The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (24 page)

She stopped in her tracks and sniffed. Breakfast and coffee smells wafted enticingly up to her, but suddenly she remembered she had to tell Sergeant Drucker of last night’s adventures. This time she was sure they were not just figments of her imagination. Back in her room, she quickly dialed the number he had given her, listening to her stomach growl.

But Sergeant Drucker was at the morgue. Another trooper took the details. In the end, her little story did not move him—the darkened hall, Bebe’s pleas, people moving around, doors opening, whispers.

“So that’s it?” he said indifferently. “Sergeant Drucker will be at the inn as soon as he can;
I
think it’s safe to wait until you see him to tell him about this.”

Fine, Louise thought. She’d wait.

In the lobby Louise found Jim Cooley, looking for all the world as if he were hung over. He had not shaved, and that alone dramatically changed his usual bandbox appearance. Even his smooth, dark blond hair seemed slightly askew in a boyish sort of way, as if a comb had not gone through it at all today. His olive sports shirt matched the color of his hazel eyes, giving him a melancholy, monochromatic appearance.

Her heart went out to him. “Jim.” She came over and touched him on the shoulder.

“Hi, Louise.”

“Why don’t you come with us this morning? We’re going to Wild Flower Farm. At least it will be a diversion while you wait …”

What was he waiting for? To be dismissed so he could go back to his Brooklyn home, alone, just a few hours away?

As if reading her mind, he said, “They’re finishing the autopsy; it got delayed last night.” A grim smile. “People insist on getting their sleep.” A long sigh. “Maybe I will go with you—it would take my mind off things for an hour or so. And it would be a fitting tribute to Grace.”

“She must have loved Wild Flower Farm.” Louise could feel her eyes dampening as she thought of Grace, lost in the beauty of the gardens yesterday.

“She visited there several times with Barbara, and she did love it, of course. I’ll check in with Drucker and then I’ll be ready to go. Thank you, Louise.”

She passed her husband, who was sitting in the sunroom talking on his cell phone; he must be completing his own calls. When she arrived in the dining room, most of the others already had settled in to eat. Quickly, she negotiated for her first cup of morning coffee. Barbara Seymour sat at a table with her niece Stephanie, and Louise was appalled at the inn proprietor’s appearance: The elderly woman looked somehow shrunken. Barbara must be bereft over the loss of her niece by marriage.

Mark Post was just sitting down at a neighboring table with his wife Sandy and the omnipresent Widow Hollowell. It was a sober little group, except for Mark. He stood at his chair, gesticulating in the air with a cigarette in his hand, as if to illustrate some point. Sandy had a sour expression on her pretty face; she was obviously not impressed with her new husband’s story.

Louise’s mind suddenly evoked an image of the two tall
men she had seen embracing in Litchfield Falls Inn’s dark hallway early Saturday morning.

It was a stretch, and she wouldn’t even have thought of it had Janie not mentioned the man’s sexual aloofness toward his newlywed wife, a wife who appeared to be increasingly alienated as the weekend wore on. Could those have been the silhouettes of Mark Post and Jeffrey Freeling? Had they become entangled in a love affair that had gone wrong— and that Mark was anxious to conceal now that he had married an heiress?

Was that why Jeffrey had died?

Her eyes alight with excitement, Louise drank down her coffee and charted what to do next. Who at NYU was going to be forthcoming enough to verify or shoot down such a mad tale, which, as she thought about it, grew even madder: Beautiful blond Sandy, apparently tossed between two men, a professor and a senior student. But in reality a cover-up for their homosexual love affair. A love affair that blossomed again at a Connecticut country inn, shortly after the former student’s marriage to the girl.

Louise took a good look at Mark. There he was, MBA, entrepreneurial businessman, computer expert, with political connections and available money. But murdering Jeffrey Freeling to permanently get rid of his sexual past? A stretch, indeed.

But she couldn’t let go of the idea. She had to find out if Mark was gay. That would help sort this thing out. But what should she do? Go up to Sandy and say,
How’s your love life? I hear your husband is a little less than heterosexual?
Frantically, she tried to recall any connection she had at NYU. What she needed right now was a raging gossip who knew the sexual proclivities of people on campus. After all, people did not conduct their love lives in a vacuum. But Louise knew no one who could help her there.

Bill sat down and she leaned forward to touch his arm. “Bill, I’ve got a theory.”

“About what?” he asked warily.

“About Mark Post—”

A shadow fell across them and she looked up, startled. Jim Cooley had suddenly appeared at her side.

“Can I join you now?” he said.

“Of course, Jim.” She rubbed her fingers gently against her eyelids, trying to quell her impatience. Now she would have to mentally switch gears again, set aside her exciting new theory about Mark and Jeffrey’s past, and concentrate instead on the new widower. Bill was right: There were so many angles, so many things happening around this old inn, that it made it hard to concentrate on anything.

Jim Cooley looked around the room, and for a long moment his gaze rested on the unhappy-looking Sandy Post. Then he turned back to Louise and Bill. “Want to hear the latest?” His voice was deep and morose. “I talked to Sergeant Drucker; he’s already busy with his men on the grounds, as they say, ‘processing’ the scene. He says the coroner found her blood levels of antidepressants very high.”

“Did she normally take heavy doses?” asked Louise.

He shook his tired head. “Lord, no, Louise. One made her exceptionally woozy and took all the edge off that needed coming off. Two or more—why, that would have made her not care about anything.”

And that, in fact, was what Grace had looked like there in the pool at the bottom of the falls, a woman who no longer cared about anything: her husband, her community, her garden. A woman who could no longer relate to the planet on which she lived, and sought peace elsewhere.

So, there was one death accounted for. Maybe Louise shouldn’t even bother to call back Paul Warren at the botanical garden. What could he tell her, anyway?

P
EOPLE ARE BEGINNING TO REALIZE
the earth’s pain. There is no doubt about it when world leaders talk as seriously about global warming as they do about potential war in the Middle East. Closer to home, many others are becoming concerned, and are doing something about it. A growing movement in both therapy and religion focuses on earth-based spirituality and therapeutic healing.

Prestigious organizations such as Harvard, and religious icons such as Catholic bishops and certain priests and ministers,
are taking up this issue, in spite of scattered critics intimating earth worship. But the movement is very grounded: At its heart is the belief that mankind is alienated from the earth and needs to return to its bosom. Both the psychologists and the theologians involved maintain that people can no longer “feel”—can no longer give and receive affection. Some cite this vacuum of meaning in people’s lives, shopping, frenetic activity, and a constant appetite for scandal as by-products of this condition.

The garden, the earth we touch, the bedrock on which we stand, the birds and animals, are all thought to help reconnect us to Mother Earth. Proponents talk about how mankind must include “land and the nonhuman community” in its concerns and its prayers. Catholic bishops have called for “environmental justice.” Citizens of communities threatened with environmental pollution are beginning to consider it a moral matter—not just a Superfund cleanup job.
*

This concern for the ecology has become a part of the healing arts. Botanic gardens, of course, have long provided training in horticultural therapy, to help the physically and mentally handicapped. But the movement is becoming more widespread. A Harvard-associated institute, as well as several other American colleges, is now teaching “ecopsychology.” And child therapists are using actual gardens to help their clients recover from traumatic stress.

Psychotherapy usually focuses on the individual. Ecopsychology is different: It tries to connect patients with their fellow human beings and with their planet.

A client emerging from a session with an ecopsychologist may have some strange homework. Among the possible assignments: Choose a plant or tree or animal near your home, and study it for five minutes each day. Go out in your yard and find out what kind of soil is there, what kind of geological bedrock, what watershed you are in. The natural world, then, becomes part of the cure, and the disturbed person develops what is called an “ecological self,” or “holon,” something that is a whole in itself, as well as a part of a larger whole.

Ecopsychologists believe that we humans can hear the earth speaking through us. Thus, our individual symptoms of unhappiness are not only indicators of personal or family dysfunction, but signals
of trouble in the environment in which we live.

“We feel the pain of the earth,” says Sarah Conn, a Harvard lecturer in psychology who teaches ecopsychology at Cambridge Hospital. “The news about environmental degradation is hard to avoid. Anyone who walks, breathes, looks, or listens knows that the air, the water, and the soil are being contaminated and that nonhuman species are disappearing at alarming rates. Yet the great majority of us, in this country and in much of the Western world, seem to be living our lives as if this were not so.”

She believes we are so cut off from our connection to the earth that “even though we are bleeding at the roots, we neither understand the problem nor know what we can do about it.” One such signal of grief is shopping. Conn calls it a “materialistic disorder” of such importance that she would like to see it catalogued in the psychologists’ diagnostic manual. The need to consume, she believes, “is a graphic signal of our culture’s disconnection from the earth. Our only current way of hunting and gathering seems to be shopping and accumulating merchandise.”

Conn thinks many people are like those unfortunate plants that live in an impoverished monoculture. “The inner emptiness that results from the breakdown of community and the rise
of consumerism leads people toward addictive behavior as they attempt to fill that emptiness with products, substances, celebrities, and activities.” Thus, there is need for not only growth in human relationships, but identification with the biosphere as a whole. And that can often start with a simple reconnection with the soil or plants.

Children’s affinity to nature was written about in the moving story
The Secret Garden
, in which three youngsters grow and heal while restoring a hidden garden landscape. A children’s medical center in Massachusetts is breaking new ground by using a specially designed garden to help children heal from traumatic events. It is a one-acre space filled with trees, small hills, a cave, water ponds, and streams. With their therapist, the young people explore the land. Some areas encourage risk-taking, while others appear as safe havens.

The theory is that sensations help unlock memories. By lying facedown on a mound in the garden, crouching within a “cave” made from an ancient yew tree, or crossing the cold river to explore an island in the middle, the children can unlock memories and feel the things that created their problems.

People over the millennia have known that gardens are good for the soul—although we can’t ignore the mixed results for Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden. Four hundred years before Christ, the Persians brought gardens to perfection. They named these enclosed and irrigated refuges “
pairidaeza
,” or paradise parks. Today’s gardeners are just as wise as the Persians. They know full well that a few minutes a day spent weeding or hoeing the garden, or simply stretched out on a couch enjoying its beauty, can be as helpful as a therapy session and as spiritual as a church service. But for the benefit of those who have missed these simple truths, mental health professionals and religious leaders are bringing them into the doctor’s office and the church.