18 Deader Homes and Gardens (28 page)

The thought gave me great satisfaction, as it surely did for her. It did not, however, move me an inch closer to the solution, and I had limited time before the police officers at the gate began to wonder where I was. I remembered that I’d wanted to talk to Felicia without Charles’s presence. I sat down at the kitchen island and took out my cell phone. I called information and asked for a number for Charles Finnelly. A computer obliged. If Charles answered, I would hang up. My heart was thumping uncomfortably when Felicia said, “Hello?”

“Don’t say a word,” I said. “This is Claire Malloy, and I have information about Esther. I’m at Winston’s house. Now I want you to say, ‘We’re not interested,’ and hang up. I’ll wait for fifteen minutes.”

I dropped my cell phone in my purse and resumed prowling around the house, looking for something the police had overlooked. The carton of cigarettes was still in the bottom desk drawer. No one had scrawled any bloody messages on the walls or left a written confession on a bedside table. I returned to the kitchen. Felicia’s time was running out. If she didn’t show up, which was a distinct possibility, I was going to have to decide on my next move. If she’d told Charles what I’d said, I could expect a police officer at the front door.

I admit I was somewhat nervous. I did not want to face Charles, Jorgeson, or Peter. I went out to the terrace and forced myself to breathe deeply. I was nearly hyperventilating when Felicia came out of the orchard and made her way to the pool area. She eyed me for a moment, then came around the pool and stood in front of me.

“Well?” she asked.

“Why don’t you sit down,” I suggested. “This will take a few minutes. Did you have any problems with Charles?”

Her expression thawed. “Yes, I had a problem with Charles. Luckily, he was going to the nursery to talk to Ethan, so I had to wait. He demands to know where I am every blasted minute of the day. If I visit Margaret Louise, he wants to know what we talked about. If I go shopping, he checks the receipts to make sure I didn’t buy myself a treat.” She glanced inside. “Is it possible to have a glass of wine? I’m terrified of what you’re going to tell me. I can’t face any more bad news.”

I tried to conceal my astonishment. “Certainly. Do you have a preference?”

“Anything.”

I found an unopened bottle in the cabinet and attacked it with a corkscrew, trying all the while to readjust my opinion of her. She was not the woman who’d referred to me as “your kind.” She appeared to be warm-blooded, unlike her reptilian mate. I filled a wineglass and went back to the terrace. I handed her a glass and said, “My news isn’t bad, Felicia. Your daughter is fine, and she currently lives in Farberville.”

Her face turned pale. “Oh, my God. Are you sure that it’s really Esther? Can I see her?”

“I’m sure as I can be,” I said gently. “She told me about her childhood and where she went after she ran away. I can’t tell you anything more about her without her consent. Shall I let her know that you want to meet with her?”

“Of course I do. She’s my daughter.” She hesitated. “Tell her that I’ll come alone. Charles will never know. When will you see her?”

“I’ll give her your message tomorrow.”

She covered her face with her hands and began to cry. I would have felt more sympathy had I not known that she allowed Charles to abuse their daughter. If she hadn’t allowed it, she had let it happen. She’d had options. She could have called the police or taken Esther to a shelter. Instead, she’d played the role of a meek, obedient wife.

“What happened to you?” I asked in a somewhat angry voice. “Why didn’t you protect your daughter?”

She looked up at me, her face wet. I can’t explain. When I met Charles, he was kind and polite. My parents were delighted with him and pressured me into marrying him. He owned a drugstore, and we lived in an apartment upstairs. Everything was fine until he joined that … that church. They’re bigots and hate-mongers. They distort the Bible to suit themselves. I fought as hard as I could, but Charles dragged me into their quagmire. I had no choice. You believe me, don’t you?”

She looked so pathetic that I eased off, although I doubted that she had no choice. “Okay.”

“It’s the family,” she said, gripping the arms of the chair. “You don’t understand about the family. I was taught from infancy that the family comes first. When my father died, we moved here to Hollow Valley. Charles took over his duties at the nursery, and I cared for my mother until her death. He became more of a Hollow than I ever was. The wealth and power corrupted what was left of him. I shrank until I was a shadowy presence.”

“Hollow Valley doesn’t seem to be overflowing with wealth or power. Sure, everyone has a big house and an expensive car, and I gather the nursery business is good. Nobody seems to be jetting off to luxurious resorts or floating their yachts in the stream. Does the family own a vast corporation or a senator?”

Felicia downed the wine and held out her glass. I went inside and brought out the wine bottle. She was likely to be unaccustomed to alcohol, and I had no reservations about exploiting her weakness. I refilled her glass and waited.

“Not that kind of power,” she said with a ladylike snort. “One can have the power to flaunt authority. And just because we don’t wear mink coats and diamonds doesn’t mean we’re not richer than a corporate law firm. Charles’s watch cost six thousand dollars. He never wears it to church, but you can bet he wears it to chamber of commerce meetings. He’s a nasty old hypocrite.” She finished the wine in her glass and, with some fumbling, managed to pour herself a very full glass. “It was a damn shame about Winston. I felt sorry for him when he was a kid. He taught Esther how to use watercolors, and they would sneak off whenever they could. Charles was furious, of course. The first painting that Esther brought home so incensed him that he ripped it into shreds and made her put in an extra ten hours at the nursery.”

“Do you believe that Winston committed suicide?” I asked.

“About as far as I can fart,” she replied with a giggle. “Want a demonstration?”

“Not really. What do you think happened to him?”

Wine dribbled down her blouse as she took a drink. “I’d like to think that Charles murdered him and that you can prove it. Drag the bastard off to jail! Unfortunately, that’s only in my dreams. Charles had the flu and could barely haul his sorry ass out of bed for a week. He complained the entire time. I should have held a pillow over his face.”

“If Charles didn’t murder Winston, who did?”

“How should I know? I was home making chicken soup and rice pudding. Charles was the only one out here who was upset about Winston and Terry’s relationship. I thought Terry was a snob, but I liked Winston. Don’t tell a soul, but I used to come here every now and then while Charles was away at a church meeting and Terry was out of town. Winston and I drank wine and talked about the old days. I’d go home, gargle with mouthwash, and be asleep when Charles got back.” She hiccuped with delight. “The good old days, when I still had Esther. How is she? Does she need money? I have some in a box in the closet. Her toys, too. She had a doll named Heloise and a stuffed monkey with one eye. What was his name?”

She was way too close to slipping into a maudlin reverie. She had the wine bottle in her lap, and retrieving it might send her over the edge. “She’s doing fine,” I said, “and she didn’t appear to need money. Do you know anything about a real estate deal that involves Hollow Valley?”

After a few misses, she managed to put her finger to her lips. “Can’t talk about it. Big secret.”

“Did someone named Danny Delmond ever come here to meet with Charles?”

Felicia gave me a lopsided grin. “Hairy Danny. Whenever business is discussed, Charles orders me to stay in the kitchen. Mostly church business. Once they heard gossip that the choir director was having private sessions with underaged girls from the congregation. You should have heard them carrying on like a flock of biddy hens. Cluck, cluck, cluck! They finally decided to punish the girls for telling sordid lies. The choir director quietly resigned and left town.”

“Danny Delmond is a developer.”

“Good for him. I’m the great-great-great-granddaughter of Colonel Moses Ambrose Hollow. I live in the middle of nowhere and am married to an evil-tempered dictator. My own daughter despises me. You despise me. Everyone else just feels sorry for me—humorless, spineless Felicia Hollow Finnelly.” She began to cry again, this time embellished with noisy gulps, moans, and whimpers.

I realized that I would hear nothing more from her that was remotely coherent. She presented a dilemma. If I left her alone, she might stumble into the pool and drown. I had opened the wine bottle, and I hadn’t wrested it away from her. I didn’t want to carry her home, where Charles might notice that she was drunk. He would not be amused.

I was sitting there, watching her for any indication that she might stop crying in the foreseeable future, when the shriek of a siren grew closer. I went to the front yard in time to see flashing lights streaking toward the Old Tavern. My throat tightened. Jordan had been furious. Had she done something outrageous that resulted in injury? Margaret Louise was at the top of her hit list, with Nattie in the second slot. I was a contender for third, but I wasn’t easily available. I wanted to chase the ambulance, but I couldn’t leave Felicia. I returned to check on the dilemma. The wine bottle was on its side, also empty.

“Is Esther here?” she bleated. “I want to see Esther. Will she forgive me? Oh, Esther, I’m so sorry!”

I grasped her arm and encouraged her to stand. “Let’s go inside, Felicia. You can rest while I look for Esther.” She sagged as if she’d been punched. I put my arm around her back and tried to keep her moving. “A nice nap is what you need. When you feel better, we can talk about Esther’s one-eyed monkey.”

We made it to the master bedroom. I gave a tiny shove that sent her sprawling facedown across the bed, then rolled her over and took off her shoes. She wiggled until her head bumped a pillow, fluttered her fingers at me, and passed out. I closed the blinds and made sure the French doors were locked. The rhythm of her breathing became slower and deeper. When she began to snore like an asthmatic dog, I tiptoed out of the room and went to the front porch.

Either the ambulance had departed without fanfare or it was still at the Old Tavern. I walked to the blacktop road. After a moment of deliberation, I went down the driveway that led to Pandora and Ethan’s house. Rainbow and Weevil were in the garden, pulverizing tomatoes with a hammer. They were too engrossed in destruction to look up as I took the path to the nursery. My plan was to skirt the greenhouses and approach the Old Tavern with the stealth of a ferret.

Two delivery trucks were parked near an outbuilding. I heard voices, but the words were indecipherable. Several men emerged from the back of a truck and headed in my direction, talking and laughing among themselves. I’d seen some of them when Ethan had given me the grand tour, but I most certainly did not want them to see me. I checked the ground for errant snakes, then scrunched behind a clump of scrub trees and brush. The men came within twenty feet of me but continued to the rows of ornamental trees and began to carry them back to the trucks. I was stuck between a rock (under my knee) and a hard place (an oak tree), and I had no idea how long it would take them to load the trees. A man with a clipboard periodically shouted instructions about flowering pears, hollies, redbuds, and whatever. The workmen cursed as they staggered under the weight of the trees with burlap root balls. Leaves rustled nearby. I bit down on my lip to hold in a squeak of terror. The only weapon at hand was a spindly branch no thicker than my thumb. I anticipated a snake with the diameter of a fire hose. Although I knew that anacondas and pythons were indigenous to South America, I wasn’t sure they hadn’t acquired the proper visas to grant them temporary residency in Hollow Valley.

The rustling noise seemed closer—and louder. No one had reported seeing an alligator within three hundred miles, but that did little to reassure me. I’d never seen a purple cow, but I could not swear under oath that purple cows did not exist. The workmen chose that moment to take a break. Their alarming proximity overpowered my nebulous fear of skunks, raccoons, and rabid possums. The men sat in the dirt or leaned against the truck, some of them smoking. A bearish man with a red face said something that the others found hysterically funny, then walked straight at me. His hands fumbled with the zipper of his jeans.

I tucked myself into the smallest ball possible and gritted my teeth. The splatter on the leaves echoed like a deluge. The smell caused me to gag. I closed my eyes and did what I could to distract myself until the last droplets hit the dust and I heard the sound of a zipper being restored to its proper place. Only then did I risk a breath. The men resumed talking. I opened one eye and peered around the tree. Most of them had their backs to me, including the one whose mother had failed to instill in him a sense of decorum.

I was trapped for a quarter of an hour before the man with the clipboard announced that they were finished. As they headed for the office, the bearish man looked over his shoulder and winked at me. I was so astonished that I would have fallen back on my derriere if I hadn’t been concerned about spiders. He might have assumed that we were compatriots, but he was wrong. I do not make alliances with men who expose themselves to Mother Nature.

I finally stood up. My knees were embedded with dirt and flecks of composted debris, and my back had tread marks from the bark of the tree. All I’d learned was that the woods were more dangerous than I’d ever imagined. One of the workmen was likely to be Danny’s accomplice. None of them was likely to admit it to me. I still had no idea what had transpired at the Old Tavern, which had been my goal when I took the devious route. I was about to plunge back into the woods when Ethan came out of his office. Charles stalked behind him, as if he were the Grand Inquisitor of his petty bishopric.

Ethan began to designate drivers and crews for the trucks. The trucks were going south and east in Arkansas. He rattled off a list of stops, some in cities and some in unfamiliar towns. I was surprised that landscaping was prevalent in places called “County Line Liquor” and “the Redbird Bar and Grill.” I recognized the name of a town in Maxwell County, only because one of my customers at the Book Depot had described it in unflattering terms. “Beerbelly’s” would soon be surrounded by flowering pear trees and crepe myrtles.