“You don’t seem very friendly to our garden guests,” I said as I let myself in.
The lights flickered. I confess it scared me just a little.
“Well, you’re right. They weren’t invited.”
I locked up and went upstairs, leaving Captain Dusenberry to hold the fort. Too tense to sleep right away, I fixed myself a cup of hot milk with cinnamon and drank it at my desk while I surfed up the details of Maria's funeral.
Her obituary was online, and I learned that she was a leading figure in the Hispanic community, so much so that her funeral would be held in St. Francis Basilica, the largest Catholic church in town, and one of Santa Fe's famous landmarks. It spoke to Maria's stature that her funeral was being held there; the cathedral (as I still thought of it) was the center of Santa Fe's Catholic community. I sipped my milk as I read through the details of an amazing life and legacy.
Maria's family had come to New Mexico with the second wave of Spanish settlers in the late seventeenth century. They had been in Santa Fe ever since, and to call them a dynasty would not be exaggerating that much. In addition to the restaurants, which were a fairly new acquisition, having been purchased by Maria's father, she owned quite a lot of real estate and several retail businesses, from a gallery of native art to a haute couture shop on the Plaza. She was the modern equivalent of nobility.
I ordered a large vase of white roses to be sent to the funeral, and wrote a formal note of condolence to Rick and his family. By that time I was yawning, so I shut down my computer and went to bed.
In the morning I slept late, then got up and puttered around the tearoom, laundering linens and aprons and refreshing the vases, pulling out tired flowers and trimming stems. I enjoyed these quiet times when the tearoom was closed and I could walk through the parlors, admiring everything, soaking up the atmosphere of peace and rich beauty. A time to remind myself of what I was trying to create, for myself and for my customers.
I fixed an omelette for brunch and debated what to do with my afternoon. A visit of condolence to Rosa’s family? Maybe, but Ricardo might have his hands full with the restaurant at midday on Sunday, unless he could leave it in the hands of a junior manager.
I thought about calling Willow to ask about researching Captain Dusenberry's murder, but the archives and probably the museum offices would be closed. Library, too.
I could follow up with the Rose Guild. An echo of remembered annoyance with Tony spurred me to get out Joan Timothy’s card and make a call. She answered on the third ring.
“Hello, Joan, this is Ellen Rosings. I was wondering if this would be a good time to talk a little more about the Rose Guild?”
“Actually I’m on my way to the City Rose Garden. We meet there every weekend to prune and feed. Would you like to join us? We could talk there.”
“I’d love to.”
“Bring a hat and gloves,” she said cheerily. “I’ll be over there in about twenty minutes.”
“See you there.”
I hung up and looked at the shorts and sandals I was wearing. Jeans would be better in a rose garden, as I had no desire to scratch up my thighs. I went upstairs and changed, putting on a light long-sleeved shirt against sunburn and trading the sandals for my garden clogs. Armed with a straw hat, a bottle of ice water, and my gloves and shears in case I was invited to help, I headed out.
The City Rose Garden is actually a park, nicely landscaped with paths, arched bowers over hidden benches, and a central fountain. Lots of people were strolling there on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I saw a cluster of a dozen or more women dressed much as I was at one end of the park, and headed over to join them.
If not for the clothing, I’d have thought they were all likely to be headed for the Wisteria Tearoom. The profile of my average customer is female, over thirty, and Caucasian, and they all fit the bill.
Joining the Rose Guild suddenly seemed an even better idea. I was a little young for the profile, but I’d always hung around with people mostly older than me. I liked roses, and it couldn’t hurt to rub elbows with potential customers.
Said potential customers at the moment were busy clipping faded blooms, tying up climbers, doing all the little maintenance chores that kept the roses looking their best. I spotted Joan’s tall form and headed toward her.
“Good afternoon!” she said, smiling as she straightened from trimming a burgeoning Mr. Lincoln. She wore a practical hat, a white blouse open over a red t-shirt, and cotton duck trousers of olive green, the knees darkened with dirt.
“Aha, you brought shears—I’m going to put to you work!”
“Please do,” I said, smiling.
“There’s an Elegant Lady over here that needs some attention.”
“That's the Diana, Princess of Wales rose, isn't it?”
“Yes. I don't know why they changed the name. Here it is.” She stopped before a tea rose bearing pale white blossoms with just a blush of pink to them.
“Oh, how lovely!” I said, stooping to cup a blossom in my hand and inhale the delicate fragrance. “I thought about planting one but they’re hard to find.”
“They’re temperamental, too, I’m afraid,” said Joan. “I’m almost sorry we planted it, except the blooms are so beautiful. Just deadhead and put the trimmings in that milk crate over there.”
I started cutting off the faded blooms, clipping each stem back to just above a five-lobed leaf to encourage a new bud to form. Joan watched me for a moment, then went back to her Mr. Lincoln. I smiled to myself, knowing I’d passed initial inspection.
It was soothing, working with the roses, surrounded by their scent and by the gentle, fussy voices of the Rose Guild. I noticed Lucy Kingston a few feet away, pruning a China rose and chattering happily with another woman I didn’t recognize. She seemed so cheerful, it was hard to imagine this was the same woman who had exhibited such revulsion at the mention of Maria Garcia’s name.
How much money had Mrs. Garcia left the Rose Guild? I couldn’t imagine it being worthwhile to kill her for any sum, but the minds of criminals do not see such things normally. I mused about what could inspire a nice old lady to commit murder. By the time I’d finished trimming the Princess Diana, I had reached no conclusion.
It might all be nonsense anyway. It was just as likely—probably more likely—that Mrs. Garcia had picked up the botulism from the soil, perhaps in her own garden.
Except she’d been in the hospital with a broken hip. I remembered the walker she’d used to get into the tearoom, and how weak she had seemed, almost strokey. Had she even gone back to gardening since she’d come home? I’d have been willing to bet she hadn’t. Maybe I’d ask Rosa.
I collected my trimmings and carried them to the milk crate Joan had indicated. Lucy Kingston arrived simultaneously with her own double-handful of deadheads. She peered at me from beneath the wide brim of her straw hat, frowning slightly as if trying to remember me. I smiled.
“Hello, Ms. Kingston. Ellen Rosings, from the tearoom?”
“Oh, yes! How nice to see you. Are you joining the Guild?”
“I’m thinking about it. Joan invited me to come and visit.”
“Lovely!” She gave me a beaming smile. “We need more younger members. Cora says we should be working to recruit, or we’re in danger of dying out, ha ha!”
I didn’t answer, a little shocked at such a joke so recently after Maria Garcia’s death. Perhaps that hadn’t occurred to Ms. Kingston.
“You mean Cora Young, right?” I said after a moment. “Is she a good friend of yours?”
“Oh, yes! We’ve been friends forever. She’s around here somewhere.” She craned her head around, scanning the many woman stooping to tend rosebushes, then turned to me with a shrug. “Oh, well. You’ll bump into her, probably. I’d better get back to work.”
“May I help? I’m done with the bush Joan assigned me.”
“Of course! The more the merrier.”
I followed her to a bed of mixed tea roses, and began pruning a G
emini while she worked on a Sundance that was covered with mostly-faded blooms. The summer was getting hot, and many of the roses would soon go dormant for a while until the monsoon rains came.
“Have you lived in Santa Fe long, Ms. Kingston?” I asked.
“Oh, call me Lucy. We’re not formal in the Guild. Yes, I’ve lived here forever. We moved here just after getting married. My husband worked for the State, rest his sweet soul.”
“Do you have children?”
“Two. They’ve both flown the coop. One’s in Oregon and the other’s in Florida, so I have to do things like this to stay busy, ha ha. Cora keeps trying to get me to volunteer with her at the free health clinic, but I don’t have any medical background, so I’d get stuck typing or filing.”
She seemed so cheery and pleasant it was hard to remember her show of animosity in the tearoom. Being curious, I decided to poke the wasp’s nest and see if anything flew out.
“How well did you know Maria Garcia?” I asked.
Her smile immediately closed down, and her lips became set in a grim line. She didn’t answer for a moment, being occupied in choosing where to prune a stem. She chopped it with a vicious snap, and threw the spent bloom at her feet.
“Too well,” she said in a clipped voice. “I’d rather not have known her at all.”
“She couldn’t have been that bad,” I said.
Lucy turned sharp eyes on me. “Did you know her?”
“Only very slightly.”
A wry, mirthless smile turned her lips. “She could appear pleasant. She had lovely manners. Cora says that’s how she could work her way into groups like ours.”
“What can she have done to upset you?”
Her eyes narrowed. “She had encroaching ways. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but she could be very forward, if you know what I mean.”
I wasn’t sure I did, but I decided not to press the issue. Group dynamics were a reality, unpleasant when they took a sour turn, but inevitable.
I had finished trimming the Gemini, and stooped to pick up my clippings. “Shall I take yours, too?” I offered.
Lucy’s smile returned. “Thank you, dear.”
I collected the trimmings and carried them to the crate, which was now full to overflowing. Stuffing my contribution on top, I decided to make myself useful by emptying the crate.
Looking around, I saw a dumpster over toward one end of the park, near a small shed whose doors stood open. I carried the milk crate over there and emptied it into the dumpster. Joan came up and joined me, smiling.
“Finished? Shall I give you another assignment?”
“Sure.” I saw a familiar face nearby, and waved. “Hello, Ms. Young. Ellen Rosings, from the tearoom,” I added as she gave me a startled look.
“Oh, hello!” She smiled, blinking against the bright sunlight from beneath her floppy cloth hat. “How nice of you to join us.”
“Beautiful day for gardening.”
She nodded and laughed. “Any day’s beautiful for gardening, unless it’s snowing.”
“Or windy,” I said, thinking of New Mexico’s notorious spring winds.
“Come have a look at these miniatures, Ellen,” said Joan.
She led me away toward a raised bed of tiny plants covered with a profusion of equally tiny flowers, little bright balls of red, yellow, pink and white. I reached down to touch a bloom.
“Wow, they look really happy!”
“Have you ever grown them?”
“Not successfully,” I admitted. “I’ve received them as presents a couple of times. I never planted them.”
“They do much better in a bed than in a container.”
“So I see.” I looked up at Joan. “They don’t look like they need pruning.”
“Oh, no. I just wanted to show them to you. There’s a Stainless Steel over here you can help with.”
“How do you decide which roses to plant?” I asked as we strolled between beds of riotous rosebushes. I kept sniffing the air, catching tantalizing whiffs of scent.
“Well, it doesn’t come up that often. We only have so much room here in the public garden. Unless a plant dies, or the City approves a new bed, we don’t usually plant new roses here.”
“I see. And you probably don’t lose a plant very often. These all look wonderfully healthy.”
“Thank you! We do our best, though we do lose one every now and then. It can get a little contentious, deciding how to replace it. The members nominate varieties they’re interested in, then the Board votes on which one to plant. We always consider the variety that was lost, of course. But there are also always wonderful new roses coming out.”
“What’s the newest rose in the garden?”
“An Our Lady of Guadalupe rose. That was a fight! I almost wanted to resign, it got so bitter!”
“Really? Why?”
“We’d lost a Judy Garland, and Lucy wanted to replace it with another, but Maria nominated the Our Lady of Guadalupe. That’s a fairly new variety, named in honor of the Pope recognizing the Virgin of Guadalupe as the patron of the Americas a few years back, you remember?”
I nodded. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a powerful symbol in New Mexico, one I’ve always been fond of though I’m not a Catholic.
“I didn't know there was a rose named for her.”
“Appropriate, don't you think? With the legend and all.”
“Yes, indeed.” La Guadalupana was famous for a miracle involving roses, and she was often depicted surrounded by them.
“Well, Cora sided with Lucy, and they argued and argued. The other board members were mostly just terrified to even say a thing! The vote came in tied, and I had the tie-breaker. I chose the Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
“Why?”
Joan stopped walking and glanced around. A troubled frown had creased her brow.
“Maria had been such a good member for so long,” she said quietly. “She was our Vice President, and she made large donations to the Guild every year, over and above her membership. And I felt sorry for her.”
Joan started walking again, so briskly I had to hurry to catch up. I wanted to ask why she felt sorry for Maria Garcia, though I had my suspicions. Maria had been wealthy and powerful and certainly a strong-minded woman, good qualities that might also get one in political trouble.
“May I see the Our Lady of Guadalupe rose?” I asked instead.
“Of course. It’s over this way.”
She turned down a different path, toward the far corner of the park. I followed her to one of the outer beds, where we found Cora vigorously spraying water onto a large floribunda covered with pink blossoms.
“Easy, Cora!” said Joan. “You’re going to blast the petals right off it!”
Cora tuned the hose away and twisted the nozzle to lower the water pressure. “Sorry,” she said in a slightly grumpy tone. “It’s got aphids.”
“Well, it needs feeding anyway. Get some of the systemic. It’s in the shed.”
Cora nodded and shut off the hose, but stood frowning at the pink rosebush for a moment before dropping the hose on the sidewalk a few feet away. She glanced at me, then shuffled off down another path toward the shed.
“This is it,” Joan said, indicating the bush Cora had been hosing down. “Not looking its best at the moment, I’m afraid. I don’t know what Cora was thinking.”
A number of petals were scattered on the ground beneath the rosebush, and water dripped off of the drooping pink blooms. I didn’t bother trying to smell one, as the scent wouldn’t be very strong after the hosing.
This was the bush Maria had fought for. Our Lady of Guadalupe. A simple pink rose, nothing extraordinary, but I knew that because of its name it would mean a lot to Maria Garcia.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll come visit it again when it hasn’t just had a shower.”
Joan smiled. “Come on. I’ll help you with the Stainless Steel.”
I spent another hour or so pruning roses and chatting with Joan.
She introduced me to several of the other ladies, very kindly mentioning my tearoom as she did so, and the ladies made polite interested noises. Very promising.
At mid-afternoon the Rose Guild began winding down its session for the week, for which I was secretly grateful as it was getting rather warm. I helped Joan gather equipment and supplies into a wheelbarrow, which she then rolled to the shed to put away.
“Thanks for visiting us, Ellen.”
“Thank you for letting me tag along. I’m very interested in joining the Guild. Do you have a brochure?”
“Oh, I should, shouldn’t I? There might be one buried in my the car somewhere—or you can just visit the website.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“It’s santaferoseguild.org,” Joan said. “It’s on the card I gave you, if you have trouble remembering.”
“Great. Thanks again!”
We removed our gardening gloves and shook hands. I rather liked Joan, and I thought my Aunt Nat might like her too. I looked forward to continuing the acquaintance.
“I’ll be calling you about the reception,” Joan said. “I’m going to want that sample menu, and a quote to put before the board. We meet Thursday.”
“All right. We’re closed tomorrow, but if you call on Tuesday I should be able to get you a quote by—say, Wednesday morning?”
“Perfect.”
Joan pushed the wheelbarrow into the shed, then bid me a cheerful farewell. I strolled off to my car, pleasantly tired and ready for a glass of something cold.
Driving home, I thought about Maria Garcia and her Our Lady of Guadalupe rosebush, and wondered if she had planted one in her own garden. If she even had a garden.
I remembered Tony mentioning she had lived in Casa de Sónset, an upscale assisted living place, a retirement community for people with money. She wouldn’t have a garden to play in there. The Rose Guild was probably her only outlet for gardening, then. No wonder she had been willing to fight for the Our Lady of Guadalupe rose.
I parked and went in the tearoom’s back door, leaving my gloves and shears on the bench out back with the intention of putting them away later. I wanted a cold drink and a shower before I put things away and figured out what to fix for dinner. Before I even reached the stairs, though, the front doorbell rang.
A Sprig of Blossomed Thorn Page 10