The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (34 page)

She cast a self-conscious look at the group, and then realized she had no time for embarrassment. In a low voice she added, “I heard those unmistakable sounds of a couple embracing. So did the others who were out in the hall—and who knows how many of us were out there, listening? I also saw two men in silhouette, talking with one another, with their arms around each other. At first, I thought it was a sexual liaison, but now I realize one was consoling the other because of a loss one of them had sustained.”

She extended a dramatic hand. “That loss, my friends, was the loss of Jim Cooley’s wife to Jeffrey Freeling.”

Barbara Seymour gasped and stared reproachfully at Louise. But even if she lost the older woman’s friendship, Louise was obliged to continue with the story.

“Jeffrey and Grace came together that night, made love for the first and last time. In the eyes of Jim Cooley and Frank and Fiona, Grace’s adultery was disloyalty of the worst kind. You can read it in their motivational manual.”

Fiona sat forward, livid. “You are merely guessing.”

Louise rushed on, ignoring her. “Your husband Frank was with Jim after Grace disappeared from their room, and when her treachery was confirmed by the sound of the lovers moaning. It was Frank who comforted Jim: He put a friendly arm around his shoulders and embraced him.”

“No, no, no,” Jim droned, shaking his head.

“But, Jim,” Louise said, “I’m sure you were in that hall Friday night, because you mentioned hearing the ‘bumps in the night’ at breakfast the next morning.”

“So
what?
” demanded Cooley.

“You couldn’t have heard those bumps, if you hadn’t been out in the hall, spying on your wife. Those rooms are silent as tombs, with their soundproof walls, and doors made by a master carpenter.”

His eyes blazed, but he remained silent.

Louise stood to one side of the fireplace, for effect, and to gather her thoughts. “So, let’s chalk up a third reason Grace wouldn’t kill herself: She was in love, for the first time in years.”

The group was spellbound now. “When the friendship between Grace and Jeffrey was discovered by Grace’s husband—and what a shock to find your wife’s secret lover staying in the same hotel for the weekend—his pride would have it no other way than to kill the happy couple.”

“Bullshit!” bellowed Cooley, grasping the arms of his chair with either hand. “I’m going to damned well sue you—”

“What the police needed was the evidence,” explained Louise, keeping her voice from trembling with an effort. “But there was none. As I told Sergeant Drucker, Grace’s notebook would have been a gold mine of evidence—it was a catalogue of her thoughts and emotions. But it’s disappeared. Yet I still found something she left behind.”

When she continued, her voice was hushed. “I went up to the falls an hour ago, because I sensed that Grace would try to tell us what had happened to her. And I remembered what she said yesterday on the garden tour about picking flowers. Bebe, you remember,” she said, turning to the woman.

Bebe nodded solemnly. “She never picked flowers,” the widow said.

“I went up the trail, inside the yellow-taped crime scene, thinking I would be safe, since the troopers were out there, but no one else. The area was sealed. I was looking for something that wouldn’t have looked like evidence to anybody else, and I found it—an obscure little bunch of vegetative
matter. Flowers, in fact, that Grace picked as she was being forced or cajoled up that trail to the falls.”

“But she didn’t
pick
flowers,” said Bebe. “It was part of her religion, or something,
not
picking flowers.”

“Exactly. In fact, she wrote a poem about it.” Louise took a piece of paper out of another pocket and unfolded it:

“But she did pick these flowers. We have to ask ourselves, why? To show us she wasn’t going up the falls of her own free will. She told us Saturday, ‘Over my dead body would I pick flowers.’ Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened!”

Louise let that sink in for a moment, noting again Frank Storm’s rigid countenance.

Trooper Barnes handed an item to Louise. It was now protected in a transparent evidence bag. A limp bouquet, an insubstantial little gathering of love-in-a-mist, yarrow, and wild daisies. It was secured with Grace’s tortoiseshell hair clip. She raised it so people could see it.

“Anyone could have put it there,” snarled Jim Cooley.

“How did it get attached to Grace’s hair clip, then?” Louise challenged.

Frank said, “That’s a pretty anonymous-looking hair ornament. It could have been dropped behind that rock weeks ago—years ago.”

And this was a break she hadn’t counted on.

“So, Frank,” she said quietly, “you knew she threw her little bouquet behind a rock. You thought it was just a few dead flowers that would look like plant debris. But only the person who took Grace up that path would know it was thrown behind ‘that rock.’”

If he was ruffled, Frank didn’t show it beyond the faintest tremble in his voice. He said, “I guessed—because the police didn’t find it, and you did, it had to be behind a rock. Now, tell me this, Mrs. Eldridge.” His tones were clipped and cold as ice. “There was a whole cadre of kitchen employees running around this place Saturday—it was a big dinner night at the inn. How do you think someone could strong-arm Grace across the grounds and up that trail without being seen? From what I understand, neither she nor this phantom assailant was ever seen going across the lawn.”

Louise felt a flush rising in her cheeks. She had known it would come to this question, and she had no answer for it. How did Grace and her assailant pass through the yard without anyone seeing them? Was it just good luck on the part of the murderer?

There was a leaden feeling in her stomach as she realized she might have proven adultery, but had certainly not proved murder. What did a silly little faded bouquet mean? If only someone else had found something….

Just then, as if in answer to her prayer, into the room came Bill, accompanied by Janie, Chris, and Teddy. The young people were panting, as if they had been running. Their eyes, like Bill’s, were filled with excitement.

The excitement of the chase
, thought Louise delightedly. These cohorts of hers had found or done something, she knew, to slice through the jungle of muddled facts and solve this mystery. They stood together at the front of the group, hardly able to wait to tell their story.

“I stumbled on these three,” Bill explained, nodding his head at the young people. “And Janie, Chris, and Teddy have confirmed some new information. They found out why Grace wasn’t seen on the side or back lawn Saturday afternoon.”

Jim Cooley glared at them. “You kids know? How the hell would
you
know?” He looked straight into the cunning face of Teddy Horton.

Teddy grinned, and shifted nervously from foot to foot,
hands clenched by his sides. “We’ve been exploring, Mr. Cooley. Now, I’ve worked here three years, and I knew darn well that the supply tunnel was blocked. But Miss Eldridge here—the lovely
Janie
Eldridge, that is—was more inquisitive than I was. She’s the one who said we should check the tunnel out good, from both sides. So we did. And it
was
blocked—’til recently, when someone tampered with the wall. The cops who saw the scene wouldn’t know the difference—although Miss Seymour would have known, since she knows this place like the back of her hand. And, of course, she hasn’t been walking around the grounds much since she took her flyer down the stairs.” Calmer now, he winked companionably at the elderly woman. Barbara beamed back.

“Go on, son,” said Sergeant Drucker.

“So whoever did this closed the tunnel up, but built it only a fraction of its former thickness of six feet and supported it with a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood. That left a pile of extra rocks, but who thinks anything of a stray pile of rocks lying around in Connecticut?” He paused to give them a big grin. “Well, to make a long story shorter, it would have been easy to open the tunnel the rest of the way and let people through. What’s more—well, you take it from here, Chris.”

Chris pulled a little package out of the pocket of his tight-fitting jeans. “We found something unusual at the very end of the tunnel, stuck behind a rock, right near where it exits through a kind of earth cave near the river.”

He held the little package up: a red notebook in a plastic evidence bag. A gasp went around the room. “Finding this proves Grace was forced through that tunnel. If she went
voluntarily
, why would she ever leave her precious notebook behind?” He broke into a smile. “And you should see what it
says
.”

Bill took a step toward Jim Cooley and looked right at him. In a commanding tone, he said, “It was stunning—you
might say
amazing
—how Grace managed to jot down the name of her killer while being dragged to her death—”

Cooley’s eyes had grown dark with anger. “Eldridge, you’re a
liar!
You’re
manufacturing
evidence. That
couldn’t
be Grace’s notebook.”

Louise sauntered toward him. “And why not? Only someone involved in killing her would know that, Jim. It can’t be Grace’s notebook, can it, because you burned it!”

At that, Cooley’s nervous gaze was drawn to the big fireplace; then it returned to Louise’s face.

Louise said, “That’s right, in this fireplace. With a trooper on guard inside the mansion all night, it must have driven you mad—you couldn’t retrieve the metal binding. But we found it in the ashes here.” On cue, Trooper Barnes held up the little bag containing a metal spine with three rings attached to it.

“Good
God
, there’s no way I could have killed my wife,” bellowed Cooley. “My movements are
totally
accounted for. And I didn’t kill that prick, Jeffrey, for God’s sake—I tried to
save
him.” He looked around frantically, his eyes lighting on Frank, who was sitting beside him. His friend looked back at him.

Cooley jerked forward involuntarily in his chair, his sweaty palms squeaking along the leather chair arms. His voice was raspy, desperate. “Maybe Frank did it, but certainly not with
my
blessing. Even if you do think I had a motive—even if my wife
was
committing adultery under my nose—you’ll never pin these murders on me.”

Frank looked over at Jim, his entire demeanor a rebuke. He said harshly, “What a friend you are. What loyalty. I’m not taking this rap alone.” With great dignity, he rose from his chair.

Fiona Storm reached out and caught his sleeve. “Frank,
no
,” she pleaded. “No one’s proved
anything
yet.” But he pulled away, giving her a mournful look. “Sergeant Drucker, let’s end this. We need to talk.”

“H
E CONFESSED
.”

“Thank God.”

“As we grew to suspect,” said Sergeant Drucker, “it was a conspiracy. Frank admits to murdering Grace at the behest of his friend, Jim. He told us Jim shoved Dr. Freeling off Bear Mountain, although Cooley won’t own up to it yet. They planned it Friday night, after they discovered the two to lovers were makin’ out in a room right down the hall. Mrs. Storm could be involved—though Frank’s trying to keep her out of it.”

“I’m sure he is. After all, they have a family.”

“It was quite sly how Grace exposed her murderer,” said the sergeant. “Frank apparently felt a lot of sympathy for Grace, so he honored a kind of last request as he forced her up that hill. He let her pick out a couple of flowers—knowing, of course, how addicted she was to gardening. When he wasn’t looking, she pulled her hair clip off and attached it to the little nosegay. He saw her drop some debris next to a big rock, but didn’t notice the clip. He thought it was just a harmless handful of flowers.”

He looked down at Louise with a frown. “And it was quite sly how you had your husband run out and buy that substitute red notebook at the local Shopko’s—”

She smiled. “You didn’t approve?”

“It served its purpose: Cooley showed his hand, and it brought both him and his accomplice, down.”

“Solving this thing must give everyone a sense of relief, especially poor Bebe.”

He chuckled. “I just got a call back from the Mattson police. The lab reports are back, and she’s pretty much cleared of any wrongdoing in her husband’s death. In fact, the chief said she’s up for a Volunteer of the Year award for her work at the Bonne Chance Retirement Home. Like she told us, those old folks never lost faith in her.”

“What a momentous waste of emotional effort,” said Louise, laughing. “The poor woman was sure she was going to be accused of serial murder. She was throwing emotion around like Pollock flinging paint. You might say she was having a
hissy-
fit.”

Drucker grinned at the homey expression. “And now she’s going to go back to get a plastic plaque and become a local hero. Sometimes things work out.” But then he shook his head and gave Louise one of his brown-eyed, hangdog looks that invited sympathy. “Yet I don’t want you to think it’s always this easy to solve murders, Mrs. Eldridge. Sometimes there’s no physical evidence. No
little limp bouquets. No burned notebook spines. No confessions.”