The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (17 page)

“And Mark and Sandy Post, what did you learn about the Posts?”

“Lots,” said Janie. She sat back, crossed her leg over one knee, waggled the booted foot, and pointed a know-it-all finger at her parent. “I meet her on the trail and fall into step and do sympathetic listener. I guess you already figured this: Sandy Post is pretty rich—old Connecticut money. Every summer when she was a kid she went to Switzerland and did mountain climbing. She’s spent lots of time training on the Olympic biathlon team the past few years—she fit in college courses where she could, and just recently got her B. A. Then she decided to settle down and do the thing girls are supposed to do—get married.”

“To her old beau from NYU,” said Louise, nodding.

Janie found another relaxation pose—by plopping her legs up over the fat arm of the chair. Louise bit back a reprimand along the lines of “
Get jour sweaty legs off the arm of that yellow chair”
The girl said, “The trouble with the old beau, Mark, is that he is a fraud. He’s in trouble and someone’s probably going to repossess that poop-marked Bentley any day, if it isn’t in Sandy’s name. Someone’s about to sue Mark, she told me, for stealing a software program he is selling for big bucks. She, of course, believes in him: thinks he’s innocent of all wrongdoing. I don’t know why she married Mark, but maybe I can find out by the time we leave for home. Maybe it’s sex: She
touches
him all the time—but for some
reason he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t seem to be on her wavelength. Even came on to me for a while, as if flirting were part of his daily exercise program. But so
phony!
For a guy who just got married, he’s totally weird. He doesn’t seem as—
you
know …”

“Passionate?”

“Horny. Like, not nearly as horny as Sandy is.”

Louise’s jaw dropped. She was appalled by one element of her daughter’s vocabulary. “Did you
have
to say
like’?
”

Janie grinned. “Ma, don’t worry about it. Everybody uses like’ these days. It’s cooler if I talk like that—it’s appropriate to my age, even if it doesn’t sound so good coming out of the mouth of someone as old as Sandy.” Sandy, at twenty-eight, was over the hill in Janie’s eyes.

“Anyway,” her daughter continued, “back to my point. I think maybe it’s because Mark has taken the nerdy MBA route. She even teases him that he can’t have out-of-body sexual experiences like she can, because he’s an uptight MBA.” Janie arched a dark eyebrow. “For ‘out-of-body,’ read—”

“Oh, I
get
it, for heaven’s sake. Is that supposed to be
funny?
”

Janie cocked her head. “J thought that was funny, in a kind of crude way. She’s pretty smart, Ma: Don’t be fooled by the way she talks. Now Mark, he’s a very
status
kind of person. Succeed-at-all-costs kind of philosophy. So anyway, I finally weaseled the story about NYU out of her. Guess what! Jeffrey Freeling broke the university rules and dated her a few times; then he chilled out and dropped her.” The girl threw up both hands, as if imparting headline news.

“Mark and Sandy were kind of together back then, but he was still pretty upset. Then, Mark cheated on Jeffrey’s science exam so he could graduate on time, only Sandy thinks he was forced into it by someone else. He did some stupid thing like breaking into Jeffrey’s office and copying the final. He got caught and thrown out of NYU. What’s more, Jeffrey
apparently saw to it that he didn’t get into the MBA program of his choice—which you can be sure was Harvard.” She grinned. “Had to take what he could get at some state university.”

“That’s good background checking, Janie.”

Janie accepted the praise with a flourish of one hand. “Thanks. You can see there was plenty of reason for the sneaky Mark to do the deed. And yet it was funny … there was Sandy telling me all this—I think she needed a cathartic-while …”

“Maybe catharsis.”

“Whatever. While she was tactfully spilling her guts, I filled in all the gaps of the story myself.”

“You mean, some of what you just told me was guesses?”

“Well … I’m just telling you this is more or less what happened among the three of them. It was kind of a veiled conversation. Very typical, Ma, of certain kinds of women; rich, protected women, who can’t call a spade a spade, but have to go through all these hoops, using, uh, you know—”

“Euphemisms?”

“Whatever. Well, that’s Sandy for you. So, while Sandy and I are doing our woman-to-woman, blonde-to-blonde thing, Mark was, like, sucking up to Jeffrey. It was as if he were trying to make up for the past. And I remember a minute there, when we saw them together—maybe she even got a shot of it with her expensive little camera—they looked like the best of buddies, Jeffrey all red-haired and fresh-cheeked and happy, and Mark all eager-beaver. Then Sandy did the same thing, trying to make peace with the professor, maybe. Later on, she helped Jim Cooley try to resuscitate him: She’s really good at CPR.” She shook her head, and Louise saw that the reality of the death was beginning to sink in.

“It’s going to be hard, darling.” Louise was silent a moment, her mind spinning. “Now, if they were acting like the best of buddies, why would you ever suspect Mark?”

Janie shook her tousled head. “Dunno, Ma. Weird chemistry everywhere, weird chemistry ever since we got here, right? I just think Mark is not all that he seems to be. He was
straining
to be a good buddy to Jeffrey. Maybe he needed a reference letter from him to stay out of jail.”

“Did you tell the police what you thought?”

“Naw,” said Janie. “Chris and I talked it over and decided they wouldn’t believe us. But what I did do was give a meaningful look to the chief investigator as we left in the car.”

Louise smiled. “It probably made the man’s day. Sure he didn’t think you were flirting with him?”

“I looked really
hard
at him and sent him a mental message:
This dumb accident is no accident
,”

“What did he do?”

“You’re right: He gave me a big smile. Thought I was coming on to him.” She directed a cool glance at her mother. “So, as usual, Ma, it’s you and me—and Chris and Dad, of course—solving this thing, if it’s ever to be solved. Which this time I seriously doubt. Rocks, after all, do not talk. They don’t hold onto DNA very well, either.”

She swung her legs down, flounced to her feet, and stomped toward the bathroom for a shower. At the door, she turned back to her mother, smiled, and said, “Only time for one bath before tea, and I smell a lot worse than you.”

Tea at the inn was a grave, depressing affair. It was served on the veranda, now dry enough for occupancy. The tall pines and willows surrounding the huge Georgian mansion registered their mournful tenor complaints as a strong afternoon breeze whipped through them and blew away some of the mugginess that had followed the rain. The primordial hum from the trees quite suited the sad occasion, Louise thought.

There was little conversation, but guests gratefully and
rather greedily partook of the fresh pastries and tea, as if determined to manifest some sign of life in the face of death. Despite Janie’s suspicions, no one showed any signs of guilt. There was only sorrow and regret over the death of the professor. Some had showered and changed, while others, like Bebe Hollowell, Grace Cooley, and Louise herself, were in the same rumpled clothes they had been wearing all day. Louise imagined that the two had drained the strength from each other by saying cruel things that may have been true, but were too hurtful and should never have been verbalized.

Stephanie and Neil Landry had just returned from a journey to antiques shops in nearby towns. They came out on the veranda and self-consciously offered their condolences to the rest, as if by being absent at the time of the tragic announcement, they had not shouldered their proper responsibilities. Stephanie still looked fresh in her bright shirt, shorts, sandals, and big trendy hairdo. Neil was casual, in a well-cut jacket, chinos, and white leather sports shoes. Louise noticed that he acted bolder than he had last night at dinner, when Jim Cooley’s quiet authority had somewhat quashed him.

A pang of fear ran through her: Was Sunday’s newspaper going to be in time to safeguard Barbara Seymour? Whether or not it was foul play, Freeling’s death struck uncomfortably close to home—and the tension that seemed to haunt the inn this weekend. She only hoped Tom Carrigan’s story did what she hoped it would. As if reading her mind, Landry slowly turned and looked at her with narrowed, suspicious eyes. It was discouraging to Louise that she couldn’t seem to disguise her disapproval of people—or even her minor philosophical disagreements, as had been the case with Fiona last evening. She would have to learn how to put on a better face for the world. After all, sometimes the occasion demanded it. Bill, of course, had always said she would make a terrible spy and a rotten poker player, because she wore her emotions on her face.

After all that had happened today, Neil Landry was an
outrage: Louise wasn’t about to sit here and engage in a staring contest with him. Anyway, she needed some rest before dinner, and she was sure others must feel the same way. Nora still sat apart from everyone in a haze of depression. Grace looked exhausted, either because of the verbal slashing from Bebe, or because of Freeling’s accident—probably both. She was involved in a tense conversation with Jim, and appeared to be pleading with him about something.

There was no doubt about Bebe Hollowell’s feelings: She loudly proclaimed them. “This day has been way too much for me, folks. I’ve a headache that just won’t go away. I don’t feel well at all.”

Stephanie interposed, “Why don’t you rest, and someone will bring dinner to your room? Then maybe you can join us later for dessert and coffee.”

Bebe heaved an important sigh; she delighted in every attention. “Oh, would you do that? I would so like to call it a day and try to forget everything—that disastrous garden tour, and that poor man’s death.” She accepted the slim Stephanie’s help rising from her chair. “So tragic, these deaths,” she sobbed, as she slowly left the veranda.

Jim Cooley, in fresh slacks and shirt, looked around at the group. “Grace doesn’t feel well, either,” he announced.

“It’s just that I have a raging headache,” Grace explained quietly.

Jim gave his wife an unreadable look. He seemed to be curbing whatever criticism he might want to offer. “I suppose we all might feel poorly at this juncture,” he continued, “but it would be good if the rest of us could return for Barbara’s superb meal.”

Of course, thought Louise: Loyalty above all, and in this case, Louise agreed with him. It was loyalty to their plucky hostess, Barbara Seymour. Jim took Grace’s thin hand. “Dear, suppose we arrange to have your dinner sent up to you, too?”

Grace gently separated her hand from his and thanked
him, then left the veranda. Frank intercepted both Grace and Bebe in the sunroom and escorted them into the interior of the inn. Jim Cooley half rose, looking after his wife with real concern, then sank back in the chair, apparently thinking the better of going with her. The rest of the guests lingered, finding comfort in each other’s presence.

Louise, Bill, Janie, and Chris sat together with little left to say to each other. They listened to the murmur of the wind in the huge pines. “That beautiful sound,” said Bill idly. “It’s coming from second-growth trees.”

“Second-growth—really?” said Louise.

“Yes. Don’t be deceived by their size. All of Litchfield Hills’ virgin forests were taken down; these hills were made bare once. This is second-growth forest.”

Janie jumped impatiently from her chair. “Dad, I can’t believe you’re talking about trees when someone really neat has fallen off a cliff.” Her voice was filled with disgust. She reached a hand out and pulled Chris to his feet. “Come on, Chris, let’s go swimming.”

Louise gave Bill a wan look. “I hope Janie’s going to be all right with this. I don’t know about you, but I’m wiped out—I have to go lie down.” He went with her to her bedroom suite, and they sat together on the edge of the bed.

He put an arm around her. “This has been a hard day for you.”

“It’s just too much, Bill.” She pressed her head against his shoulder, and, not finding that enough, clasped both arms around him. He turned and shoved her long hair back with one hand, found her lips, and gently kissed her. Then he lifted her onto the bed, and they made love slowly, drawn closer in this act of creation by the knowledge that one of their companions had lost his life today.