The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (38 page)

“I will say my knees hurt where I fell,” Louise said, “and my neck, where Bebe Hollowell throttled me.” The conversation in the car had of course been all about the crimes. But Nora didn’t take part, staring out the car window in a silence so deep it was as if she weren’t really there.

“So Sandy Post actually killed Jeffrey,” said Bill. “And Jim Cooley won’t admit that he
meant
to kill him by throwing him off that cliff.”

“Not yet,” said Louise, “but I think he will eventually. Sergeant Drucker said it would help with the other charges against him if he cooperates.”

“Such a deceptively friendly kind of guy. Didn’t he tell his wife anything after Jeffrey’s accident? Didn’t he say,
’Your lover’s dead, and you’re next’
or something like that?”

She laughed. “No, or Grace would have taken off like a gazelle. Jim dosed her with a couple of sedatives in their room before they returned at teatime. That made her less resistant when Frank came along to abduct her. Certainly she needed some sedation: Her lover had died—possibly been murdered. Jim says he never told her he knew of her disloyalty. But she figured it out, of course, the minute Frank came to her room.”

“When did Grace write the poem she never finished?”

“She had started it, but was interrupted by Frank. Then he hustled her down the back stairs to the basement, and out that tunnel to the trail that leads to the falls.”

“What strikes me is the amount of bad feeling floating around the place,” said Bill.

“Bad vibes everywhere, that’s for sure,” said Chris, leaning forward against the front seat. “I knew something heavy was goin’ down with those newlyweds—and here it turns out that Sandy’s a murderer. They’ll both probably end up in jail—one for murder, one for computer fraud.”

“Then there’s Rod and Dorothy Gasparra,” said Bill. “For all we know, they may still be there, plotting against Fenimore Smith.”

“Good grief, I hope not,” said Louise. “Since I was a witness to their argument in the nursery, I think Dorothy, at least, has come to her senses.”

“But how about that
Bebe
!” said Janie. “The town gossips of Mattson, Massachusetts, nearly ruined her. It makes me want to never live in a small town.”

Louise silently remembered Bebe for a moment. Then she said, “I like it that she’s going home to receive an award from the old folks. And Barbara Seymour—she’s safe now. She can close the inn and turn it over to the Connecticut Trust.”

“Or else she could sell it to an eager billionaire,” said her husband. “One thing for sure: Stephanie’s marriage will never be the same. I gather she’s staying with Barbara for a while. That ought to help them both.”

“Ho, Stephanie won’t have any problem,” chuckled Chris. “I bet she can find herself another man in no time flat.”

“Oh, really?” said Janie airily. “Any woman can, if she tries.”

“In the meantime,” Louise said, “it’s going to be awfully hard on Barbara to watch what happens to her nephew.” She shook her head. “What a weekend. Rainy weather. Two murders to avenge adultery …”

“Adultery, let’s face it,” said Chris, “causes an awful lot of trouble.”

Louise continued: “An attempt on the life of Barbara Seymour. Marriages gone sour: the Posts’, the Landrys’, of
course the Cooleys’. And a malicious attempt to blackmail the country’s top nursery …”

“And one maligned widow who was exonerated,” said Bill, “but will probably never stop talking about it.”

“It’s quite a story.” Louise struck her forehead. “
Story
— damn. I promised to call Charlie Hurd. He’s probably home biting his nails waiting for the phone to ring. Or else he’s shown some initiative and called Litchfield barracks on his own. I have a feeling he may get beaten out by Tom Carrigan.”

She turned to the passengers in the backseat. “You know, we never would have made any sense of these murders if we hadn’t worked together.”

“Let’s not get all mushy, Ma,” said Janie in a sarcastic tone she used when sentiment reared its ugly head. “Though I thought Chris was
really
great.”

“Thanks,” said Chris.

The girl added mischievously, “But I like Teddy, too. And if I were going for the
money
, well, I hear Teddy’s going to be very rich someday.”

“Oh, so that’s it,” protested Chris. Janie slid closer to him and put her head on his shoulder, and his objections were silenced. Louise noted that though Teddy might be charming, Janie had not changed the object of her affection.

Nora was in her own world, staring out the window as the lights of the parkway swept by like lasers, and ascending airplanes buzzed over their heads.

Soon, Louise felt as if she and Bill were alone in the car. “You know, darling,” she told him, “I hate adultery. And I dislike books that make it into the most romantic of all pastimes. They elevate it into something almost holy.”

“Yes, but, honey, you had a lot of sympathy for Grace and Jeffrey. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”

“That’s because they were decent people. Even then, they could have been more honest about it. They could have maintained a friendship …”

“’Just say no’ to sex, huh? How was she supposed to cultivate a friendship with a man with that autocratic husband breathing down her neck?”

“They could have done it. They could have met once in a while—”

“For what, tea?”

She looked over and could see he was grinning, not taking her seriously.

“They could have corresponded, say, through a private post office box. Discovered whether they truly were in love. Then, she could have filed for divorce, and that would have been doing it properly. Or else she could have stuck with Jim and tried to change him.”

“Change him? Come
on
. What we have to remember is that Jim Cooley was a hard case, a really hard case. She couldn’t reform that guy.”

“That may be, but cheating’s not good for one’s health.”

They looked at each other and laughed. Bill said, “Very bad for Grace and Jeffrey’s health.”

Then, embarrassed, they fell silent, remembering Nora in the backseat. Through the rear view mirror Louise could see her neighbor, still brooding. Nora’s ears must be burning: She’d been there, done that.

They traveled the next few miles in silence, and the noise of the airport subsided. Then Louise turned to Bill. “I know the final line.”

“The final line?”

“
‘That you are not dead.’
That’s the conclusion of Grace’s poem. If Grace had only had a chance to finish it, we might have figured out much faster that she was pining after the dead Jeffrey Freeling.”

“Huh,” said Bill. “So how does it go?”

Louise had been over it so frequently that she knew it by heart.

“What do you think of it?” asked Louise excitedly. They were turning into Sylvan Valley now. She could smell the lovely, familiar mold of the Virginia woods, almost see her house set amidst the trees. “Isn’t that it? That has to be it. The words fit perfectly.”

“The passion’s there,” said Bill nonchalantly, “but it doesn’t scan terribly well.”

Nora had an unbelievable headache. Perhaps it had come on because she hated the thought of going home. Chris was going to be either at work or over at Janie’s house, so she would be essentially alone. Ron wouldn’t be back for a week. That meant at least a week before she could even try to mend her marriage.

And there was another reason. She felt a guilt so heavy that it hung about her shoulders like the massive ceremonial shrouds worn by heads of state. Chinese empresses. British queens. Except she was no queen, being celebrated by her people. Quite the opposite: a woman of questionable intentions, questionable integrity. A woman whom Louise might describe as not taking her marriage vows seriously.

Just barely, she could hear Louise in the front seat talking of adultery. But she forgave her friend, who had no idea of the biological imperatives that drove some humans. Like Nora.

While Louise mingled with many men, and admired some, and even possibly entertained a sexual twinge or two, Nora was different. Her body, her psyche, and her spirit were highly charged, and sometimes there was very little she could do to control it. She seemed to emit pheromones,
like moths in heat. So it wasn’t only her fault, it was also the way men were attracted to her.

Granted, it was a tiny bit better as she grew older, although menopause had recently created a setback. It heightened her sexual desires again. While Ron loved this, he knew he wasn’t always enough for her, and it grated on him. And each of his many absences put her at risk.

The irony of this weekend was that the man who had caught at her heart and her loins—who had the look of someone who
needed
love, needed her—was already taken. A cruel joke for both of them.

She had waited. God knows she had waited Friday night, until when—one, one-thirty? And then Jeffrey had come downstairs from his bedroom, and she had risen from the chair on the veranda, and approached him. Reached out to him, her mouth filled with soft words of longing.

But he had held her rigidly, at arm’s length, and said, “It’s best you go to bed, my dear. Best for both of us.”

Without more words, she had left him and gone upstairs, through the lighted hall, to her corner bedroom. A few minutes later, as she was getting into bed, her bedside lamp went out. There was so much psychic energy outside her door that she arose and opened it.

Utter darkness. Someone had interfered with the lights in the upstairs hall as well. As she stood there, she could detect the faint chemical odor of Jeffrey’s tweed jacket, as if he had not quite rid himself of the smells of his beloved laboratory. There followed a confusion of sounds—muffled footsteps on the stairs, a moan, right there in the middle of the hall.

Then she saw the faint shadow of two men standing in front of the nearby window, caressing. She was cold with shock, not understanding at all. Jeffrey, with another man? Since Louise had also seen the men, Nora was spared the humiliation of bringing it up after Jeffrey’s death. She, too, thought he and Mark had unexpectedly found themselves
thrown together at an isolated country inn, and were bidding each other goodbye forever. After all, Mark was now a married man.

And yet it had not been Jeffrey and Mark at all.

Friday night had been so dismaying. Jeffrey had preferred Grace’s arms to hers, and what a deadly decision that had been!

The cloak of guilt fastened tighter. If only Nora had had the power to lure Jeffrey, to bring him to
her
room …

That would have left Grace, the sad, disappointed Grace, stumbling aimlessly about the hall, but forced eventually to return to her room. Making some little excuse to her suspicious husband, and then going safely to sleep.

Oh, if only she had been able to entice him to her bed. It would have saved both lovers, and such fine people they were. They would have lived to love another day. And she would have had her man—at least for
that
night.

If you loved
The Garden Tour Affair
, don’t miss the next installment in Ann Ripley’s Louise Eldridge series
,

The Perennial Killer

On location in Colorado filming alpine butterflies and avalanche lilies for her syndicated television show,
Gardening with Nature
, Louise Eldridge hopes for some vacation time with her family. Until the pure Rocky Mountain air is fouled by the discovery of elderly rancher Jimmy Porter’s body draped like a coyote carcass over his own backyard fence. Now, Louise finds herself tracking a murderer who is mercilessly pruning the field of human competition for the most precious commodity of all: beautiful Colorado land
.

Coming from Bantam Books in May 2000