The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (21 page)

Look at the big picture and then zero in on the particulars. First, study the microclimate of your yard. Is it changing? Microclimate includes wind, sun, shade, and water supply. Since deer are invading even the White House grounds and seem to make all our yards their playgrounds, your analysis should include a system for deer-proofing your precious plants. Don’t be content to just let things happen naturally. Remember, the very definition of a gardener should be “one who tinkers with nature.” Don’t be afraid to make changes in the microclimate that could benefit plants and trees for decades ahead. This might mean “limbing up” big branches of a tree to open a view; planting a row of trees for wind control; erecting a high screening fence against the deer; felling a tree completely, or moving it to another site; and creating hills and swales in the land purely for aesthetics, or for water dispersion and control.

Try to save this heavy-duty work for when there are helpers around—neighbors, friends, family. They’ll have a special feeling for you if they’ve
helped you rope, tie, and haul a two-hundred-pound cedar tree to a new location in your yard. If we’re talking gargantuan tree, hire a landscaping company; it is worthwhile, for mature trees add enormously to your property’s value. If you wield a ruthless pruning scissors, you can delay moving trees and bushes for years. Get a book and learn how to prune, not by snipping off the tips of limbs, but by removing them at the base, and leaving the collar. Do it regularly; do it to flowering trees after they bloom.

Strangely enough, once they have a hole in their landscape, some people seem to think they must fill it with a big plant. This reflects a Camus-like, existential view of life, and ignores a delicate truth: Gardens should be permitted to
grow
—to develop over time. Your home garden is not expected to look finished on a day-to-day basis. The idea of “becoming” perfect should be valued by gardeners, as well as the idea of “being” perfect. Therefore, when you think replacement plants, think smaller.

Once you’ve created an enormous bare spot by ripping out a huge shrub, try landscapes’ tricks to fill it. Use self-seeding plants, like
Coreopsis
‘Moonbeam,’ white cosmos, snapdragons, or ground covers. A jazzy, newer variety is the dazzling chartreuse-leaved sweet potato vine,
Ipomoea batatas
‘Margarita.’

When dividing plants, you don’t always have to do it the hard way. Bearded iris and peonies are among the plants that can be divided by the overhead “ax-murder” technique. That means chopping straight down from above the plant and lopping off a root section at the edge of the plant. Also, do not move specimens that are nicely filling their spaces. Enjoy, and don’t consider changes until plants grow far beyond their boundaries or die out in the middle.

You may be getting to the stage in life where you feel older than you did last year. After all, immortality doesn’t go on forever—or did Yogi Berra say that? You look at your wonderful but needy garden with the jaundiced eye of a Gerstner of IBM. You begin to scream inwardly,
Downsize, you fool!
It’s easy: Just put in woody shrubs, variegated foliage plants, small evergreens, ornamental grasses, peonies, hostas, and ground covers such as ferns. Pros say they’re the kind of plants that “pay rent.” That is, they provide maximum visual glory with a minimum of effort. They are perfect choices for the downsizing gardener.

B
ILL SAT ON THE VERANDA, STARING AT
an unusual sight. The tall hemlocks at the edge of the forest, backlit by the moon, cast huge shadows onto the lawn that looked for all the world like prostrate worshipers to a pagan god. He let his imagination run loose.
If this were a horror movie
, he thought,
the worshipers would rise up from the lawn and come and get me; a Disney movie, and they’d get up and do a spirited dance together
.

But there was little joy in his fantasy, for he could not share it with his wife. He stole a look at Louise. She sat
ramrod-straight beside him, stress emanating from her like a high-tension tower. He had a sudden feeling that if he touched her, he’d be electrocuted. No, she was not approachable right now. In fact, he didn’t like the way things were going at all in the pretty hills of Connecticut. What was supposed to be a relaxing weekend for his family and friends had been anything but. And Louise looked ruined. Usually, she was sensitive to the fact that as a TV garden-show host she was a public figure, if only a minor one. Her summer dress was fresh and attractive, but her long brown hair was messy, and she hadn’t put on any new makeup since she’d washed it off in the shower they’d taken together late this afternoon. Deep circles cut under her eyes, heightening the vacant expression in them. Yet he could hardly tell his forty-three-year-old wife to go to the ladies’ room and put on a little makeup.

Louise was now mixed up in the deaths of two strangers— attracted like a bear to a honey tree by anything resembling a mystery. One death appeared to be an accident, one a suicide—but who knew for sure? Certainly not that Boy Scout of a state trooper, Drucker, who’d had the chutzpah to drag Louise in on the investigation. Yet Drucker had cleverly issued the same invitation to them all, as Bill had discovered from talking to Janie and Chris and Nora. The trooper told each one of them that he needed any scrap of information they had, and that they should hustle it right over to him— even phone him at night—if they thought of anything.

Bill felt sorry for the guy. He had come upon an assortment of fifteen out-of-towners, practically strangers to one another, and needed to find out—quickly—about any hidden relationships, grudges, or alliances that might exist among them. And Drucker didn’t want anyone to leave Litchfield until the preliminary investigation was completed, around noon tomorrow—which was fine with Bill since their plane reservations from New York back to Washington were not until tomorrow evening.

It made him uncomfortable, though, that Louise was the one Drucker’d singled out to take to the Cooley bedroom and show the evidence. What especially annoyed him was that Drucker had called Detective Geraghty in Virginia to vet Louise before essentially signing her up as an extra detective. He would have to keep an eagle eye on his wife, because he knew from past experience how impetuous she could be. Geraghty’s imprimatur would encourage her to God knows what kind of lengths to “help the investigation”!

Now Louise, Nora, and Bill sat at a table on the nearly empty veranda with a brandy nightcap provided by Barbara’s staff. Off to one side, Sergeant Drucker was just concluding a conversation with the local reporter Louise had befriended today. His wife had apparently spilled the beans about Barbara Seymour’s plan to turn the mansion over to the Connecticut Trust. Then the young reporter had heard about Grace’s accident and probably ditched his Saturday night date to hustle over to the inn. He looked over at them briefly, and Bill could see a hunter’s gleam in his eye.

Through talking to the reporter, Drucker and his men solemnly gathered up their notes and prepared to go, leaving one trooper stationed inside the mansion tonight. An unhappy-looking Jim Cooley came out to speak with the sergeant then, and from the fragments of conversation he could hear, Bill guessed Cooley wanted to go to the morgue where his wife’s body had been taken.

He looked at Louise. She had heard the exchange, too.

“I suppose it would be a comfort to him,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Maybe he wants to find out the exact cause of death. She may have OD’d on Prozac and then staggered up that hill and jumped.”

“Maybe,” said Louise, her eyes staring right through him. Then she seemed to come to her senses. She looked at him again, only this time she saw him and gave him a little smile, like a token gift to a friend. Her shoulders relaxed about a millimeter. “I’m exhausted—are you?”

“Certainly am. Why don’t we say good night to the veranda at the friendly old Litchfield Falls Inn and hike off to bed?”

“Just a minute—I’m thinking.”

Nora was sitting across the table observing Louise, and she nodded in a knowing way. “Her detective juices are flowing. Don’t disturb her.” Bill drew back as if Nora had struck him.
Since when can’t I talk to my own wife?

Nora was beginning to get on his nerves. She had been down in the dumps ever since they heard about Jeffrey’s fall, and seeing Grace in that pool at the base of the falls had made her mood even darker. He wished she could find some little thing to be happy about. Maybe it would be less annoying if she hadn’t worn that black mourning outfit for a guy she’d known for ten hours total.

“So—what are you thinking about?” he asked Louise. He sat back carefully in his chair, trying not to feel left out, desperately wanting to become a member of her club.

Without answering him, she turned to Nora. “Would you have guessed Grace was suicidal?”

“I don’t know, Louise,” Nora said. “Today she acted intoxicated—all excited by the garden tour, I expect. And then just as quickly she was wounded, like a small, vulnerable animal, when Bebe said a cross word to her. That’s strange behavior. She could have been near the breaking point, for reasons we don’t even know.”

“How about this reason: a marriage about to break up?” asked Louise.

“That could explain it,” said Nora.

“Yes, sure could,” parroted Bill.

Louise touched his arm and said, “Honey, you’ll be interested in this, too.” These words made him feel better; he sat forward to listen as she pulled out a little pad of paper and read them the poem that Grace had written and left in her bedroom. “I wrote this down as best I could—I think I have it right.”

“How would you finish that?” said Bill, his mind instantly clicking into action. “Has to rhyme with ‘iris red,’ So it’s ‘dead,’ ‘fed,’ ‘head,’ ‘led,’ ‘said,’ or ‘wed,’” He grinned. “Or maybe it’s ‘abed,’”

Nora inhaled her cigarette and glanced at him disdainfully; his attempts to lighten the mood were not being valued highly. In a sad voice she said, “It sounds like a tragic goodbye to her husband.”

“Then Drucker damned well ought to find out what was going on between Jim and Grace,” observed Bill, returning to a serious tone. “I could tell that woman was ready to break.”

Louise leaned toward him. “We have to remember that there were two people unaccounted for when Grace disappeared from her room.”

“Who and who?” he asked.

“Bebe—you remember how Bebe had her dinner sent up, like Grace—and Fiona. Fiona scooted away from the dinner table as soon as she finished her main course. But Sergeant Drucker thinks she wouldn’t have had enough time to be involved. And Bebe? She was a wreck this afternoon. Could she have been strong enough to get Grace up to the falls?”

“There’s no exact time of death, I suppose,” said Bill.

“No. They never can cut it that close.” Louise smiled wanly at them. “Only in detective stories, where the murderer breaks the victim’s watch during a struggle.”

Bill was glad to see even this small bit of levity from his wife. “Or topples over the grandfather clock,” he added.

“So let’s conclude that Grace is a suicide, at least for the moment. What about Janie and Chris’s theory about Jeffrey’s being pushed? They’ve shared it with that Teddy Horton…”

“And inadvertently with Mark Post,” he added.

“Is it worth thinking about?” she asked.

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Bill pontifically. “We have to remember to keep our minds open.” He looked at the
two women guiltily. Since they had done him the honor of including him in the conversation, he wished he could have offered something pithier. “Maybe” and “maybe not” were not the brightest things he’d ever said.

They all fell silent for a moment, and then Nora said, “Louise, promise me something.” The woman’s large gray eyes focused in on Louise like a laser. Bill had a wild desire to wave his hand between the two women’s faces and break the connection.

“Of course,” said Louise.

“I realize this place will be swarming with police again in the morning,” said Nora. “But be careful, please—I beg you.”

Oh, oh. It was Nora’s sense of impending danger again. At this late point in the evening it bugged the hell out of him. Bill knew about her extrasensory powers, but it was the first time he had seen this oraclelike woman coming out with one of her prophecies.

He shoved his chair back roughly and crossed his legs. “Aw, c’mon, Nora,” he said, “you’re not telling us you sense disaster again. Do we really believe this?” His words were sharp, because he was feeling nervous, not wanting to be part of this crazy stuff, not wanting Louise to be frightened again. Though God knows at the CIA he had been involved in secret scientific studies of this very topic: first, the studies of ultra-low-frequency ground communication with American submarines—a venture attempted in rural Wisconsin that failed miserably. And then, the corollary studies of ESP to see if men in airplanes could communicate with those same nuclear-equipped subs: This again was a super-secret, but eyebrow-raising, failure. Even the memory of it was embarrassing. He recollected how the U.S. secret services—army, navy, and CIA—resuscitated these efforts over and over in the ’70s because of repeated rumors back then of the Soviets’ success sending thought messages through space and water.