The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (8 page)

Jim Cooley had a stern look on his face which seemed to dampen conversation at his table, Louise noted. But while Frank and Fiona Storm, as well as Stephanie and Neil Landry, were clearly subdued by Jim’s mood, Jim’s
frail-looking wife rose to the occasion, quietly carrying the conversation on her own. And she was talking, if Louise was hearing right, about flower metaphors in poetry. “… The blue flower, for instance, was the symbol of yearning in German Romantic literature,” Louise overheard her say.

Louise was sure the reason for Jim’s bad humor was the presence of the skulking Neil Landry, who was joining the group for the first time since Barbara Seymour fell down the staircase.

Sighing, Louise took another bite of the scrumptious meal. Even at their own table, Dr. Freeling’s formal manner discouraged a free flow of conversation and squelched the usually talkative Janie and Chris.

When Louise questioned him about his projects in plant genetic engineering, the scientist would touch only on generalities. “Mrs. Eldridge,” he told her quietly, raising a graceful hand to adjust his glasses, “I am a scientist. Surely you can’t expect me to reveal what’s going on in our laboratories. There are some projects to alter major crops, and thus deeply impact the American economy. It’s premature, and indiscreet, to talk about them, since it can affect all sorts of things …”

“… even crop futures, I suppose,” she said breezily. “It’s funny how forthcoming a business like Monsanto Chemicals will be: It’s heavily into this field. I’m just anxious to do a program on it for my show, and I can’t do it without specifics.”

Freeling smiled in what Louise thought was a rather supercilious way. “I’m sure that Monsanto will tell you everything you need to know.”

“And that implies that your work is so secret that you can’t even mention it.”

“It does, doesn’t it,” he said, and then turned to Nora, who was sitting to his right. She had on a show-stopping red silk dress. As if to be sure he was rid of the inquiring busy-body,
Freeling bent deliberately toward Nora and asked her more about her poetry.

Louise had seldom felt so rebuffed.

Janie had drifted away from the dinner table, but now she returned, swinging back into her chair with blond hair and light pleated skirt twirling after her. Louise noticed she had been talking to the personable young employee, Teddy, who, it turned out, ran the dining room. He made it a point to introduce himself fully—first name and last. Teddy Horton. This cowlick-haired individual looked as if he should be munching on a hayseed: He was straight out of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover. Yet he had handled the crowd with the panache of a Parisian maître d’hôtel. Now, he followed Janie’s movements with his eyes, and Louise suspected that it was a case of love at first sight.

“Guess what, folks?” Janie told them. “After dessert and coffee, there’s going to be dancing, right out here in the evening air.”

“Good,” said Freeling. “I like to dance.”
Ah
, thought Louise,
the man has an Achilles’ heel, a genuine human weakness: He likes to dance
.

The professor also had his eye on Janie, not covetously, but as if she were the image of someone he knew. Louise suspected he was the kind of man who had had a wife who died young, rather like one of the great tragic figures in literature whose true love died of tuberculosis.

Yet if she was wrong and the man was a bachelor, she had certainly caught a glimmer of why: Though attractive enough, Freeling had an irksome quality about him. It was almost as if he wanted her to dislike him. Conversely, he was finally beginning to open up to the others, especially Bill and Chris. Maybe he was more comfortable talking to men—but if so, why had he spent two hours with Nora?

As the twilight deepened, the tables were cleared and
pushed to the side. Inside the large adjacent sunroom, someone turned on 1940’s music that reminded Louise of World War II movies. She could hardly imagine the impact of that war, but her mother had told her how the music had somehow unified people emotionally. Through multiple speakers the songs flowed out to them: “I Had the Craziest Dream,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Sentimental Journey,” and “Lili Marlene.” The music worked its magic on her, too, bringing tears to her eyes.

“Aha,” noted her observant husband, “the music’s got to you.”

She clutched his hand. “I feel a great need to kiss you.” And she leaned over and pressed her lips gently to his. But their romantic moment was interrupted by a clamor of greetings at the next table. Barbara Seymour had arrived to join her family group. The guests gave a little round of applause as the tall woman entered the porch area, wearing a gleaming blue taffeta dress that was another stroke of good fashion sense for a woman playing the part of historical dame.

“This is a little sick, isn’t it?” Louise murmured to her husband.

“Sick—why?”

“To clap for her. It’s as if we’re celebrating—as if Barbara is some kind of Evel Knievel. She didn’t cavort through the air off those stairs for our pleasure.”

“Honey, that’s not it: Everyone is happy because she’s okay.”

As the mansion owner sat down with her family, she gave an especially warm wave to the day’s heroes, Chris and Janie. Louise noticed Neil soon excused himself from the table, after appearing to have a problem looking the matriarch in the eye. He hurried down the stairs of the veranda and disappeared into the cricket-loud night. Shortly after this quick departure, the Storms left the family table and
joined her and Bill. Quite right, Louise thought: That family needs to talk things over.

The music swelled, and the action began. The professor snared the lady in red and led her to the dance floor. Soon they were locked in an embrace, moving slowly to “These Foolish Things.” Janie and Chris joined them there, awkward, but enjoying the close bodily contact. In the shadows, Louise could see the earnest Teddy, standing with an arm hooked snugly around a veranda pillar, as if he wished it were Janie. His eyes were riveted on the girl; he might have been dying for a dance, but he knew it wasn’t appropriate. She was beyond his reach. The princess and the commoner.

Louise’s eyes widened in alarm as she watched Nora, her smooth dark hair falling over one cheek as she practically swooned in the arms of the professor. For his part, he looked quite dashing, those weird glasses tucked away somewhere, his sandy hair falling casually across his forehead, his eyes half closed. Heads turned as he gracefully guided his alluring dance partner through the slow two-step.

Was Nora feeling the chemistry that was evident even to the wallflowers? Was she going to yield to temptation again?

Stop it
, Louise thought to herself.
As Bill said, Nora’s a grown woman and I am not her keeper. The only ones I have to keep an eye on this weekend are Janie and Chris, and that shouldn’t be too hard, since Janie is sleeping in the same room with me
.

“They make a nice pair, don’t they?” said Frank Storm in his deep, mellow voice.

“Indeed, they do,” she agreed hoarsely. Then she turned determinedly toward Frank and tried to forget the potential waywardness of her friend. “But now tell me more about your work at Higher Directions.”

Just then, Bebe Hollowell tapped Bill on the shoulder and requested a dance. Bill was a prince of a man: He would do his best to make whole this flawed woman. Bebe, who must
have weighed in at two hundred pounds, danced as lightly as a feather.

Louise adjusted herself comfortably in the chair as Frank opened his story. He and Jim had joined forces ten years ago to set up a unique school for troubled kids. They had become acquainted in graduate school studying education. Both were religiously inclined, and thought an ethics-based high school would help the difficult cases who often dropped out. “We started on a shoestring,” said Frank, “but with substantial help from people like Barbara Seymour, we set up our first school in Brooklyn. And it succeeded.

“The school’s philosophy,” he said, “is an amalgam, but it’s all laid out in our motivational manual. There’s an element that some call ‘tough love.’ We are absolutely ruthless about disciplining people who won’t follow the rules, or who exhibit disloyalty.”

“Disloyalty,” repeated Louise.

“Yes. From our research, we’ve found that loyalty and obedience to a group are the two most important factors in getting kids through the teen years.”

“And what does disloyalty include?”

“Our creed bans cheating of any kind, premarital sex, homosexuality, adultery … But the message is presented positively, not mired in negative language.”

Soon she was sitting on the edge of her chair, arguing vigorously about their “one-strike-and-you re-out” policy. “I think young people need chance after chance. Tough love or not, it would take more than one mistake for me to kick a child out of my school.”

“Oh, but the child has plenty of forewarning of what’s going to happen.”

She pursed her lips and tried to think of a rejoinder that would adequately display her disapproval while still being
fair to Frank. He explained that the schools were incredibly sensitive to their young clients’ educational needs—much more so than almost any public school, for instance. They employed methods like mental imaging to quicken the learning pace. And they had been so successful. Who was she to criticize their way of doing things?

“And, of course, when punishment is needed,” Frank said, giving her a calm smile, “the punishment fits the crime, as the old song goes.”

“That sounds like the code of Hammurabi to me—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

“The ancients understood many things,” he said solemnly. As he went on talking, she realized her shoulders ached from sitting forward in rapt attention. Her mind was numb from an overabundance of information. But the discomfort was worth it, for now she had some insight into the enigmatic Frank and Jim. They had developed a nondenominational, evangelical creed called, fittingly enough, “Higher Directions,” just like the school. It was a loose church structure set up when the first school opened. No doubt about it: Frank and Jim were true believers, in the tradition of the evangelicals of old. Of course, she reflected, evangelicals had burned witches in Salem, Massachusetts, just a hundred miles or so to the north, and stirred up national religious revivals across the United States. Powerful people, those evangelicals.

And the lovely Fiona Storm believed just as strongly. She chimed in occasionally to add to Frank’s earnest words, gesturing with graceful hands that flashed with a large diamond. “We are making these youth into
new people
,” she declared. The woman might have deferred to Frank earlier, but now she was having her say. It was a brief speech about her “raison d’être,” as she called it. “I was raised on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia. It was a deprived childhood, let me assure you. But someone back then gave me a chance: In my case, it was the Sisters of Mercy. But that
chance enabled me to boost myself out of the ghetto and transform myself into a successful, contributing member of society.”

Louise looked at the woman. She was so attractive that Louise couldn’t imagine her remaining in a deprived environment for long. Movies or television would have claimed her, had not Frank Storm come along first—and even if she weren’t as smart as she obviously was.

Perhaps Fiona read her eyes, for there was a barrier there: She did not like Louise. Maybe Louise was too upper-middle-class? Too associated with the establishment? Her husband
was
with the State Department. Or was it because Louise was connected to the great Mammon television? “I’m
pan
of television, so sure, I watch television,” Louise had confessed to the woman. “I watch everything, just to see what’s being offered to the public.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to spend your time on more serious pursuits?” Fiona had asked.

The conversation, Louise realized now, had been like a boxing match. Why hadn’t she just sat there and listened, instead of arguing every point?

Now Fiona concluded her little speech: “So I made a chance for myself and I didn’t muff it. And that’s what we do for these kids: We allow them to have a chance. Then, if they blow it, it’s blown. There’s no room for—”