McMansion (14 page)

“No woman at all?”

“Not since his wife divorced him.”

“That's a while back, isn't it?”

“Six-seven years.”

“Was he gay?”

“Gay? Billy? I don't think so. Just alone. I mean he's not the only guy alone. Are you gay, Ben?”

“No. Just alone.”

“So what's so odd about Billy being alone?”

Women of Aunt Connie's generation used to say of bachelors that a man unmarried in his forties never would marry because he would never change. This was sometimes an unspoken reference to sexual orientation, too. I was not gay, but I had an awful feeling that if I was I would still end up in the same fix, a single unlikely to hook up.

I said to Edwards, “If someone asked you about me, asked was I dating anyone or did I have a girlfriend, the answer would be, ‘I've seen him with women. I've seen him having dinner at the Drover or drinks or going for a walk in the woods or a bike ride or a picnic on a rock in the river.'”

“Not so much since Tim Hall and Vicky McLachlan hooked up,” Edwards observed with an unpleasant smile.

I wondered if he was being nasty for a reason or was just built that way. “You knew Billy as well as anyone. Did Billy suffer a similar disappointment, shall we say? Did Billy screw up a relationship and then find it hard to hook up again?”

Edwards shrugged. “Who knows?”

“You would know better than anybody, spending time with the guy.”

“Working time.”

“So did he?”

“Did he what?” Edwards didn't quite snap at me, but the engineer was getting irritable. Tough. I wasn't the one who started talking across coffins.

“Screw up a relationship and find it hard to hook up again?”

“No one he told me about.”

“Did he ever act like a guy with a broken heart?”

“Not around me.” By then we had reached his Lexus. Edwards climbed in without offering his hand or saying goodbye, started it up, backed and filled, and drove away. Leaving me to ask, if someone ran me down with a bulldozer, would Vicky drop a flower on my grave?

Of course she would. Bouquets, with Tim following along with armloads more. Friendship had survived love. But the point was, we had never had anything to hide. Neither of us had been married. Neither of us had had an angry spouse shooting our lover on Main Street.

I had to find that grieving wife.

***

I checked out Connie's garden from the sidewalk by leaning in over the low, ornamental wrought iron fence that her grandfather had erected after the Civil War. Eddie Edwards was right. In the dappled shade under a flowering cherry, within a step of the fence, Connie had a clump of single-petal yellow peonies, or as Edwards named it formally (and correctly, I checked out later on Google),
paeonia mlokosewitschii.

I swung one leg over the fence for a closer look. Damn. Just as Edwards had suggested, one flower had been plucked. The stem was barely dried, as if the thievery had occurred this morning.

I heard my name called in a strong voice known to make small boys wish they had not been caught. “Benjamin Abbott! Why are you lurking in my garden?”

“Just checking out a peony, Connie.”

She was standing at her front door, erect, arms crossed. “Surely it's not necessary to vault my fence. People will think you're not welcome here. Someone might even telephone Trooper Moody.”

I got untangled from her fence and hurried up her front walk. “May I come in?”

“Wipe your feet.”

I followed her into her foyer and there muttered a quiet but heartfelt, “Damn!”

“Now you are swearing in my front hall. What is going on with you, today, Ben Abbott?”

“Sorry.” I was staring at a flower in a slender glass vase. “Is that
paeonia mlokosewitschii
?”

Connie beamed. “Good for you! I know perfectly capable gardeners who would not recognize it.”

“You picked it this morning?”

“They last longer if you pick them when it's cool. You know that.”

“Of course.”

“Is that what you were looking for in my garden?”

“There was one like it on Billy Tiller's coffin.”

“Sheila Gordon probably left it, in lieu of dancing on his grave.”

“I didn't see any peonies at the Gordons'.”

“She had a few struggling up through mud when I was there. Herbaceous, though. And certainly not flowering, buried so deep.”

“Who else grows these?”

“Scads of people.”

“Connie. It's a pretty rare flower. Name three.”

“I could name eight.”

“Eight?”

“I gave seeds to eight people last summer. Those who planted early in autumn and kept them watered have flowers this spring.”

“Who?”

She started to answer. Abruptly her face closed up. She looked away. Her voice faltered. “I'm getting so bad with names. They were on the tip of my tongue.”

“Would any of them have been a married woman between let's say twenty-five and forty-five?”

“Several.”

“Do you recall whom?”

“Who.”

“Do you recall who?”

“From the garden club.”

“Maybe if I got a list of the members, we could go through them.”

“No.”

“Could we try?”

“We don't have to. They'll be in my diary.”

She kept a garden diary. In fact she had a library shelf lined with them going back to the nineteen-thirties. She pulled out last year's and we thumbed through to June. It had been a rainy month.
Primula japonica
, Dutch iris,
Pseudacorus
, and peonies were in bloom, as was
Camassia
. Evergreens needed pruning, she had noted, but it was too wet. In July Connie had harvested, among others,
paeonia
seeds. In August she hosted cocktails for the garden club and gave out packets of seeds. She had written that her guests were grateful for cocktails instead of tea because cocktails started later, which meant they could work longer in their gardens.

“Here,” I said. “Here's when you gave them.”

She read the names. Three were widows who admitted to their late seventies. Sheila Gordon was married and slightly younger, but highly unlikely to have been conducting an affair with anyone, particularly a builder who had won a zoning change in her neighborhood. There was one lady in her thirties, but she was a happily coupled lesbian. Scooter's wife was another seed recipient, but by all evidence my next-door neighbors adored each other. Georgia Bowland was a possibility, on the other hand:attractive, independent, and miserably unhappy. But Connie put the kibosh on that when she observed, “Of course, Georgia was too busy last summer to plant them. You know her, starting another of her new careers.”

“Who is Caroline E.?” I asked.

“Now there is a gardener.”

“What is her last name?”

“Edwards, of course. Caroline Edwards. The engineer's wife.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Oh,” I said.

Maybe that was how he knew the name of the flower.

Well, well, well.

A Newbury mover and shaker. A suspect too high up the food chain, too smart, and too sure of himself for state police investigators to lean on without solid cause. Not a man to be bullied.

“What is Mrs. Edwards like?” I asked.

“Sturdy woman. Hearty.”

“Do you know her well?”

“Not really. Just through the club. Lovely girl. A bit lonely when she moved here. Perhaps spends more time in the garden and less with people than she should.”

“Is she…” How to put it to Connie? How to—

“Promiscuous? I would think not.”

“Connie why would you choose the word promiscuous?”

Aunt Connie rolled her startlingly blue eyes toward her ornate ceiling. “You are looking for a woman who left a single blossom on a dead man's casket but did not attend his funeral.”

“Well I didn't want to put words in your mouth.”

“Benjamin, as difficult as it may be for you to grasp, try to understand that back in the Pleistocene some of the people with whom I shared the epoch ran around on their spouses. Obviously, you're looking for a gardener who might have had an illicit affair with the murder victim.”

“I think I found her.”

“Well, she certainly doesn't seem like the type. Although, God knows what is the type.”

“What would she see in someone like Billy Tiller?”

“Considering the couples I observe, that is unanswerable.”

“Okay. What would he see in her?”

“Equally unanswerable. Although, if he was half as bad as I have heard he was, he might have enjoyed cheating his employee. But perhaps he just saw someone he liked who liked him. I don't know much about men, but I have long suspected that for men, merely being noticed is a powerful aphrodisiac.”

“Connie, would you do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Do you have some special plant you could dig up for Caroline Edwards?”

“I suppose.”

“It's got to be something special that you would really want to give her. One master gardener to another.”

“Why?”

“I'd like to bring it to her.”

***

We dug one of the
Primula japonica
from the shady wet spot in the back of her yard and laid it on a flattened plastic bag. Its wide, pale leaves were spreading vigorously and in their center soared a candelabra supporting six rings of blossoms.

“I can't seem to be worming my way into their house. You're sure she doesn't have one of these already?”

“No one grows this shade of white,” Connie promised with a jihadist's certainty. “It gleams like an egret. I should have given Caroline Edwards one of these years ago.”

Mrs. Edwards ceased to breathe for a long moment.

Had I asked if she was the lady who had placed a rare peony on Billy Tiller's casket, her reaction would have confirmed I had found the grieving wife who hadn't been widowed. Unfortunately, it was only the sight of Connie's egret-white
Primula
, that rushed the air out of her lungs.

When the air finally returned, accompanied by a lively flush to her round cheek, she said, “I have coveted this plant since the first time I saw it. What possessed her—Oh, come in, come in.” I was standing on her front step, cradling the plastic bag in my arms, the two of us bending over the plant like a pair of politicians vying to kiss a newborn constituent.

Connie had called her “hearty” and “sturdy.” She was also wonderfully jolly, the kind of person seemingly prepared to celebrate. I liked her immediately and wondered, more than ever, what she would have seen in Billy Tiller. She was quite attractive, full-boned, big-bodied, with a flashing eye and smile that said, Isn't everything wonderful, and if it's not, won't it be soon? I can't say she seemed in mourning.

“Come in,” she said, again. “Come inside.”

“Should we maybe put this down outside?”

“No. Let's take it in the kitchen. I'll put it in the sink. I want to gloat over it a while.” We walked through a house furnished with nice old pieces, mostly antiques, nothing “museum quality,” just the kind of furniture that multiple well-fixed grandparents passed down. The carpets had been walked on a long time, showing lines of white warp, and there was a pleasant smell of wax in the air. The kitchen looked recently re-built, but despite the latest high-end appliances, it did not shriek “gourmet granite.” In fact there was no granite at all. The counters were butcher block, an indication that they actually used the room for cooking. I lowered the
Primula
into the big porcelain sink that she used to pot plants.

“Would you like tea?” she asked. “Or coffee?”

“Tea, please, if you're having it.”

I was surprised by the Evil Engineer's wife, and equally surprised by his lair. I had never given any thought to his home life. I knew him only as the remote and arrogant public figure I had observed dominating P&Z hearings, but had I been asked I would have guessed that he was married to a brittle blonde and lived in a McMansion furnished in a stark and dreary modern loft style with large televisions in every room. Instead, his was a home like others I admired in Newbury—the Gordons' cottage, Al and Babs Bells' estate house up on Morris Mountain, Aunt Connie's and Scooter's on Main—that formed an archipelago of understated, old-fashioned comfort scattered in a desolate sea of new development. There are fewer each year as the old die off or join their offspring who have moved to less crowded areas in hopes of replicating the space and serenity of their childhood.

Caroline Edwards was anything but brittle. Her hair was chestnut, and wisps of it played on her check as she filled a kettle. I could not imagine her with Billy Tiller. Nor, for that matter, could I imagine her with her unpleasant husband.

“You know,” she called over her shoulder, “your aunt was my first friend in Newbury. I joined the garden club and Connie just scooped me under her wing.” She put the water on the stove, lit the gas, and turned to me with a smile. “Sometimes I sort of think of her as my own aunt.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Easton. I hated leaving my garden, but Eddie thought it was getting too crowded down there.”

I looked closely for irony, but saw none in her expression, nor heard any in her tone. “Things are getting built up here, too,” I ventured.

“It probably seems that way to you, but to me it's still empty by comparison.”

She laid napkins and a plate of shortbread on a maple work table in the center of the room. We sat across from each other on stools, discussing the weather, which had been gyrating for weeks between wet and cold and warm and dry, until the water boiled. She made tea in a pot, the way Connie did, warming the pot with hot water and pouring it into the mugs to warm them before brewing the tea.

“Are you close with your aunt?”

“Connie had been my friend since I learned to speak complete sentences. She had no children and I was born right across the street. My parents were older—not as old as Connie, of course—she's my great aunt, my father's aunt—and my father was always busy. Connie kind of took me everywhere and showed me everything.”

Caroline Edwards looked at me with a smile and asked, “Was your mother busy, too?” so openly that it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world to admit to this woman I had just met, “My mother sometimes had trouble getting through the day.”

She poured half and half cream in a short pitcher, placed it and a matching sugar bowl on the table, brought the tea pot, and emptied the warmed mugs into a watering can. “I had a mother like that. I couldn't wait to go to school just to get out of the house.” She looked around her kitchen and smiled. “To me, to be able to stay home is the greatest luxury. I love any day I don't have to leave the property.”

She poured the tea. We sipped in silence a while and watched the birds swarming the feeder hung outside the window. A squirrel was staring at it from a perch on a tree, but he could not reach it because it hung from a long, long wire suspended from a tree branch thirty feet off the ground.

“Edward did that. Drives the squirrels insane. I pray he'll conjure up something as clever for the voles.”

“How did he get it up there?”

“He went right up the trunk like a monkey, with climbing spikes.”

I was surprised. I had figured E. Eddie Edwards for a desk guy.

Eventually, Caroline looked at the sink.

“I should get it in the ground.”

“I'll carry it out.”

“Would you like more tea?”

“No, I'm fine. I'll carry, you dig.”

Out to her garden we went. It was huge and beautiful, enclosed between hundred-foot-long stone walls that connected the old house and a multi-level red barn. There were handsome wooden gates in the walls, broad grass paths, and stone steps where the ground sloped. The plants were in a blue phase. Blue bells, Virginia and Spanish; bluish Mountain Pinks, lilac, dark and light blue
Camassia, Aquilegia, Corydalis, Allium
, Jacob's ladder,
Baptisia
about to pop. Even her chives were studded with bristly little knots of purple blue.

She noticed I had veered from the path to inspect her peonies, which were about the only flowers that weren't blue. “
Paeonia mlokosewitschii
,” she said, cupping ghostly petals in her rough hand. “Your aunt gave me seeds.”

I counted ten stems that had been cut. In a vase in her living room had stood nine.

We were approaching a dark wet spot where
Japonica
had hoisted magenta candelabras, when I heard the hee-haw noise of a wood saw coming from the other side of the barn. “Edward,” she explained. “Cutting down a tree.”

“By hand?”

“Manly man,” she said with a smile. Mocking her husband? I wondered. But it wasn't necessarily mocking. It could just as easily have been an affectionate “boys will be boys” remark. I was utterly unable to picture her relationship with Billy Tiller.

Caroline turned a wedge out of the wet ground with a narrow garden spade. She softened the exposed earth with a few quick strokes of the blade, dropped to her knees, and fit Connie's clump of root into its new home as neatly as a piston.

Suddenly I hard a loud crack, a rush of something heavy parting the air, and a shouted, “Oh, shit!”

A shadow loomed from the sky. A tree was falling at us. I grabbed Caroline's hand and pulled her hard. The tree stopped falling, propped in the branches of a neighbor at an angle over the low part of the barn. I was still releasing her hand when E. Eddie Edwards ran around the barn with a multi-toothed tree saw that was curved like a scimitar.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Right this minute,” I said, “I'm dodging trees.”

“Are you all right?” Caroline asked.

“Yeah, yeah, fine. I just really screwed up. Damned tree fell the wrong way. I screwed up the wedge cut.”

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.

“Wha'd you have in mind?” He jammed his saw into a sheath hanging from his belt and glared up at the tangle of branches where the two trees met.

“I've got a come-along in the car. We could crank from the other direction, pull it out of that tree and maybe get it to fall where you want it.”

“I have my own come-along,” he said sullenly, and I could see that he was embarrassed that I had seen him screw up a “manly” job and probably kicking himself for not securing the tree with his come-along to start with.

“Even better,” I said. “It'll be much easier to control with two.”

“I vote for that,” said Caroline. “If that tree slips, we'll need a new barn.”

“It's not going to fall on the barn,” Edwards grumbled, but I could see him calculating the angles. He started around the barn. His wife and I followed and we all looked at the tall, skinny tree, which had slipped off its stump and now leaned precariously over the barn in the fragile arms of a soft red maple. He pointed at a slot of open ground between two hemlocks. “That's where it was supposed to drop.”

“I've done the exact same thing. It's amazing how unforgiving a wedge cut is if you get it just wrong.”

“Well, if you've got the time, Ben, I'd appreciate it.”

“Let's do it.”

They walked me to my car to help carry the stuff. I passed him a hundred-foot coil of two-ton wire cable. Caroline grabbed the heavy chain, which was in a strong bucket. I took the come-along—or winch-puller—a cumbersome, six-foot-long web of pulleys, ratchets, wire rope, grab hooks, and clove pins all connected to a finger-threatening lever.

“You usually travel with a winch-puller?”

“I took down a dead tree for my mom. She lives by herself out in Frenchtown and the place is a handful.”

“House thy name is entropy,” said Edwards. “I'm taking the rest of this week off just to try and catch up.”

“Speaking of which,” said Caroline, “if you gentlemen can handle this, I've got things going inside.”

We manly men assured her we could.

We got a ladder from the barn, and Edwards' come-along and wire and chain. He climbed up and looped both wire cables around the tree about twenty feet off the ground. Then we walked the cables at forty-five degree angles to the direction we wanted the tree to fall, hooked them to the come-alongs, and hooked the come-alongs to chains we looped around strong trees. It took a while. And it took a while longer to get the slack out by adjusting the chains. Edwards reminded me to make sure I had an escape route if the tree fell toward me.

When we had the cables stretched as taut as we could between the errant tree and the come-alongs, we cranked the levers, calling to each other to ease off and then pull again, to keep it balanced. The tree tipped up from the red maple that had caught it. It was swaying and it didn't take Paul Bunyan to realize it would have gone out of control if we had only had one cable. We kept cranking. The come-alongs had only a six-foot fetch, and the question was what happened if they reached their limit before the tree fell where it should. Nothing good. But just before we ran out of pull, the tree began to lean, gathered speed, and fell between the two hemlocks with a thump that shook the ground.