The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (18 page)

At dinner, Louise noted the sober mood that prevailed; the absence of Grace and especially Bebe also made the
crowd quieter. Even the faint curtain of mist in the air outside the veranda seemed to enclose them in a kind of quiet gloom. Louise had put on a fresh dress but hadn’t bothered with makeup. Nora looked like a woman out of the Old Testament, in her black caftan and sandals. There was little joy to be found, except among the outside dinner guests, who knew nothing yet of the death. And then there were the flowers, robust, patriotic-colored bouquets of red geranium, blue delphinium, and white daisy, that flew in the face of emotions like sadness and mourning. Obviously, they were prepared before the staff learned of the accident. Or was Barbara Seymour doing her best to restore a sense of normalcy to the inn?

Louise also noticed that young Teddy found many excuses to pass their table, which was probably what started all the trouble. And Louise didn’t need trouble, after her nearly sleepless night, performing all day in front of the camera, and returning to the inn to deal with the trauma of Jeffrey’s accident. But trouble it would be, when they all finished their appetizers and Janie, looking more grown-up than usual in a calf-length, sleeveless, pale green print dress, impetuously got up from her seat next to Louise. She crossed the veranda and caught up with Teddy, guiding him down the porch stairs with a firm hand. Louise could only see their heads. Her daughter was talking rapidly to the young man, hurrying, as if she wanted to get back before the next course was served. He bent down to listen, his cowlick cunning as ever, his eyes alight with interest.

Their little conversation created waves. The red-haired waitress, for one, seemed infuriated that Teddy was conversing with a guest. She flounced by and stared down at the pair, nearly spilling her tray when she bumped into a chair. Chris reacted in a similar jealous fashion. Blond and handsome in his best clothes, he stared indignantly at the two of them for a while. Then he excused himself and stalked over, descended the stairs, and joined them. Louise could see
from their gestures that Chris didn’t want Janie to divulge more to the young maître d’hôtel. But when he tried to pull her away, Janie coldly removed his hand from her arm.

At this juncture, Mark Post appeared from somewhere on the lawn, where he had apparently gone to smoke. He came up the steps past the young people, shooting them a surprised look. Janie and Chris returned to the table, Teddy resumed his maître d’ responsibilities, and Louise incorrectly assumed that peace had been restored.

“What was that all about?” Louise asked her daughter.

Janie’s eyes shone with excitement. “I told Teddy what Chris and I suspected about Jeffrey’s death—that it was no accident. That Mark or—”

“Now, wait, Janie,” she interrupted, “I think you and Chris are going too far.”

The girl waggled her legs like an accordion under her fancy print skirt, and said, “No way are we wrong.”

Louise moved a hand over and gently pressed upon her daughter’s legs to stop the wiggling. “Darling,” she whispered, “I know you’re nervous, but don’t do that.”

Janie pushed her mother’s hand away. “Aw, c’mon, Ma, don’t obsess. You just wait—time will tell whether Chris and I are right. In the meantime, it’s good to have Teddy in this with us.” She cast a wary glance at Chris sitting on the other side of her. “Except Chris doesn’t think so.”

Suddenly, Mark Post rose from his table on the edge of the veranda, came over, and crouched down between Janie and Chris. His thin face was dark red, his mouth twisted angrily. Janie’s blue eyes widened.

“What a couple of losers
you
two are.”

Louise, alarmed, leaned in so she could hear. Even from where she sat, she could smell his tobacco breath. For some reason, he’d been smoking up a storm.

“I just overheard you talking to that young hick who runs the dining room. And I heard my name mentioned, and then something about how I probably shoved Freeling off
the top of that mountain today. Now, are you kids crazy or something? Did you ever hear of slander? You’re
slandering
me, and I’ll be damned if I know why. Sandy told me just now that she spilled the story of what happened at NYU five years ago. Well, talking about that could be slanderous, too, because, you know, none of that was ever proved: I pleaded nolo contendere for some very good reasons …”

The candlelight falling on his sharp features gave him a malevolent look, rather like a thin gargoyle sculpted in stone grimacing at the world. “I’m not about to explain this whole thing, because you wouldn’t even understand it—you’re too damned wet behind the ears. I’m just telling you that you’d better not talk like that about me again or I could sue you. Do you hear that?
Sue
you: a real grown-up concept you’d better learn right now before you shoot your mouths off again.”

Done with his warning, he stood erect. As if Chris would take the lead in this, Mark gave him an encouraging little hit on the shoulder and said, “Get that, buddy?” Then, as an afterthought, he leaned over and hoarsely whispered in Chris’s ear, “Don’t be a fuckin’
loser
” He strode back to his own table with the grace of an athlete, but Louise noticed his wife took no notice of him and simply kept up her own conversation.

“Well, well,” said Louise.

“Don’t say ‘I told you so,’ Ma, although you did. It’s okay. We’ll just be more careful how we go about things next time.” Janie put her hands in her lap and clasped them together.

“Who, you and Teddy and Chris?”

Janie cast a regretful glance at Teddy. “Not tonight. Teddy has a date, unfortunately. But we’ll get together with him again tomorrow. See, he’s not so trusting as you, Ma. He agrees that Jeffrey could have been shoved.” She flashed a quick look at her mother, and then turned her attention to her rack of lamb.

It was apparent that no one had the heart to make it a late evening, although Janie and Chris, only slightly subdued by Mark’s angry outburst, drifted off together as soon as dinner was finished. Their whispered exchanges practically telegraphed their intentions, and Louise looked at Bill in dismay. “They’re still snooping, I can tell. Why can’t they just play a quiet game of Scrabble in the library and then go to bed?”

“Dream on, Louise. Just who did you think you were dealing with? Talk about ‘her mother’s daughter.’” Still looking at his wife, he cocked his head toward the door and then turned to include Nora. “Come on—let’s all get out of here and go for a walk.”

When they left the veranda, they passed Jim Cooley, perched on the veranda rail with the remaining guests of the inn clustered around him like moths to a flame. Jim was playing the hero again, engaging them in a warm conversation, obviously trying to soothe their frayed nerves so that they could leave Litchfield Falls Inn tomorrow with happy, not morose, feelings.

With Nora loosely holding one of Bill’s arms and Louise the other, they sauntered up one of the winding paths through the wooded hills. The cloud-harassed sun had set somewhere beyond the trees, and there was little light left. Louise glanced at Nora as her neighbor trudged slowly along. “This must be sad for you, walking here,” said Louise. “Isn’t this the way…”

“Yes. We’re retracing the path that Jeffrey and I took yesterday afternoon. It takes one to a very deep, magnificent pool. It’s beautiful.” There was a catch in her voice. “As for Jeffrey, I don’t believe I’ve ever met a nicer man …”

“Better not dwell on it, Nora,” said Bill. “What you have to remember is that it was one of those terrible accidents that sometimes happen to people.”

“Bill, our daughter doesn’t think it was just a terrible accident,” said Louise. She stopped when she saw the look Nora shot her.

“Janie doesn’t think
what?
” demanded Nora.

“Oh, well, Chris will be telling you, anyway—though heaven knows I don’t want to upset you. I don’t want to upset anyone more than they’ve already been upset. Chris and Janie believe Jeffrey was pushed off that mountain.”

Nora stopped in the middle of the path, pulling the others to a halt with her. “Tell me that isn’t so,” she whispered. “It’s what I have feared the most, and what has been intruding more and more on my subconscious.” Louise saw in the woman’s gray eyes the kind of dreamlike look that had been there when she predicted danger and death in the past.

And Nora had always been right.

“Who did it?” she demanded suddenly.

“Oh, Nora, please,” said Louise. “They suspect Mark Post or Rod Gasparra, but it’s merely suspicion. Apparently both Mark and Rod had some sort of grudge against Jeffrey. But there’s nothing there, or the police would know about it.”

“Would they?” Nora asked.

Bill, ever practical, grabbed their arms again and hustled them forward. “Friends, do you realize how useless it is to speculate like this? Let’s just go for our walk. We can sleep on it and talk about it tomorrow morning. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Louise echoed. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

With Nora as the guide, they took one of the three flower-lined paths that led to the falls. It was the middle path that emerged where the twenty-five-foot-high waterfall plunged into a pool and rushed on across a tumble of rocks to become a lively downhill stream.

The path turned, and they walked alongside a pristine pool so deep they could not see its bottom. It was fed by the constant flow of water from the falls above, which broke the mirrored surface with a pleasant chattering sound. The last rays of the sun peeked through the woods and caught the edges of the iron-gray rock, highlighting ferns and other bog plants tucked into the moist rocky crevasses by both nature’s hand and the hand of the inn’s groundskeeper.

Momentarily, this beauty distracted their eyes from seeing what was so obvious, and so much more important than the plants and the flowers and the sound of falling water and the motion of small birds as they darted about, catching tiny bugs on the pool’s surface.

It was the broken body lying at the edge of the deep pit, partly in and partly out of the water. The body in its wet lavender dress, thin and pathetic. Slim arms flung over a head cocked grotesquely back on the neck and resting below the surface. Wide-spaced blue eyes still open and staring up into a dusky sky. Rosy-colored strands of hair swaying in the cool water, like so many pale, slithering snakes.

The body of Grace Cooley, a broken flower lying at the foot of the falls.

“I
T LOOKS LIKE A SUICIDE,” SAID
S
ERGEANT
Ed Drucker.

“Suicide,” said Louise. She sat opposite him, legs crossed at the ankles in a most ladylike fashion, her hands placed serenely in her lap. “I suppose
murder
is something that never happens in Litchfield.”

He chuckled. “You think nobody ever gets killed around here?”

“I would have believed that when I first came here. Maybe it’s because this place is so beautiful, so … well-painted. Even the oldest barns and
outbuildings, carefully preserved, cherished. I jumped to the conclusion that people would be just as careful with preserving lives. But all of a sudden everything appears much darker—” She stopped.

“Darker?”

“Yes.” Her hands twisted together for comfort. “Darker, and more dangerous. Two of us are dead, and another one survived an accident meant to do serious harm. Suppose someone has killed, and wants to kill again?”

Drucker chuckled again, longer this time. She noticed that he had a groove on his forehead above the dark shock of hair pushed down by his gray felt trooper’s hat. He was a big man, probably six foot six, with an innocent-looking, boyish face, and laugh lines that fanned out from his eyes and down the sides of his cheeks. Women, probably his mother and later his wife, had told this man how special he was. He was unself-consciously assertive, but with an affectionate regard for his fellow human beings. And yet his dark, searching eyes told her how tough he was: Those eyes had scoped her out from the moment the two of them had sat down to talk.

“You have some imagination, all right, Mrs. Eldridge,” he told her. “Anyway, there’s fifteen more of you to go. You don’t think someone’s trying to mow down the whole bunch?”

She gave him a sheepish smile. “Maybe not everyone. But two are dead, and who knows what might happen next?”

“Well, to answer your previous question, we have had murders in and around Litchfield, but don’t get the wrong impression. This is a quiet, law-abiding village. The people here do lots of good works, and are very generous in funding things like the boys’ home and a home for recovering alcoholics. But there is occasional violence. Why, we had a nasty little murder just last year. A son of a prominent local businessman shot the son of another longtime resident. The young fellow parked his pickup on a side street, walked up to the other man, and shot him clean through the head.”

“Why?”

“Drug deal gone wrong.”

Louise shook her head. “Well, at least he didn’t kill someone on the town green: That would be more than anyone could bear.” To have that picture-perfect New England scene bloodied was unthinkable.