The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (5 page)

Elizabeth had tea brought to them and refused to accept any more apologies for their early arrival. Barbara Seymour was still nowhere to be seen, but there was a hum of activity within the enormous mansion. Louise could smell, even from the veranda, delightful food aromas that whetted her appetite for the evening’s dinner.

The five of them sat on the wicker chairs in their rumpled traveling clothes, clutching their cups of tea. “Don’t
we
make an interesting picture,” said Louise. “The other guests will never figure us out. Janie, you and Chris are so tall and blond that you look like brother and sister.” She grinned. “Wait ’til somebody sees you with your arms around each other!”

Janie frowned her disapproval, and Chris looked embarrassed. On a roll now, Louise said, “And Nora and I, with our dark hair, might pass for sisters. Since Ron’s not here,
we’ll share the attentions of Bill and raise more eyebrows. And Bill, you’re so blond they’ll think both Janie and Chris are your kids, of course.”

“Sounds incestuous to me,” he said, and then lowered his voice. “The real question is, what kind of people are we going to meet here—or do we care?”

Louise shrugged her shoulders: “I don’t think it will matter. My guess is we’ll be so busy we won’t get a chance to get well acquainted. And we can always go out on the town tonight.”

Nora looked skeptical. “I wonder about that. Small towns like this roll up the sidewalks at the fall of darkness.”

As fifteen minutes stretched into a half hour, they consumed a steady supply of cucumber, watercress, and pimento-cheese sandwiches off a frequently replenished tray. The restless Janie and Chris explored some of the thirty acres of grounds attached to the inn and returned. By then, two other guests were drifting toward them, looking as if they had stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine.

“Dressed to kill,” murmured Nora.

“From the way she’s hanging on him, they have to be the newlyweds,” replied Louise.

Mark and Sandy Post introduced themselves smoothly, then made the rounds of the table, schmoozing individually with each member of the group. Sandy was small, with a perfect figure and a feathered blond hairdo, and wearing a honey-beige, wide-legged St. John knit pantsuit. Her smart, blocky shoes clacked gently as she crossed the wide floorboards. On her shoulder was an enormous, flawlessly coordinated leather bag big enough for anything—a small arsenal, perhaps, or enough clothes for the entire weekend.

The tall, self-assured Mark had a thin face and aquiline nose, and his brown hair had been styled by an expert. His body was muscular but slim, as if he were a runner. Louise was surprised to find out that
Sandy
was the jock. “I hardly had time to plan my wedding,” she complained, “because I
was training for the Olympics with the U.S. women’s biathlon team.” In that outfit, it was hard to imagine her cross-country skiing while shooting a gun. Particularly eye-catching was the little bee pinned to Sandy’s jacket; its body was made of one enormous pearl, its wings of many tiny diamonds—probably a throwaway item from Tiffany. Mark held up his end of the image, decked out in sports clothes with expensive logos.

“We, like,
just
returned from Italy,” Sandy told them, shedding most of her mystique with the one sentence. “We wanted to keep the romance of Tuscany alive by spending a few days in charming Litchfield hills.” Her blue eyes widened. “You know, they say there’s a similarity between the two places.”

Mark turned his birdlike gaze on them. “But not between the profits they make. In Tuscany, it’s fifteen-dollar lattes in the piazzas, and thousand-dollar Ferragamos.” By accident, probably, his glance rested on Louise and stayed there. He gave her a slow grin, as if he were saying, “I’m cute, and so are you.” Ah, thought Louise, is this the kind of guy who must prove his manhood at every turn?

“Like, you wouldn’t believe the crowds near Florence,” Sandy continued, her voice grating on Louise’s ears. Although Sandy was grown up and married, she had not left behind her Valley Girl vocabulary that, thanks to television, had come into universal use even among the allegedly educated. Louise was suddenly thankful her daughters hadn’t picked it up.

“
Everybody’s
doing Tuscany this summer,” Sandy continued, “in addition to wherever else they might be going—it’s kind of, you know, an obligatory stop. Of course, Mark had to get back to Stamford to his computer company …” She gave her new spouse a look that would have dissolved most men, but which did not seem to penetrate Mark. When the new bride went on to tell them she worked in marketing with Calvin Klein in New York, Louise and Nora discreetly
shared a look that said, “Tell us something we couldn’t already guess.” It was the kind of job that would fit Sandy like a glove.

The pair good-naturedly sat down at an adjoining table with Janie and Chris, and the four soon found something in common, despite a decade’s difference in their ages: cars. With this proximity, it was easy for Nora and Louise to overhear the details of Mark Post’s problems garaging his Bentley in the horse barn on the inn’s property—the only option available. And the car
needed
garaging because—after all—it was brand-new. Mark and Sandy fervently hoped bird droppings wouldn’t land on the car’s pristine roof.

“Young love takes many forms,” Nora told Louise, sotto voce. “One is working together to ward off bird guano.”

Louise giggled. “This may be Janie and Chris’s chance to absorb Yuppie life and learn to love it.”

“Or better still, learn to hate it.”

When another—older—couple arrived, getting acquainted with them was more difficult. They were shy, Louise guessed. They sat at a table by themselves and sipped iced tea, determined to appear too busy refreshing themselves to speak. But Louise was more determined to include them. She sauntered over and asked them straight out if they were interested in the garden tour. And they finally opened up: The Gasparras were growers from southern Pennsylvania, their specialty, the iris.

“We didn’t come here for the tour, you can bet your life on that,” said Rod Gasparra, a short, stocky man with dark heavy eyebrows sheltering his brown eyes. Louise guessed his ancestry included some Middle European—Romanian, perhaps—blood, plus an assortment of other nationalities. He wore a sober business suit. If this was to be a vacation weekend, the man hadn’t gotten into the mood yet. “We might do the tour, we might do something else, like hike.
Viewing
flowers is not our top priority,” he added, his tone rising. “I have some serious talking to do with that fellow
who owns Wild Flower Farm.” During this little burst of emotion his fists balled up and his face turned a dull red; Louise would hate to see the man really blow his top.

Dorothy Gasparra put a restraining hand on his arm, her face wary. Her rosy cheeks were framed by wavy, attractive brown hair caught back in a no-nonsense bun, and she had spectacular brown eyes that reminded Louise of gypsy nights. “Dear, Mrs. Eldridge doesn’t—”

“Just call me Louise.”

“Louise doesn’t want to hear about our problems.”

Churlishly, he replied, “Okay, then, that’s enough: I won’t tell her.”

Bursting to know what was bothering the man, Louise nevertheless was loath to get in the middle of a husband-wife struggle. After a few tactful words, she returned to the table where Bill and Nora waited.

Four more people arrived on the veranda, a white couple and a black couple. Jim Cooley was in his mid-forties, big and muscular, with wavy dark blond hair, strong features, and smiling hazel eyes. Louise felt an immediate sense of comfort in his presence; perhaps it was his warm baritone voice. Frank Storm was a black man in this white world, perhaps a little older than Jim, but it was hard to tell. He was a standout as well: virile, dignified, and even more solid than his companion, but with a more aloof manner.

Jim’s small, pretty wife was appropriately named Grace. She was at the very least ten years younger than her husband, and the aura of youth about her was accented by her short, many-pocketed cotton dress with flowers so delicate and pale that they appeared faded.
Child bride?
wondered Louise.

Grace timidly waved at the Posts, as if she had met them before; Sandy Post smiled back in a flush of recognition.

Frank’s wife, Fiona Storm, stood out all the more beside the pale Grace. She was a classic dark beauty with a touch of Asian lineage in her slightly slanted eyes, and wearing a
well-cut pantsuit, with perfect posture. Her expression was almost confrontational: It said, “I am not only black, I am smart and competent.”

Jim Cooley brought four chairs to the table where Louise, Bill, and Nora sat, then cajoled the reticent Gasparras until they, too, drew their chairs into the group. Immediately they began to look more at home, and Louise saw how clever Jim was at bringing people together.

It turned out Jim and Frank ran the cluster of New York-area schools for troubled young people called Higher Directions, about which Louise and Bill had recently read several newspaper articles. Fiona was the school’s fund-raiser. If Grace had a role in the business, nothing was said of it.

“I hope you all feel as at home here as I do,” said Cooley, casting his eye around the veranda, where
Clematis montana
‘Rubens’ rambled in and out of the white wooden porch railing posts. “I’m Barbara Seymour’s nephew, and I’ve visited this mansion since I was a little boy. Used to help around the place every summer. I’d sit out in the kitchen garden at night with the help and we’d play folk music on guitars. What a long time ago that seems. This has always been like the family’s country home. It was turned into a hotel in the late thirties, well before I was born, but there were always rooms set aside for family members.”

Only minutes later, they were joined by another of the innkeeper’s relatives, Stephanie Landry, a porcelain-skinned young woman with long, dark-brown permed hair that stood out as boldly as the Afro hairdos of two decades before. Louise judged her to be in her mid-thirties. She caught everyone’s eye, even that of some of the kitchen help, including a homely young man watching from the edge of the veranda. After effusively kissing her cousin Jim and bear-hugging his thin wife Grace, Stephanie felt it necessary to apologize for the absence of her husband Neil, who was apparently in town picking up something from the store.

“I’m the bearer of good news,” she said, her eyes shining.
“My aunt has just told me our rooms are ready, and we can go upstairs. You can use the lovely staircase, but you might prefer the elevator; it’s certainly easier with luggage.” With Louise lagging behind to examine each interesting piece of antique furniture she passed, the group slowly drifted back into the house.

At the large front door, there appeared two late arrivals. They were obviously strangers to each other, the man holding himself apart from the older woman as if she had permanently disenchanted him on their brief walk together from the parking lot.

Since Elizabeth had disappeared on other duties, Stephanie and Jim stepped up to greet them. The woman was in her early sixties, and large in stature, with a face bronzed by the sun. Louise noted her hair was dyed that ambiguous blond-beige color that sixty-year-old women seemed to favor. She wore big gold hoop earrings. In a rasping smoker’s voice she announced that she was Bebe Hollowell and had had “one devil of a time getting here from Massachusetts.” Then she began her litany of complaints. “First, I got a late start. Then, the traffic on Route Two—why, it was
terrible
—some funeral. And it’s impossible to make up for lost time once you get to Connecticut, which in my opinion has very poor road signage. Especially near Litchfield …”

“Oh, I agree,” said Stephanie placatingly, “very confusing.”

“I took a wrong turn to Kent: That delayed me for at least half an hour.” Bebe Hollowell granted them all a big smile, as if they had passed a test just by listening to her tirade. “Anyway, sorry I’m late. And I see you’re all waiting, anyway. Is everything all right here?”

“Oh, quite all right,” said Jim Cooley, stepping in to introduce her to the others. The man who had arrived at the same time was no more than forty-five, tall, with sandy hair and a Vandyke beard, wearing small, effete glasses with wire frames. While he stood waiting for Bebe Hollowell’s conversation to subside, he looked around with keen eyes.
Louise noted that his gaze was like a butterfly’s flight, resting for a moment on the fragile, bright-eyed beauty of Grace, then on Janie and Chris, moving on to encompass the rest of the group, but pausing lengthily when it reached Nora, and then stopping dead at the Posts. The man exchanged a shocked look with the newlywed husband.

Sandy Post gave an involuntary cry, then put her hand quickly over her mouth.

The new arrival gave her a measured look, then announced in a quiet voice, “I’m Dr. Jeffrey Freeling. Some of you obviously know me from NYU.” A few deft questions from Jim Cooley established that Freeling was a botany professor at the university who specialized in genetic engineering; naturally, he was “intensely interested in gardening.” Jim started to mention a prestigious science award the professor had won for discovering the gene that allows plants to bloom at will, a fact his aunt apparently had told him about Freeling. The professor brusquely interrupted. “Please— it’s not important to these people.”

During the introductions, the Posts acknowledged knowing the professor, their embarrassed facial expressions indicating they regretted the fact. Dr. Freeling seemed equally discomfited.
Is it love or hate that inspires such emotion
, Louise wondered.

As the amenities progressed, Louise noted the crowd was, in a manner of speaking, deteriorating. The delicate Grace had donned her dark glasses and sagged onto a velvet-cushioned side bench. Frank and Fiona Storm waited near her, and Fiona put a hand on Grace’s shoulder, as if consoling a tired child.

After their cool greeting to Dr. Freeling, Mark and Sandy eyed each other as if they were going to burst, from suppressed anger, full bladders, or a surfeit of love’s passion, Louise wasn’t sure. Both Gasparras shifted nervously from foot to foot, and Rod Gasparra was giving Dr. Freeling what Louise could only describe as dirty looks. Chris and
Janie were leaning on the balustrade at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the signal to go to their respective rooms. On the far edge of the crowd, the young man from the kitchen waited, also, for the signal to carry up the baggage.