18 Deader Homes and Gardens (11 page)

“If they had cause, they would have done so. The case is closed. My wife says to tell you to come by and cut some flowers from the garden. We’re being overrun by roses. Have a good day.”

“Wait!” I yelped, but he’d already hung up. He’d been spending too much time around Peter, I thought with a sniff. All that pettiness about one skinny file containing a couple of sheets of paper. I hadn’t asked for a list of the names of local businessmen who’d been picked up with prostitutes—and the telephone numbers of their wives. I hadn’t asked him to fix a speeding ticket, or even a parking ticket. I was stewing when Ethan came across the green.

“You must be Claire Malloy. I’m Ethan Hollow. Welcome to the valley.” He had on jeans, a dingy T-shirt, muddy boots, and the bandanna headband. “I’d offer to shake hands,” he continued with a broad smile, “but I’ve been mucking in the field. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I came to visit Nattie, but she’s not here.”

“I think she went to the market. Would you like to tour the nursery while you wait for her?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping he had a golf cart available for dignitaries. It was already a bit too warm in the sunshine.

“It’s this way.” He gestured at the path. “You must be the outdoors type, since you want to live in the country. I love it, or I wouldn’t be here. It’s a great place to raise kids. These days parents are reluctant to let their kids walk home from school or play without adult supervision. The kids don’t have any time to be creative and spontaneous, what with sports leagues, music lessons, gymnastics, tutoring sessions, and God knows what else. They end up stifled in identical cubicles, with identical spouses and identical children.”

He needn’t worry about his children blending in with the bourgeoisie. “I met your wife yesterday,” I said. “She wasn’t at all stifled.”

“Wife? Oh, you mean Pandora Butterfly. She didn’t tell me, but her short-term memory is unreliable. Some days she remembers the addresses and zip codes of old friends and writes them long letters. The next day she’ll forget where she left the car keys and we all have to search the woods.”

“She was dancing on the road. I thought she might have been smoking something other than tobacco.”

Frowning, he pulled off the bandanna and used it to wipe his neck. “I don’t like to tell people this, but she was in a motorcycle accident when she was in college. There was brain damage. Once she got out of rehab, she got a job at an animal shelter and mooched off friends. When we met at the ashram, we knew that our lives were destined to be interconnected. One of the five precepts is that we abstain from alcohol and drugs. Now, I’ve been known to stray off the path for a beer, but neither of us has used drugs in ten years. Pandora Butterfly gets her high from nature.”

Marijuana was as much a product of nature as the scattered oak trees on one side of us and the unidentifiable shrubs in neat rows on the other side. I wasn’t in the mood to pursue the topic, since I didn’t really care how high Pandora chose to hover. I became more concerned about my own physical well-being as Ethan dragged me through four greenhouses filled with pots of flowers and trays of seedlings and his exotic plants, acres of flowering trees and shrubs, the field of aspiring Christmas trees, outbuildings that contained engines for the irrigation systems and a generator, storage sheds, and many other things in which I had not an iota of interest. The humidity inside the greenhouses was sufficient for a steam room, and while I was admiring the red maple saplings, we were blind-sided by a sprinkler.

I am very fond of flowers and tidy lawns, but I prefer them to settle in with no questions asked. They need not explain their origin, their genus and species, their petty requirements, their strengths or their frailties.

My face was damp when we returned to the stone circle in front of the Old Tavern. Ethan had talked steadily during the hour-long tour, preventing me from asking him about Winston’s tenure and death. I sat down, acting as though I had no need to catch my breath, and vowed never again to show even an infinitesimal speck of curiosity about the Hollow Valley Nursery.

“Thanks for showing me around,” I said to Ethan. He was still amiable, if a bit distracted. I wanted to get his opinion about Winston’s death before he returned to harangue some employees who were sprawled in the shade. I’d seen two women working in the greenhouses. The rest of the forty employees were marginally kempt men of varied ages. I’d received a few impudent stares and leers during the tour, but I knew I could handle them by myself, if the occasion arose. Which it wouldn’t, unless I was overpowered by a fern-fueled compulsion to steal hanging baskets for the porch.

“Nattie should be home any minute,” Ethan said as he started to turn away.

“Ethan,” I said in a charmingly innocent voice, “could I ask you something? I realize you’re very busy, but if you could give me a minute or two…”

“I can spare a few minutes. What’s your question, Ms. Malloy?”

“There appear to be different stories about Winston’s death, none of them verifiable. Do you know what happened?”

He sat down on a nearby stone. “Nattie said you were interested in buying his house. Are you afraid it might be haunted?”

I gritted my teeth at his condescending tone but decided to play along. “Why would the house be haunted? He drowned in the stream. Did somebody die inside the house?”

“Somebody must have. What little remains of the original house is more than a hundred and twenty years old. It was a family home filled with grandparents, babies, children, parents, teenagers, and aunts and uncles and cousins, and until the road was paved, it must have taken a long time for a horse-drawn carriage to reach a hospital. You don’t have to worry about Winston rattling his chains, though; you need to worry about the title to the property. It’s going to take several years before anyone can buy or sell the house.”

“Terry mentioned a lease,” I said, watching his pale blue eyes.

They narrowed, although his smile stayed firmly planted. “So you spoke to Terry. Where is he these days? He left town in such a rush that he didn’t leave a forwarding address. Did you get hold of him through his lawyer?”

I was a paragon of proficiency in the field of evasion; even Peter had acknowledged as much. “I have no idea which lawyer in Farberville is handling his affairs. Do you?”

Ethan shook his head. “Our lawyer has that information, but I haven’t had a reason to ask him. Terry was … well, really upset when he got back from his trip and heard the sad news. He became so enraged that Nattie had to lock herself in the bathroom until he left. The legal business is best left to the lawyers until we go to court. I hope that she’s able to testify with him sitting in the courtroom.”

Nattie might not be capable of pinning Terry to the mat, but she had not implied that she was afraid of him. I put that aside and said to Ethan, “Do you believe that Winston committed suicide?”

“I don’t know,” he said as he tugged on his wispy beard. “When we were little kids, we hung around together. As he got older, he kept to himself. I’d see him sitting on the swing with a book, totally engrossed in it. The only cousin he really talked to was Nattie, and only because she followed him like a puppy. By the time he went off to boarding school, he was a vague nobody who came and went. When we heard that he was moving back to Hollow Valley, I was kind of excited to see him. I’d escaped to California, and he’d escaped to New York. We had that in common.” He stood up and stared at the distant bridge, his arms crossed. I was about to prompt him when he said, “It was tense. Winston acted like he was pleased to see me again, but I could tell that he remembered some of the childish pranks we played on him. It was like his face was behind a pane of glass. Make that bulletproof glass, and installed by none other than Terry himself. Every time I tried to get Winston aside so I could apologize, Terry was there with a snarky remark about me, like I was nothing more than a grimy redneck. It was humiliating.”

“Did you know that Winston was gay?”

Ethan relaxed but remained standing in case he needed to dodge my questions. “I figured it out before he was sent away. My parents never told me, but all of the adults had what they thought were private family councils. In the front room of the Old Tavern, with the windows open. Back then, I bought into their bigotry, but once I got to middle school, I started thinking for myself. By college, I’d shed all those malicious attitudes and learned to love without boundaries. My first significant partner was a thirty-year-old Malaysian woman with three children. My parents cut me off financially, so I had to wait tables.”

He may have been disappointed when I failed to applaud his act of defiance and the brutality of his parents’ retribution. “College is an eye-opener,” I said mildly. “The rest of the family must not share your tolerance for alternative lifestyles.”

“You’re talking about the party, aren’t you? It may have been awkward, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Nattie remembers. Charles and Felicia—yeah, they were offended, but they’re offended by the local weather reports. They tolerate Pandora Butterfly and me because I manage production. We don’t socialize except for obligatory family meals on holidays, which are excruciatingly dull. They attend church without fail and then go out for Sunday dinner with their pet deacons. Charles told me that he never leaves a tip because the waiter’s committing a sin by working on Sunday.”

My face went from pink to red. “That’s—that’s repulsive! What a total hypocrite! I want to speak to him right this minute. How dare he stiff some working kid by—”

“He’s not going to listen to you,” Ethan said wryly. “You’re a woman, so your opinion has no value.”

“Go get him! I’ll show him—”

Ethan put his hand on my shoulder and kept pressure on it until I sat down. “I feel the same way. The first time Nattie collided with one of his right-wing convictions, she kicked him in the shin. She said it was a reflex.”

“My reflex might involve a fist,” I muttered, then forced myself to cool off. “It sounds as though you had a problem with Terry, not Winston.” When he shrugged, I added, “Did you think he was overly controlling?”

“From what I saw, yeah. Winston was always easy to manipulate, and Terry was a pro. I dropped by their house a couple of times with fresh vegetables, but Winston never came to the front door. It was always Terry, staring at me as if I were vermin. You’d think that after all the discrimination they’d encountered, they wouldn’t be so quick to judge me. I guess I wasn’t as well educated and as fond of the arts as their other friends. When Terry was away, Winston and I hung out sometimes, drinking beer on the terrace and talking. He remembered stuff from when we were kids. Once we hiked up the mountain to a cave that was our hideout during our train-robber days. Another time he wanted to go fishing. I found rods and a tackle box in the attic of the Old Tavern. We never caught anything, but it was nice. When Terry was around, I rarely saw them.”

Ethan sounded very sincere, and wounded as well. I now had three versions of the relationship between Winston and the other Hollows. It was confusing, despite my talents in intuition and my keen sense of perception. I bluntly asked Ethan if he believed that Winston had been depressed and suicidal.

“I don’t know. I do believe that Terry coerced Winston into signing the deed to the property. Winston was a Hollow by birthright, and he knew about the sanctity of his inheritance. My estate leaves my property to my children, just as all the past direct descendants made sure their estates went to their offspring. Other members of the family have always been welcome to live here, such as Nattie and that pain-in-the-butt Jordan. Have you seen her today? She vanished before she finished cutting back the japonicas.”

“Jordan was here earlier,” I said. “She went in the direction of the mill.”

He growled under his breath. “She acts as if she were in a gulag, subsisting on crusts of bread and turnip soup. Did she try to sell you that yesterday? I’ll bet she didn’t tell you why her parents sent her here. She was arrested in Philadelphia for loitering in a park known for drugs and underage drinking—for the third time. She barely showed her face at school all year and was in danger of expulsion in April. Her parents pulled her out of school before anything was official. Uncle Sheldon and Aunt Joanne were ready to give up on her, but they called Nattie and she came up with the idea. Not that I think anything short of boot camp can turn Jordan around. Charles and Felicia forced her to go to church with them, but she was so disruptive that they had to slink out in the middle of the sermon.” His lips curled slightly. “They never suggested that again.”

“I imagine not.” I felt a small twinge of trepidation, having sent the miscreant off to meet Inez. Inez’s parents would not be pleased if their daughter came home with a pierced navel and a Kafkaesque tattoo.

He gave me a final pat on the shoulder and then walked in the direction of the greenhouses et al. I had no particular reason to think Nattie would show up in the immediate future, so I drove back to my house to see if Terry had returned. His rental car was parked in front of the house. Feeling much better, I got out of my car and walked toward the porch. The sound of laughter from the back of the house caught my attention, so I detoured accordingly. Terry, Inez, and Jordan were sitting on the edge of the swimming pool, their bare feet in the water. Terry said something inaudible to them. They both responded with whoops of amusement. Even Jordan had forsaken her perpetual sneer, at least for the moment.

“Hello,” I called, delighted that Terry appeared to be in a jovial mood. The obvious reason would be good news from his lawyer, which meant good news for me.

“Ms. Malloy,” Inez said, “did you know that there was an off-Broadway show called
Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party
?”

Jordan giggled. “That’s the sort of thing we need to lighten up life around here. Ethan’s already got the beard, so he can be at the front in the dance numbers. Can you see Uncle Charles and Aunt Felicia prancing onstage? Terry says we can stage the production on the front porch.”