The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery (22 page)

It was crazy then, he thought, and it was crazy now. As a
young CIA officer at that time, he had suspected that the Soviets were putting the Americans on; but no one wanted to believe a low-ranking employee who had barely blown in from Harvard.

Right now, all that didn’t matter. He was in trouble. His facetious remarks had been bad enough, but the perceived insult was over the top. He could see that a distinct tremble had developed in Nora’s sensuous, pink bottom lip; she was going to cry. Here was their attractive neighbor, a woman Bill liked very much, one of the most composed women he knew, about to shatter into tears.

“Nora, look, I’m
sorry
—I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s just that I’m not sure it does Louise any good—”

“—to be warned her life is in danger?” Nora said the words in such a low voice that he could hardly hear them.

“You think her life is in danger?” he repeated, feeling foolish.

Nora sat back in her chair, much as she had the evening before, as if she were closing Louise and Bill out, physically and spiritually. A picture of Athena popped into his mind, often described in
The Odyssey
as the gray-eyed goddess who directed the affairs of men. Whimsically, he imagined Nora as their very own gray-eyed goddess.

But the goddess was pissed off right now. She turned her back to them with quiet deliberation, and for the first time in his life he understood fully the term, “turning a cold shoulder.” The smoke from her cigarette floated around her like a filmy mantle as she stared into the shadows of the night.

“I believe you, Nora,” said Louise in a tight voice. “And I will take care.” She grabbed Bill’s hand. “Walk me up to my room, will you? Nora wants to be alone. But I surely don’t.”

She hurried him through the downstairs rooms. His banishment was to be swift. Without turning her head to him, she hissed between clenched teeth, “Did you have to fight with Nora? Surely, Bill, you can deal with that woman by now—she means only good.”

“Sorry, honey. But all that mumbo-jumbo ESP stuff…”

“That comes
straight
from her inner, poetic self. Don’t you understand?”

Understand Nora? He wasn’t sure he understood his own wife.

Softly, he muttered, “What you have to remember is that I’ve been there, done that …”

“What did you say?” Her voice was sharp. “What do I have to remember
this
time?”

“Oh, nothing important.”

She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her pink charmeuse nightie riding up around her thighs, but she barely noticed it. The little pad of paper on her lap was illuminated only by the dim millefiori bedside lamp, the antique shade made of the pieces of glass left at the day’s end in the shop of some ancient glassblower. It cast a multicolored glow on her pad: cute but impractical, since she had to squint to see what she had written.

Scribbled on the pad was Grace’s unfinished quatrain. How had Grace intended to finish it? Granted, Louise and her husband and her friend Nora had agreed that Grace was the suicidal type. And yet Louise couldn’t quite lay the matter to rest, or get this poem off her mind. She knew if she could find the right words, she would be able to tell whether Grace had jumped or had been forced over those falls.

“’For I will be dead’?” she muttered to herself. “’Until I am dead’? ‘Why should I not be dead’? No, that’s not right.” Bill’s rhyming words also led nowhere.

Louise pressed the pencil against her lip. Bill. The thought of him made her guilty. She had been snappish with him this evening, over Nora. She thought philandering, not ESP, would be the issue that caused a flare-up with Nora.

ESP, indeed. Even Louise was skeptical. She knew in her heart when she was in trouble—she didn’t need Nora’s special powers to detect it. Only once had her friend pulled out of the blue a forecast of impending danger. The other times had been as predictable as a CNN weather map predicting a big storm. She thought,
Snoop into the affairs of dangerous men, and of course I’m going to be in danger
.

She would have to apologize to her husband first thing in the morning.

With that resolved, she turned her attention back to the quatrain. Grace appeared to have been a clever although not brilliant rhymester. Louise herself did not write poetry. She had in fact gone to great pains to avoid doing it her whole life, from grade school right through college creative-writing classes.

The lump on the right side of the bed moved, accompanied by the relocation of a mass of long yellow hair. Janie’s muffled voice said, “Aren’t you ever going to stop mumbling and go to sleep?”

“In a minute, darling.”

“You could at least quit talking to yourself.”

“Yes, darling, I’ll do that.” Louise looked at the door that led to the hall, and it came to her in a flash: If she could sort out what happened in that hall last night, everything else would fall in place—she wouldn’t even have to decipher Grace’s rhyme.

Without wanting to be, she was drawn to that door. The attraction was as strong as if she were a character in a Poe horror tale. Then, the millefiori lamp suddenly went black, and she had no choice. She put her feet on the floor and fumbled around until they found her mules. Then, in a kind of impromptu blindman’s buff game, she stretched out her
hands to find the overstuffed chair, picked up her robe, and put it on. She silently moved to the door.

The hallway was a pit of darkness. In a shock of understanding, Louise realized that the lights had been deliberately shut off both last night and tonight. But why again tonight? The only explanation was that someone at the Litchfield Falls Inn intended to perpetrate a crime in the rich, velvety darkness….

She had released herself from the safety of her room and now felt as if she were adrift in a black sea. She took a few steps into the hall. What drew her there was the knowledge that the answers were there, among the occupants of this vast upstairs floor.

Like one of the lower, invertebrate animals, Louise slunk along the wall, making her way again to the relative safety of the bench under the windows. Her fingers found the highly polished ancient pine seat, and she sat down carefully, ducking so that her silhouette was not outlined against the window. She had seen the moon bright in the sky earlier—yet clouds had moved in and now stood in the way of any light reaching into this dark hallway.

After a few minutes, she began to hear the little noises again, as she had last night. Clicks of doors quietly shutting, the spooky sense of footsteps back and forth. A low murmur of voices at the far end of the corridor, and tonight, in the deep gloom, only a suggestion of movement by the window at the end of the hall. Then a thrill of terror surged through her like an electric current, as a big body crowded in next to her and arms encircled her. “Oh!” she started to cry out. A strong hand was clamped over her mouth. With every fiber of strength she possessed, Louise tried to pull away and failed. Then there was a loud whisper in her ear. “Shut up and listen.”

She had been overpowered so completely that until that moment she had been sure it had to be a man. But now there was the rich, feminine voice and the odor of perfume on the body next to hers. Nora? No. Bebe.

Louise shook her head vigorously, freeing it for a moment from the smothering hand. “For God’s
sake
, Bebe,” she hissed, and then the hand clamped onto her mouth again, tighter this time.

“I
told
you, listen, don’t talk! Half the people in this inn are wandering around this hall, but I’m only interested in you. If you promise not to yell, I’ll take my hand away. Promise?”

Louise nodded her head sharply, up and down. The hand was slowly drawn away, but Bebe continued to hold her in her viselike grip.

“Why are you doing this?” Louise whispered angrily.

The other woman talked directly in her ear. “I’m warning you, Louise. I’ll let you go in a minute. I know you’re the one working with the police. I want you to know all about me, because I’m the only one without an alibi for when Grace … went over those falls.”

“How do you know that?”

“I figured it out from talking to the others. So now I’m afraid they might charge me. How do I
know
what they’ll do to me?”

“Bebe, I don’t think they will. Why would they?”

“The same reason they did in my husband’s death: I’m
around
, and I don’t have an alibi, like the rest of you. So, Louise, I want you to know I didn’t do it. And I want you to call my brother—he’s in Mattson. He knows I’m not a murderer. He’s the only one that will vouch for me. Him and a bunch of old folks.”

Louise had dealt with strange people before, but she guessed Bebe was one of the strangest. “Now tell me, just what on earth have old folks got to do with this?”

“I teach dancing at the old folks’ home in Mattson. They love me, Louise. I come once a week and teach them everything— the waltz, the fox-trot, even the tango. I’m a volunteer, and they love me! They’ll speak for me. The ones that can, though some of them don’t make much sense—too senile. Them and my brother. The rest of the town thinks I did it”

“The sheriff still thinks—”

“
Yes
,” she rasped, and Louise felt the noise rebound through her ear canals. “He has tests still out at some lab, trying to prove I murdered Ernie. When he hears about what happened down here in Litchfield, who knows what they’ll do …” The woman was crying. Finally she removed her grip from around Louise and sat back on the bench.

Louise exhaled in relief, then rubbed her arms where the woman had held her. She was perplexed. Was this a ruse to cover up her guilt in another murder, or was the woman simply half crazy over the thought of being falsely suspected for a second time?

Bebe snuffled.

“Shah,” said Louise, “listen.” They could sense, more than hear, the presence of other people.

Bebe leaned over and whispered in her ear. “There’s bad things going on around here, Louise.”

“Oh, God, do I need you to tell me that, too?” She scrambled to her feet. “I’m going to bed. There must be a good night’s sleep left in this weekend for me. I suggest you do the same.”

But fear was catching. On her way back to her room, the sense of something evil in this dark old hall began to take hold of Louise’s mind. By the time she reached the door, she was clammy with sweat and nearly running. She clawed the door open, and closed and locked it behind her. Then she leaned against it, exhaling a great breath, as if she hadn’t dared to breathe for several minutes. Bebe was no phantom in the night—she was a flesh-and-blood person, or Louise wouldn’t still feel the pain of her unwelcome embrace. But who else was out there?

More than anything else, those bumps in the night convinced Louise that murder had been committed in Litchfield County. Last night was like the prelude, and tonight, the reprise.

L
OUISE DOVE INTO THE DEEP END OF
the rocky pool and came up shivering. A dozen vigorous strokes brought her back to where Bill and Nora were still inching their bodies into the shallow end. She could see the goose bumps on their upper legs. “Very cold,” she said, “but you’ll
love
it once you get in.”

“That’s what people like you always say,” grumbled Bill. He liked his pools or oceans warm, preferring the Pacific to the Atlantic, a hot springs pool to the YMCA’s. There was no sun this morn-and a faint drizzle of rain was coming
down, reducing the water temperature below his comfort level. It hadn’t deterred Janie and Chris: They were already diving and playing together like two porpoises, delighted with this pool adjacent to the river. It was another natural cavity in the land, like the watery pit at the base of the falls where Grace had been found dead.

Finally, Bill and Nora immersed themselves and swam enough to at least warm up. It was time to call their clandestine meeting to order. After all, who would bother them, in an isolated pool near the river’s bend, in a drizzle, at eight in the morning?