by Gin Jones
That wasn't what Helen had hoped to hear. "If Sheryl was so safety conscious and so good with a bulldozer, then how…?"
"How did she die in an accident?" Marty finished. "She didn't, that's how. Someone killed her."
"The police think it was an accident."
"No way," Marty said. "Sheryl didn't take risks with her safety. No, someone killed her. I'm sure of it."
"Who would have done that?"
Marty didn't even stop to think. "Dale Meeke-Mason. She's so obsessed with protecting the environment that she doesn't care what happens to people. She's trying to shut down all construction here in Wharton, and she doesn't care about the local residents who would lose their jobs. I wouldn't put anything past her if she thought it would protect her stupid trees."
The ground shook as another massive tree fell toward the back of the lot.
Marty didn't notice. "I'm telling you, everything about Sheryl's death stinks. There's absolutely no reason for her to have been at the garden unless Dale lured her there to kill her."
So much for simply reassuring herself that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for how Sheryl had died. Helen wasn't sure what to believe, but she couldn't simply discount the possibility that Marty was right. Not about the identity of the culprit but about the suspicious nature of Sheryl's death.
Despite what she'd told Tate about only talking to Sheryl's employees, Helen couldn't stop asking questions yet. If the police ever came around to believing the circumstances were suspicious, she was afraid that Marty wouldn't be alone in thinking that Dale or one of the other gardeners was to blame for Sheryl's death.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Marty might have continued ranting about Dale's villainy except that his phone pinged yet again, and apparently, this caller couldn't be ignored. He gestured for Helen and Jack to go back to the car.
"Leave the hard hats next to the sign," he said and headed back to the construction trailer. As he walked, he shouted over the background noise of the heavy equipment, complaining to his caller about some supplies that were late.
There really wasn't anything more Helen could do here, she decided. Her nieces might not believe it, but she wasn't foolish enough to try to sneak past Marty and flag down a backhoe to ask its operator questions about which of her employees or competitors might have wanted Sheryl dead. There were other people she could talk to who would have answers to that question. People who worked in safe settings. Like town hall. Even Lily and Laura wouldn't consider a little visit to town hall to be dangerous. In fact, Lily thrived on confronting government bureaucrats, so she was in no position to deny her aunt the same thrill.
Helen had just taken off her hard hat when a black SUV pulled up next to the sign, and Detective Almeida climbed out. Jack slunk around the back of the car and into the driver's seat. He would defend Helen to the death against the hazards of tripping on a construction site, but he knew he was more of a liability than an asset when dealing with the police.
Eleanor Almeida was a tall, muscular black woman in her late twenties. She seemed to be settling into her relatively new job with the Wharton Police Department, no longer its newest hire. She'd changed her hairstyle since Helen had last seen her, from a heavily teased and gelled helmet shape to a much easier-to-maintain closely cropped style that left her natural tight curls unstraightened. She hadn't abandoned her uniform of a severe navy pants suit with a white blouse, but now it looked natural on her rather than obviously new and not what she was used to wearing.
Almeida slammed the SUV's door shut and came around to the back of it. "I've been looking for you."
"Ready to schedule a girls' night out?" Helen said as she approached the SUV.
Almeida shook her head. "I wish."
"All you have to do is call," Helen said. "My social calendar is pretty empty these days."
"Really? I heard you've got a new boyfriend."
News traveled almost as fast in Wharton as among the political insiders on Beacon Hill. "It would take more than a boyfriend to keep me busy."
Almeida waggled her eyebrows. "Like two new boyfriends?"
"I was thinking more along the lines of a new hobby," Helen said. "Growing my own vegetables should keep me busy. Plus, if my garden plot and I experience an irretrievable breakdown of the relationship, there's no paperwork or courts involved."
"So you really were at the garden as a farmer," Almeida said, leaning against the back bumper. "Hank thinks you had some sort of preternatural hunch that you'd find another dead body."
Helen nodded. "I know your boss thinks I go looking for trouble, but I just want to grow my own vegetables this summer. That's all. And having a suspicious death at the garden isn't exactly helping matters."
"Actually, that's why I was sent to look for you," Almeida said. "I'm supposed to tell you that there's absolutely nothing suspicious about Sheryl's death. She fell off the bulldozer, hit her head, and died."
Helen really wanted to believe it, but she couldn't help asking, "Then what's with all the police tape around the site? If it's such an obvious accident, shouldn't that have been removed by now?"
"Standard procedure," Almeida said with a shrug. "We have to do this by the book. Especially with an OSHA rep nosing around."
"Even more especially if the end result is to annoy Dale," Helen said. "What's Peterson got against her, anyway?"
"I wish I knew." Almeida grinned. "He turns purple whenever her name is mentioned."
"Worse than when my name is mentioned?"
Almeida's grin widened. "It's hard to believe, isn't it? But yeah, Dale annoys him even more than you do. That's why he sent me to talk to you. 'Woman to woman,' he said."
"Next time I see him, I'll tell him you were very persuasive," Helen said. "That you convinced me it was just a tragic accident. Nothing for me to investigate since I only get involved when it's murder."
"You don't have to lie to me about your plans," Almeida said. "I agreed to talk to you, but I didn't guarantee the results. I was pretty sure you'd think that Peterson's telling you to stay out of the investigation was tantamount to daring you to catch the killer."
"If I thought it was murder, it probably would have been." Helen felt the reverberations of yet another tree falling and couldn't help glancing behind her to make sure it wasn't anywhere nearby. Fortunately, the nearest piece of heavy equipment was well out of range, even if it sounded like it was just a few feet away. She turned back to Almeida. "But I'm hoping it's actually what it looked like—a tragic accident."
"You don't sound entirely convinced."
Helen sighed. "I was at first, but then things started to not add up. Did you know that she was really good at operating heavy construction equipment? I could see her having an accident if she hadn't been inside one for a while, but she spent a lot of time at the controls."
"Anyone can have an accident," Almeida said. "The rawest rookie can tell you that after his first week on the job. Some of the worst MVAs are caused by really good drivers who just made one little mistake, one little lapse of attention."
Helen hoped Almeida was right, that no one had pushed Sheryl or otherwise caused her death. "You can tell Peterson that I'm only interested in growing my own vegetables. As soon as he releases the scene to the gardeners, I'll be too busy with my planting to do anything else."
Almeida's radio squawked. She listened to what sounded like gibberish to Helen, and then said, "Sorry. I've got to go. Peterson nominated me to be the Domestic Violence Officer, and I couldn't turn it down."
Helen was familiar with the position, which involved follow-up visits after domestic violence incidents to make sure the victim knew his or her rights and had access to whatever resources were available. It was a relatively new state initiative, one that her husband had long pushed for funding in his proposed budgets. "Did Wharton get a state grant for the position?"
"I know it's important work," Almeida said, nodding. "It's just not quite what I was hoping to do when I joined
the Wharton PD. It's not that I wish there were more murders or assaults to keep me busy, but I'd rather deal with a bloody corpse than a marital dispute any day. At least with the corpse, I've got a concrete goal to work toward—identify and incarcerate the killer. With domestic cases, there's no closure to it. We just keep going back to the same couples time and again."
"I read some of the early studies on the program back when I was still involved in politics, and the results were promising. The number of repeat offenses did fall."
"I haven't seen any benefits yet," Almeida said. "I guess it's too early to tell though. I've only been the DVO for the last three months."
"I'm sure you're making a difference," Helen said. "Just think. If you weren't doing it, Peterson might. He'd be escalating the tension instead of decreasing it, and you'd have plenty of bloody bodies to get justice for."
"Or perhaps he'd just push them to the breaking point, and they'd separate permanently, which would be better for everyone," Almeida said. "As it is, my visits keep them calm on the surface, and they go through the motions of talking to each other and working things out. But I can feel the anger and frustration and sense of injustice barely contained by their facades. They're not hitting each other, and that's definitely a good thing, but they're still doing sneaky little passive-aggressive things, which keep the emotions simmering in the background. That's no way for a person to live."
"Makes me glad I live alone." Tate practically lived with her, but there was a big difference between having him nearby in the garage and having him underfoot in the cottage. "I think I used up all my patience back when I worked in the Governor's Mansion. These days, the only people I care enough to placate are my nieces, and they don't live with me. Besides, no matter how annoying they can be, they're never passive-aggressive. They come right out and tell me to my face when they think I'm being foolish."
* * *
Wharton Town Hall was a simple, white, two-story building in the Greek Revival style that had been deemed insufficiently quaint for the summer-resident-attracting center of town. In the 1970s, an urban planner who applied his obsessive-compulsive tendencies to entire sections of town as if they were household clutter that needed organizing had moved the building, which didn't match any of its more ornate neighbors, a few blocks away from its central location to the very edge of the downtown district. It would have been moved farther if the city hadn't owned an empty lot taken for nonpayment of taxes, which had then turned out to be unsellable because it was adjacent to a cemetery with a reputation for unhappy and sometimes menacing ghosts.
Simply moving the building apparently hadn't been enough to satisfy the planner's need for everything to be organized and efficient, so the late-1800s building had been gutted, destroying all of the historic interior details and replacing them with nondescript but admittedly functional things like reliable heating and plumbing systems and easy-to-maintain floors and walls. Nothing had been changed in the intervening decades, and it seemed likely that the linoleum floors and plastic faux-wood paneling would become historical features in their own right before anyone updated them again.
A sign just inside the entrance indicated that the town clerk's office was down the hall to the right. Helen noted that Paul Young's office was in the opposite direction with the water department in between.
Helen turned right and ended up at a door plastered with a large poster that declared April 19th to be National Hanging Out Day. In the background was a picture of clothes hanging from a laundry line.
Inside, guarding Dale's inner sanctum, was a woman who reminded Helen of Annie Quattrone. Not in appearance exactly—this woman was younger and thinner and blonde instead of brunette—but she had the same subservient attitude. Or perhaps that was just how everyone appeared once they began living in the shadow of Dale's take-charge personality.
Helen introduced herself to the clerk, and a moment later, Dale appeared in her open doorway. "Come in. Come in. We don't stand on ceremony here."
The metal desk, a several-year-old computer, and hulking file cabinets were standard issue and could have been found in any office in the country. What marked the space as belonging to Dale was the selection of posters that lined every inch of available wall space from the chair railing to the ceiling. They documented the last twenty years of Earth Day events, including the addition of Earth Hour in 2007. Mixed in were items from what appeared to be a more recent involvement with the right to hang movement, including a poster that featured underwear pinned to a line and the caption Let it all hang out. The environmental decor didn't stop with the walls either. On Dale's desk, a mug with the Project Laundry List logo held pens and pencils.
Dale went around to sit behind her desk. "Is there another problem at the garden?"
"That's what I stopped by to find out." Helen placed her hands on the back of one of the dingy guest chairs. "I thought you might know if it's been confirmed that Sheryl's death was an accident, so the entire garden will be released for use."
"Not yet," Dale said. "It's got to go through channels."
"Channels?" Helen said. "Detective Peterson doesn't seem all that formal, and you are the town clerk, after all."
"You're right that things here don't work quite like big cities," Dale said, "but there are still procedures to be followed. They're not written down anywhere, but we all know what they are. Hank barely acknowledges that I exist, so he won't tell me anything directly. Still, he knows I need to know what's going on, so he puts all the relevant information for me into his reports to the selectmen. He knows I'll be the first to see them, but this way he can avoid interacting with me personally. If there's anything I need to know before he files his reports, he can tell anyone else who works here and be confident that person will share them with me."
"Sounds a bit like high school cliques."
"Pretty much," Dale said. "But I've been here long enough to know how to play the game. Paul Young will tell me when he hears anything, and he should be among the first. He's entitled to information about the status of the investigation into Sheryl's death since the community garden is an official program of his department."
"I thought it was run by the Wharton Garden Club."
"It's a joint operation," Dale said. "The club gets to choose who receives a plot and what the cost is, and we find the volunteers to do workshops on things like food preservation, composting, and beekeeping. The Park and Rec Department just gives its seal of approval and provides the spring plowing and the insurance. In return, they get to claim the credit for having an environmentally focused program. That helps them get more funding through special state grants."
"What would happen to that funding if the garden is sold?"
"Paul's budget would be a mess. If he couldn't find new sources of funding, he'd probably end up losing his job," Dale said. "But that's not going to happen."
"I hope you're right."
"It's been said that everything that is done in the world is done by hope. But I think there has to be more doing than hoping," Dale said. "You know how politics work. You'd be an asset when it comes time to convince the selectmen not to sell the garden."
"Just tell me what you need me to do," Helen said. "I've been counting on the community garden for growing all my vegetables this summer."
"That's a huge goal for a first timer," Dale said. "If you're aiming for at least three servings of vegetables a day, not counting things like potatoes, that's about a thousand servings, somewhere around five hundred pounds of produce. You'd need at least half of the entire community garden's land to grow that much. And that's assuming Mother Nature and the local wildlife cooperate."
"I read about small gardens that produce a lot more than five hundred pounds of food."
"You can't believe everything you read." Dale strode over to the corner filing cabinet and opened the bottom drawer. She knelt to pull out a stack of about twenty magazines the size of vintage Reader's Digest magazines. "These will set you straight. You need to study
what gardening is like for real people. Not the statistics in catalogs and not the impossible dream of professionally landscaped works of art that you'll see in coffee-table books."
"That looks like a lot of reading," Helen said, "and I can't stay long."
"You can take them with you. Just bring them back when you're done." Dale filled a canvas bag with the magazines then set it on the visitor's chair. She handed Helen one last copy of the magazine. It had a banner identifying it as GreenPrints, also known as The Weeder's Digest.
"Thanks."
Dale went back to the filing cabinet and pulled open a middle drawer. She rifled through its contents until she found the paper she was looking for. "Even if you don't grow all the food yourself, you can support local farmers and get organic produce. Wharton has some good resources for a locavore if you're ready to join the trend toward eating only locally produced foods."
Helen took the paper, which turned out to be a flyer for the Wharton Farmer's Market. At the bottom was an acknowledgment that the market was a joint project of the Wharton Park and Rec Department and the Wharton Community Supported Agriculture Association.
"Paul Young seems really committed to gardening."
"Oh yes," Dale said, returning to the chair behind her desk. "And it's not just because of his Native American heritage, either. He's a descendant of the Mahican tribe that was living here before Columbus, you know, but he doesn't always follow the party line. He got some grief a few years back when he opposed legalizing gambling in the state. Regardless, we're lucky to have someone in the Park and Rec Department who's a real environmentalist."
"What did he think of Sheryl's construction projects?"
"It's hard to tell," Dale said. "Paul is a natural-born peacemaker. He's always so darn cheerful, and whenever he mediates a problem, he can usually find a way to convince both sides of the argument that they've won. One of Sheryl's projects last year generated a lot of resistance from the neighbors who thought she was proposing too many units on too little land. Paul suggested giving up one building lot and turning it into a shared garden just for the people on that street. Sheryl agreed, the neighbors were happy, and the project sailed through the permitting process."