The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (2 page)

I
T WAS HOT IN NORTHERN
V
IRGINIA
— 98, with the comfort index at 120. Tropical Washington’s heat monster was loose again, devouring people imprudent enough to step out of air-conditioned buildings. Louise Eldridge got out of her air-conditioned car, and hurried up the mossy walk through deep woods where even the trees seemed to be sweating. Within ten steps, she herself was dripping like a stevedore. Quickly, as if evading an attack, she slipped in the front door of her low-slung, modern house and slammed it
shut. With a swipe of a forearm she got rid of the heaviest perspiration on her brow.

For a minute, she just stood there, trembling with relief in the chilly-feeling seventy-five degrees. Life was going to be okay as long as she didn’t absentmindedly open the glass sliding doors and let the beast in.

“Hi, Ma.” A light voice floated to her from the living room.

There, her seventeen-year-old daughter Janie was slumped on the couch, as limp as a piece of raw liver. She wore shorts and a halter top and little else. Her blond hair was splayed over the cushion behind her, her bare feet propped up, a glass of iced tea equipped with a bendable straw clasped in her hands. Her dark-lashed blue eyes were fixed warily on her mother. Louise went over and gave her a kiss. “Hello, darling.”

Janie said, “I’m boiling: I just came in from hanging out my undies.”

Louise could see two lacy brassieres strung on a collapsible wash line in a sunny spot amidst the tall trees. “It’s beastly, isn’t it?” She went to the refrigerator and poured herself a tall glass of iced tea, then returned to the living room and perched on a sturdy antique chair opposite Janie. “Maybe your hair would be better off in pigtails.”

Janie’s mouth turned down, as if Louise had failed a test. “We’re not going to talk about the weather and hair, are we?”

“No.” The only thing on the girl’s mind was the trip with her parents that she didn’t want to take. They had started this debate last evening, and gone to bed with the winner uncertain.

Janie said, “I’ll be okay by myself.”

Louise didn’t answer. She thought,
Oh, no, you won’t
.

But the girl’s statement hung in the air, waiting like an anxious atom to bond with another to make a conversational molecule.

“I’ll be okay by myself,” she repeated.

“Probably,” Louise said carefully. “But you might enjoy coming on this trip with us, seeing how your father wants to come, and Chris’s mom has invited herself, too. Connecticut’s interesting. You can go on a historic garden tour, hike the Appalachian Trail, raft on the Housatonic, Your father will have just come back from Vienna, and I know he would love to have your company.”

And besides, the alternative was alarming: Janie alone with boyfriend Chris, while Louise and Bill and Chris’s mother Nora went off together for the three-day weekend. No way.

The teenager was as cool as Louise was trying to be. She gave her mother a calculating look from under dramatic dark brows, then took a long slurp of iced tea. Only after that was she ready to launch her opening argument. “Ma, I’m not nearly as earthy as you are. Garden tours are just not my scene. Anyway, why would you want me there? The three of you can have a nice, quiet weekend together. You and Dad can—you know—do the things you like to do when you’re alone. Nora—why, she can knock off a few poems sitting by one of those rivers. When you’re in the car, you can groove on Dad’s tapes of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. Frankly, I wanted to do some things around the house—you know, clean out my closet, pack up the clothes that no longer fit me and give them away …”

Really—is that what you would he doing?
Time for the trump card. She had just spoken with Nora. “What if I told you Chris wants to come.”

Janie sat upright on the couch and swung her legs to the floor. “He
does?
But what
for?
” Louise could see the young woman’s visions of an unchaperoned weekend vanishing like a cloud of vapor.

“I guess he heard about all the neat things to do— mountains to climb, waterfalls to photograph, craggy rocks to hop about on … Being away for his first year of college, he hasn’t seen much of his mother and he thought it would be fun to spend some time with her.”

“And his dad—what about Ron? Won’t he be home alone then?”

“He’s been called away to Singapore on business.”

Janie’s eyes widened angrily. “I can’t believe it. Now you and Dad expect me to go because Chris is going, right? That way, you don’t have to worry about the two of us hanging out together without the ’rents and doing all sorts of terrible things, like having
sex!
”

“Janie.” Louise was hurt. Neither she nor Bill deserved that—or did they?

“Now that you’ve engineered everything the way you want it, I guess I have to go. Or else I’ll be alone in this dank house in the swamps of northern Virginia for three whole days.”

Granted it was hot in Washington, but did Janie have to describe their home in such a contemptuous way? The size of the mortgage alone gave Louise deep respect for this house in the northern Virginia woods.

Now the girl was facing her, sitting on the couch like a thin Buddha filling in the ignorant parent. “You realize, Ma, Chris and I could have sex any time—in a closet over at his house, in their garage, in his room—his mother never intrudes, you know—she’s way too busy sending her poems off to little magazines in hopes someone will buy them. We could be doin’ it in the car on the way to the movies, or when you send us out to help you with
grocery shopping
. Why do you think we need a weekend alone to manage it? After all, it only takes
minutes!
”

“That’s all true. But this is our house, and you’re our seventeen-year-old daughter. Both are our responsibilities. And we prefer that you don’t stay alone. It’s called, in the words of your father, who after all was raised Catholic, ‘avoiding the near occasions of sin.’ Or substitute ‘temptation,’ if you don’t believe premarital sex is a sin, which most likely you don’t.”

“I don’t, you’re right. Okay, Ma. But let me tell you something.”

Louise sat up straighter and wiggled her back against the old wooden chair, a Detroit chair that had been her grandmothers and which she found particularly comfortable. “Go ahead, tell me.”

Janie looked right at her and narrowed her eyes a little, as if she were looking at something unpleasant under a microscope.
Very odious specimen: Manipulative Mother
. Louise could feel the goodwill draining out of their mother-daughter relationship like water out of a leaky pail.

“You always have to manage everything. You can’t just let Chris and me develop our relationship in a natural way and let what happens happen—you have to put these enormous roadblocks in the path.”

“As I said before—”

Janie was not to be stopped. “You’re a control freak, but you don’t
have
to be, you just
choose
to be. Life isn’t an eternal crisis here. But you had to manage everything when we came from overseas because Dad got stationed in the States—to make sure nothing went wrong. Then, you’re just a Foreign Service wife in America with nothing to do. So you have a big job crisis: ‘Oh, dear,’” she mimicked, in a falsetto voice Louise found particularly objectionable, “’I must find a career right
now!
”

Louise reddened. “So that’s how you think I acted.”

“Then”—and her gaze veered away from Louise, toward the living room’s big glass windows—“that first crazy murder happens and you, unfortunately, get involved. You did good, Ma, don’t get me wrong …”

“Thanks.”

“And then the PBS station hires you for that garden show, and you even get a job as a mouthpiece for some screwy lawnmower company. How would you like kids teasing
you
about your mother advertising
lawnmowers?
”

“It’s a
mulch
mower …”

Janie ignored her and continued in a low, menacing voice.
This must be the bad part
, thought Louise. “All it’s been
since you started working is control, control,
control
. You get involved in more crazy, dangerous things. Nobody else’s mother stumbles on crimes left and right. And you’re traveling to all those botanical gardens and nurseries all the time, so everybody has to do everything you say while you’re out of town—or something will go
wrong
. But when you are in town, you don’t even get home in time to cook dinner. Sometimes I have to cook, and even
Dad
has had to cook.”

“Poor Dad.”

“Worst of all, you have a constant fear that I’ll jump in the sack with Chris, when you don’t even know the first thing about how we feel about each other. Why, I might have a love interest in French class. Chris might have a girlfriend at Princeton …”

“I don’t think so, from the way you two act.”

Some of the wind had gone out of Janie’s rhetorical sails. “Act, schmact, Ma. All I have to say is that you can’t control everything. You can’t control my life. You can’t control my
love
.”

“Honey, I’m not really trying to. But it’s my job to be your mother until you come of age. I believe that’s next year. Then you can call your own shots. As for the other things, well, I’m sorry I’m not managing my life very well.”

Janie waved a careless hand, but Louise had no idea what this casual gesture meant—another slam, or a reprieve? It turned out to be a reprieve. “Oh, you’re really not that inadequate,” said her daughter. “Just sometimes.” She threw both hands out, in the same gesture the Pope used when blessing crowds. “Actually, it might be kind of fun to go with you and Dad and Chris and Nora to Connecticut.”

Louise blinked. Did she hear that right? Was that speech real, or just something aimed at driving her mother crazy? Cautiously, because she didn’t want to let her guard down completely, Louise threw in some travel information: “Litchfield County’s a beautiful corner of the world. The
town is a gem: the prettiest in all of New England, they say. Old colonial houses, old barns, a covered bridge or two. We’ll be staying at a wonderful old inn. You and Chris can go off on your own there and do whatever you want.”

“Will there be anyone under forty at this place?”

“I’m afraid the youngest people will be a newlywed couple.”

“What will you guys be doing?”

“A PBS crew’s driving up from New York, and we’ll be taping a show, but it won’t intrude too much. We want to feature the Litchfield garden tour and Wild Flower Farm, which I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about: It’s a great nursery. They’ll still have their new red iris in bloom. It’s known as the Sacred Blood iris.” Louise smiled. “A gory name, isn’t it?”

“So that’s the big attraction for you—a red iris with a religious moniker? You plant people must be really sick. What else?”

“Otherwise, the weekend’s free. We can swim, too: there’s a natural pool on the property of Litchfield Falls Inn where we can take a dip any time we want.”

“Cool,” said Janie. “Though it sounds like your program will be the usual garden pablum—irises, roses, probably.”

Zapped again by the daughter’s verbal ray gun.

“I beg your pardon?” Louise’s voice had a chill in it. “Since I took over the show I’ve bent over backward to do a more serious job than my predecessor—”

“You mean your
murdered
predecessor.”

Louise could feel herself reaching the boiling point. “Yes, her. You know what they called Madeleine Doering at Channel Five? ‘Lady Madeleine,’ because she liked lightweight programs where all she had to do was wander up and down the flower borders.
Gardening with Nature
is serious, in case you’ve never noticed. It focuses on practical, organic gardening. And we’ve covered every environmental issue there is that’s related to gardening.” Sarcastically she added, “After
all, there has to be some reason why the President appointed me to the National Environmental Commission, hasn’t there?”

Coldly, she looked at her daughter, still snuggled in the comfort of the couch. “And you call that garden
pablum
”

“All right, all right.” Janie put her hands up in front of her, as if to ward off a blow. “Your show is not all pablum. But
this
place—Litchfield—sounds totally white bread. Anglo-Saxon all the way. The white hinterlands of America.”

“Not true,” said Louise, losing hope. “That area is a real mix of people.”

“But mostly Europeans, Ma.”

She gave her daughter a good once-over. A stint as a volunteer in Mexico last summer, plus a summer job this year working with underprivileged kids in Alexandria, was making its mark on the teenager. What was more, Janie’s twenty-year-old sister, Martha, also into social reform, was advocating that the family move out of the Virginia suburbs and into Capitol Hill in Washington, so they could experience life in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. Louise tried to smile at her younger daughter and failed. Dryly, she said, “Connecticut is where the British settled in colonial times, so it can’t be a surprise to find a few Anglo-Saxons still hanging around the place. But our next two shows are on urban gardens—one in Newark, and the other in Wilmington. So there’s no reason why we can’t do one program in the white hinterlands.” She got up from her chair stiffly.

“I’ve hurt your feelings, haven’t I?”

“Maybe you have.” She didn’t want to look at her daughter right then. She went into the kitchen, wondering what on earth she could conjure up for dinner without running out to the market. Maybe macaroni and cheese? But the cheese, a soft, not-very-good cheddar, had a thick coat of green mold. She caught a glimpse of herself in a tiny Mexican silver mirror hung up with other gimcracks on the kitchen wall next to the stove. Her long brown hair looked straggly;
she gave it a remedial smoothing. And there were alarming, drawn-down lines around her mouth, about which she could do nothing.

The conversation with Janie seemed to have aged her about twenty years.

The girl, looking like a particularly pretty blond-haired waif, trailed her to the kitchen and leaned on the door frame, one bare foot twined around the other. “Ma, it’s good we’re having arguments. It’s part of my growing up. If we got along too well, it might hamper my development into a grown woman.”