Death Under the Lilacs (9 page)

The last lilacs at Nutmeg Hill had been torn up by the roots the previous summer by Bea Wentworth.

The clue was in her last spoken line.

Lilacs?

Under the Lilacs
was a book by Louisa May Alcott. Bea had always said that she'd loved Alcott when she was a girl. They didn't have a copy in the house; he would have to borrow one from the library.

Lilacs,

False Blue,

White,

Purple.

He recited the lines aloud. Yes. Amy Lowell. He rummaged through the bookcases again until he came across a volume of Lowell's poems. He flipped through the index and then to the poem, “Lilacs,” reading it again and again as he tried to make contact with his wife's thinking.

A line sprang from the page: “Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England.”

All over New England! God, some clue!

He closed the volume in disgust and began to pace the room. He paused by the window overlooking the river, and another line of poetry came to him:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd.

His mind went blank. He could not connect the line with a poet. Think. It was famous, and he was a former English teacher. He had read it dozens of times. He paced the room again, grasping for the elusive thought that seemed to squirm farther away as he reached for it.

He was trying too hard.

He sat back in the leather chair and tried to remove his mind from the immediate thought of identification.

Who were Bea's favorite poets? There would be a connection.

When they were first married, it had been Emily Dickinson. God, her poems didn't have names and there were hundreds of them. Had she written anything about lilacs? Probably.

No. Emily Dickinson was for the young, Bea had said. As she had grown and matured, her tastes had changed.

Bea loved Whitman. Walt Whitman.

The line, “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,” was an elegy for Lincoln.

He searched the books for the appropriate volume and, when he found it, nearly dropped it as he searched frantically for the poem.

He read the first stanza aloud.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd.

And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,

I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

He read the remainder of the poem to himself, but before he was through he knew instinctively that the clue lay in the first stanza.

Just as he knew what flavor Bea liked in ice cream and how many sugars she took in her tea, he knew that this first stanza would lead him to her whereabouts.

What was she telling him?

He went back to the book of poetry and carefully typed out the first stanza in capital letters. He began to scan the poetry as if he were a teaching instructor pouring over a seminar's submission.

He underlined “western sky” with a red pencil and wrote “elegy” in the margin. He underlined several other phrases, “I mourn'd,” and “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd.”

He tilted back his desk chair and looked down at the words and his note.

She had told him where she was.

Why didn't Bea like lilacs? Everyone loved lilacs. He closed his eyes and tried to recall ten thousand conversations.

“They're eerie,” she had once said.

He had laughed. “Why in the world do you feel so strongly about a flower?” he had asked.

“They don't fit into my scheme of things in the garden.”

“They go with everything.”

“They bring back memories that I don't care to recall.”

The conversation had taken place only last summer, when they had been sitting on the patio with drinks in hand. A summer sky had crested overhead, and the river sparkled below. It was a perfect New England summer eve, yet her face had wrinkled with displeasure and he had known she was thinking of something unpleasant. When the silence continued, he had said in a low voice, “A penny for—”

“I was thinking of my Aunt Hattie.”

“I thought she was a favorite of yours?”

“She was, and that's why the lilacs. I was only fourteen when she died, and that's sort of a super-sensitive age for a young girl. I was broken up because we had been close. At least as close as a teenage girl can be with a woman in her sixties.”

He had nodded, knowing it was not time to speak.

“She was buried from that small chapel at Middleburg College. She requested only lilacs, and the place was filled with them. The smell, that sweet, cloying smell. I'll tell you, Wentworth, it drove me bananas. I had to leave the service.”

“So now they are the symbol of death for you.”

She had smiled at him. “Enough of that,” she had said.

He had fixed them another drink and they had eaten bay scallops on the patio, and the next day she had ripped the last remaining lilacs from their garden and they had gone for a balloon ride.

Lyon slammed from his desk chair and jerked to his feet. His heartbeat had increased, and his palms were moist with tension.

His hot air balloon was in the barn. He ran through the French door to the patio, vaulted the stone parapet, and broke into a full run as he approached the barn. He fumbled with the lock, then slipped into the dim interior. He found the switch by the door and flipped it on, and overhead lights illuminated the room.

His flight case was placed neatly on top of the hot air balloon's neatly rolled envelope. He took out the log and flipped the pages until he found the date of the entry last summer which concerned their only flight to the northwest part of the state.

On June 2 of the previous year, they had trucked the balloon to Hampstead in the western part of the state. They had inflated late … he ran his finger along the entry and read it:

Inflation at 2
P.M.
Flew at 1250 feet. Winds NNW at ten miles per hour. Three-hour flight. Descended at Reckledge Green at 5:10. R. Herbert in chase car.

He reached back into the flight case and pulled out his maps. He spread a geodetic survey map for northwest Connecticut on the envelope and took a quick measure with his fingers. Direct flight from Hampstead to Reckledge was twenty-seven miles. The wind must have remained relatively constant.

He drew a neat line between the two points. He believed that somewhere along these twenty-seven miles, directly beneath or to either side of their line of sight, lay a cemetery where Bea Wentworth was entombed.

Captain Norbert's lips moved as he read the poem. He finished and thrust it impatiently back across the desk. “Where'd you get the jingle, Wentworth? Off the back of a cereal box?”

Lyon half rose in his chair. “That was written by Walt Whitman.”

“Prefer Edgar Guest, myself.”

“You can't begin to compare …” Lyon stopped. This was insanity. He was arguing literary appreciation with a state police captain while Bea might be dead or dying. “I need your men to check all the cemeteries in the area,” Lyon said firmly.

“I heard your wife's voice on the tape too. She said she wanted to come home to take care of her lilacs. That's a natural thing for a woman to say.”

“She hates them.”

“So be it. But from that one sentence you figure that she's a prisoner in a tomb or grave in the northwest part of the state?”

“Somewhere along a twenty-seven-mile line.”

“What about to the side?”

“I've checked with the weather bureau. On June the second of last year, flight visibility was eight miles.”

“On either side?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know how many square miles that is?”

“Approximately.”

“Do you know how many cemeteries are in that area?”

“No.”

“Well, I worked in that area when I was a young trooper, and I didn't count them either, but there's a lot. Let me give you a history lesson. Not only does every church in that section have a cemetery, but the towns also have them.”

“We can hit them all.”

“And there's more. That part of the state, before the textile mills opened up in the last century, was filled with small farms. The farms are gone now, but the cemeteries are all over the lot. They're hidden so deep in the woods that you stumble across them only when you go hunting.”

“Are you going to help me?”

For the first time since he had known the man, Norbert had the grace to look embarrassed. “How about that batch of lists we gave you? Come up with anything?”

“No,” Lyon lied.

“I can't do it, Wentworth. Not on what you've given me. I'd have to call the Litchfield Barracks in on this, and they would laugh me off the force. A poem, for Christ's sake! A grave! It's just not enough information to pull a bunch of men off patrol to tromp through a lot of rotting tombstones. You have to understand, I have paperwork, reports, manpower utilization forms to fill out. I have to be able to justify what I do.”

“I'm sure of this.”

Norbert shook his head. “I'm sorry. Try and understand.”

7

Lyon spread the geodetic map across the breakfast room table and thumbtacked it down. He wished Rocco were back; at least he'd have gotten some aid from that quarter. He sighed and bent over the map. There wasn't time to wait for Rocco's return.

He would have to start by himself, but there was too large an area to cover. He would have to eliminate.

He lay a ruler across the map and drew his first line: the approximate heading they had taken on the balloon flight a year ago. Around the balloon's flight course he drew lines to indicate the areas of visibility that day.

The area was huge and included a huge chunk of the state. More elimination.

He would assume that the kidnapper would not hold Bea in a populated area: towns, villages, and the few cities in the area could be ruled out. He drew black circles around the populated districts.

Northwestern Connecticut contains the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, and large swatches of land include rolling mountains with lake-filled valleys. Working with the map's contour lines, Lyon began to eliminate other portions of land.

He went to work with a magnifying glass to search for cemeteries and wished that New Englanders did not revere their dead so much.

Lyon let the Datsun idle at the end of the driveway as he waited for the morning mail delivery. The ransom had been paid; instructions as to Bea's whereabouts should have been received or should arrive this morning. If it wasn't in the day's mail, there might be a phone call. Their phone was being monitored by the police, and he would check in with them several times during the day.

He had an inchoate feeling that there would be no instructions. The kidnapper now knew, as he had probably suspected, that there were police waiting when the stamps were dropped off. Bea might already be dead.

He saw the mail jeep in the distance. It stopped at a box down the highway and then slowly began to approach Nutmeg Hill.

Lyon was out of the car and standing by the box as the jeep braked by his side. “Any news, Mr. Wentworth?”

Lyon shook his head and reached for the mail. He quickly sifted through the few letters and found them all to be familiar bills. He waved at the mailman and climbed back into the small station wagon and drove away from Nutmeg Hill. He was a balloonist in heart and soul, and like his counterparts of the sea who depended on sails and hated powerboats, he had an active dislike for fixed-wing aircraft with gasoline engines. There would be no choice today. A small aircraft would be the only way to cover the chunks of territory he had to inspect. A helicopter would be better, but that would require a drive to Hartford to arrange for a rental, and time was too short.

Time. He remembered a harrowing balloon flight several years ago when a quirky downdraft had made his hot air balloon dip dangerously near the towering pylons of a high-tension line. He had immediately activated the propane burner to give lift to the balloon, but a wind had shoved him toward the lethal power line.

The mental calculations consisted of a mental graph: the time available for the balloon to lift as its envelope heated, and the rate of drift toward the power line. In seconds the decision was made and he had leaped out of the gondola. The fall had nearly killed him, but he had remained conscious long enough to see the hot air balloon incinerate itself on the power line.

It was such a convergence of factors that he now felt about Bea. The graph lines were intersecting—today. He pressed down on the accelerator and sped toward the Murphysville Airport.

The town's airport, which consisted of a single runway, had a dozen planes tied down and chocked along its concrete expanse. A hangar and a small operations office made up the remainder of the complex. A wind sock mounted on the top of the hangar hung limp against its pole.

Gary Middletown, the manager, his crushed fifty-mission cap jauntily perched on the rear of his head, smiled at Lyon. “What's up?”

“I'd like to rent a small plane as soon as possible. I want something maneuverable with a low stall speed.”

“I've got a Tripacer that's all gassed up and ready to go.”

Lyon nodded. “I'll take it.”

Gary handed him a form to sign and a ballpoint pen. “Can I see your license?”

Lyon jerked his wallet from his pocket and handed the laminated license across the counter, signed the form, and picked up the small bag he had carried into the building. “The red-and-yellow one midway down the track?”

Gary Middletown shook his head. “Ah—Lyon, this is a hot air balloon license. It's NG for conventional craft.”

“My private pilot's license expired years ago. I never flew after I took up ballooning.”

“Sorry. You'll need a pilot to go with you.”

“Fine. Just please hurry,” Lyon said impatiently.

“I'm the only pilot here and I have to run the shop. Herb flew a family to the Vineyard and should be back late this afternoon.”