by Gin Jones
She and Jack left for the garden early on Monday morning, well before Tate usually arrived to use his woodworking studio in Helen's garage. She wanted to talk to him about Sheryl's death, but he'd be here at lunchtime, and it could wait until then.
At the garden, there weren't any open parking spots near Helen's plot, so Jack double-parked beside the Harley at the entrance to the garden. He quickly unloaded her supplies onto the sidewalk, adding a bottle of water from the cooler his professional pride insisted he should keep stocked in her car. He left to find a place to park and play games on his phone until she was ready to leave.
The bulldozer was still in the garden where she'd last seen it, and around it was a police line cordoning off the front right quarter of the garden's land.
Dale was over near the tape, dressed more like Helen had been on Saturday, in business-casual pants and a sweater set rather than gardening clothes. Instead of pumps, though, Dale still wore black combat boots that Helen could tell from here were spit polished to perfection, or at least they had been before she'd tromped around in the garden's mud.
Dale was talking to two women and one man who looked old enough to have come over from the retirement community. Dressed like Helen for working in the garden, they were obviously upset about not being able to access their assigned plots in the corner that had been cordoned off. If Paul hadn't already planted the pea seedlings in her assigned plot, Helen might have offered it to one of the displaced gardeners. She couldn't do that now, especially not right under Paul's nose, without seeming ungrateful. He was in his assigned space at the far back of the property, doing something with a hoe and looking up occasionally to check on Dale's interaction with the three unhappy gardeners.
Helen exchanged a waved greeting with Paul and then carried her supplies over to check on her peas. She wasn't exactly sure what she was supposed to do once she'd looked at them, but weeding was supposed to be a perennial chore in gardens, so she could always do a bit of that.
Helen pulled on her gloves, placed the kneeling bench next to the pea plants, and lowered herself onto it. Five of the seedlings looked just like she remembered them, but the sixth, the one closest to the road, had been cut about a quarter inch from the ground. The top of the plant was lying on its side, like a miniature tree that had been toppled by a tiny logger.
Who would do such a thing? A random passerby? Maybe one of the displaced and disgruntled gardeners, jealous that she was able to get an early start while they were delayed?
Helen sat back on her feet to consider what she should do now. She couldn't see any weeds, and it was too early in the season to plant any of the seeds she had, but she'd feel foolish calling Jack to come pick her up after only two minutes in the garden.
Perhaps she could help Paul with whatever he was doing, in return for the plants he'd given her. She was on the verge of standing up to go see his garden when he approached and knelt in the damp dirt beside her.
"I see a cutworm got one of your plants. I had the same problem." Paul opened his hand to reveal half a dozen two-inch lengths of a plastic drinking straw. Each piece had been slit lengthwise. "Try these. Just wrap them around the stem, and push them down into the ground a bit. That way, the cutworm can't wrap itself around the plant."
He demonstrated, and then Helen put the collars on the remainder of her plants. She had just finished when she heard shouting from somewhere near the bulldozer. Helen turned to see what the disgruntled gardeners were doing, except they weren't the ones making the commotion. They'd fallen silent to stare at a confrontation at the end of the farmhouse's driveway. A small, bright red SUV was trying to leave the property, but a hulking diesel pickup truck was noisily idling across the end of the driveway, blocking the egress. Apparently, Jack wasn't the only one who hadn't been able to find a legal parking space this morning.
Helen recognized the driver of the SUV in the driveway as RJ Avery, the middle-aged man who lived in the farmhouse. He honked his horn, but the truck didn't budge. RJ jumped out and went over to talk to the truck's driver through the rolled-down passenger side window. Helen could make out enough of the truck driver's words to get the gist of his excuses for not moving. He was waiting for his mother who needed to see someone about when an apartment would be available for her in Wharton Meadows. She wouldn't be more than another minute or two, and he couldn't risk leaving even long enough to circle the block because his mother would be confused if he wasn't where she'd left him. RJ, on the other hand, needed to leave to get his father to a doctor's appointment.
They seemed to be at an impasse until RJ suddenly said something Helen couldn't hear and then jogged back to his SUV. A moment later, he drove onto his lawn and waited until the truck pulled into his driveway so RJ could go around him. After RJ left, the truck returned to the street to block the driveway again.
"That RJ has the patience of a saint," Paul said. "The parking on this street has gotten worse and worse. Wharton Meadows keeps adding residents and expanding their services to nonresidents, all without considering the traffic flow. The rumor is that they would like to purchase the garden land for an additional building and a great deal of parking."
"Like the Joni Mitchell song about paving paradise and replacing it with a parking lot?" Having said it, Helen had a feeling "Big Yellow Taxi" was going to be running through her head nonstop for the next few days.
Paul smiled. "That is what Dale believes."
"So if the owner of the retirement community had been plowed under instead of Sheryl Toth, Dale would have been the prime suspect."
"With Sheryl as well," Paul said. "Putting a dozen town houses on this land, like she wanted to do, would have been almost as bad as paving it over."
"Good thing it was just an accident then, or Detective Peterson would probably have Dale in custody by now," Helen said.
"She would not be the only suspect," Paul said. "Marty Drumm would be another."
"But he was distraught when he heard about her death."
"That is so, but his distress could have been as much for himself as for her. She was not an easy person to work for. Today, it is not that uncommon for a woman to own a construction business, but thirty years ago, it was different. A woman had to be tougher than the toughest man. She learned that lesson perhaps a little too well. By the time she had become accepted, she did not know any other way to act." He shrugged. "Or perhaps she was just like that naturally. It is difficult to say."
"If Marty can operate a bulldozer, he has skills that are in demand," Helen said. "If he didn't like working for Sheryl, he didn't have to kill her. He could have just gone to work for someone else."
"The rumor is that Sheryl recently threatened to fire him for drinking on the job. He could not have gotten another job with that on his record. Not driving heavy equipment."
"It's a good thing, then, that the police are convinced Sheryl's death was just an accident," Helen said.
"I am not so sure." For once the smile on Paul's face faded, and while he didn't exactly frown, there was a hint of sadness in his eyes. "Sheryl took risks with her business ventures but not with personal safety. I believe you have had some experience with the local police being wrong before. They could be wrong this time too."
* * *
Paul glanced at the sky. "I must get to my office. I did not mean to stay in the garden so long this morning. But I am glad we had the chance to talk again, Helen Binney."
"I might as well go too," Helen said. "There's nothing more for me to do here."
Before Helen could insist that she didn't need help, Paul had carried her kneeler and tools over to the sidewalk beside the Harley. She thanked him, and he headed over to his pickup truck.
Helen pulled out her phone to call Jack, a little surprised he hadn't simply shown up already. Before she dialed though, she was distracted by Dale's approach.
Helen nodded a greeting. "Any news about Sheryl's death and when the police will be releasing the crime scene?"
"I'm afraid not." Dale abse
ntly lifted the helmet off the back of the Harley. Beneath it, the tour-pak had a bumper sticker that read Born to Hang.
Dale followed Helen's glance down to the bumper sticker and laughed. "It's not what it looks like. It's part of the campaign to ensure that everyone has the right to hang laundry outdoors."
"I didn't know it was an endangered activity."
"It is," Dale said. "Homeowners associations love to ban it as an eyesore. But line drying is environmentally beneficial. Did you know that drying clothes accounts for about ten percent of all residential electricity costs? Plus, generating all that electricity wastes about thirty million tons of coal a year."
Helen recognized a passionate advocate when she heard one. During her years in the Governor's Mansion, she'd always been amazed by how riled up people got over causes she'd never heard of. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not so much. It was always tricky figuring out which was which.
Helen settled for a cautious, noncommittal, "I didn't know that."
"Everyone should have the right to hang," Dale said, looking like she expected Helen to argue with her. She opened the little trunk on the motorcycle and pulled out a clipboard. "I'm putting together a petition for the State House to override local rules against laundry hanging. Will you sign it?"
It was odd, Helen thought, being on the receiving end of a request to sign a petition. She'd always been the one asking for signatures. "Sure."
Once Helen had signed and the clipboard was secured again, Dale said, "I'm so glad to see you come back to the garden today. I was afraid you'd be scared off before you even had a chance to experience gardening. I've already had a few people tell me they're dropping out, claiming the land is somehow tainted by Sheryl's death."
"If I were afraid of a place where someone died, I wouldn't be able to enjoy my own yard," Helen said. "It will take more than a dead body to make me give up gardening."
"I knew you'd understand," Dale said. "You're going to be one of us, I'm sure of it. True gardeners understand about the cycle of life. A dead body won't scare them off."
Helen wasn't that sure yet, but she was determined to give it a good try. Meanwhile, as long as Dale had brought up the subject of the dead body so no one could claim that Helen had been actively meddling, she might be able to get an answer to the question that had bothered her yesterday. "Sheryl wasn't a gardener, though, I gather. So what was she doing here?"
"Probably thought she was showing everyone how committed she was to buying the land out from under us."
"By trespassing?"
"She wouldn't have seen it that way," Dale said, folding her arms over her chest. "More like she was just exercising her right of free speech. Sending me—the whole town, really—a message about how she always got what she wanted. She took the town to court several times in the past when her projects were rejected by the planning board, and while she did have to make some changes to her plans, she eventually got the permits she wanted."
"So you don't think there was anything odd about her being here? Or dying in a place where she didn't belong?"
"Not really. It was just an accident, and it could have happened anywhere. Everyone knows it. Peterson is being his usual pompous, pigheaded, prejudiced self," Dale said indignantly. "The accident reconstruction expert even checked out the machinery. It's all in working condition, and nothing had been tampered with. But Chief Homicide Detective Peterson"—Dale's voice dripped with disdain—"loves being able to say he's investigating a serious crime, and apparently he doesn't have enough other cases to work on, so he's dragging out this investigation. Treating it as a potential homicide."
"On Saturday, Peterson seemed convinced it was just an accident." Helen knew from experience just how difficult it was to change his initial impression of a case. "I wonder what changed his mind."
"He's got it in for me. We've got a history, you know. Holds all my arrests against me."
"He doesn't like me much either." Peterson did hold a mean grudge, but it was hard to believe Dale could have been arrested for anything too serious. She was the town clerk after all, and a single felony conviction or even a significant misdemeanor on her record would have prevented her from holding that job.
"I don't much care what anyone thinks of me, but Peterson's punishing all the other gardeners because of me. Probably hoping they'll vote me out as the Garden Club's president if they lose a whole growing season to the investigation." Dale's face suddenly froze in horror. "Not just one season, either. If he drags it out long enough, waiting to release the scene until there's an arrest in a crime that didn't even happen, we might not be able to put in a cover crop for winter protection. It would be the first time in thirty years that we failed in our duty to the land."
"There's always next year."
"I'm not ready to give up on this year." Dale looked out over the land that was growing nothing but stakes, twine, and random specks of green that could be either seedlings or weedlings. "Especially now. I can't let people forget how much they care about this site. Not while the selectmen are considering selling it."
Helen knew politicians, and there was nothing a politician liked better than to have a persuasive reason to explain why he backed an otherwise unpopular position. If Sheryl's death wasn't an accident, and someone associated with the garden was accused of murder, the accusation would provide the perfect cover for a selectman who wanted to sell the garden land. He would be able to say that it would be wrong to allow the killer to get what he—or she, if Dale were blamed for it—had wanted to accomplish by committing murder. If Sheryl had been killed to prevent the sale of the land, then it was terribly sad, the selectman would say, claiming he would have voted differently in other circumstances, but he just couldn't in good conscience allow a murderer to benefit from his crime so the land would have to be sold. The pitch had all the elements of a good spin: a reference to conscience and morality, a desire to do the right thing for the environment, and a juicy bit of scandal.
"How big is the risk that the land will be sold?"
"Big enough. I'm working on it though. I've got a Good Old Girls Network working behind the scenes. It can handle anything the guys can throw at us." Dale put on her helmet. "Speaking of which, I need to get back to town hall. I just popped over here because Paul alerted me to trouble brewing. The garden can't afford any more bad press right now."
Dale climbed onto the motorcycle and roared off with Jack arriving just in time to take her parking space. Helen had become accustomed to his uncanny ability to predict when she was ready to be picked up, but his timing today seemed even better than usual. If his techy niece and nephew hadn't been in California the last few months, Helen would have suspected them of setting up some sort of hidden camera that allowed Jack to monitor her every move.
Jack didn't give her a chance to load up her own supplies but had them in the trunk of the Subaru Forester before she could do anything to help. She climbed into the front seat, mulling over what Dale had told her about the risk to the garden.
Helen couldn't let Peterson muck up the investigation of Sheryl's death so badly that the community garden's land was sold. Not when she'd just taken up gardening. She had plenty of land around her cottage, but the trees that gave her privacy also gave her too much shade to grow vegetables.
Plus, there were her six—no, make that five—little pea plants to protect. She couldn't just sit back and let them get plowed under.
CHAPTER FIVE
Since Dale didn't have any inside information on Detective Peterson's investigation, Helen needed another reliable source, and she knew exactly where to find one.
"The Wharton Nursing Home, please," she told Jack.
It had been a few days since she'd visited her friends there, and they would be anxious to hear all about how she'd stumbled across Sheryl's body. Besides, the nursing home was where Helen would find Detective Peterson's uncle, himself a veteran of the Wharton Police Department, privy to more details of major cases than he should have
been and more than willing to share them with anyone who showed the least bit of interest. With luck, Peterson would have stopped by yesterday afternoon, as he usually did, even when working long hours on a major case. If so, his uncle would be up to date on the current investigation.
Jack pulled into the circular driveway of the nursing home, coming to a stop at the base of the grand front entrance stairs. The building had once been the vacation "cottage" of a Golden Age millionaire, made of brick, three stories high, and wide enough to seem shorter than it was when viewed from a distance. The town had purchased it for use as a nursing home, gutting the second and third floors to turn them into a maze of tiny, bland, and sterile rooms for residents. Only the first floor with the administrators' offices and the areas open to the public retained much of the original grandeur.
What had once been a sprawling ballroom that ran the full length of one side of the building was now an activity room for the ambulatory residents and their visitors. That was where Betty Seese and Josie Todd could usually be found, seated in a pair of wing-back chairs at the far end of the room, needlework in hand, and yarn bags at their feet. Today, as a nod to the damp chill in the spring air, a few small logs were burning in the energy-efficient insert retrofitted into the massive fireplace next to them, just enough to overheat the room to the point where it was uncomfortable for Helen but perfect for those whose advanced age meant that they had difficulty maintaining their body temperature.
Josie definitely fell into that category. At eighty-something, she was exceedingly thin but generally healthy. Her professionally dyed brunette hair made her look twenty years younger than her actual age. She tended to wear clothes that should have looked ridiculous on an elderly woman, like today's white leggings printed with larger-than-life flowers in hot pink, purple, and red and a baggy purple fleece tunic that came down to her mid thigh—but she rocked the outfit harder than most teens could. Her best friend, Betty, was ten years her junior but looked her age, with her white hair, plump build, and somber black pants and sweater.