Because Bob had peed all over her.
Anyway . . . Jayne yelled out the door for Ingrid Beechum, and Ingrid came running. Ingrid and Amos got Jayne into Amos’s patrol car, and Amos drove her down to Bigelow County Hospital. A good twenty or thirty Creekites followed right away to stand vigil for Jayne, since she’s a young widow and has no family in the county. Ingrid, always a tough and take-charge woman, stayed with her in the birthing room. Ingrid will never have a grandchild of her own. She counted on Jayne’s baby to be a good substitute.
The end result? Matthew Reynolds, Junior. A healthy, dark-haired boy. Seven pounds, eight ounces. Ingrid, crying like a grandmother, held him up to a window of the birthing room so we could all see him.
Jayne sent a message that made the rest of us cry, too. “He’s been born a Creekite,” she said. “So now he has a whole town for a family.”
We take people to our hearts quickly. It’s a testament to the magic of this town that we still feel that way. We endured a lot of strangers in Mossy Creek right after the high school fire—and not happily, I have to admit. Nobody liked the investigators from the state crime lab and the reporters from the Atlanta newspapers and TV stations. The investigators treated us like ignorant small town hicks, and the reporters made sure the rest of the world thought so, too. Zeke Abercrombie was so upset his blood pressure went sky high, and Dr. Champion ordered him not to serve as mayor again. That’s when Ida stepped in. She ran for the office, she won, and she vowed to check out every newcomer in town from then on. I couldn’t agree more.
That’s why, even now, we don’t let newcomers keep to themselves. We don’t like mysteries, even little ones. We have a saying about strangers: Throw ‘em in the Creek quick, and see if they float.
It’s kinder than it sounds.
Read on and see what I mean.
PEGGY
Life’s not just about what you plant, but what you harvest.
PEGGY
The P-Patch
I’d always loathed gardening, in part because gardening loathed me. That saying about ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,’ is idiotic. If you don’t succeed at something, then for pity’s sake drop it and take up something you’re good at. With that said, I have to tell you that none of what happened after I moved to Mossy Creek was my fault.
It was the zinnias’.
I tore every one of them right out of the ground and threw them into the trash.
But I suppose this story really starts with Ben. Ben Caldwell, my husband. He convinced me to retire early as a professor of English at the University of Tennessee when he retired from his law firm in Knoxville. Then he moved us down here to Mossy Creek, Georgia so we could be close to our married daughter, Marilee. We hadn’t lived close to her since she went away to college, and Ben was determined to reunite the family in case there should be grandchildren.
Ben actually longed to get his hands on the acre and a half of derelict garden that came with our grand old house on a side street off the square in Mossy Creek. The previous owner, Astrid Oglivie, was apparently a legend among the local gardeners until she developed cataracts at ninety-three. By the time she went peacefully to meet her Maker at ninety-six and we bought the house, the untended garden reminded me of the impenetrable thicket that surrounded Sleeping Beauty’s bower.
Ben had ambitious plans to make the garden a showplace again. Unfortunately, the first time he dragged me into the back yard, I nearly tripped over a copperhead snake the length of a football goal post. My relationship with the garden was all downhill from there. It’s taken women millennia to drag themselves up off their knees. Why should I grovel in the mud in the blazing sun while blood-sucking creatures attack the back of my neck and my skin goes leathery? I’m in that age group where I’m turning leathery enough, already.
I was delighted to leave Ben to the outdoors while I stayed indoors in the new central air conditioning reading the latest murder mysteries and chatting with my university friends on-line. Ben was completely happy. He loved puttering around outside, and cleaned out most of the encroaching jungle right away. He kept running inside to tell me about his new discoveries. There was even a small ‘secret garden’ at the back of the property, hidden behind mossy stone walls. I took his word for it.
Then six months after we moved in, he keeled over dead in the zinnias. I haven’t forgiven him for that, yet. I still get angry when I see gray-haired couples tottering hand in hand down Mossy Creek’s main drag. That was supposed to be us a few years hence. In my mind, the garden killed him. So you can see I am not well-disposed to green-growing things.
Or, I wasn’t.
Sooner or later I knew I’d get up the gumption to put the house on the market and move back to Tennessee. Preferably to a high-rise condominium within walking distance of a mall. In the nearly nine months since Ben’s death, I hadn’t been able to overcome my inertia.
Marilee swore I was clinically depressed. Well, heck, yes, I was depressed! In a little over a year, I’d lost my job, my city life, and my husband. But I wasn’t clinically depressed. Just garden-variety, if you’ll excuse the allusion. If Marilee hadn’t brought in the mail when she came to see me, if she hadn’t seen the Mossy Creek Garden Club return address on their invitation to me, none of it would have happened. So in a sense it’s her fault. I would have declined the invitation politely and gone back to the latest true-crime police novel on my nightstand.
But Marilee, who is unfortunately a status-conscious Bigelow by marriage, screamed so loud when she saw the invitation that my Maine coon cat, Dashiell, leapt to the top of the nearest bookcase and hissed at us. “Mother, you have to go to that tea! The garden club is the smallest, most exclusive club in Mossy Creek! My Claude would kill to be a member.”
“Since I’ve heard that you have to be female, over fifty, and definitely not a Bigelow to be invited, I don’t think he’s got a snowball’s chance in hell.”
“Please, mother, say you’ll go. Since Daddy died all you’ve done is sit in this house with that wicked cat and read books.” She waved a hand at the bookshelves that were double and triple-shelved with paperbacks. “One of these days I’ll find you buried under a pile of books with one frail hand scrabbling feebly at the carpet.”
“My hands are not frail, thank you very much. Your father and I should never have allowed you to audition for the Playmakers at the University of North Carolina, Marilee. You’ve over-dramatized ever since.”
“Say you’ll go to that tea, mother. Swear!”
I knew I’d never get rid of her otherwise, so I swore. Garden club indeed. Those exclusive old ladies would take one look at me, shout ‘unclean’ at the tops of their voices, and kick me out.
* * * *
The party was at Ida Hamilton Walker’s. Ida Walker is mayor of Mossy Creek and just barely eligible, age-wise, to join the club. Looks-wise, she could be forty, tops. A good-looking forty, too. I knew she lived just outside town at the Hamilton family’s showplace farm, in a large, Victorian home full of inherited antiques, but I’d never been invited there, before. I expected to be grilled about my theories on rutabagas by Mayor Walker and a crowd of superbly svelte crones sporting perfectly coiffed hair, fake fingernails, and a combined carat weight of diamonds that would sink the Titanic. All drinking oolong out of Lowestoft cups.
And wearing ultra-suede, lots of it. I have a friend who swears ultra-suede rots the post-menopausal brain.
When Ida’s housekeeper, June McEvers, ushered me into the library, instead I found half a dozen women in Wranglers and chinos knocking back mimosas with their Nikes propped on stacks of gardening magazines atop Ida’s antique butler’s table. I felt overdressed in the black blazer and skirt I’d dredged out of the back of my closet for the occasion. I even had on panti-hose and pumps with heels.
I was introduced all around to women with names that meant almost nothing to me. I’ve never been good at names, even though there were only five of them, not counting my hoste
ss. I knew the mayor, of course, and had met a couple of the others casually at Mossy Creek’s Mt. Gilead Methodist Church, but I felt certain none of their names would stick, especially since I never expected to be asked to another meeting.
They shoved a mimosa into my hand and proceeded to try to get me drunk as a skunk.
While I was fending off a giddy urge to hiccup, the aged elf next to me, Mimsy, put a nearly transparent paw on my arm and whispered, “We want you to join our club, dear. We like the way you drink. But lose the pumps, all right?”
Okay, I thought, while I can still walk, I’d better disabuse these ladies of any hope that I could be an asset to them. “You ladies really don’t want me in your club. I swear.”
That brought a flurry of disclaimers. I held up a hand—I still saw only one, thank God—and said, “Look, you’re wonderful people, and I’ve enjoyed this ‘tea’ thoroughly. But you are about to clasp a viper to your bosom. I’m no gardener. I can even kill philodendron.”
Gasps. Nothing can kill philodendron.
“You remember Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story about the princess whose father kept her in a poison garden?” I went on. “Then one day she got out, and every plant she touched died? You are looking at Rappaccini’s great-great-great-whatever granddaughter. I am come as a blight upon your land.” As a former English professor, I tend to talk flowery when I get smashed, which I do about once every twenty years.
“But dear, anybody can garden!” Mimsy said.
“That’s like saying anyone can cook or ride a horse or do quantum physics. It ain’t necessarily so. My husband was the gardener. If you’ve driven by and seen our place looking half-way decent, it’s because Ben did a bunch of work before he died, and my daughter and son-in-law have tried to keep the lawn mowed and the shrubs cut back since then. Frankly, I haven’t had the heart.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll help you.” This from a large woman wearing a Hawaiian shirt. She looked like a small tropical island after a typhoon.
“I don’t want to be helped. I want to sit indoors with my cat and read mysteries.”
“And get old and shriveled and just wait to die?” Mimsy added helpfully.
After a moment of dull dignity, I gave up and nodded.
I saw Ida’s fingers begin to drum on the candle table by her chair. I heard concerted sighs. I saw an exchange of looks that could only be called ‘speaking.’
That’s when I should have tossed my empty mimosa glass at them and run for cover.
“We’re staging an intervention on your behalf,” Ida said, leaning toward me and motioning for a tiny lady near Mimsy to refill my tumbler. “We need you. Mossy Creek needs you. Your garden needs you. Surely that makes a difference.”
“Not to my ability.”
The tiny lady actually began to stroke my hand, much the way I stroke Dashiell when he’s annoyed at me. “We always counted on dear Astrid,” she said. “At least until she got so blind she couldn’t tell an ageratum from a hydrangea.”
Titters all around. Apparently ageratum and hydrangeas look different to the trained eye.
“We can’t afford to lose just because she died and sold you the house.”
“Lose? Lose what?”
“The contest, dear. The gardening contest against the Bigelow Garden Club.”
Oh, boy.
One of the first discoveries I made about Mossy Creek is that it is locked in an eternal competition with its neighbor at the south end of the county. This includes Bigelows—the family—and Bigelow—the well-to-do small city—and Bigelow—the county, which includes the town of Mossy Creek. The feud is complicated by the fact that the governor of Georgia, Hamilton Bigelow, is Ida’s nephew by way of being the only son of Ida’s estranged sister, Ardaleen Hamilton Bigelow. Ida despises Ardaleen for family reasons going back to their girlhood, and the feeling is mutual. Ardaleen hates, loathes and abominates anything and everything to do with Ida and Mossy Creek. She thinks her sister and the entire town is out to destroy the life, happiness, and possible presidential candidacy of her pampered, arrogant son, Hamilton.
Which, in all fairness, it pretty much is.
“You see,” Ida said, relaxing into her wing chair, certain that she had me corralled between Mimsy and the Brunhilde in the Hawaiian shirt, “This year, as part of the reunion festivities, we’re having a contest between the gardens of Bigelow and Mossy Creek. It’s an uneven contest, of course. Their garden club has almost twenty members, while we have six—seven with you, Peggy.”
I started to say something, but she shushed me. “It’s not a straight ‘Yard of the Month’ sort of thing. That would be too simple. The contest is judged by neutral officials of the state garden society. This is a very elaborate contest in which each category acrues points. The town with the most points wins.”
“Then you’ve already lost,” I said.
“No, we haven’t.”
“And we won’t,” Brunhilde chimed in. I got the feeling she was threatening me.
“We all specialize in different sorts of things,” said Ida. “We know we can count on Eleanor over there to win the rose division. She’s bred three roses that are named after her. Nobody can touch her roses. She’s safe points.”
Which one was Eleanor? Oh, right. Eleanor Abercrombie. She was the tall, thin one with the dyed black hair in a bun at the back of her neck. She appeared to be sleeping and was snoring quietly. She looked like a cross between a librarian and an aging Hell’s Angel. She grew roses?
“Mimsy’s herb garden is pretty much a shoo-in, too.”
Mimsy bridled happily. “I have fourteen different varieties of basil.”
Brunhilde sighed. “But after that we hit the problem areas.” Brunhilde, whose real name, I finally remembered, was Erma Something-or-other, went on, “My spring garden is to die for, but since the contest is going to be judged in June, the only way to judge the spring gardens is by pictures. Jess Crane over at the Mossy Creek Gazette heard that witch Helen Overbury from Bigelow hired an actual TV production team to videotape her garden with music. A couple of Polaroids won’t do it.”
Ida threw up both hands. “So we’ll do our own video production complete with fancy camera work and a mixed chorus, if we have to. I’ll speak to Bert Lyman over at WMOS about it. You know? He’s turned his barn into a small television studio. He’s producing shows for local-access cable. He’ll help us.”
Everyone looked eager and nodded.
“Elton John still keeps an apartment in Atlanta,” Brunhilde said. “I know his personal florist. I bet we could talk Elton into narrating our tape.”
These women were beginning to scare me.
“The ‘Formal Garden’ points are bound to go to Eustene Oscar,” Ida continued. “That’s another guaranteed winner for us.”
Brunhilde looked at me. “Eustene’s not here today. Had to visit her mother at Magnolia Manor. But trust me, Eustene has hard-to-beat topiary boxwoods imported from England before the Revolutionary War.”
“And the design was copied from Capability Brown,” Mimsy said with pride. Apparently I was supposed to recognize the name. She picked up on my blank stare. “He was a famous garden designer in the eighteenth century in England.”
“Oh.”
“But Eustene’s nearly eighty. With her arthritis, the topiary is getting really hard for her to trim, even with help. Last year the elephant looked more like a rhinoceros with a sinus condition.” A spatter of conversation commenced regarding the elephant as a symbol of Mossy Creek’s unsolved school mystery, and how Eustene vowed to keep the elephant topiary going until the twenty-year-old mystery was resolved—something involving a carnival elephant named Rose—but by that point, I just sat there in a kind of stupor, thinking about Eustene and her mama.
Eustene was nearly eighty? How old was Mama?
Brunhilde turned to me again. “But the most points go to the Top All-Around Garden. That’s the problem. We never win the top-all-arounder.”
; “As it stands, Ardaleen Bigelow is bound to win,” Mimsy said. “She cheats. I’m sorry, Ida, but it’s true. Your sister cheats.”
“I hope to shout,” agreed Ida, unoffended.
“I beg your pardon?” I mumbled.
“She cheats,” Mimsy repeated with a sneer. “That nitwitted son of hers, Governor Ham Bigelow, pardoned a landscape designer from Atlanta a couple of years ago just so he could come up to Bigelow and design Ardaleen’s garden.”
“Disgraceful,” Brunhilde-Erma snorted. “That man only served four years for cutting off his wife’s head with a hedge trimmer.”
I stared at her, dazed. “Can you do that with a hedge trimmer?”
“Ardaleen does not know her liriope from her acuba, but then, she doesn’t have to. She’s got half the trustees from the county jail working in the yard at her mansion three days a week.”
“Is that legal?”
Everybody laughed.
“Since when does my nephew care about what’s legal?” Ida said. “He uses the trustees to do the yard work at the state house and the governor’s mansion. All above-board, on that count. But obviously, he considers his boyhood home in Bigelow to be like a second White House is to the President.”
“So long as her son is governor, nobody’s going to be able to win the Top All-Around Garden category but Ardaleen.”
“When the prize should go to Ida,” Brunhilde-Erma said. “Ida has a beautiful summer garden—color coordinated and everything. And she does all the crucial upkeep herself, except for bribing the Mossy Creek Boy Scout Troop to weed—”
Reunion at Mossy Creek Page 9