The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (26 page)

The rain was beginning to encroach on her. Louise hurried from underneath the dripping branches of an English beech and past a gloomy stand of rhododendrons as tall as a small house. Then she slowed her pace despite the rain, bewitched by a pleasant, open path lined with flower beds. As she turned a corner, she met Jim Cooley. He, too, was avoiding the company of others.

“Hello, Louise,” he said wearily. Jim brought out a motherly instinct in her, although she didn’t know why, for the man, along with Frank Storm, ran three of the toughest schools in the country. “Tell me something,” he pleaded.

“Of course. What?”

His voice was monotone, driven flat with depression over his wife’s death. “You’ve solved crimes before. Just how do you do it?”

“I don’t have any special tricks. Mostly it was just by being there. Being there, I mean, at a time when some evidence showed up.”

A short silence as they wandered down the path. Jim’s unhappy eyes were trained on the ground straight ahead, as if he dared not view the wider world lest he be hurt again. “Grace’s death appears to be of her own volition. But suppose it’s not—suppose it turns out to be something else? You could help find that out, couldn’t you?”

The man obviously did not know she was already helping the police. But nevertheless, his query made her feel odd, for a combination of reasons. It
was
a rather intrusive request. The weather—close and breathless and damp. And the surfeit of emotion created by one crisis after another. She was beginning to feel like a character caught in a soap
opera. Indeed, this weekend had the right mix for one of the daytime dramas—suspicious deaths, sorrowing survivors, an emotional widow, angry and possibly crooked businesspeople, and warring lovers. Perhaps not enough sex, though, to get those needed Nielsen ratings.

With her feet and sweater now dripping water and her body cooling—soon to face the shivers and shakes—the only surcease was a cup of hot tea and something sweet to go with it. It was time to head for the refreshments tent, not to talk about murder versus suicide.

She turned to him. “So you think someone murdered Grace.”

“I don’t know.” His voice was hollow. “I thought maybe you, with your experience, could …”

She looked at him curiously. He must suspect Bebe Hollowell; she was the likeliest person. The woman was strong, and able—did Louise ever know that!—and emotionally skewed herself. Bebe had been in her room when Grace went or was taken from the inn. Could she have persuaded the delicate Grace to accompany her on a lethal little walk to the falls? The answer was yes. With a start, Louise realized Grace’s kind heart had made her vulnerable to people who suffered. All Bebe would have had to do was apologize, give Grace a sad tale of how she missed her dead Ernie, and ask her please to go up that woodsy trail with her to the falls. There, they could honor his memory. Louise had been exonerating the very best candidate from all suspicion.

At that moment, she and Jim were passing a big patch of lacy, clawlike, blue flowers. Perfunctorily, for now she was thinking of things besides flowers, Louise said, “There they are—your flowers.”

He looked without interest at the tiny-petaled blue blossoms. “What are they?”

“Oh, I thought you’d know. It’s love-in-a-mist.” Grace had obviously been the only gardener in the Cooley house,
but was it possible this man hadn’t even
noticed
his wife’s new romance garden?

She said, “That plant is in your new garden at home.”

He doubled back on the path a few steps, leaned down, and peered at it. “Oh, yes,” he said, “now I recognize it.”

They walked a few more paces before she said, “To answer your question: If someone asked me to look into a possible crime, the answer is, of course, I would certainly try to help.”

“Oh, God, Louise, I wish you could just make some sense of it…”

Again, he aroused her compassion. “But, Jim, even if there was foul play involved in Grace’s death, I would have little to contribute. You know why?”

“No. Why?” The eyes had a waiting expression.

“Because it would be hard to find clues to a murder committed outdoors on a thirty-acre piece of property. If anyone is going to solve it, it’s those troopers who are combing through the grounds.” She thought guiltily of how she and her helpers were already snooping into the affair. “And Sergeant Drucker must have told you he’s doing a background check on everybody who’s been around the inn. That includes even you and me.”

“He did tell me—I understand. Well, thanks, anyway, Louise. I just thought maybe if …”

“I wish I had something special to offer, Jim, but I don’t.”

And at that moment, she didn’t.

Soggy cucumber sandwiches were the fare at the tea under the tent. Afterward, people headed back to the van to return to the inn, where they hoped for something better. Louise saw Jim again; this time he was meeting up with Frank Storm among the cheerless rhododendrons. Fiona Storm joined them, giving each man a friendly hug. They linked arms and walked down the wide path, looking like
three sad musketeers. Well, at least Jim has his good friends, she thought. He was going to need them.

Quite a trio. The stern Frank. The stern Fiona. And Jim, stern, but with those friendly, rounded edges that made him a sympathetic figure, one who could be trusted. Musketeers, indeed: one for all, and all for one.

But the musketeers had gone no more than a few strides when they were intercepted by the omnipresent Bebe Hollowell, stomping along in her sturdy walking shoes, determined to break into the group. Louise could tell by their body language that they would rather be alone. After all, they knew, and Louise knew, that this woman could be a killer.

L
OUISE HAD LOST TRACK OF
B
ILL AND
Nora, so she climbed into the van that would return them to the inn and hunkered down in one of the seats. A moment alone might give her the chance to sort out her tangled thoughts. She looked up just in time to see Bebe plopping herself down in the seat next to her. Not Bebe again!

“I’m sure your husband won’t mind,” said the woman tersely. “It’s such a short trip.” Louise stole a glance at her. The woman was really quite handsome, in her pantsuit and jaunty raincoat,
though her bronze suntan somehow looked out of place on a rainy day. Her big green eyes were giving Louise a sideways glance. Louise tried to disguise a shudder, and shrank back in her own seat. Three miles to town, and no getting away.

The van filled up and they drove off. Bill and Nora were somewhere behind her. Leaning in toward Louise, Bebe talked in a quiet voice so the others wouldn’t hear; Louise had to strain to catch the words. “Did you call him? Did you call my brother? Are you going to let the police do it all-have you no mercy?” She stared at Louise, and it was scary to see a woman so frightened, so angry. Even if Bebe had committed no crime, she carried an enormous amount of guilt—for something. And of course, if she had killed her husband last month, and Grace Cooley yesterday, she was a dangerous threat. Louise couldn’t remember when she had felt more uncomfortable with a fellow human being; the woman’s heady perfume, and even her mint-laden breath, seemed to surround Louise in an oppressive fog.

“Bebe, I promise I’ll call him—I’ll try to help you. Now let it rest.” She slumped in her seat, realizing what she had done was totally wrong. Detective Geraghty had recommended her to the Litchfield police, and she was blowing it. It was completely inappropriate to promise to help a murder suspect. Her only reprieve would be if Bill could learn something about the woman from the hometown authorities that would set this all to rest. In the meantime, she would take care not to be alone with Bebe.

Louise leaned her head back against the plastic seat, closed her eyes, and tried to shut out the world, tried not to mind the smell and the sense of Bebe sitting next to her. She opened her eyes only when they reached the inn.

Without talking to her family or Nora, she went immediately to her room to complete her calls, first exchanging her wet tennis shoes for sandals. The “Big Five,” as Janie had nicknamed them—the three Eldridges and the two Radebaughs—would meet again at noon to share the results
of their inquiries, and to pass them along to Sergeant Drucker.

The message button on her phone was blinking: Charlie Hurd had called back. She quickly dialed his number from memory. “Louise, how’d you get mixed up with this outfit? Higher Directions: very hot, very cutting edge, very
successful
—but a little kooky. You have to give them a lot of credit, though. They’ve learned how to jam math into delinquent kids’ brains, and as a little bonus, to teach ’em how to read.”

“So I’ve heard,” she said. “Did you get any details? Is there any dirt—you know, anything that’s not strictly on the level?”

On the other end of the line Charlie paused. “Let me read you something here. Higher Directions is, quote, very highly leveraged. Read: several million in debt. They were banking on Federal funds which haven’t materialized because of their religious component—”

“I know they’re religious, but I thought it was non-denominational.”

“It is. One of those fuzzy nondenominational churches with lots of personal agendas. You know—improving yourself in ‘regular increments.’”

“Does that mean saying to yourself, ‘Every day in every way I’m getting better and better’?” she joked.

“Yeah, and straighter and straighter: no lying, cheating, fornicating, or—if you’ll pardon the expression—buggering.”

“How do people view Jim Cooley and Frank Storm— and, for that matter, Fiona Storm?”

“They’re well respected, all three of them. The only other problem they’ve had is the two kids who offed themselves.”

“Killed themselves? Really?”

“Yeah. Kids who were banished from the school, or faced banishment—did I say that right? ‘Banishment’?”

“Yes, but if you’re more comfortable with ‘expulsion,’ you could use that, too.”

“Louise, quit twitting me: I’m not some kid. So these two students, both of them about to graduate from their Brooklyn school, were found dead. OD’d on drugs. Story was vastly underreported, which tells me someone in Higher Directions has clout. Rumors were that both kids were gay, but nothing firm on that. The police did a long investigation, and there was even talk of it going to a grand jury. They finally concluded the school wasn’t responsible, but there’s still a lot of buzz about the incident.”

“Suicides. How interesting.” Louise thanked Charlie and gave him Drucker’s phone number to follow up on the details. She knew Charlie would not rest now until he had the full story.

But then, neither would she.

Charlie’s research showed that Jim Cooley was in financial difficulties. He might have had a reason to rid himself of Barbara Seymour so that he could inherit. But everything in Louise’s being told her Jim was Barbara’s protector, and not the one preying on her.

However, the suicides of the two students left her with a nervous feeling in her stomach.
So that’s what tough love does for you
, she thought. Maybe the Higher Directions file should remain open.

She lay on her bed and rang Paul Warren again. No luck. She left another message, longer this time, tweaking his memory of Channel Five’s
Gardening with Nature
program set at the botanical garden, and providing him with more detail on Grace Cooley.

But what could she learn from him that she didn’t already know? That Grace visited the garden on a weekly basis? That she filched plants, maybe? That she bought pamphlets on plant culture, or took courses in how to raise dahlias?

Louise lay back and relaxed for a second. It took only that
long, after the swim and the lengthy tour of Wild Flower Farm, to send her into a deep sleep.