edwards seemed on the verge of another pronouncement. I decided to tell him to shut the hell up. But when I glanced toward him to do that, I saw his face working, and it struck me, belatedly, that while I may have hoisted a corner of Billy’s casket on a vague principle that a man ought to have some acquaintance at his burial, Eddie Edwards might actually have cared for his former boss. How many years had he worked for him? How many years had Billy and his trusty “Evil Engineer” scammed the town? How many wins had they notched together at P&Z?
Edwards said, “At least they caught the jerk who did it. There’s a certain relief in that.”
“Where’s the minister?”
“Billy told me he didn’t want clergy.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“When his mother died.”
We reached the hole in the ground, rested the casket on three strong straps laid out on the grass, and used them to lower it into the hole. I looked around the cemetery again. Still no grieving woman.
With neither the minister nor the priest in attendance there followed an awkward silence and some foot-shuffling confusion. Then Eddie Edwards rose to the occasion, addressing the Guatemalan gardeners, Mortician Brooks, and me like commissioners of an extraordinary Planning and Zoning session.
“I worked for Billy Tiller for many years. I watched him grow from an inexperienced kid, accustomed only to being an employee, into a savvy businessman. No one ever said he didn’t work hard. And he leaves behind a legacy that Newbury will always cherish.”
Every muscle in my back stiffened.
Edwards sensed a volcano starting beside him and he shifted gears smoothly. Instead of naming oversized, shoddily built McMansions as Billy’s legacy, he said, “Billy Tiller leaves a legacy of open spaces donated to Newbury in perpetuity.”
True, though we both knew that in every case those were open spaces that Planning and Zoning and appeals courts had already ruled off-limits to building anything larger than a breadbox.
Walking back to the cars, Edwards said to me, “One thing Billy really understood. You can’t stop progress.”
“Sounds like another great-grandmother saying.”
“She was right.”
I said, “I wonder who left that peony on the casket.”
“That was a fairly rare botanical species,” Edwards answered. “Paeonia mlokosewitschii. Kind you’d find in your great aunt’s garden. Maybe somebody reached over her fence and stole it for Billy.”
“Did Billy have any girlfriends?”
“None that I heard about.”
“Was he dating anybody?”
“No one he told me about.”
“Would he have told you?”
“I don’t think so. He was pretty much a loner. I mean you just saw at the cemetery.”
“No woman at all?”
“Not since his wife divorced him.”
“That’s a while back, isn’t it?”
“Six-seven years.”
“Was he gay?”
“Gay? Billy? I don’t think so. Just alone. I mean he’s not the only guy alone. Are you gay, Ben?”
“No. Just alone.”
“So what’s so odd about Billy being alone?”
Women of Aunt Connie’s generation used to say of bachelors that a man unmarried in his forties never would marry because he would never change. This was sometimes an unspoken reference to sexual orientation, too. I was not gay, but I had an awful feeling that
if I was I would still end up in the same fix, a single unlikely to hook up.
I said to Edwards, “If someone asked you about me, asked was I dating anyone or did I have a girlfriend, the answer would be, ‘I’ve seen him with women. I’ve seen him having dinner at the Drover or drinks or going for a walk in the woods or a bike ride or a picnic on a rock in the river.’”
“Not so much since Tim Hall and Vicky McLachlan hooked up,” Edwards observed with an unpleasant smile.
I wondered if he was being nasty for a reason or was just built that way. “You knew Billy as well as anyone. Did Billy suffer a similar disappointment, shall we say? Did Billy screw up a relationship and then find it hard to hook up again?”
Edwards shrugged. “Who knows?”
“You would know better than anybody, spending time with the guy.”
“Working time.”
“So did he?”
“Did he what?” Edwards didn’t quite snap at me, but the engineer was getting irritable. Tough. I wasn’t the one who started talking across coffins.
“Screw up a relationship and find it hard to hook up again?”
“No one he told me about.”
“Did he ever act like a guy with a broken heart?”
“Not around me.” By then we had reached his Lexus. Edwards climbed in without offering his hand or saying goodbye, started it up, backed and filled, and drove away. Leaving me to ask, if someone ran me down with a bulldozer, would Vicky drop a flower on my grave?
Of course she would. Bouquets, with Tim following along with armloads more. Friendship had survived love. But the point was, we had never had anything to hide. Neither of us had been married. Neither of us had had an angry spouse shooting our lover on Main Street.
I had to find that grieving wife.
***
I checked out Connie’s garden from the sidewalk by leaning in over the low, ornamental wrought iron fence that her grandfather had erected after the Civil War. Eddie Edwards was right. In the dappled shade under a flowering cherry, within a step of the fence, Connie had a clump of single-petal yellow peonies, or as Edwards named it formally (and correctly, I checked out later on Google), paeonia mlokosewitschii.
I swung one leg over the fence for a closer look. Damn. Just as Edwards had suggested, one flower had been plucked. The stem was barely dried, as if the thievery had occurred this morning.
I heard my name called in a strong voice known to make small boys wish they had not been caught. “Benjamin Abbott! Why are you lurking in my garden?”
“Just checking out a peony, Connie.”
She was standing at her front door, erect, arms crossed. “Surely it’s not necessary to vault my fence. People will think you’re not welcome here. Someone might even telephone Trooper Moody.”
I got untangled from her fence and hurried up her front walk. “May I come in?”
“Wipe your feet.”
I followed her into her foyer and there muttered a quiet but heartfelt, “Damn!”
“Now you are swearing in my front hall. What is going on with you, today, Ben Abbott?”
“Sorry.” I was staring at a flower in a slender glass vase. “Is that paeonia mlokosewitschii?”
Connie beamed. “Good for you! I know perfectly capable gardeners who would not recognize it.”
“You picked it this morning?”
“They last longer if you pick them when it’s cool. You know that.”
“Of course.”
“Is that what you were looking for in my garden?”
“There was one like it on Billy Tiller’s coffin.”
“Sheila Gordon probably left it, in lieu of dancing on his grave.”
“I didn’t see any peonies at the Gordons’.”
“She had a few struggling up through mud when I was there. Herbaceous, though. And certainly not flowering, buried so deep.”
“Who else grows these?”
“Scads of people.”
“Connie. It’s a pretty rare flower. Name three.”
“I could name eight.”
“Eight?”
“I gave seeds to eight people last summer. Those who planted early in autumn and kept them watered have flowers this spring.”
“Who?”
She started to answer. Abruptly her face closed up. She looked away. Her voice faltered. “I’m getting so bad with names. They were on the tip of my tongue.”
“Would any of them have been a married woman between let’s say twenty-five and forty-five?”
“Several.”
“Do you recall whom?”
“Who.”
“Do you recall who?”
“From the garden club.”
“Maybe if I got a list of the members, we could go through them.”
“No.”
“Could we try?”
“We don’t have to. They’ll be in my diary.”
She kept a garden diary. In fact she had a library shelf lined with them going back to the nineteen-thirties. She pulled out last year’s and we thumbed through to June. It had been a rainy month. Primula japonica, Dutch iris, Pseudacorus, and peonies were in bloom, as was Camassia. Evergreens needed pruning, she had noted, but it was too wet. In July Connie had harvested, among others, paeonia seeds. In August she hosted cocktails for the garden club and gave out packets of seeds. She had written that her guests were grateful for cocktails instead of tea because cocktails started later, which meant they could work longer in their gardens.
“Here,” I said. “Here’s when you gave them.”
She read the names. Three were widows who admitted to their late seventies. Sheila Gordon was married and slightly younger, but highly unlikely to have been conducting an affair with anyone, particularly a builder who had won a zoning change in her neighborhood. There was one lady in her thirties, but she was a happily coupled lesbian. Scooter’s wife was another seed recipient, but by all evidence my next-door neighbors adored each other. Georgia Bowland was a possibility, on the other hand:attractive, independent, and miserably unhappy. But Connie put the kibosh on that when she observed, “Of course, Georgia was too busy last summer to plant them. You know her, starting another of her new careers.”
“Who is Caroline E.?” I asked.
“Now there is a gardener.”
“What is her last name?”
“Edwards, of course. Caroline Edwards. The engineer’s wife.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Oh,” I said.
Maybe that was how he knew the name of the flower.
Well, well, well.
A Newbury mover and shaker. A suspect too high up the food chain, too smart, and too sure of himself for state police investigators to lean on without solid cause. Not a man to be bullied.
“What is Mrs. Edwards like?” I asked.
“Sturdy woman. Hearty.”
“Do you know her well?”
“Not really. Just through the club. Lovely girl. A bit lonely when she moved here. Perhaps spends more time in the garden and less with people than she should.”
“Is she…” How to put it to Connie? How to—
“Promiscuous? I would think not.”
“Connie why would you choose the word promiscuous?”
Aunt Connie rolled her startlingly blue eyes toward her ornate ceiling. “You are looking for a woman who left a single blossom on a dead man’s casket but did not attend his funeral.”
“Well I didn’t want to put words in your mouth.”
“Benjamin, as difficult as it may be for you to grasp, try to understand that back in the Pleistocene some of the people with whom I shared the epoch ran around on their spouses. Obviously, you’re looking for a gardener who might have had an illicit affair with the murder victim.”
“I think I found her.”
“Well, she certainly doesn’t seem like the type. Although, God knows what is the type.”
“
What would she see in someone like Billy Tiller?”
“Considering the couples I observe, that is unanswerable.”
“Okay. What would he see in her?”
“Equally unanswerable. Although, if he was half as bad as I have heard he was, he might have enjoyed cheating his employee. But perhaps he just saw someone he liked who liked him. I don’t know much about men, but I have long suspected that for men, merely being noticed is a powerful aphrodisiac.”
“Connie, would you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have some special plant you could dig up for Caroline Edwards?”
“I suppose.”
“It’s got to be something special that you would really want to give her. One master gardener to another.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to bring it to her.”
***
We dug one of the Primula japonica from the shady wet spot in the back of her yard and laid it on a flattened plastic bag. Its wide, pale leaves were spreading vigorously and in their center soared a candelabra supporting six rings of blossoms.
“I can’t seem to be worming my way into their house. You’re sure she doesn’t have one of these already?”
“No one grows this shade of white,” Connie promised with a jihadist’s certainty. “It gleams like an egret. I should have given Caroline Edwards one of these years ago.”
Mrs. Edwards ceased to breathe for a long moment.
Had I asked if she was the lady who had placed a rare peony on Billy Tiller’s casket, her reaction would have confirmed I had found the grieving wife who hadn’t been widowed. Unfortunately, it was only the sight of Connie’s egret-white Primula, that rushed the air out of her lungs.
When the air finally returned, accompanied by a lively flush to her round cheek, she said, “I have coveted this plant since the first time I saw it. What possessed her—Oh, come in, come in.” I was standing on her front step, cradling the plastic bag in my arms, the two of us bending over the plant like a pair of politicians vying to kiss a newborn constituent.
Connie had called her “hearty” and “sturdy.” She was also wonderfully jolly, the kind of person seemingly prepared to celebrate. I liked her immediately and wondered, more than ever, what she would have seen in Billy Tiller. She was quite attractive, full-boned, big-bodied, with a flashing eye and smile that said, Isn’t everything wonderful, and if it’s not, won’t it be soon? I can’t say she seemed in mourning.