The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (30 page)

“Forgives you? For what?”

He made a dismissive “aw, shucks” gesture with his hand, and said, “You’ll probably find out about it from him. If not, I’ll tell you about it the next time I see you.”

“If there
is
a next time,” said Louise.

“Oh, there will be,” said the confident young man. “It’s all set—I’m visiting at Thanksgiving.” His pale blue eyes registered concern. “I—I hope that’s all right with you.”

Louise nodded absently. “Oh, of course.” She conjured up a memory of Thanksgiving at the Eldridge house. Parents and family visiting. A nightmare of cooking that she always made worse by leaving everything to the day itself: pumpkin pies, with their excessive number of ingredients. Homemade cranberry sauce, the only kind Bill would eat. Candied sweet potatoes, which the girls insisted upon. Special sage turkey dressing, her grandmother’s tradition. Even the defrosting of the turkey, which she invariably accomplished in the last two hours before baking time, by running a swimming pool’s worth of cold water over the chilly beast in the kitchen sink.

Let’s face it, Thanksgiving is hell—always has been since I’ve had to do it myself
. Dismally, she recalled the contrast with the years growing up when her grandmother had them down to her farm for the holiday. Gram pulled off Thanksgiving like a professional. Food prepped ahead of time like any sensible housewife. Everything cooked or baked or
canned so delightfully that even now Louise could taste the crisp exterior turkey meat, the dark, rich, fleshy pumpkin pies, the crunchy homemade pickles.

But a thought came to her, and she brightened, coming back to the present. Maybe Teddy would help her in the kitchen! She gave him a winsome smile, but even as she did, she wondered if she would regret it. “I bet you would love to help with that kind of dinner—all those fixings and everything …”

He seemed to get her message. “Ma’am, I’d be happy to spend all day in the kitchen with you.”

“Thanksgiving it is,” she said. Wondering,
Did he just con me, or was it the other way around?
As she walked off, she turned and took a last look at him, standing there in his white uniform shirt and black trousers, with his charming, snaggly-toothed smile. He was staring at her legs. A pleasant young man, and yet there was something about the way that his eye always lingered that she didn’t like….

Grace Cooley had possessed the most remarkable legs. And Teddy must have become acquainted with Grace during her visits over the past three years—the lonesome, vulnerable Grace. But no, it couldn’t be. There was simply no motive—or was there? And then Louise remembered the other thing that was bothering her: the fact that Teddy would inherit from Barbara Seymour. Louise had made a mental note when she first heard about this from the elderly proprietress. Yet she had been so distracted by Jeffrey’s and Grace’s deaths that she had shoved the fact to the back of her mind.

Teddy Horton, always on the scene, was a young man who had a way of charming people. Louise could just imagine him flattering his way into elderly Barbara Seymour’s heart. Could he have loosened that carpeting, hoping the woman would die and he would get his money? A future where the inn was closed did not augur well for Teddy—unless he knew about the inheritance.

And he hadn’t even crossed her mind as a suspect in either the two deaths or Barbara’s accident. Now Louise dearly wished they had done a background check on him. But of course Sergeant Drucker would know all there was to know about the young man, she thought. Louise reminded herself firmly that this whole investigation was not on her shoulders.

As she circled around the kitchen garden, her suspicions faded. Right now she was on a much hotter lead. And she expected to follow it right up the gray, misty path to Litchfield Falls.

She crossed the damp lawn to the flight of eight steps that led to the veranda. With one hand resting on the stair railing, she stared up at the side door, the one that gave access to the back stairs of the mansion. Then Louise turned around and gazed at the huge expanse of lawn.

Was anyone expected to believe that Grace crossed sixty feet of open space without being seen? For that was the distance between the inn and the path to the falls. Half a dozen members of the kitchen staff and any of the more than a dozen guests could have spotted her. Louise’s high-flying hopes of solving this case began to flag.

Just as Grace might have done, she crossed the lawn, entered the open pine forest, and took the path to the top of the falls. As she walked through the filtered light, she noted the flowers growing in patches of sun beside the path: yarrow, stands of white daisies, and even an occasional drift of love-in-a-mist, in full but delicate bloom.

As she shoved her hands into her shorts pockets, it all became clear. Grace, killing herself? Never, thought Louise, especially not after the weekend Grace had experienced. Louise knew her in a way that others would never know her—as a passionate gardener, with all the requisite foibles. This special knowledge made Louise more certain that Grace’s death could only have been foul play—not suicide.

If her theory proved right, it meant Grace had had strong
reasons to stay alive. But it would take a miracle to convince the prosaic, live-by-the-rules Sergeant Drucker. He would demand hard evidence. It would be nice to find Grace’s notebook, but Louise knew the troopers would have spied that little red object. No, it was something else Louise was after. Evidence that the state troopers, as skilled as they were, might not recognize as such.

Her eyes searched the path carefully. Afraid she might miss something as she passed, Louise grabbed at a Sir Harry Lauder’s walking-stick bush and ruthlessly wrenched off a branch. It was scraggly and dangerous, and perfect for pulling back the brush and examining the ground beneath.

After a few minutes’ climb, the path took her over a rise and around a stand of hemlocks. Louise found herself looking down upon the trickling stream that constituted the headwaters of the Litchfield falls. Huge rocks crowded into the creek as if they were attempting to block the water from plunging over the cliff. Two more bloated granite boulders guarded either side of the falls, leaving only a two-foot entrance. Grace would have had to stand right there between them in order to throw herself off—or be pushed.

Louise clambered down the hill to the stream, her eyes still searching the ground, behind each rock, deep in each crevice. She discarded her branch because she needed both hands now to make her way over the first of the fat boulders. On the other side, she hopped down and maneuvered through the slippery stones in the shallow, steely-cold water, her sandaled feet growing numb. All the while she looked for the thing that would show that Grace had not come here willingly. She climbed onto the rock on the other side of the falls opening. The people—men, probably—who so colorfully named mountain peaks and rock formations would surely have called these two “The Breasts.”

Peering over the edge of the boulder, Louise saw what she was looking for.

“Grace, you did it!” she exulted. It was no more than a bit of wilted vegetation with something smooth and brown attached to it, tossed among the ferns alongside the rock. Like Grace herself, it was slight, but it would be enough. Enough to start making people ask the right questions.

Louise reached out, holding on to a hemlock seedling for balance, then twisted herself around the rock like a contortionist. She could feel her heartbeat against the arm she held crushed against her chest. If she looked down at this point, she would certainly topple off the cliff. She kept her eyes fastened on her prize, pushing aside the delicate fronds to examine it more closely. Then she smiled with satisfaction—but didn’t touch it. A trooper should collect this evidence.

Hoisting herself back up onto the rock left Louise red-faced and panting, and she crouched there for a minute to catch her breath. Then she stood up, steadied her feet, and felt, for a wild moment, like the king of the mountain. She considered beating her breast and giving a Tarzan-like cry of joy.

Instead, she smiled to herself and turned away from the falls to climb down. It was several seconds before she understood what she saw. She was looking into the scary hazel eyes of Jim Cooley. Cooley stood balanced expertly on the boulder opposite her, as if it were something he did every day. No longer playing the morose widower, he looked like an avenging angel.

She had not meant to do it again—put herself in danger with no apparent way out. But here she was, trying to solve things her own way, facing another life-threatening situation. And this one was too grave, too watery, to laugh off. Louise was afraid. The precipitous tumble that would take her to the deep pond or the rocks below was only moments away, unless she did something—like shout bloody murder.
But she couldn’t. Being right was not satisfaction enough. She had to know everything. And she could scream later.

For the deadly mastermind was here: a modern-day killer standing on a prehistoric boulder not twelve feet away. Louise stared back at Cooley. He had on a navy blue anorak, with the hood tightened around his face. His cheeks were red from the effort of climbing, his eyes bright, his smile intact. He looked like a poster boy promoting the great Connecticut outdoors.

“You didn’t kill Grace,” she said.

“What makes you think Grace was killed?”

“Oh, I know she was—and so was Jeffrey.” Louise didn’t elaborate. The man hadn’t seen what she saw alongside the boulder on which she now stood. “You might say, Jim, that Grace has spoken to us from the grave.”

T
HE IRIS IS THE
W
UNDERKIND
OF FLOWER
design. It overshadows the simplicity of the Compositae—that is, the daisy, the mum, and the coneflower—and some say even the mighty rose. Its bold, sometimes bearded falls, graceful erect standards and crests, triangular stigmas, long stamens, and graceful, strappy leaves have put it not only on the map, but also on the flag. France’s fleur-de-lis is, in fact, the yellow flag iris.

The flower has an early place in history. In 1950 B.C., Thutmose I brought irises home to Egypt from Syria as part
of the spoils of war. The iris’s image was carved on the brow of the Sphinx because Egyptians regarded the flower as the eye of heaven and a symbol of eloquence. Ancient Greeks almost deified the flower, and a nymph-goddess by this name was thought to be a messenger of the gods, traveling between Mount Olympus and mankind. The variegated colors of the flower’s falls symbolized the colors of the sky through which she traveled.

Later, the iris was adopted by the Christians and became the Virgin Mary’s symbol of purity, along with
Lilium candidum
, the Madonna lily. The pagan Clovis I of France acquired a shield bearing three golden irises on a blue field; it was thought to have been bestowed by an angel. He succeeded in battle after that, and soon converted to Christianity. Not only was the fleur-de-lis the royal badge of France, but also part of the British royal arms until Britain gave up its claims on the country in 1801.

The rhizomes of this beautiful plant were thought to be both medicinal and magical. Its use in medicine goes back to the earliest times; it has been used as a cathartic, an emetic, a cure for scrofula, and a relief for toothache. Dried rhizomes used to be strung into beads and hung on babies’ necks for them to chew. Today, some irises are grown for
their violet-scented fragrance, which is added to perfume. Few plants have attracted more names, or been more inspirational to writers and painters.

And yet, for all its illustrious history, the iris is of
such
easy culture that you might call it the courtesan of the plant world. Iris will grow almost everywhere, in varied conditions of cold and warmth, moisture and relative drought. As a gardener, your most important concern is not the
growing
of these delightful plants, but rather their unbridled spread. For if left alone in a benign environment, they will take over your garden world: Then there’s a heavy digging job involved in removing them.