by Justin Scott
“Come in,” she said, again. “Come inside.”
“Should we maybe put this down outside?”
“No. Let’s take it in the kitchen. I’ll put it in the sink. I want to gloat over it a while.” We walked through a house furnished with nice old pieces, mostly antiques, nothing “museum quality,” just the kind of furniture that multiple well-fixed grandparents passed down. The carpets had been walked on a long time, showing lines of white warp, and there was a pleasant smell of wax in the air. The kitchen looked recently re-built, but despite the latest high-end appliances, it did not shriek “gourmet granite.” In fact there was no granite at all. The counters were butcher block, an indication that they actually used the room for cooking. I lowered the Primula into the big porcelain sink that she used to pot plants.
“Would you like tea?” she asked. “Or coffee?”
“Tea, please, if you’re having it.”
I was surprised by the Evil Engineer’s wife, and equally surprised by his lair. I had never given any thought to his home life. I knew him only as the remote and arrogant public figure I had observed dominating P&Z hearings, but had I been asked I would have guessed that he was married to a brittle blonde and lived in a McMansion furnished in a stark and dreary modern loft style with large televisions in every room. Instead, his was a home like others I admired in Newbury—the Gordons’ cottage, Al and Babs Bells’ estate house up on Morris Mountain, Aunt Connie’s and Scooter’s on Main—that formed an archipelago of understated, old-fashioned comfort scattered in a desolate sea of new development. There are fewer each year as the old die off or join their offspring who have moved to less crowded areas in hopes of replicating the space and serenity of their childhood.
Caroline Edwards was anything but brittle. Her hair was chestnut, and wisps of it played on her check as she filled a kettle. I could not imagine her with Billy Tiller. Nor, for that matter, could I imagine her with her unpleasant husband.
“You know,” she called over her shoulder, “your aunt was my first friend in Newbury. I joined the garden club and Connie just scooped me under her wing.” She put the water on the stove, lit the gas, and turned to me with a smile. “Sometimes I sort of think of her as my own aunt.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Easton. I hated leaving my garden, but Eddie thought it was getting too crowded down there.”
I looked closely for irony, but saw none in her expression, nor heard any in her tone. “Things are getting built up here, too,” I ventured.
“It probably seems that way to you, but to me it’s still empty by comparison.”
She laid napkins and a plate of shortbread on a maple work table in the center of the room. We sat across from each other on stools, discussing the weather, which had been gyrating for weeks between wet and cold and warm and dry, until the water boiled. She made tea in a pot, the way Connie did, warming the pot with hot water and pouring it into the mugs to warm them before brewing the tea.
“Are you close with your aunt?”
“Connie had been my friend since I learned to speak complete sentences. She had no children and I was born right across the street. My parents were older—not as old as Connie, of course—she’s my great aunt, my father’s aunt—and my father was always busy. Connie kind of took me everywhere and showed me everything.”
Caroline Edwards looked at me with a smile and asked, “Was your mother busy, too?” so openly that it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world to admit to this woman I had just met, “My mother sometimes had trouble getting through the day.”
She poured half and half cream in a short pitcher, placed it and a matching sugar bowl on the table, brought the tea pot, and emptied the warmed mugs into a watering can. “I had a mother like that. I couldn’t wait to go to school just to get out of the house.” She looked around her kitchen and smiled. “To me, to be able to stay home is the greatest luxury. I love any day I don’t have to leave the property.”
She poured the tea. We sipped in silence a while and watched the birds swarming the feeder hung outside the window. A squirrel was staring at it from a perch on a tree, but he could not reach it because it hung from a long, long wire suspended from a tree branch thirty feet off the ground.
“Edward did that. Drives the squirrels insane. I pray he’ll conjure up something as clever for the voles.”
“How did he get it up there?”
“He went right up the trunk like a monkey, with climbing spikes.”
I was surprised. I had figured E. Eddie Edwards for a desk guy.
Eventually, Caroline looked at the sink.
“I should get it in the ground.”
“I’ll carry it out.”
“Would you like more tea?”
“No, I’m fine. I’ll carry, you dig.”
Out to her garden we went. It was huge and beautiful, enclosed between hundred-foot-long stone walls that connected the old house and a multi-level red barn. There were handsome wooden gates in the walls, broad grass paths, and stone steps where the ground sloped. The plants were in a blue phase. Blue bells, Virginia and Spanish; bluish Mountain Pinks, lilac, dark and light blue Camassia, Aquilegia, Corydalis, Allium, Jacob’s ladder, Baptisia about to pop. Even her chives were studded with bristly little knots of purple blue.
She noticed I had veered from the path to inspect her peonies, which were about the only flowers that weren’t blue. “Paeonia mlokosewitschii,” she said, cupping ghostly petals in her rough hand. “Your aunt gave me seeds.”
I counted ten stems that had been cut. In a vase in her living room had stood nine.
We were approaching a dark wet spot where Japonica had hoisted magenta candelabras, when I heard the hee-haw noise of a wood saw coming from the other side of the barn. “Edward,” she explained. “Cutting down a tree.”
“By hand?”
“Manly man,” she said with a smile. Mocking her husband? I wondered. But it wasn’t necessarily mocking. It could just as easily have been an affectionate “boys will be boys” remark. I was utterly unable to picture her relationship with Billy Tiller.
Caroline turned a wedge out of the wet ground with a narrow garden spade. She softened the exposed earth with a few quick strokes of the blade, dropped to her knees, and fit Connie’s clump of root into its new home as neatly as a piston.
Suddenly I hard a loud crack, a rush of something heavy parting the air, and a shouted, “Oh, shit!”
A shadow loomed from the sky. A tree was falling at us. I grabbed Caroline’s hand and pulled her hard. The tree stopped falling, propped in the branches of a neighbor at an angle over the low part of the barn. I was still releasing her hand when E. Eddie Edwards ran around the barn with a multi-toothed tree saw that was curved like a scimitar.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Right this minute,” I said, “I’m dodging trees.”
“Are you all right?” Caroline asked.
“Yeah, yeah, fine. I just really screwed up. Damned tree fell the wrong way. I screwed up the wedge cut.”
“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.
“Wha’d you have in mind?” He jammed his saw into a sheath hanging from his belt and glared up at the tangle of branches where the two trees met.
“I’ve got a come-along in the car. We could crank from the other direction, pull it out of that tree and maybe get it to fall where you want it.”
“I have my own come-along,” he said sullenly, and I could see that he was embarrassed that I had seen him screw up a “manly” job and probably kicking himself for not securing the tree with his come-along to start with.
“Even better,” I said. “It’ll be much easier to control with two.”
“I vote for that,” said Caroline. “If that tree slips, we’ll need a new barn.”
“It’s not going to fall on the barn,” Edwards grumbled, but I could see him calculating the angles. He started around the
barn. His wife and I followed and we all looked at the tall, skinny tree, which had slipped off its stump and now leaned precariously over the barn in the fragile arms of a soft red maple. He pointed at a slot of open ground between two hemlocks. “That’s where it was supposed to drop.”
“I’ve done the exact same thing. It’s amazing how unforgiving a wedge cut is if you get it just wrong.”
“Well, if you’ve got the time, Ben, I’d appreciate it.”
“Let’s do it.”
They walked me to my car to help carry the stuff. I passed him a hundred-foot coil of two-ton wire cable. Caroline grabbed the heavy chain, which was in a strong bucket. I took the come-along—or winch-puller—a cumbersome, six-foot-long web of pulleys, ratchets, wire rope, grab hooks, and clove pins all connected to a finger-threatening lever.
“You usually travel with a winch-puller?”
“I took down a dead tree for my mom. She lives by herself out in Frenchtown and the place is a handful.”
“House thy name is entropy,” said Edwards. “I’m taking the rest of this week off just to try and catch up.”
“Speaking of which,” said Caroline, “if you gentlemen can handle this, I’ve got things going inside.”
We manly men assured her we could.
We got a ladder from the barn, and Edwards’ come-along and wire and chain. He climbed up and looped both wire cables around the tree about twenty feet off the ground. Then we walked the cables at forty-five degree angles to the direction we wanted the tree to fall, hooked them to the come-alongs, and hooked the come-alongs to chains we looped around strong trees. It took a while. And it took a while longer to get the slack out by adjusting the chains. Edwards reminded me to make sure I had an escape route if the tree fell toward me.
When we had the cables stretched as taut as we could between the errant tree and the come-alongs, we cranked the levers, calling to each other to ease off and then pull again, to keep it balanced. The tree tipped up from the red maple that had caught it. It was swaying and it didn’t take Paul Bunyan to realize it would have gone out of control if we had only had one cable. We kept cranking. The come-alongs had only a six-foot fetch, and the question was what happened if they reached their limit before the tree fell where it should. Nothing good. But just before we ran out of pull, the tree began to lean, gathered speed, and fell between the two hemlocks with a thump that shook the ground.
“Appreciate the help,” Edwards said, after we had gathered our gear and loaded mine into my car.
“Beats sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring.”
“You didn’t say what you were doing here.”
“Delivering a plant from my Aunt Connie.”
“She usually comes out herself.”
“She’s not feeling that well, today.”
Caroline came out. “Edward, it’s time to get dressed. I’m sorry, Ben, we’ve plans, or we’d ask you in for a drink.”
“Just leaving. Thanks again for the tea. I’ll tell Connie I can personally vouch the plant is in the ground.”
I headed home, fairly sure that Caroline Edwards was the woman who had put the peony on Billy Tiller’s casket, but not at all sure why. She certainly hid her grief well, if grief she felt. Edwards, on the other hand, was still only marginally civil even after a couple of hours’ work and problem solving of the sort that usually gave a couple of men some sort of bond they hadn’t shared before. Either he was congenitally unpleasant, or he was a very jealous husband. The look he had shot at me when he saw me releasing Caroline’s hand had cut no slack.
***
When I got home, Alison was waiting in my office, quite excited about something.
“Do you see who wrote you?” She had brought in the mail and put it on my desk.
“All I see is bills and junk mail.”
“This is not junk mail,” she said, extending a UPS Next Day Air envelope. “This is from Joey Girl.”
She tapped a fairly clean finger on the return address.
I asked, “What is Joey Girl?”
“Are you serious? You’re joking. You’re always joking.” She looked at me askance, tilting her head as if peering into sun glare. “You’ve never heard about Joey Girl?”
“Now that you mention it, I’ve seen the name on all that garbage they put on the e-mail screen.”
“You should get out more. Can I open the letter?”
“It is ‘May I,’ and, yes, you may.”
“May I?” She grabbed the plastic stiletto I used for a letter opener, slit it open reverentially, and drew out a square envelope made of heavy stock. “See!” she said, tapping a company logo of cat whiskers.
“Open it.”
She slit the square envelope and opened the contents. Her big eyes got bigger. “Oh God. Ohmigod. You are invited to a Joey Girl Party. Ohmigod, ohmigod.”
“I still don’t know what Joey Girl is.”
Joey Girl, she explained, was a hot hip hop clothing label prized by fashionable wagamamas.
“Wagamamas? What are ‘wagamamas’?”
Nine- to-thirteen-year-olds, Alison told me. “It’s Japanese for ‘naughty little girls.’”
I wondered, not for the first time, how long before I would be dealing with gentleman callers on motorcycles.
“You’re so lucky—how do you rate?”
The mystery of that absurdity was solved by a note scrawled on the bottom of the invitation. Joey Girl was owned by Jeff Kimball’s straight-arrow businessman father. He hoped I could come to his “First Annual Watercress Picking Party,” to be held at his Fairfield County Estate. (His capital ‘E,’ not mine.) But why? If he wanted to talk about Jeff’s case all he had to do was telephone, or instruct Ira to send me down to New York.
“Bring a friend,” he wrote, apologizing for short notice.
“I’m your friend,” said Alison.
“You are twelve.”
“It doesn’t say what age.”
Alison watched, barely breathing, as I dialed the RSVP number. I didn’t particularly want to go, as I would have to juggle Saturday house-showing appointments. But I very much wanted to ask—face to face—why Kimball had neglected to mention that he knew how to drive bulldozers.
A polite secretary answered.
“This is Benjamin Abbott. I’ll be delighted to attend Mr. Kimball’s Watercress Picking Party at one o’clock on Saturday. Would a twelve-year-old young lady be welcome as my guest?”
I held the phone so Alison could hear. “I’m sorry, Mr. Abbott. The party will be child-free.”
I mouthed, “Sorry.”
“You tried,” she mouthed back, and I said to the nice lady on the phone, “Understood. In that case I’ll bring someone age appropriate. Miss Constance Abbott. That’s Miss, not Ms., M-I-S-S.”
“Mr. Kimball looks forward to seeing you, Mr. Abbott, with Miss Abbott.”
After we had traded goodbyes, Alison said, “Maybe Connie’s a little too old to go to that party?”
“I think she’ll enjoy it.”
“You should take Vicky.”
“I’m sure Vicky wants to spend her Saturday with Tim.”
“Tim’s doing a seminar in Hartford. He won’t mind.”
“I think I’m better off taking Connie.”
“You’re just afraid to be alone with Vicky.” Alison loved Vicky McLachlan as only a little girl could love an exciting big sister sort who let her watch her put on makeup and showed her things to do to her hair on the occasions she drifted out of Tomboy mode.
“I am in no position to ask her out.”
“Yeah, but if Connie doesn’t feel up to it, Saturday, you have to take Vicky.”
“I’m asking Connie right this minute. Catch you later.”
***
I found her dozing in her rose garden. She blinked awake when my shadow crossed her face. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“W
hat happened at the Edwards’?”
“Caroline loved your plant. Her husband loved my comealong.”
“Come-along? You mean come-on?”
“No, he would not have liked me coming on to his wife. He struck me as jealous. No, I helped him cut down a tree. I had the come-along in the car.”
“Working side by side is a good way to get to know someone. What did you think of him?”
“Methodical, precise, a little dull, someone you could count on to keep a level head in a pinch. Brusque, if not downright unpleasant.”
“What did you think of her?”
“I liked her. Liked her a lot.”
“I hoped you would.”
“Why? She is married.”
“Well of course she’s married and I don’t mean it quite that way, but it is good for you to appreciate other types of women—types different than you usually fall for. It suggests a budding maturity.”
“Why do I think you are not complimenting me?”
“I’m sorry. I’m teasing you, Ben. But she’s a lovely woman, isn’t she?”
“Very. Very self-contained.”
“Did you learn what you hoped to learn?”
“Not yet. Meeting her, I found it even harder to imagine Billy Tiller seducing her. But I did see ten peonies cut and only nine in her vase.”
“Odd numbers usually look better in a vase.”
“So unless she dropped one on the lawn, it was the one I saw on Billy’s casket.”
“When are you going back?”
“First thing tomorrow.”
“Do you want another plant?”
“No, I’ll just barge in. He’s working at home tomorrow. Listen, I came over to invite to you a party down in Newtown on Saturday. Jeff Kimball’s father. A hip hop mogul. It ought to be a scene.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather take a date?”
“I tried to take Alison, but they said the party is ‘child free.’ Would you like to come? They’re calling it a watercress picking party.”