A Dawn of Death

by Gin Jones

"You are new this year, I believe," he said. "I am Paul Young."

  "Helen Binney. And yes, I am new. Not just to this garden but to all gardens." She pointed at his cart. "You look like a pro."

  He gave her a wide smile. "You could say that. I work at the Park and Rec Department, and when I'm not doing landscaping for my job, I'm here in the garden."

  "Isn't it a bit early to plant anything?" she said. "I thought we were just coming here to claim our plots today. And participate in the blessings too, of course."

  "For most things, yes, it is too early." Paul picked up one of the peat pots. "But not for peas. It is said that they should be planted on St. Patrick's Day for the luck of the Irish, but I am not Irish. And I have found that March is too early here. The seeds will either not germinate in the cold ground or the seedlings will die in a freak snowstorm. Better to start the plants indoors and then transplant them outside in April."

  "I guess it's too late for me then."

  He shook his head. "Not at all. I would be honored to share my plants with you. I always start a few extras for anyone who needs them."

  Helen looked at the mud in the path to her garden and then down at her clothes. "I'm afraid I'm really not prepared for any actual work today."

  "I will plant them for you," he said cheerfully. "They will be here waiting for you when you are ready to work."

  "Thank you." She was grateful for the plants, of course, but even more so for the man's confidence that she was more capable than she looked and the assumption that the only thing holding her back was her wardrobe. "If there's anything I can do in return, just let me know."

  "I shall remember that." Paul glanced past Helen in the direction of the farmhouse on the corner lot.

  She turned to follow his gaze. An elderly man in nothing but a gray tank top and white briefs was coming down the back stairs of the farmhouse. When he reached the bottom, he made a beeline for the back corner of the garden.

  Paul held out the handle to his wagon. "Would you hold this for me? I will be back in a few minutes."

  He jogged down the central path of the garden, apparently intending to intercept the underdressed man. Before Paul had gone more than thirty feet, a middle-aged man—fully clad in a dark sweatshirt and sweatpants—came racing out of the farmhouse. The older man gave the younger one a good chase, bobbing and weaving around some overgrown bushes between their backyard and the garden. Paul hesitated, shifting from foot to foot indecisively until it was obvious his help wasn't needed. Then he turned around to reclaim his wagon. By the time he'd reached Helen's side again, the underdressed man was being hustled up the back stairs and into the farmhouse.

  "What was that all about?" Helen asked.

  "Richard Avery Senior has Alzheimer's, and Richard Junior—everyone calls him RJ—is determined to care for him at home." Paul took the wagon's handle. "It is a challenge for both of them."

  "I'm sure it is." Helen had seen only the very tip of that particular iceberg at the Wharton Nursing Home. The staff there were extraordinary, and they made caring for dementia patients look easy, but she knew it was an illusion even there where the staff had the advantages of a secure environment, colleagues to share the burden, and a substantial period of time off between shifts. RJ, on the other hand, was apparently trying to do everything all by himself and around the clock in a building that wasn't designed for preventing the patient from leaving.

  "Tell me about your garden plans," Paul said, "so I will know where to put the peas."

  Plans? Helen didn't have anything particular in mind other than to buy plants and stick them in the ground until she ran out of space. She'd have to do some more reading to come up with a plan. "Perhaps I should skip the peas. I wouldn't want to keep you from working on your own plot."

  "A gardener's work is never done," he said, leading the way down the incline from the sidewalk and into the garden, pulling his wagon behind him. "But, in the end, it does not matter what is left undone each day. You do what you can, and if it is not enough, well, there is always another day, another year, and the chance to start over with a freshly plowed bed. There is no guarantee for a do-over when it comes to making a new friend."

  Helen hadn't really expected to make friends here at the garden. She'd been thinking of the activity more as it had been presented in the gardening books, as a solitary occupation that would improve her health and produce a bounty of vegetables. But she could use some more friends. Ever since she'd left Boston and her old way of life behind, she'd been having trouble establishing new friendships, especially with people in her own age group. She'd thought she was making progress in establishing a comfortable camaraderie with the president of the Friends of the Library, Terri Greene, but that had been before the incident with Victor Rezendes last fall, and their budding friendship was a little strained right now. From what Helen had seen so far this morning, the community garden might provide an excellent opportunity to meet some new people who, for a change, weren't murder suspects.

  "All right," Helen said, following Paul down the muddy path, "but I've got to warn you I'm a total newbie in the garden. I've read a lot, but it hasn't quite settled into my brain yet. All I know for sure is that I'd like to grow more of my own food since there's at least anecdotal evidence that a healthy, vegetable-rich diet and moderate exercise might reduce the frequency and severity of my lupus flares."

  "Gardening is good medicine." Paul knelt in the path beside the far corner of Helen's plot and laid out six pea plants on top of the freshly plowed dirt. "This is the northeast corner of your plot. If we plant the peas here along the path, they will not be shadowed by the taller plants you grow beside them."

  "Whatever you say." Helen had read about the different amounts of sunshine that various plants required and how tall different things grew, but there had been too much information to remember it all. She'd have to make some sort of chart when she got home. She was good with charts.

  Paul had all six plants in the ground in less than a minute. He stood, removing the damp dirt from his hands by brushing them against his jeans. "Uh-oh."

  This time, he was facing the road, not the farmhouse, so he couldn't have been reacting to another attempted escape from the Avery farmhouse. Helen turned to see the problem.

  A lime-green smart car had just double-parked next to the Harley. A short, middle-aged man with curly black hair emerged.

  "Here comes trouble," Paul said.

  "He doesn't look bad." In fact, he looked quite good. Even from a hundred feet away, she could see the dark shadow of facial stubble that emphasized his strong jawline and gave the impression that he was confident and didn't particularly care what people thought of him. Nothing about his appearance, from his navy sports shirt and khaki pants to his cheerful expression and light step, suggested he was on his way to any sort of confrontation. "What kind of trouble could he cause?"

  "Cory O'Keefe is on the board of selectmen for Wharton. They are considering some legal issues related to ownership of the garden land. I thought they had been resolved, but his presence here today suggests otherwise. Dale will not want to hear what he has to say." Paul grabbed the handle of his cart. "If you will excuse me, I need to plant my seedlings and get to my office to clear up a few things. I hope to see you again, though, Helen Binney."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cory O'Keefe was heading for the front, left corner of the lot. Dale was there supervising Annie who was a lot stronger than her pixie-like appearance suggested, as evidenced by the ease with which she pounded the sledgehammer on the last of the stakes for the first half of the garden.

  Neither woman seemed to have noticed the new arrival. They'd been abandoned by most of the other volunteers who'd raced off to claim their respective plots as soon as they were marked with twine. Only a handful remained, presumably those with plots in the other half of the garden, either underneath the bulldozer or behind it.

  Helen's row of pea plants that had seemed like such a big accomplishment just a minute
before now looked insignificant as gardeners rolled out sheets of black plastic in some plots and in others, planted thirty-foot-long rows of seedlings and covered them with floating row covers.

  Curious about what it was that Dale wasn't going to want to hear, Helen headed for the far front corner of the garden. O'Keefe should have reached the two women long before Helen did, but he kept getting intercepted by gardeners who took a break from their work to run over and talk to him. He never brushed anyone off but stopped each time to shake hands and share a few words.

  He did the same thing when he caught up with Helen a few feet away from Dale. "I don't believe we've met," he said. "I'm Corcoran O'Keefe. Everyone calls me Cory."

  She accepted his proffered hand, noticing as she shook it that the palm was more calloused than she'd have expected of a politician. "Helen Binney."

  Helen could see in his expression the exact moment when Cory put the name together with what he must have heard or read about her. She just didn't know whether it was her history as the governor's wife or her more recent notoriety here in Wharton.

  He didn't miss a beat, though, and just said, "Pleased to meet you. I didn't know you were a gardener."

  "I'm not sure I am, but I like trying new things."

  "I wish more people had that attitude. Perhaps we could explore new territory together sometime." Cory glanced at Dale, and while his smile didn't fade, his eyes did seem to narrow a bit. He was expecting trouble.

  Annie finished pounding the last stake into the ground and looked up, catching sight of Cory. She said something to Dale and scurried past Helen in the direction of the crosswalk to the retirement community, dragging the sledgehammer behind her.

  Dale turned to glare at Cory and then stomped over to confront him, her army boots sounding like a dozen people marching, not just one. "Well?" she said. "What are you doing here?"

  "It's my job to keep an eye on town property," Cory said patiently. "Until the selectmen have made a final decision about what to do with this land, it's not wise for the garden club to start planting. If you can wait a week, that will give us enough time to make the decision about whether the garden will remain here."

  "Mother Nature doesn't wait for anything," Dale said. "We have to plant when she says the time is right."

  "I understand." Cory's smile didn't waver. "It's just that gardening is hard work, and it would be a shame to make it harder than it has to be by making everyone do their planting twice."

  "The real shame," Dale said, crossing her arms over her chest, "is that there's anyone at all in this town who thinks this land should be sold for development. It's been a community garden forever, and that's what it should remain."

  "It's not that easy," Cory said evenly. "You know how long it takes for some of the selectmen to commit to a position on a new issue. There's a benefit to having the community garden here, but the money from selling the land could also benefit the town. It's not a simple decision."

  "Yes, it is," Dale insisted. "The garden needs to stay right here where it belongs. I'm going to make sure we have the necessary votes, no matter what it takes."

  They continued to argue, but Helen tuned them out. She'd heard enough political posturing over the years to know that Dale and Cory weren't likely to change the other's mind or offer any new insights, and yet they would both insist on repeating their positions until they felt that they'd done their duty and impressed their supporters with their dedication to the cause.

  Helen wasn't sufficiently invested in either side of the argument to care, and she'd heard enough to know what the issue was. If the garden was relocated, it didn't really affect her. She only had the six little pea plants in the ground, after all, and presumably they could be moved with little more effort than it had taken to plant them.

  Helen was still waiting for an opening in the argument so she could excuse herself and go home, when a man jogged up to interrupt the conversation. He was in his late twenties and skinny, with short, dark hair and a full beard. He wore faded jeans and a hooded, mud-brown jacket with Toth Construction embroidered in an elegant font across the upper left side of the front. He carried a hard hat with the same logo on it.

  "Where's Sheryl?" His eyes were in constant movement, his gaze darting seemingly at random from spot to spot. "I've been waiting over at the Elm Street job for an hour now. I swear she didn't tell me my dozer was over here. I'd have come to get it earlier if I'd known, and now she's going to blame me for the delays at the other site."

  "I have no idea where Sheryl is," Dale said, "but after she schemed to buy this land out from under us, I'm going to make sure she never sets one foot in the community garden."

  The construction worker snorted. "She already did. That dozer certainly didn't get here on its own, and she's the only one who could have brought it here."

  "Don't take that tone with me, Marty Drumm. Your mother raised you better than that," Dale said. "No matter how the dozer got here, we're not letting it leave again until we're compensated for the damage it did compacting the soil where it's parked."

  "You can't do that," Marty and Cory said in unison, although it was hard to hear Cory's quieter voice beneath the other man's angry shout.

  "Sheryl's going to blame me," Marty said. "I've got to get that dozer back to the jobsite right now."

  Helen decided no one would notice if she slipped away now, so she took several quiet steps back before turning and heading down the sidewalk in the direction of the corner property where her car was parked. She continued to hear the two raised voices behind her and the occasional quieter comment from Cory.

  Helen passed the central path of the garden and her plot with its six little seedlings that, from ten feet away, were hard to identify as things that had been intentionally planted rather than some random weeds. As she approached the end of the garden's frontage, she couldn't help wondering how the bulldozer had ended up being left there instead of returned to the primary jobsite.

  Toth Construction was painted on the side of the cab in the same elegant font as the embroidery on the construction worker's mud-brown jacket. It was obvious that Dale hadn't arranged for any earthmoving help, and Helen couldn't imagine why anyone would think it would be a good spot to leave heavy equipment. Moving it during business hours would be particularly tricky, considering the street's heavy traffic and the double-parking that narrowed the travel lane to less than the width of the dozer.

  At the corner of the lot, she paused to contemplate the dozer as if it might be able to tell her what it was doing there. When it didn't offer up any answers, she looked back at Dale and Marty who were still arguing while Cory waited patiently for them to wind down. Helen had a fleeting moment of regret, wishing for once that she had her cane with her so she could use it to jolt Dale and Marty out of their pointless shouting match. If they worked together, they might have figured out what the dozer was doing here. As it was, Helen might never know how it had ended up here, and she hated having unanswered questions.

  She looked away from the argument toward her car where she knew there would be warm, dry air and a comfortable seat. She might be feeling like her old self, but the cold, damp air wasn't good for her, and the last thing she wanted to do right now was risk triggering a flare.

  Still, something bothered her about the way the bulldozer was parked, something she couldn't quite put her finger on, and she knew it would continue to gnaw at her if she didn't at least try to figure out what it was.

  Helen turned away from where Jack and her car were waiting for her to stare at the out-of-place earthmover. She'd always known, in some vague way, that bulldozers were large, but when viewed from a distance, against the backdrop of a large parcel of land or a skyscraper, they seemed fairly ordinary. Standing just ten feet away, this one was intimidating. The roof of the cab was a good twelve or thirteen feet high, and the blade was taller than she was, taller even than her friend Tate's six feet. To get into the cab, the operator had to climb over the track it ran on, whic
h, at its highest point, was above Helen's eye level, and it wasn't as if there was an elevator or even a sturdy little ladder.

  She glanced back at the construction worker who'd come to claim the bulldozer, only to feel even more baffled than before. How could someone so slight operate something this gargantuan? She knew it wasn't as if he had to physically push it around, but surely, something this big would require a good deal of physical effort to operate. She'd ask him, but he and Dale were still shouting at each other while Cory waited patiently like a good politician looking for an opening to propose a compromise.

  As long as they were too busy to notice her, it wouldn't hurt to get a closer look at the dozer to see if she could figure out what it was that was bothering her about it. She wasn't in any rush to get back to the cottage. She usually had lunch with Tate in her garage, which served as his woodworking studio, but he wouldn't be there today because of a family commitment. She didn't have anything else on her schedule until tomorrow when her nieces would be visiting for Sunday brunch, which was really just an excuse for them to make sure Helen wasn't doing anything remotely interesting.

  Helen stepped off the sidewalk and made her way across the corner of the farmhouse's lawn, staying uphill from the garden itself. As she approached the far side of the dozer, she shivered, not from the chill in the air but from the prickly sort of reaction that was often described as feeling someone walk over one's grave. More likely, she was just sensing that someone was watching her. She was hidden from Dale's, Marty's, and Cory's view, but there were hundreds of windows facing her from the retirement community across the street. None of them had any reason to wish her ill, so why was she feeling so uncomfortable?

  Perhaps the threat came from somewhere closer. Almost all of the gardeners had gone home when the shouting began, leaving only Paul Young working in the last plot in the far corner. He was kneeling with his back to her, planting his peas and definitely not watching her. That just left the farmhouse, so she checked its windows but didn't see anyone there.