How Does Your Garden Grow

by April Hill

  There were a lot of pieces still missing from the picture he was forming of Beth Walker. Was she a little nuts, the way most of the other guys at the station thought? Unlikely, from what he'd seen so far. More like mildly unconventional, trying for eccentric. The menagerie of cats was a little curious, and her manners could use some improvement, that was for sure, and she had an attitude a mile wide when it came to cops. The big question was, who was the guy who'd knocked her up, and more importantly, where was he? Unless she'd availed herself of the services of a sperm bank, there had to be a man. There'd been no sign upstairs of a husband or boyfriend, but if there was a man in the picture, he wouldn't be the first one to be jealous enough to make unannounced late night visits—checking up on his property. Then again, there was always the possibility that the lady was gay, and for some reason, that particular possibility irritated McCann. He could compete with another man if he had to, but he couldn't fight nature.

  "It was Kruger tonight," she said, interrupting his train of thought. "I know it was. You saw how close his wall is. He could have made it from my back door and into his own yard in seconds."

  "From what I saw out there, there probably was someone in the yard," McCann conceded. "And it's still only a guess, but one of the cans you threw may have hit whoever it was. But, there's no proof that it was Mr. Kruger. We found your rear gate wide open. Anyone could have come from the street and walked into your back yard."

  "So all you need to do is to check the blood from the damaged can you found against Kruger's DNA," she suggested.

  McCann smiled. "I'll pass that idea along to the CSI guys."

  "Now you're laughing at me," she said, sullenly.

  McCann shook his head. "No, I'm just pointing out that there are no grounds to ask for a sample of Felix Kruger's DNA, or anything else of his. All they'll be looking at now is to determine if the blood is human, which may—or may not—prove that there was a prowler.

  "Meanwhile," he said brusquely, attempting to change the subject, "I know this isn't really my investigation, but is there some reason why the back gate wasn't locked?" He nodded toward the back door. "Or your back door, for that matter?"

  "The latch on the gate doesn't work," she explained. "I'm sure I locked the back door, though. I always lock it since this all started. Anyway, everyone says this is a safe neighborhood."

  "Don't count on that. Some of the worst crimes happen in the best neighborhoods."

  She ignored the remark. "Why isn't it your investigation?"

  "I work out of the Homicide Division, not Burglary."

  "I've called there numerous times, as well."

  He suppressed a smile. "Yes, I know

  "Smile all you want, Lieutenant, but the fact is that there have been at least four different women living in that house back there since I moved in here, and all of them have disappeared. I should think that would be of some passing interest to a homicide detective. One with any real interest in his job, anyway."

  "Disappeared, or simply left?" he asked, making no comment on the personal barb.

  "I didn't get a chance to talk to three of them, but I did to at least one—over the back wall. It was around two months ago, and she was there for at least a couple of days. I had already seen her once, through the bedroom window."

  "His bedroom window or yours?"

  She flushed. "Both. And yes, I suppose I was being just a little nosy."

  "How nosy?"

  She glowered at him. "I keep a pair of binoculars by the window."

  He nodded, and Beth could see a trace of another smile.

  "She was an older woman," she added quickly. "The one time we talked, she told me her name was Jasmine, but we didn't talk very long because she kept looking back at the house, like she was afraid of being seen. I remember her because she looked frail and kind of drab. Almost unkempt. It surprised me, because Kruger is always so neat and…well, dapper. He usually wears a bow tie and vest to work, and he carries an umbrella, even when nobody's forecasting rain. The woman just didn't seem like the kind he'd be involved with."

  "Maybe she was a relative or just visiting, "McCann suggested.

  "I thought about that, but she made a couple of remarks that didn't sound that way."

  "What kind of remarks?"

  "Very crude, but kind of sweet and giggly at the same time, as if she had a schoolgirl crush on him."

  "Crude in what way?" McCann asked.

  The woman blushed, and at her age, the reaction struck McCann as odd. "You want me to repeat it?" she asked. "What the woman said?"

  "Not if it upsets you," he said.

  "Of course it doesn't upset me," she snapped. "I'm not a child. She made several comments about Kruger's…well, about his size, frankly."

  "His size?" McCann repeated. He was beginning to enjoy her discomfort. "You mean how tall he was?"

  Beth Walker' s face went beet red. "No, Lieutenant. That's not what I mean. She told me that she had reason to believe, and I quote, that the sonuvabitch was 'hung like a big old Missouri mule'. The word sonuvabitch was mine, obviously, not hers. The woman wasn't well educated, and sounded like she came from the deep south, somewhere. It sort of gave me the creeps to hear her talk about him the way she did."

  "The creeps," he repeated, his expression flat.

  Beth glared at him. "Make fun of me if you want to, but it was weird. The next morning, she was gone. People don’t just leave like that."

  "It happens."

  "Without taking their clothes?"

  "How would you know that?"

  She flushed again. "I…I did a little investigating on my own."

  McCann tried not to smile. "What kind of investigating, if you don't mind my asking?"

  "I looked through his trash, if you must know."

  "And what did you find out?"

  She sighed. "Mr. Kruger is apparently very fond of tomato soup. And diet root beer."

  This time, McCann couldn't stop the smile.

  "Since you're finding all of this so funny, Lieutenant, perhaps you can explain something to me. If a woman doesn’t take her clothing with her when she leaves, and it's not in the trash, then where is it?"

  "It seems to me the most obvious possibility if that this woman—or women—left when you weren't at home, or when you weren't investigating."

  "In the middle of the night?"

  "That happens, too." He grinned. "It's even happened to me once or twice."

  "How sad for you," she remarked coolly. "Is that why you're been treating my concerns so casually? Because of your own disappointing experiences with women?"

  McCann had had enough. "What was it you do for a living, Miss Walker? It's not mentioned in the report we took after your last call."

  "I'm a part-time counselor at the Barwood Women's Center, and a teaching assistant at the university. I'm working on my Ph.D."

  "In women's studies, right? The suppression of women, subjugation, whatever?"

  "Your male chauvinism is showing, Lieutenant. My area of expertise is Modern American Literature and for your information, I do not hate men."

  "Did anyone say you did?"

  "That was my inference from your questions."

  "Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd stop inferring. I'm trying to explain to you how the process works, and take my word for it, it doesn't happen the way it does on television. Until there's something more to go on than your own uneducated inferences about some probably totally innocent guy you know nothing about, there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it."

  "What more do you need?" she demanded. "I hit the sonuvabitch with a damned can of beef stew!" Isn't that prima facie evidence of something or other?"

  "Prima facie?" he repeated, with an amused chuckle. Beth was even more annoyed to see that he was smiling again. "Do you even know what that phrase means?"

  "Of course I know what it means," she said smugly. "I received straight A's in Latin. Four years of Latin."

  Sensing an opportuni
ty to start over with a woman with whom he would have liked to be a lot friendlier, McCann tried a friendlier approach. "Congratulations. I pulled down a D minus for three semesters, until a very wise woman by the name of Sister Perpetua pleaded with me to get out of her class and never come back. Did you graduate from St. Joseph's, here in town, or from Sacred Heart, over in Millberg?"

  "No, Lieutenant, I didn't attend a Catholic High School."

  "Oh, I'm sorry. I just assumed… I thought Catholic schools were about the only ones that still offered Latin."

  "I didn't take Latin in high school. I studied it at the Dominican convent where I was living." She seemed to hesitate for a moment. "I spent eight years there—as a nun, obviously."

  "A nun?" he repeated. "A real one?"

  "No," she snapped. "A fake one, from Central Casting."

  Annoyed by her sarcasm, McCann began imagining a slightly different scenario. Miss Walker was still naked, but this time the lady was draped across his knee, with the blue Cookie Monster robe in a heap on the floor and her beautiful ass the color of a plump, ripe strawberry. He'd never actually seen Miss Walker's ass, of course, naked or otherwise, but somehow he knew it would be round and soft, and warm. He wasn't sure where the spanking image had come from, either, but it was definitely something worth tucking away and remembering on some cold winter night in the future.

  "I apologize," he said, trying to retire the image until he finished his questions. "It's just that I've never met a defrocked nun."

  "You still haven't. They defrock priests, not nuns. I left entirely by choice."

  "You can do that? Just leave?"

  "It's a religious order, Lieutenant, not the U.S. Marine Corps, and not a damned prison."

  Her tone brought the spanking image back in a sudden flash. Beth Walker was still mostly naked, but now she was upended over the arm of the comfortable armchair in his own living room, with her panties down around her ankles and her soft, beautiful ass on fire—a fire he had just set with the very large hairbrush that had magically appeared in his hand. That was the best thing about fantasies: things just sort up popped up when you needed them. The Cookie Monster robe had disappeared, replaced by the panties, which were pale blue, and filmy. Miss Walker was squirming and kicking, while he spanked merrily away with the fat wooden hairbrush. He was paying special attention to the tender under swell of Miss Walker's nicely rounded buttocks, where her flawless ivory ass ended and her sensationally creamy thighs began. This time, though, both plump bottom-cheeks had turned a rosy shade of deep pink—sort of like fresh watermelon. The Lieutenant had a good deal of experience with women, and knew that in many women of Miss Walker's specific age and weight, using terms like "sensationally creamy" and "flawless ivory" in the same sentence was probably mildly optimistic. Which was another great thing about fantasies.

  Beth wasn't aware, nor did she even suspect, what the Lieutenant was imagining. She was simply grateful that he didn't seem to be angry about her rude answers to his questions. She assumed that police officers were specially trained to take a lot of annoying crap from people like her without losing their patience, but she wasn't sure why she was being so blatantly rude to the very first person who'd taken her seriously. She suspected, though, that it had something to do with his being so attractive. And so tall. It had been two years since she left the convent, but being in close proximity with attractive men still made her nervous. And when she got nervous, she got unaccountably contentious. The tall, attractive ones made her especially nervous. Tall, attractive men with gray-blue eyes were the most disturbing of all, and it hadn't escaped her notice that the tall, attractive detective's eyes were gray—on the gray-blue side.

  She could tell that he wanted to ask something else about what she'd just revealed—about her years in the convent. In her experience, people, and men in particular, always asked a lot questions when they learned that she'd been a nun. The questions were often insensitive and intrusive, and many of them included sly allusions to sex—or the lack of it. In the two years since she left, she'd gotten used to being an object of curiosity, but she still hated it.

  "So, let me get this clear," she said, "if I expect anything to be done about those poor women, I'll have to do it myself."

  McCann shook his head. "That's a really good way of getting yourself in big trouble, Miss Walker," he said wearily.

  "Why? If you’re right, Felix Kruger is as innocent as a lamb. A selfless Citizen Of The Year, who gives to the poor and helps little old ladies to cross the street."

  "In the first place, I didn't say that," he said patiently. "Any of it. And in the second place, that's not the kind of trouble I had in mind. What I meant was that your friend, Mr. Kruger, has probably noticed what went on here tonight, and if he finds out that you've been trying to implicate him in a series of kidnappings, or murders, or whatever it is you think happened to these women you're talking about, he could drag you into civil court. Take your bank accounts, your car, even this house—though I doubt that he'd want it."

  When McCann looked up, Beth Walker had tears in her eyes. McCann could have kicked himself. His sister Ellen got like that she was pregnant—ready to start bawling at the drop of a hat. "Look, Miss Walker," he said quickly. "I'm sorry if that sounded rude. Since this isn't even my case, I've already said too much. I just thought you should know where …"

  "What's wrong with my house?" she asked morosely.

  He smiled. "Probably nothing that a couple of bulldozers couldn't cure."

  She wiped her eyes. "My mother says almost the same thing, but the way I look at it, insulting someone's house is like insulting an ugly baby. It's not the house's fault—or the baby's."

  "I'm really sorry," he said feeling clumsy now, and helpless. "But at least you don't own it."

  "Not for another fifty-four years, anyway," she said, with a sigh.

  "They told me you were leasing."

  "I am, sort of. After I left the convent, I used a small inheritance from my great-grandmother, then threw in my first two paychecks to put a sort of down payment on this house. I signed what's called a lease-option, which means I'll be paying for it until I'm like a hundred and twenty-eight years old. I bought it from a man named Lawrence. He lives a few blocks from here. This house belonged to his mother, but she passed away. I thought I should have some sort of investment—at my age, and real estate seemed the best…" The sentence trailed off, and she sat down on the couch, looking dejected. "It is pretty awful, isn't it?"

  "Well, it's…kind of small," he said, cautiously.

  "Cozy," she corrected him. "That's what the ad said. Cozy and cheerful. But it's not either, is it? It looks like it belongs at Disneyland, or on a birthday cake."

  "My advice would be to get yourself a good lawyer and bail out of the contract, if you can." He glanced around again. "Do you mind if I ask you how much you paid for it?"

  "Yes, I do mind," she said. "You'll just go back and tell your idiot colleagues, and then they'll have something else to laugh about—at my expense. Do you think I don't know that most of them think I belong in a loony bin?"

  "I think you overreacting a little," he began. "Sometimes—late at night, especially—the guys in the squad-room get a little…"

  "I am not overreacting," she snapped. "And I'm getting tired of being a big joke for you and your little friends at the precinct. Why don’t you get yourselves a video game, or a bunch of goldfish? Something besides me to waste your time on—at the taxpayers' expense?"

  "I think I'd better go," McCann said, tersely.

  "That's an excellent idea. The door's right where you found it."

  "One more question before I leave, though," he said. "Is there someone else we should be looking at? Besides Kruger. Maybe another man? The father of your baby or…"

  She seemed startled by the question, and there was a long pause before she said anything. "And exactly how did you know about that? Have I been investigated, as well as joked about?"

  He flu
shed. "No, of course not. I couldn't help noticing the books on your bedside table, and…"

  "So, you spied on me and found out everything," she said wearily. "My darkest secrets."

  He shook his head. "It was just an educated guess, really," he said. "But I do have a kid of my own. Just one, and she's not a baby, of course. She's almost sixteen, actually—lives with my ex-wife. Anyway, my sister has a lot of the same books. She got four kids—going on five, so when I saw the titles…"

  "And your sister has a husband, of course," she said coolly "Unlike me."

  "Yes, but that's not really the point. What I meant was…"

  "I know what you meant, Detective, but you’re wrong. There's no other man lurking out there, intent on harming me."

  "You can never tell," McCann said. "Sometimes, a simple argument between two people—even people who think they’re in love, can turn into…"

  "He—the man you’re talking about—doesn't know about my situation. About his unborn child."

  "Are you sure of that? What if he's been following you, or…"

  "He hasn't."

  "Sometimes the woman doesn't know what…"

  "I barely knew the man." At this point, it was obvious that Beth Walker was suppressing a smile, leaving McCann further confused. Being an unwed mother wasn't the kind of thing most women took lightly, and it sure as hell wasn't something to be smiling about. But then she sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands. "I suppose you're going to insist on hearing the sleazy details," she said, weakly.

  "Not unless they're relevant to what's going on," he said, gently.

  She sighed. "You'll have to decide that for yourself, Lieutenant, but please try not to think too badly of me. My story's not a new one, of course. In your profession, you've probably heard it hundreds of times. An innocent, unsophisticated young woman, with no knowledge of the world. Thrown into an environment she no longer comprehends after living a cloistered, almost medieval existence. Years of silence and piety, lived behind ancient stone walls. And when she finally comes out into the sunlight, with her hopeful heart seeking love and affection, what does she find, instead? Betrayal and abandonment—and heartbreak.