The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery (14 page)

The gun felt heavy and loathsome in her hands.

“Don’t ya wanna fire it?” asked Herb. “It’s got the kick of a mule, ’n if ya don’t hug it that way, it kin knock y’off your feet and leave ya with a black-and-blue shoulder.”

Louise lowered the weapon. “I get the idea. Thanks, Herb, but I doubt I’d ever be comfortable shooting one. I guess I’d rather count on my wits to save myself.”

He said, “Suit yerself. But when the chips’re down and a
live
rattler’s starin’ at ya, a gun’s a darn sight better.”

It took what seemed like hours to fall asleep that night. And when she did, Louise had a dream in which developers’ bulldozers climbed up steep mountain roads and she fell off the edge in a pickup, while rattlers lurked menacingly in the tall grass below.

What was particularly strange was that the snakes were
slithering around, not in native Colorado grasses like buffalo grass or blue grama, but rather in clumps of
Miscanthus sinensis
“Gracillimus.” Not a native grass, but an ornamental, the kind you had to buy in a nursery. Just as she thought: She continued gardening in her dreams.

L
OUISE WAS SITTING IN THE
overstuffed chair with the Wednesday morning paper, dressed and ready to go to work. Relieved, in fact, to be doing something organized after her day off. Then the phone rang, and she had a foreboding that it would be bad news. It was. Marty Corbin wanted to delay the shoot. “Look, I’ve worked it out with the cameraman and the rest of the crew—they’ve got another project brewing, anyway. Would you mind?” She hesitated, trying to stem her disappointment. Then she said, “Of
course not, Marty.” She had no choice but to agree with her producer. That was the deal on this trip—fun came first. Except, unlike Marty, Louise had no one to have fun with. When he told her he and Steffi would spend the day in the casinos of Central City, she tried to hide her distaste. In a light voice, she said, “I hate gambling, so it’s useless to try to sell me on this. Gambling in the city is bad enough. But gambling in the mountains—it’s a desecration.”

“Louise,” said Marty, his enthusiasm put on hold, “can I tell you something and you won’t get insulted?”

“Sure, Marty.”

“You’re a hard-ass. Do you
ever
let it go and have a little fun? You, and that Bill of yours? Waddaya do for fun, read
The New York Review of Books
, while you have a quiet cup of herbal tea?”

She laughed. She knew Marty could give as good as he got. “Look, I know everybody’s doing it—so you guys might as well do it, too. Have fun.”

She looked bleakly out the living room window, where a few raindrops had fallen, and dark clouds still threatened. It wouldn’t have been a good day for shooting, anyway. But now she faced another twenty-four hours of trying to fill her time.

The phone rang again just as she had stepped out of her jeans to change into shorts. She ran back to the living room and answered it in her underwear, hoping no one spied her through the big windows. The words of the sheriff’s deputy were brief and to the point, and sent a chill through her body. She could see the goose bumps on her bare legs. Sally Porter, Jimmy Porter’s daughter, had been found dead this morning. Her car had plunged off the Porter Ranch road as she was returning home last evening.

“But who…”

The deputy was patient. “Ma’am, it looks like an accident,
according to the sheriff. But a couple of loose ends need to be tied up. Sheriff Tatum wants you to come in this morning and have a nice long talk with him.”

Tatum. The aspect of the man, bullying and faintly dishonest, and the smell of him, reeking with garlic, were vivid in her memory. She could not think when she had had a more unwelcome invitation.

“What would he want to talk to me about?”

“You and Ann Evans and the undertaker were the last parties to have talked to the deceased. You may be able to shed light on her mental state.” Did they think Sally committed suicide?

Louise was supposed to come in at eleven. That would give her plenty of time to think of what to say, and what not to say, to this unappealing man.

She swooped her long brown hair off her neck and secured it with a big barrette. Then she climbed back into her new jeans. Well, she was involved now—in not just one death, but two.

“Oh, my God,” she said softly, “what will I tell Bill?”

Then the phone rang again. This time it was her husband.

“You mean, the daughter of a rancher supposedly shot by a poacher went off a cliff in her car?”

“They think it was an accident.”

“
Louise
.” Bill’s voice on the other end of the phone line was ominously quiet. “I don’t know what’s going on around there, but don’t believe that story. Damn. I don’t have time for this. I don’t know how you came to get mixed up in some land deal mess. Now, listen. I’m not that far away. If things get rough, call this number.” He gave her a phone number with a Virginia area code: Langley.
The CIA would patch the call through to him, if an emergency big enough reared its head.

Now the voice was stern. “I would also like you to stay in close touch with Janie.”

“Of course I will. And I have nice neighbor s—Herb, and Herb’s wife, Ellie, who I hear makes good cookies. Look, I’m so removed from this thing you wouldn’t believe it. I’ll talk to the sheriff this morning, and that will be the end of it.”

“The sheriff? Is that what you call being removed?”

“Ann, the county officer, and I were among the last people to talk to Sally—but neither one of us heard anything that’s going to be helpful.”

Louise felt guilty. In spite of how preoccupied he was with his own business, Bill was now worried about her. So she was not surprised, just before leaving the house, to receive a phone call from her daughter at the YMCA Camp in Estes Park.

“How’s wilderness camp, darling?”

“Ma,” the exuberant voice answered, “I love it. The concept, the mountains, the people—especially my fellow counselors.” A pause while the teenager arranged some tactful words. “And—how are ya makin’ out there on your own?” Her voice seemed to have acquired a twang.

“Janie, I know your father put you up to this phone call. But I’m fine, and I don’t need you to worry about me.”

“Promise me you’ll call if things get weird, Ma?”

“Promise.”

“Well, then, I have a little fourteen-thousand-footer to climb, and someone terrific to climb it with.”

“Someone?” Louise thought it was probably healthy for Janie to find new male interests at camp; that would relieve the intensity of her friendship with Chris back home. “Who is this terrific person?” she said, and bit her tongue
as soon as the words were out. Her relationship with her seventeen-year-old no longer included direct questions like that.

“Well, Ma”—Louise could tell the pause was for some quick thinking—“let’s just say that he’s the coolest guy I’ve met since I left Virginia—smart, cute, funny.”

“Hmm.” Louise was having uncomfortable mental pictures of teenagers making love in log cabins. She could remember being at camp herself, and it had been pretty romantic. Although she hadn’t gone that far, that was just
her
generation. Janie’s was expected to be much more liberated.

“Well, sweetie, I just hope—”

“What—that I stay out of trouble?” Her daughter’s voice dripped with irony. “Hey, get real, Ma. Remember who called whom for what. Compared to you, I am the soul of discretion. Don’t
you
do anything rash, and if you do,” she added breezily, “give me a call. I’ll come down with my friends and try to get ya out of whatever mess you’re in. Now I really have to go—he’s waiting for me.”

It was a little disheartening to realize her family didn’t trust her to take care of herself. But she surely didn’t need Janie around. It was true the girl had helped her in previous encounters with dangerous people. But even if it turned out Sally had been forced off the road, the killer loose in the county certainly wasn’t focusing on Louise.

L
OUISE HADN’T BEEN WAITING
long when the door to the secured area of the sheriff’s department swung open. In the doorway stood the sheriff with a grinning Mark Payne. Two big men with their heads together, intent as lovers—or deal makers. Since they were almost certainly not talking about love, Louise wondered what the deal was. They didn’t notice her.

The sheriff’s final words floated put of the office: “It’s a question of getting others to do the work for you—” Then, with a start, he saw her waiting
in the anteroom. Sending the blond-haired developer forth with a friendly pat on the shoulder, Tatum cocked his head as his desk phone ring. Before turning on his heel, he said to Louise, “Be with you in a second, Miz Eldridge—just let me take this call.”

Alone with Mark Payne, Louise found his very size a bit intimidating—among the numerous tall western men she’d met the past few days, he was by far the tallest, perhaps six feet seven. He seemed to realize this, and sat down in the waiting room chair beside her to be closer to her level. He still represented a massive, hulking presence. “Louise Eldridge, right?” He held out a big hand. “I haven’t had a chance to meet you, Louise.” They solemnly shook hands and he studied her with his pale-lashed, hooded eyes. Her imagination deviated dangerously to a scene where this man was laid on a table and given a whole new face, like a Frankenstein monster—new eyes, new skin, new bones…

His words, spoken in a completely normal voice, pulled her back from her fantasy. “I see you’re pretty mixed up in this Porter Ranch thing, whether you want to be or not.”

“I don’t know what you mean, exactly. Do you mean Sally Porter’s accident?”

“Yes, and Jimmy Porter’s shooting,” he continued, in an uninflected voice. “You’re all over the place. Up at Harriet Bingham’s. At the meeting last night.” Sitting this close to him, she could finally see what disturbed her about his face. He had undergone extensive plastic surgery. This, combined with his emotionless delivery, gave her the sense that his feelings were all hidden behind a mask of scars.

“So—you’re one of those women who likes to get her hands in things,” he concluded.