The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (35 page)

“Isn’t it ironic that Frank and Jim just barely escaped blame in the suicides of those students, and then they get themselves in much deeper trouble.” She looked at Drucker anxiously. “It
is
pretty certain that Jim will be convicted along with Frank?”

His eyebrows came down in a frown. “Can’t say for sure. The case against Frank is stronger.”

“I’d hate to see Jim get away with Jeffrey’s murder,” said Louise, “especially since he was probably the mastermind of the whole plan.” She stared out the front door of the mansion, into the misty rain.

“I was wondering, Mrs. Eldridge …”

“Wondering—what?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Cooley’s been talking about you. I think he considers you the personification of something—unholy.” Drucker chuckled nervously. “I know this sounds corny, but he thinks he’s an agent of
God
, and you’re some sort of representative of the
devil
.”

“Oh,
swell
” she said, angrily shoving her hands into her shorts pockets. “Is the man totally crazy? What did I do to deserve this? Or I should consider it a compliment, since he’s a bloody killer. That makes
me a saint
,”

“It’s wild, I know. But would you be willing to come over to the barracks with me and talk to him?” He looked at his watch. “Provided, that is, that you have the time.”

“I have the time.”

The state police barracks’ interrogation room was small, about six by six, with stark white walls and a small window. Louise wriggled a bit to try to make herself comfortable in the wooden chair, then sat stock-still and gathered her thoughts. Sergeant Drucker was counting on her to break through Cooley’s reserve, but he hadn’t supplied any
particulars. He had only looked down at her with a twinkle in his eye and said, “You’ll figure out what to say to him.”

Cooley was brought in by a trooper and sat down opposite her. She was relieved to see the guard standing at the closed door, but Cooley had no handcuffs on, and probably would have liked to reach over the table and strangle her. Instead, he spoke, his rich baritone voice resonating in the bare room. “Mrs. Eldridge, the instrument of my destruction. You’ve come.”

“I heard you wanted to talk.”

“I swear I didn’t kill Jeffrey Freeling. I wish you could persuade Sergeant Drucker of that.”

Louise sat back in her chair and just looked at him. Much to her discomfort, she could swear the man was telling the truth.

“Then you’re saying it was really an accident.”

He looked down at the table, ran the fingernail of his right thumb casually back and forth over the cuts in the Formica, then gave her a calculating look. “Someone might have pushed him, but it didn’t kill him. Afterward, I was right there, giving him mouth-to-mouth …”

Louise remembered the story. “And then Sandy took over when you got tired.” She had an image of Sandy, sitting in the library with the others, her eyes wide with panic.

“Yes,” he said, hope in his eyes now. “Sandy took over— and
she
killed him. I saw it happen. They all saw it, but they didn’t realize what they were looking at.”

“But… why didn’t you stop her?”

He stared at her for a long time before he answered. “Because, of course, I wanted that man dead. That’s a statement I will make only to you.”

It was a delicate moment. Quietly she said, “Tell me how it happened: Sandy stepped in to help you … and she deliberately suffocated the man?”

He looked at her with guarded eyes. “I knew from the shouts of the climbers down below that something was
wrong. I came down as quickly as I could and began CPR, but I was running out of wind, what with having to scramble down that hundred feet of rock so fast. Jeffrey appeared to start breathing again when Sandy stepped in and insisted on relieving me. She told me and the others to step back, because in the close, rainy air, Jeffrey Freeling was going to need as much oxygen as he could get.” He extended his hands in a wide gesture. “So everybody moved way back, out of the line of vision. When he got worse, not better, I figured out what the little minx had done.”

“What?” asked Louise hoarsely.

“Pressed two strong thumbs against his trachea. Why, the autopsy would have shown it, if someone was looking for it: specific bruising at the trachea. So there he was, a traumatically injured person on the verge of resuming breathing, who instead is deprived of a crucial oxygen supply.”

Louise slumped back and gave a loud grunt. “My God, what a mess.” She looked over at Jim. “Why on earth would she do that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t have the faintest idea why Sandy did it, except I can tell by his odd behavior that Mark Post knows something happened.
He
might know why. I’m telling Drucker, and my lawyer. He’s got to get me off the hook for
that
one …”

She shook her head. “The only way you can clear this up is to confess—if you did push Jeffrey.”

“I … I’ll admit I
wished
him dead with every fiber of my body.”

She stopped him. “Listen, this is between you and Sergeant Drucker. But if you tell him everything, it might leave you free of one murder charge, and only up against a conspiracy to murder your wife.”

Cooley was thinking about that. “Yes. That might be the way.”

She looked at her watch, then at the devastated man sitting across from her. Here was a person with a set of ethics,
even if the ethics were sadly distorted. What could she say to him to cause him to do the right thing? It was a responsibility she hadn’t asked for, and didn’t want. She had no magic words. Finally, she told him the practical truth. “I absolutely have to go. We have to get to the airport and catch a plane. I won’t wish you good luck, exactly, Jim. I only hope you have enough goodness left inside of you to tell the truth. That would help everybody, and it might atone a little for the vicious things you’ve done.” She started to get up.

He reached a hand out and lightly touched hers. “Wait. Louise, you’re a woman of principle, even if your principles are too diluted and liberal for me. I’m an evangelical of the old school. I believe we have contrary states within us—the state of nature, and the state of grace. The state of nature merits eternal wrath, the other merits eternal happiness in heaven.”

“So Grace and Jeffrey merited God’s eternal wrath …”

“But Louise, this is not so strange to you. You, too, possess a fervent sense of justice.”

She looked at him, and the words scared her. Indeed, justice was her overriding passion.

“Justice is allied with vengeance,” he continued. His eyes were bright with the torment of his inner thoughts. “Back even before Christ, they used to stone women to death who committed adultery. No one questioned it.”

“Yes, and then Jesus came along and changed all that. He said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’”

He persisted, as if he needed her approval. “But what would you do if your husband were untrue to
you?
”

She shook her head slowly, and thought of her beloved Bill, and how such disloyalty would break her heart. She said, “I know I wouldn’t kill him. I’d try to talk him back home.”

He sighed again. “Maybe you’re right. I did love Grace as best I could. I
tried
to take care of her, but she was a strange, needy woman—and I couldn’t, or maybe I was too busy to
even understand what she needed.” His voice rose in desperation. “I never knew what the devil was going on in her
mind!
Then recently, she blossomed, just like a flower. I read her notebook one day. It had this smarmy love language in it, each little passage with a date on it. I remember some of it. Just a couple of weeks ago, she wrote,
He told me—’It takes so very little—just jour hand warm against mine and our fingers entwined, and I feel as if I’m connecting with jour very soul’
,”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “How beautiful.”

“Oh,
yes
,” he said sarcastically, “isn’t it, though.”

“But, Jim, maybe she just made it up—maybe it was her own poetry …”

“
Somebody
was saying things like that to her. She was so different. I forced her to tell me what it was all about. She finally admitted she was seeing another man. Just an innocent friendship, she swore it. And she promised me she would quit going to those gardens and end her running around.”

“When was that?”

“Just last week. To reward her, I planned another trip up to Litchfield to stay with Barbara. Grace was very fond of Barbara. The garden tour was the big attraction this weekend.” He got a faraway look in his eyes. “Something about her manner when we arrived Friday got me suspicious. Not of Jeffrey—I didn’t suspect him at all. I don’t know what it was—maybe the way she looked …”

“I remember she acted as if she felt weak.”

“Yes, and her face and eyes were all lit up. I didn’t take my usual pill at bedtime—it knocks me out immediately, and God knows I need the sleep—”

“What pill?”

He laughed in embarrassment. “It’s only melatonin, but it works. Then, sure enough, she got up about two o’clock, and I followed her. I
heard
her, moaning as she fell into somebody’s arms. Frank was out there, too and he could
tell which room they dodged into. It was the professor’s.” Cooley’s eyes blazed with jealousy, as they must have in that dark hall Friday night.

“You think she planned this? I suspect Jeffrey was the one who planned it; he was probably desperate to see Grace again.”

“Whoever planned it, it was a terrible betrayal.” He hit his breast with his open hand. “It hurt me, right here. It was as corrupt and subversive as anything I’ve ever known—my own wife cuckolding me right under my nose! And the final irony: She might actually have become impregnated that night…”

“But I thought you two couldn’t have children.”

“Oh, not her,” he said bitterly. “It was me who couldn’t beget. Ironic, isn’t it, that in eighteenth-century America, Cotton Mather preached that a woman’s inability to have children meant she had fallen out of favor with God. Think how badly off Grace would have been back then—and all on account of people’s ignorance.” He gave a short laugh. “No, Grace was perfectly healthy, except for being too thin. Her spirit was ready, her body was ready. My childless wife was like a plant, with a passionate desire to be pollinated.”

Louise had a horrifying flashback to the broken, bruised Grace at the foot of the falls. She looked at Jim. “And that was the unkindest cut of all, wasn’t it?”

He sat there, head bowed, stripped of pride. “Yes.”

“What are you going to do, Jim? Let Frank take the blame? Try to pin Jeffrey’s death on Sandy Post? Let it go at that?”

“I don’t know anymore what’s right. When Grace died— and I knew when she died; I could tell by the look in Frank’s eyes when he returned to the veranda—I began to realize how wrong I was. I thought of an old folk song I used to play when I was young. And believe me, I thought I had put all that romantic stuff away for good. But knowing Grace lay
dead somewhere up that hill—that brought it all to the surface again.”

For a moment Louise didn’t think he could go on. But he did. “The song was called ‘Mattie Groves’—about an English lord who cuts off the heads of his wife and her lover.” He raised his head and gave her a lopsided smile, and she could see his big, sad eyes were wet with tears. “Penalty for adultery, of course.”

He sat there at the dismal Formica table and sang the last verse of the song. His baritone voice was even hollower than usual.

“
’How now, how now—my merry men … why stayed you not my hand? For I have hilled the fairest pair—in all of Eng-a-land… in all of Eng-a-land’
,”

It had begun as a somber narrative in the lower registers, but it finished in a high, despairing flurry of notes that caused Jim Cooley’s voice to crack. Louise bowed her head and tried to restrain her sobs.

When she finally looked up, he was staring at her. He said, “I was arrogant, playing God, administering justice. I was so arrogant that I thought you’d never catch me. I’ve done terrible things, but you have to believe that I
loved
that woman.”

After a long moment, she said, “I guess you did. But now you have to set things right.”