Hearse and Gardens (3 page)

His license plate read
BYRON3
. I could only imagine what kind of cars
BYRON1
and 2 were. I never understood the charm of owning vanity plates—I was too modest, or too cheap, to consider buying them. At least his plates didn't say
LORDBYRON
, of course, too many letters for a New York plate.

I cringed at my reflection in the Range Rover's dark tinted windows. Black mascara trailed in spikes down my face. I'd make the perfect stand-in for a Kiss band member. I licked my pointer finger and tried to erase the smudges,
only managing to create two little bat wings, which extended from the outside corners of my eyes to my ears. Now I looked like an Edward Gorey gothic cartoon from the opening sequence of a PBS
Masterpiece Mystery!

As a distraction, I reached into The Old Man and the Sea Books shopping bag and pulled out my gift from Byron,
The Illuminated Language of Flowers
, by Jean Marsh and illustrated by Kate Greenaway. I quickly thumbed through the index and looked up daisies. Daisies meant farewell. Which made the daisies and the book an oxymoronic welcome gift.

I glanced over at Byron, just as he was about to drop the silk-cocooned gull into a rusty trash can.

“Wait!” I ran toward him and wrenched the gull from his hands. “He deserves a proper beach burial.”

I thought I saw an eye roll.

“You might catch a disease. Look at all these insects.” He peeled away the top section of the pocket square and revealed an entomologist's dream.

I cringed but wasn't swayed. We Michigan gals were tough. The summers of my adolescence were spent at my grandfather's house in Traverse City, or Up North, as my family called it. Up North was a wonderland, another universe from Detroit's urban sprawl. My summers included building a fort next to a stream that emptied into Lake Michigan.

I became a loner at a young age. Having a hearing loss I didn't know about until much later wasn't a conduit to close friendships. I had only two playdates with Patsy, the little girl who lived next to my grandfather. Her mother told my grandfather, who told my mother, that Patsy
thought I was stuck-up. I realized later, Patsy probably tried to talk to me when I wasn't facing her, and I hadn't heard a word she'd said. So I spent long summer days alone, surrounded by Nancy Drew, centipedes, garter snakes, and pollywogs. I wasn't a big fan of the crayfish. Their pasty beige exoskeletons and pinchers creeped me out. However, that didn't stop me from putting one in the basket of Patsy's bike.

“Do you have any idea who would do this to you?” Byron pointed at the gull.

“I have a good idea. I'll take him home and bury him in front of my cottage.”

“I thought this was your home?”

“Well. Yes and no. I'm in a dispute with someone over ownership. But, in the meantime, I want to draw up plans for the garden. I guarantee you, it will soon be mine.”

“Sure you want to make the investment?”

I tried to see myself the way he must: smeared mascara, holey jeans, a Detroit Tigers hat and T-shirt, clutching an insect-ridden seagull. “Follow me, I want to show you a few things.”

It was such a welcoming feeling, walking into my tiny four-room cottage. I'd lucked out renting it because my buddy, Barb Moss, Montauk real estate agent extraordinaire, took pity on me when I burst into Sand and Sun Realty during a snowstorm, looking for an immediate oceanfront rental. Fortunately, the owners had just handed Barb the key. The owners were on a two-year waiting list for a top Hamptons architect who would replace the charming four-room cottage with a mega beach house—the reason for my two-year lease.

The kitchen was small, with room for only one piece of furniture and a small table to go against the cushioned banquette. No dishwasher but a vintage turquoise “icebox” still tickin' after sixty years of service.

I grabbed a Vernors, a made-in-Detroit ginger ale, from the icebox, then sat on the sofa so I could call Elle
on my landline phone. She would be waiting for a report on Byron Hughes.

“So, he was gorgeous and rescued a damsel in distress,” Elle said.

“Well, I wouldn't go that far. Although, he did have a certain charm. He even brought me gifts.” I remembered my first impression this morning of Byron as a knight in armor, and the ground shifted from all the nineteenth-century suffragettes rolling in their graves.

“He's a catch. Be extra nice to him and maybe he'll do the job for free.”

“Before you pimp me out, I don't think I stand a chance with him. Out of my league. And the only reason I got lucky enough to pay in the low thousands for blueprints was because it's October, not March.”

“He's not out of your league! You were engaged to Michael. His pedigree wasn't chopped liver.”

“Michael was a user. He would've never made it as editor in chief of
American Home and Garden
without his ex-wife's publishing connections.” Michael was my former fiancé and boss, whom I'd found in bed with his ex-wife, a.k.a. Paige Whitney, of Whitney Publications fame. Michael was also the reason for my escape from Manhattan to Montauk. Even though I had to leave behind my dream job at the magazine, it was the best decision I'd ever made.

“The whole gull thing is disgusting. I think you should tell the police,” Elle said.

“Crime is pretty rare in the Hamptons, but I don't think a dead seagull will make the police blotter in the
Montauk Journal
. Do you?”

“Maybe not, but be careful. Between this and the skeleton at Sandringham, you'd better take things as a warning. I dreamt last night I couldn't fit into my Edith Head dress from
The Birds
. An omen, don't you think?”

“You told me about that dream months ago. And, you also told me the dress was from
Vertigo
.”

“Semantics. It's a Hitchcock movie, for God's sake.”

Elle's great-aunt Mabel had been an assistant to the famous movie costume designer Edith Head. Aunt Mabel willed Elle many items from classic '40s, '50s, and '60s movies, along with a few hundred pieces of costume jewelry, and an entire store filled with antiques and vintage. Lucky girl.

I said, “Let's talk tomorrow afternoon, when we meet at your place with our finds.”

“Sounds good. By the way, I called Sandringham and talked to Uncle Harry for a whole two minutes before Celia grabbed the phone and told me, in no uncertain terms, the discovery in the bungalow was to be kept top secret. As if I'd upset my great-uncle.”

“Celia didn't seem like the caring type when we saw her at the estate, chastising your great-uncle like a child. I hope you've got Detective Shoner on call to let you know when they ID the body.”

“Why would I?”

“Time to step up that relationship. We need an inside track to the investigation.”

“Oh no, you don't! You almost got murdered last spring.”

I looked at the base of my landline phone. Elle's words filled the screen at such a fast pace, I could hardly keep up.
Most of my home time was spent hearing-aid-less: no feedback, and as tiny as they were, they still irritated my outer ear canal. My house phone transposed everything into words, like the captions on foreign movies. Occasionally, things got spelled incorrectly, like Elle's last sentence. It read, “You almost got merlot last spring.” I wish. In fact, I had an open bottle in the fridge. But I always stuck to my after-five drinking curfew.

“It can't hurt to know what's going on in case it involves your family. I doubt there's any danger. That skeleton had been sitting there for a long time.”

After I hung up with Elle, I spent the next three hours working on a proposal for a potential Cottages by the Sea client. My rates were quite different than Byron Hughes's. I didn't charge for my time or designs. I just invoiced a reasonable markup for the items I placed in my clients' cottages. That made me very popular, but not very rich.

Dinner consisted of Stuffing à la Mac and Cheese: follow the boxed stuffing microwave directions, dump in a nuked cup of macaroni and cheese, mix together, and you've got a meal to satiate your worst hormonal carb crave.

My father, the best home chef I've ever met, would have a canary if he knew about tonight's meal. However, his gastronomical genes hadn't missed me completely. I'd learned using fresh herbs in cooking wasn't for gourmet chefs only. I grew my own year-round. I had herbs in a windowsill planter and in two gardens, one on the side of my rental and one at Little Grey, hidden behind the folly—my secret garden.

Herbs helped elevate fast-food and microwave dinners to another level—a palatable one. I pinched off a few leaves
of sage and thyme from the windowsill planter and added them to my Stuffing à la Mac and Cheese. Oooh la la. My father had taught me a tip about storing fresh herbs. He told me to only wash them right before using. And if I needed to store fresh herbs in the fridge, I shouldn't wash them, just wrap them gently in a damp paper towel, then put in a Zip-loc bag with trapped air.

After dinner and a few more hours of work, okay one hour of work, and one on the Internet surfing for design inspiration, I bundled up and stepped onto the deck. The wind off the ocean was merciless. I flipped down the flaps on my fur-lined hat and secured the chin strap. Then I grabbed the vintage Red Rose Coffee tin from the plant stand and went to the beach.

The sky was clear, freckled with crisp white stars. I took out my flashlight and aimed it on the milk-mustache foam left by the huge waves beating the shore. I found a stick wide enough to use as a shovel and dug a hole. I opened the tin, turned it on its side, and slid the seagull corpse into its final resting place.

In my head, I recited the words from my mother's eulogy, written by Samuel Butler.
I fall asleep in the full and certain hope that my slumber shall not be broken. And that though I be all-forgetting, yet shall I not be all-forgotten. But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I loved.
I thought about the skeleton in the bungalow. Was it foul play or accidental?

Foul play
was just a nice way to say murder.

It felt like someone was nearby. My rental butted up to a small nature preserve on one side, and on the other, my neighbor was a seasonal occupant. I was isolated. A
fact I usually reveled in, but not tonight. Tumbleweeds of kelp somersaulted across the beach. I turned to go, and the weirdest feeling crawled up my spine, like the hairy legs of a tarantula.

I'm not a soothsayer, but I must admit, between the seagull and the skeleton, I had a bad case of the ooks. And without my hearing aids, a banshee could be clomping toward me with a butcher knife and I wouldn't know it.

I tore up the steps, locked the French doors, and with spastic fingers set the alarm.

I tried to start each day with a simple but powerful five-minute meditation. As I looked out at the ocean, I repeated over and over again, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Elle had called to confirm our plans for the day and to tell me the skeleton from the bungalow was positively identified as Harrison Falks's son, Pierce. Not a huge surprise. Pierce's death was ruled suspicious and a possible homicide. The CSIs deduced someone locked Pierce in the recording studio and placed the bookcase in front of the door. Another no-brainer. Pierce had no keys or wallet with him. The room was empty, except for the desk and chair. One question on everyone's mind, including the paparazzi, was where the heck was Helen Morrison, not to mention the Warhol painting of Aqua Net hairspray?

Today's fifty-degree weather set the stage for a perfect day of garage and yard saling. I'd programmed each estate
sale into my cell phone's map app. Three sales were in Bridgehampton, two in East Hampton, and four in Amagansett. Elle was covering Sag Harbor, Wainscott, and Water Mill.

Before leaving, I separated my singles, fives, and tens from my large bills. In my shoulder bag I had my trusty loupe, a keychain tape measure, baby wipes, and a penlight for dark corners. In the back of the Jeep were four huge zippered plastic bags like you could find in dollar stores. I'd learned the hard way it was important to zipper the bag shut as you collected your loot so no sticky fingers could make off with your booty.

The most important thing before you headed to a sale: a stomach empty of liquids, not even a sip of coffee. Homeowners weren't too keen on sharing their bathrooms with strangers, and once you hit the vintage trail, you didn't want to traipse back to town for a restroom. I'd seen people waiting in line drop like flies because they needed the loo. Not me. I was a camel.

I pulled onto Route 27. There was more traffic than usual. The Hamptons International Film Festival started on Friday. Soon, every hotel in a twenty-mile radius would have
NO VACANCY
signs.

The first sale was disappointing. I came away with only a Japanese doll with a damaged face, stuck to a wood base under a glass dome. The doll would go straight into the trash, but once I removed the glue from the base, I'd have a vintage cloche to play and display with.

Another disappointment, at the first sale, was seeing none other than Tara Gayle, my professional and personal archnemesis. Our history wasn't good. She was my
competition at estate and garage sales, and we'd both dated the same guy. I smiled at the memory of this past June when I saw her walking along Montauk Highway with a big stick, stabbing litter, dressed in a reflective orange community service vest, penance for stealing from a nearby estate. The jumpsuit was a step down from her usual designer wardrobe.

The next sale in East Hampton kept me busy for hours. It was the thing dreams are made of. Even the trash on the curb netted a few projects I knew had rosy futures. When I saw what the third-floor attic hid, it set me back a minute, reminding me of my barricaded cottage with its attic of treasures. Treasures I hadn't been able to get my mitts on because of Gordon Miles. But my personal credo was: live in the moment. After seven trips up and down the stairs with goodies, my angst disappeared. The bags I'd brought were full, so I made do with empty laundry baskets I found in the basement.

Weary, but satiated, I drove to Sag Harbor. I passed slowly through historic Main Street, then turned right on Sage Street. I parked in the back of Mabel and Elle's Curiosities. The shop took up the bottom level of an early-nineteenth-century captain's house. It was painted sand beige with white gingerbread trim and black shutters and even had its original fish-scale shingles. At the top of the house was a widow's walk with a full view of the harbor.

The wraparound porch had two high-back rocking chairs, a porch swing, wrought iron tables, and plant stands. The flower shop, Sag Harbor Horticulture, supplied the porch's flora and fauna, in this case: mums, pumpkins, and ornamental cabbage, along with cornstalks and bales
of hay, all for the measly price of Elle displaying their business cards in her shop. That was how small business worked in small towns—even the Hamptons.

Mabel and Elle's Curiosities had been in business for fifty-five years and was a favorite stop for many a Sag Harbor tourist and local alike. Three years ago, after the death of Aunt Mabel, Elle took over ownership, adding her name to the letterhead. Elle kept the front of the shop as it was back in her great-aunt's day—stuffed to the rafters with odds and ends.

In the back of the shop was a room without Aunt Mabel's influence: the White Room. All the smalls, a decorator term for knickknacks, and upholstered furniture were in white, accented with whitewashed wood tables, even the wide plank floor was painted white. Elle's White Room had been photographed in all the top home décor magazines. She liked to change it up every season, but still kept to the white theme.

Elle's living space was on the second floor. Her bedroom was on the third. On the third floor she'd torn down walls without the approval of the Sag Harbor zoning commissioners, our little secret, and created a perfect loft that faced the bay.

After I unloaded my Jeep, I went inside the carriage house. I put the day's “finds” on top of the ten-foot workbench, next to Elle's. We discussed Pierce Falks's murder. There wasn't much to analyze, except for the sadness of the situation. Elle had also informed me that over the past weekend, Tara Gayle had come into Mabel and Elle's and grabbed one of my business cards from the checkout
counter. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why Terrible Tara would want my business card. Elle also mentioned Tara had spent an inordinate amount of time in the White Room. I hoped Elle had checked Tara's handbag when she left—thievery was her modus operandi.

I sat on my stool and said, “Okay. I'll go first.” It was magic time—where Elle and I pulled out the day's catch and determined what restoration needed to be done. Sometimes nothing was best. Sometimes pitching items straight in the trash was best. “Amateur midcentury female portrait, paint with wood stain glazes to faux age it. Eight dollars. Sell for thirty-six.”

“Okay. Floral, wrought iron chandelier with chippy paint, electrify. Twelve dollars. Sell for two fifty.”

“What a steal!”

Elle's grin said it all.

We continued until we decided to call it a draw.

I took pictures of each of my lots, dividing items by the location. Instead of a file name, I put the amount I'd paid at each sale. An easy way for me to keep the books for Uncle Sam.

Elle put her items in the huge cubby against the north wall of the workroom. I had a smaller space on the opposite side. Fair was fair. Plus, my stuff didn't stay long. If I didn't use my items in my current design project, I'd give Elle first dibs for her shop. If she passed, I'd sell to local dealers.

When it was time for me to leave, Elle walked me to my Jeep. “Glad you agreed to go to the funeral with me tomorrow.”

I said, “Of course.” I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to Pierce Falks's funeral. It would be an affair to remember and a good place to get a feel for the players at Sandringham, or should I say my suspect list. I sounded a little cocky. Believe me, I wasn't. I just had a bone to pick with myself for not figuring out who murdered the Queen Mother of the Hamptons last spring until it was almost too late.

I waved good-bye, and set out for my three o'clock appointment with a potential Cottages by the Sea client.

I'd spent yesterday finessing my presentation for a mother/daughter property in Montauk's Hither Hills neighborhood. Last week, I'd stopped at the property and was given a tour. There was a good-sized, four-bedroom contemporary beach house, and a half an acre away, a traditional Hamptons shingle-style cottage with three bedrooms. Both sat on their own separate hills and had amazing views of the ocean.

Sylvie and Rebecca Crandle were a famous mystery writing team—S. R. Crandle. Their last book recently made the
New York Times
bestseller list. They wanted a Montauk retreat to keep the writing juices flowing. I couldn't think of a better place.

I pulled into Sylvie Crandle's drive. When I got out of my Jeep, a golden retriever bounded toward me. I knew there wasn't a need to worry if goldens were friend or foe—they were always friend. And I was right. The dog licked my hand in welcome.

“Hey, girl.” I wasn't psychic. She wore a pink bandana around her furry neck.

I'd toyed with the idea of getting a dog for protection and company, especially after meeting the love of my life last spring: Tripod, the three-legged dog. Tripod was traveling the open seas with his master, Cole, the gorgeous blue-eyed devil I'd also met last spring.

Sylvie's golden retriever led me to the stairs in front of her cottage, just as the door opened and someone stepped out.

Tara Gayle!

She had on a shaggy fur vest. Animal killer. In Tara's hand was a large portfolio case, like the one I was holding. Oh no. She was poaching clients, just like she tried to poach my man last spring. Tara was a former antiques shop owner and an Internet seller, but never an interior decorator.

I thought I heard the sound of an asp hissing as Tara passed me on the steps.

I snarled, “Tara.”

She snarled back, “Meg.”

Sylvie held open the door. “Hi, Meg. Come inside. I made pumpkin bread. It's still warm.”

When I showed Sylvie my storyboards, she seemed excited. I'd tailored each cottage's interior design with her and her daughter's individual aesthetics in mind. She had e-mailed me photos of her daughter's loft in Soho and her Upper East Side apartment, giving me a good idea about each woman's preferences.

My appointment went well, but it was too soon to pat myself on the back. Sylvie promised she'd call to let me know if I was hired. There was only one other designer in the running. Guess who?

*   *   *

True to her word, when I returned home, there was a message on my machine. Sylvie called to say I was hired. But only to decorate her daughter Rebecca's shingle-style cottage. The job of decorating her contemporary went to Tara Gayle.

Then I remembered what Elle had told me earlier, that Tara had taken my business card from Mabel and Elle's. She was out for revenge because I'd outed her to the police for stealing. I could only imagine the spiel of lies Tara told Sylvie. Did Sylvie know Tara had a police record? I could tell her, but it might be more amusing to watch Tara crash and burn.

Later that night, I took Patrick Seaton's book,
Tales from a Dead Shore—A Biography of Tortured Poets,
to bed with me. The first poet listed was Lord Byron. Quite a coincidence that the name Byron was popping up all over the place.

Lord Byron's tale of woe started when he was born with a clubfoot. It not only caused him physical pain, but psychological. When he was young, he nicknamed himself
la diable boiteux
, French for “the limping devil.” Despite his handicap, Lord Byron enjoyed adventure. And like myself, he was passionate about the sea.

In 1810 he swam from Europe to Asia, across the Hellespont Strait. Today, swimming the strait was an annual event. Lord Byron's even accredited with being the father of long-distance swimming. Unfortunately, his life ended badly at the age of thirty-six, not from disease, but more likely from the unsterilized instruments used in the barbaric,
but popular at the time, medical procedure of bloodletting. Patrick ended his biographical passage with a quote from Lord Byron:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin; his control

Stops with the shore.

I fell asleep with dreams of Byron Hughes in a sword fight with Patrick Seaton, battling for my honor. In the dream, Patrick had a definite limp.