Pushing Up Daisies db-1 Page 3

  There'd be no shame in going back to Richard Stapley to tell him the job was too big for me. I could do that, or I could simply dig in and see how far I got.

  I'd get Hugo and anyone else I could shanghai into working with me. Tools would be a problem, but I knew where I could borrow some heavy-duty equipment. It would require some hair flicking, a skimpy tank top, and industrial-strength lip gloss, but I'd make the sacrifice. And the Historical Society would have to hold more than a "small event"; I'd need at least a hundred plants, probably more. I added to my already voluminous notes and lists.

  Making a quick sketch, I named all the different garden areas. Then I labeled the Baggies I'd brought. Call me crazy, but I love taking soil samples. All you do is dig up some soil, ship it to your local extension university, and for five bucks they analyze the soil's texture and structure; make fertilizer recommendations; and, most important, determine the pH factor—something no serious gardener would consider proceeding without.

  Okay, where to start? The center of the white garden was as good a place as any. I reached into my backpack, like a doctor going into his medical bag, and got out my favorite trowel and my thinnest goatskin gloves. I regretted not bringing a tiny airplane bottle of booze to have a little groundbreaking ceremony.

  With my first stab, I hit something. When you garden in Connecticut, this is not an unusual occurrence. We grow rocks here. But this didn't sound like a rock. I plunged my trowel into the soil again, this time scraping a surface that was definitely metal. Ten minutes later, I had unearthed a box. Eleven minutes later, a small body. Stone-cold dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  Until that moment my involvement with the local constabulary had been minimal. Three years of summers and eight months of full-time residence had netted only a few brushes with the law—once when my neighbor had an unusually rowdy party and another time when my flag was stolen. (What kind of lowlife steals a flag?)

  Uniformed cops, Officers Guzman and Smythe, responded first. I told them I was alone but knew they wouldn't just take my word for it. I stayed put until they'd made some calls and done a preliminary search. Then they returned to get a statement from me. More cars arrived while we spoke, including one bearing the state seal. People hopped out and sprang into action as if they did this sort of thing every day in our little town. I watched, fascinated.

  I didn't have much to tell, but I still had to repeat it all when Sergeant Michael O'Malley arrived about twenty minutes later from the local town center, where he'd been speaking and handing out bicycle safety helmets to kids.

  O'Malley was five foot eight or nine and had black hair with the kind of pale skin that made him look like he always needed a shave. If there were two kinds of cops—the rock-hard not-an-ounce-of-fat-on-their-bodies kind and the other—he was one of the others. Not exactly fat but soft; this guy looked like he knew his way to the donut shop. With the whisper of an accent, O'Malley grilled me, repeating and expanding on the same questions asked by the uniformed cops.

  "Paula Holliday, two ells. No, I didn't go in; I didn't need to. Besides, I don't have the keys."

  "What made you start digging there?" he asked.

  "Nothing in particular. Path of least resistance— maybe there were fewer roots and leaves there."

  He nodded gravely. I repeated my answers in an impatient, slightly singsong fashion, shifting my weight and hugging my arms tightly over my chest to keep warm.

  "Is that your sweatshirt?" he asked, standing over the flower bed.

  "Yes. It—it was rolling over."

  He picked up the sweatshirt, shook out the imaginary cooties, and draped it around my shoulders. I was taken aback by the intimate gesture.

  "Why didn't you just put it back in the box?"

  "I don't know. It didn't seem right."

  He nodded again and scribbled more notes. "I see you, uh, mulched the rhododendrons," he added, referring to the breakfast I'd left in the flower bed.

  That shook me out of my stupor. "Haven't taken that sensitivity training yet, have you, Sheriff Taylor?" I said, snottily suggesting that Springfield was Mayberry and he was out of his league.

  "You'd do well to take this a little more seriously," he said, straightening up and taking his own advice. "Did you see anyone else?"

  "No. Oh, wait. There was another woman here. Well, briefly anyway. I almost forgot about her. The other guys didn't ask."

  "Yeah, well, that's why I get the big bucks," he said in an obvious attempt to reestablish some connection.

  "I see. You can joke, but I can't."

  "Point taken. Did you know her?"

  "No. She said she used to live near here. We talked a bit, then she disappeared."

  He looked at me as if I'd said the dog ate my homework. "All right, she probably didn't really disappear, but when I came back—I was looking for a pen and paper to get her phone number—she'd taken off. I figured I'd bump into her later somewhere around the grounds, but I didn't."

  Another blank look from O'Malley. Maybe he thought I'd hit her on the head with a weed whacker and tossed her onto the compost pile. I described the woman and our brief conversation. After that, O'Malley loosened up and so did I. We chatted politely while he took more notes and dozens of pictures with both a Polaroid and a digital camera. Stupidly, I thought it was casual conversation, then I realized he was getting background info on me, to see if I was the kind of psycho who might have buried a baby here.

  "Who knew quiet little Springfield was such a hotbed of criminal activity?" I mumbled. "I assumed the worst crime ever committed here was some soccer mom running a red light."

  "Unfortunately, we have everything they have in the big city, just a bit less of it," O'Malley replied. I couldn't tell if he was sorry or proud. "If you remember anything else, give us a call," he said, handing me one of his cards, "or stop by the substation on Haviland Road. If I'm not there, ask for Officer Guzman. She'll be working with me."

  Renata's white garden was cordoned off with yellow tape. Other people kept arriving. One of them, a cheery blonde about my age, had three cameras slung around her neck, and she rattled off a running commentary as she videotaped the entire area. She might have been at Disneyland.

  I was pushed farther and farther to the edge of the property. I made a few feeble protests to no one in particular about needing to get back to work, and finally someone barked, "So do we, lady. Check back with Mom in a few days, okay? You're sort of in the way here."

  "Mom?"

  "Sergeant O'Malley. Nickname."

  Just as I was climbing back into my car, Richard Sta-pley arrived, gliding in on his bike.

  "Good Lord, is it true?" he asked, swinging his left leg gracefully over the seat, dismounting, and resting his bike against an oak tree. Tall and patrician, he was just as ready to take command of this situation as he had of me a few hours earlier.

  "I'm afraid so, Mr. Stapley."

  "Please, call me Richard. What did the police say?"

  "Not much they can say at this point, except that I seem to have stumbled upon a very old corpse."

  "Good grief," he said, bending down and fussing with his bicycle clips. "What was it?"

  "A baby."

  He shook out his pant cuffs and recreased his pants with a quick thumb and forefinger on each leg. "I knew those girls were strange, but I never imagined anything like this." He straightened up, resuming his military bearing. "Mike O'Malley called me; I'd better go talk to him."

  I was getting tired of being dismissed, so I decided to return the favor. "I have had a long day. All I want to do now is head home. The police will let me know when I can come back, but I'm sure it'll be at least a few days. That's okay. It'll give me a chance to do some research."

  "That's the spirit. Go home and try to relax. We'll take care of everything here."

  On the way home, I slowed down as I drove by the police substation. The two-story strip mall was diagonally across the road from the Paradise Diner and was home to a handful
of local businesses—Shep's Wines and Liquors, Penny's Nails—and sandwiched in between the Martial Arts Family Center and the Dunkin' Donuts was the substation. I'd been kidding about the donuts. Now I wondered if O'Malley got the belly from the donut shop or the liquor store.

  Suddenly I was anxious to get home. I picked up speed. The same manicured lawns and tidy flower beds I'd passed in the morning whizzed by, but instead of critiquing the plant selections, now I wondered what long-buried secrets they, too, might be hiding.

  CHAPTER 3

  Eagle Road is a dead end. Turning into my driveway, I thought, Not many secrets here—single woman, thirties, no kids, no cats. Obsessive devotion to mini pine bark nuggets. The mailbox reads HOLLIDAY AND MAZ-ZARA, although that second name should have been razored off months ago.

  My house was built about thirty-five years ago. The perky real estate agent I rented—then ultimately bought—it through said it had once been owned by a basketball player. Must have been a college player, because it was small, not the humongous estates even the benchwarmers have nowadays. It might have been true, though. When my ex and I first started spending summers up here, we saw a few of my beloved New York Knicks having breakfast at the Paradise. Perky real estate agent aside, that may have closed the sale.

  Anyway, the player got cut by the team and the bank foreclosed, so I was able to pick the house up for a song—just about all I had.

  I pulled into the garage and hopped out for a quick stroll around my garden before it got too dark. My own little controllable environment. That's a laugh. All you can do is deal with the weather, the soil, the sun, the bugs, the bacteria, the fungi, and then resign yourself to the fact that the deer will eat most of it anyway. I didn't kid myself that I controlled the garden. But at least there were no dead bodies here—or none that I knew of.

  Outside the garden, control was no easier. Chris Mazzara had moved out months ago. The body had stuck around, but, to paraphrase B. B. King, the thrill had gone. Now the only thing left was the name on the mailbox, which I hadn't had the heart to remove, since that made the departure more final.

  I ended my short garden inspection, picking off a few dead leaves in the pro cess, then went inside.

  "Anna?" I yelled. No answer.

  Anna Peńa is my cleaning lady. The cushy days of double income no kids were gone and I couldn't afford her anymore, but Anna didn't seem to want to leave. And it was anyone's guess when she'd show up. I suspected she came to watch English lessons on cable, which she didn't get at home, but she never said. There was only the inconclusive evidence of the laundry being done and the TV being on channel 106. Far be it from me to discourage her.

  Anna was a hardworking single mom and she'd decided that polishing her English and being my "assistant" would land her a job at the country's biggest tequila distributor, based in neighboring Greenwich. So sometimes she came by to answer the phone and do a little filing to practice. "I don't want to clean houses forever. I have ambition," she'd told me.

  To that same end, she'd recently embarked on a cutrate make over including the permanent tattooing of her eyebrows, eyelids, and lips; so it was also possible she was just lying low until all the swelling went down.

  My voice echoed through the empty house. I dropped my backpack in the entrance and hauled myself up the open staircase. To night the climb felt longer than usual, but it was worth it. Upstairs was the living room, kitchen, bedroom, and a small deck. Downstairs was the entrance, office, and—for want of a better name—the TV room. It also housed all my workout equipment: rowing machine, free weights, Fat Boy punching bag, and any new gizmo guaranteed to flatten my stomach.

  Eight hours before, I thought I'd be celebrating with a bit of bubbly, but I was going to need something stronger now. I made myself a very large, very dirty martini: lots of vodka, lots of olive juice, three olives, and "just say the word vermouth," as an old friend once instructed. I opened the slider out to the deck, took my glass, and headed out to the old teak chaise I'd found at a yard sale.

  I kicked off my shoes, put my feet up on the railing, and took a long pull on the drink. If the martini was a vacation in a glass, as that same friend once told me, my deck was a freaking sabbatical. No noise (usually), lots of sky, and a chance to contemplate my latest gardening project.

  The land adjacent to mine was a bird sanctuary, but subscribing to the Japanese concept of borrowed scenery, I enjoyed pretending I was mistress of all I surveyed. And usually I was, except for the occasional birder who strayed off the trail. What more could a woman want? I drained the martini and went back inside for another. Second drink in one hand, door handle in the other—the phone rang. I prayed it wasn't Richard Stapley or, worse, my mother. With no lunch, and having left my breakfast in the bushes, the large economy-sized drink I'd just polished off had gone straight to my head. I wasn't sure I could compose an intelligent sentence.

  "Hello?" I said, working hard to sound sober.

  "Ms. Holliday?"

  "Speaking." Just barely, I thought.

  "It's Mike O'Malley. I wanted to see how you were doing."

  "Great, once I get all the cadavers out of that place." I hadn't meant to sound that flip; it was the vodka talking.

  "I'm glad you got your sense of humor back. It's understandable, of course, but you seemed a bit stunned this afternoon. I almost suggested you go to Springfield Hospital."

  I had been surprisingly calm that afternoon; O'Mal-ley probably thought I was in shock.

  I'd seen plenty of dead people before. My large Italian-Irish family generated boisterous wakes, watered by beer, wine, and anisette for the ladies in black dresses. Ancient relatives, the deceased generally looked better dead than they did when they were alive thanks to the talented folks at Torregrossa's Funeral Home in Brooklyn. ("That's the dress she wore to Donna's wedding, periwinkle blue. It was always a good color for her.")

  The vodka kept me babbling. "I'd also like to thank whoever took such good care to keep the blowflies and the earthworms at bay." That last graphic description rang in my ears. "God, that must have sounded terrible. I don't know where that came from. Black humor— just my way of dealing with things."

  "I find it useful myself sometimes." He finally sensed this wasn't a good time to talk. "I just called to let you know we'll be at the house for the next couple of days. Someone will give you a heads-up when you can go back. Glad to hear you're okay."

  I replaced the phone in the cradle, missing the contacts the first two times. That's when I noticed the red light and the flashing number 17. The first three messages were all from the same person, Jonathan Chap-pell, a reporter from the Springfield Bulletin. I didn't bother playing the rest.

  The sun was about to go down and I knew that would mean a drop in the temperature, so I pulled on an old black cardigan, big as a blanket and at least ten years old. I popped a Van Morrison CD in the player, cranked it up a bit, and padded back to the deck just in time to see the sun setting through the trees.

  Most homes up here have a lot of house on a small piece of land—McMansions; mine is just the opposite. Tiny house, more land than most. Only the one noisy neighbor and a family I've never even seen on the other side. The far end of the property bordered wetlands and the bird sanctuary. A seasonal stream there, heavy from all the spring rains, was lined with rows and rows of swamp cabbage, ferns, and jack-in-the-pulpits. The birds were having a field day drinking and hunkering down for the night. Just like me.

  CHAPTER 4

  The cold woke me, and the sky was so clear, it seemed as if Orion's belt was dangling over my head. I briefly considered dragging my telescope outside, then the memory of the day's events shook any fanciful notions of stargazing out of my head.

  Inside the house, last Sunday's dutifully purchased but unread New York Times made excellent kindling. I started a fire and went to clean myself up. A hot shower and fresh clothes made me feel almost normal again, normal enough to be hungry. Back in the kitchen, I checked out the dismal
contents of my fridge: yogurt, wilting veggies, water, and every condiment known to man. I was always so virtuous when I went food shopping, but once home, hanging on the refrigerator door, I invariably craved high-fat food of no nutritional value. Since I never had any in the house, I opted for my patented Greek yogurt with flaxseed, honey, and raisins sundae; if I was feeling really reckless, I might throw in a handful of wonderful walnuts. Why not go to hell in a handbasket?

  I settled in on the floor in front of the fireplace with the Halcyon file, my laptop and garden books spread out around me.

  Oddly enough, finding the body hadn't scared me. Everything pointed to its being evidence of someone's old secret, as opposed to someone's new crime. Perversely I even found myself thinking it would add to Halcyon's mythology and make it even more of a local attraction once the gardens were restored. I got to work.

  Renata Peacock's birthday, June 18, would be an appropriate date for an opening. And there was a certain symmetry to it. Richard's file revealed that was the date the sisters used to do their noblesse oblige thing and invite the locals. Problem was, it was only two and a half months away. Tomorrow I'd get in touch with Hugo and maybe rope some of my city friends into pulling weeds and mulching in exchange for a pleasant weekend in the country. I pored over the stacks of garden books and old pictures, adding to my bulging folders of notes and shopping lists.

  I didn't doubt Richard Stapley's ability to raise funds. He was handsome, in a rugged, old-fashioned, Mount Rushmore way; I could see the blue-rinse crowd getting weak in the knees and handing over checks after just a few flattering words from him. I also saw that every once in a while I'd have to remind him I was a grown-up—not some kid he'd brought in to mow the lawn.