Summerkill Read online

  The first building expansion, six or seven years ago, gave them a simple but pleasant facade and generous spaces behind it. A couple years later Kate took the then bare-bones garden supply store as her project, with the goal of building it into the best of its kind in the area. Ever since, things had gotten progressively more crowded. They were running out of space for inventory, and everybody’s working room had shrunk to the point of being cramped. The Etlingers had visions of expanding again when things picked up. Many struggling small businesses would have made that “when” an “if” and given serious thought to debt reduction. This was not the Etlinger mentality.

  I let myself in the side door and started toward my desk, nodding at Grant as I passed. The barely perceptible return nod was a clue I wasn’t going to get much farther unimpeded.

  “I can’t believe you had the nerve to show up here!” Rodney had bounded—that’s the only verb to capture it— out of his office to plunk himself down in my path, arms folded across his chest. I started to give credit for bravery, my having seven inches and at least forty pounds on him; knowing Rodney, I downgraded to foolhardiness.

  “Do you want to tell me what that means?”

  “I’m only surprised the police haven’t come for you yet. Phil let me in on what he’s told the Star-Journal: an arrest is imminent. For me, he added the name, not that it came as a surprise.”

  “Maybe you should check if he told the sheriff, too. Meantime, I need some things from my desk.”

  I took a step toward him. He glared. I took another step. He took a smaller one backward. In this basic pattern we worked our way along to my desk, at which point he executed another bound and ended up sitting on the top, crossed legs blocking my three-stack of drawers. A fun vision: grab him by the feet and spin him around. Right, and he’d fall off, break an ankle, and sue the shit out of me. “I think you’ll need to move,” I said regretfully.

  “Emma,” he called sharply, “get on the phone to the sheriff’s office.”

  I turned. His secretary had come to a halt a few safe feet from me. “Ask if any of the media people are still around. He’s so picturesque perched there on my desk, guarding all that valuable evidence.”

  Emma wasn’t sure and, turning back to him, I could see Rodney starting to waver. He is an impeccably groomed man with styled hair and delicate features—handsome, I guess, if you’re into doll collecting. Most people consider him longer on charm than brains. Probably he wasn’t concerned about making an ass of himself—I doubt Rodney is capable of believing he could do that. But might he somehow have miscalculated?

  “What is it, exactly, that you need?”

  “Exactly? Whatever’s mine that I may have a use for. I’ll have to look.”

  “Very well. God knows you’ve put us through enough of your melodramas. Five minutes, and I want you out of here. Permanently.” With that he got down off the desk and stood to the side of it, arms folded. “I intend to watch and see just what you’re removing from these premises.”

  “Make a list, if you want. And I’ll take as much time as I need. If that doesn’t suit you, feel free to have Emma make her call.”

  He succeeded in containing himself for the better part of a minute. “I told Willem not to hire you. I mean, really, what was it going to do for our image, having a cow like you representing us?”

  I’d long since found my visionary version of Rodney: he was the perfect toy poodle. Occasionally I had wondered how he saw me. One of those buxom milkmaids, maybe, in some corny bucolic scene? Well, I’d gotten the setting right, just not the participant. To each his own critter. I managed not to say that, and after a few moments he reneged on his watchdog responsibilities and left me to my clearing out. No one else ventured to come near. Since I kept most of my records and copies of all design sketches at the house, it didn’t take long to pack up what I wanted. It all fit in two manila envelopes.

  Later, when I got around to reviewing the scene, I found it rather sad. After four years, you’d want to have more to take away. And get to make a more pleasant exit.

  At the time I was too steamed for such niceties. Who the hell was telling what to whom?

  This was more or less how I put it to Sheriff Dye when I barged into his office. From the Garden Center the shortest route over to that section of Route 7, our other main north-south artery, requires a lot of back-road cutting and tacking. It’s just as well there weren’t many other vehicles about as I negotiated it.

  “I haven’t been telling anybody much of anything,” he responded mildly. “It’s too early.”

  “So how come it’s going to be in this afternoon’s Star-Journal that an arrest is imminent? How come Rodney Etlinger was sure enough about this to threaten to throw me out of the office just now?”

  “Damn! Phil must be making believe he’s on top of things again. I haven’t told him anything of the sort.”

  “Well, that certainly does make it all better. Mariah says you two have a communications problem. Might it just possibly be time you touched base? I have not had a good morning so far, and I don’t even want to contemplate how things are going for the boys in the rec program. When I left the house, it was under the impression of being at least halfway out of the hot seat for Ryan’s murder. Was I assuming way too much there?”

  He brushed at the top of his hair. “Look, let me make a phone call.”

  “Should I wait outside?”

  “No need.” He punched in the numbers. “Simon, glad I caught you still at the lab. How are we coming on those tests on the Jessup body? … Right, I know that one takes a while. Did you get to the stomach contents yet? … How firm are you calling that? … All right! … Listen, I’ll let you get back to it. Keep me posted.”

  He looked up, smiling. “His estimate is no later than eleven-thirty. In testimony, he’ll add half an hour for margin of error. I’ll make it official: you’re cleared.”

  “That’s infinitely nicer than I’m up to sounding just at the moment. Who else is going to hear, and when?”

  He got up from behind his desk, a little abruptly, I thought. “How about whoever’s out there, and now?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “But you know,” he hesitated, frowning, “it’s a little early to break out the champagne. Not everybody around here takes official pronouncements as gospel, and the circumstances do have your name written all over them. At the very least they’ll have questions.”

  CHAPTER 6

  If the four media people who were on hand for the announcement were any indication, there would be questions aplenty. Watching from the doorway of his office, I got the impression that this sheriff was not entirely comfortable with making public statements. I’d goaded him into something he’d rather not have done, at least not yet. They wanted to know, of course, but he was unwilling to reveal the specifics of why I was not a suspect—I guess that would have meant giving away too many details. This led the two uniformed cops on hand to look at each other questioningly and one of the reporters to wonder aloud why he was making the statement in the first place. His “to take some of the pressure off an innocent person, we like to do that when we can” didn’t appear to strike anyone as an enlightenment, but they let it pass and went on to bombard him with a bunch of other questions he wouldn’t answer. As press conferences go, it was pretty dismal.

  Driving away, I acknowledged that I probably shouldn’t have pushed him and that his cautions were clearly justified. Still, questionable to negative celebrity seemed a far less heavy prospect than getting hauled off to jail. I’ve had a lot of experience being noticed, often less than favorably. I don’t like it much, but what am I going to do—put duct tape over my mouth and shrink?

  After sneaking away from his office I started to swing over through the village center to pick up a Star-Journal and see exactly what the DA had chosen to tell them, but realized en route it was at least an hour and a half too early. Besides, regardless of my employment or media status Mariah had those unpla
nted shrubs lying around. Her place is not far from the sheriff’s department building. I course-corrected, patching together a second back-roads route and driving it much more gently.

  Like me, Mariah preferred country to village living, but she’d settled into a more elegant patch of country—there wasn’t a property within several miles of hers that wouldn’t go for upwards of three hundred thou. The majority of the houses were renovations of late-nineteenth-century structures, center-hall colonials and Victorians being the most plentiful. There were even a couple of restored Dutch brick farmhouses dating from the seventeenth century.

  Those property owners who needed to build from scratch had at least tried for a traditional look. All except Mariah: Moorish is the closest stylistic relative to the walled complex she’d coaxed out of her architect. Her neighbors must have been grateful for that deep, deep lawn that hid all but the front wall from drive-by view.

  By intent, her landscaping is even harder to categorize than her house. You could cite a postmodernist sensibility in that it juxtaposes stylistic elements most people wouldn’t think were compatible. Her rose garden, for example, is formally laid out along precise radial spokes. But what they converge on is a nearly flat Dalíesque melting clock, done in bits of brightly colored glass.

  The rose garden, along with the other oddities in the acre or so of plantings, was her concept, but she wouldn’t have known how to make it work: that’s where I’d been coming in for the last several years. This is my preferred way to develop a garden—to make it the expression of its owner. Most people don’t express themselves as loudly and clearly as Mariah, so you have to ask questions, suggest alternatives, do some steering. You learn to interpret and incorporate. Whatever it takes, when I’ve finished they should be able to call it their garden.

  It’s hard to imagine Mariah’s garden being mistaken for anyone else’s, which is the core reason I came to take the project over from Willem. He is a signature designer. When you know a few basics to look for, you can easily pick out a planting as his. His style and hers had made for a horrendous clash. One of the few things they ever agreed on was to call me in to the rescue.

  By the time Mariah was up and about that Friday morning I had a good third of the shrubs in the ground. We were going for dramatic shapes and winter effects in that particular area—variegated-leaf red-twig dogwood, witch hazel, and Harry Lauder’s walking stick were to form the backbone, fronted by accent clumps of Russian sage and a high ground cover of rockspray cotoneaster.

  I’d had to correct Ryan’s behind-our-backs downsizing on the plant order, of course, but in truth I prefer to start with smaller specimens. They go in more happily and usually grow to a better shape than the ultraexpensive, nearly full-size bushes I was working with that day. Naturally, when you start small, you have to wait at least a couple of years to get the desired effect. Some clients are happy with that—they find it rewarding to watch the plantings develop. Mariah was emphatically not of this persuasion. She wanted to see her ideas implemented now.

  This isn’t to imply a lack of seriousness in her gardening, merely a mercurial spirit. Though Mariah had accumulated an excellent personal library on the subject, she was never satisfied with mere book knowledge. Her inborn curiosity drove her to find out all she could, however she could, on any subject of interest. In the realm of growing plants she felt free to draw on my expertise, of course, and Willem’s, together with that of whichever fellow garden club members and friends might have something pertinent to offer.

  Holding a doctorate in an appropriate subject area was a surefire way to draw her attention. Thurman Haynes claimed there was hardly a square yard of her soil she hadn’t made him test, and when the retired plant pathologist Chauncy Bellis moved to the area to live with his brother some years back, she’d appropriated him as her own living pest and disease manual. Thurman, who had known her since childhood, was goodhearted about the whole thing. Chauncy seemed incapable of bestowing any crumbs from his vast larder of knowledge without making you feel ignorant first. Mariah claimed not to notice; as for myself, any question in his field I tended to take to the Cooperative Extension.

  It was an affordable indulgence, all the buying and replacing Mariah did. By age forty-something she had buried one well-heeled husband, in between divorcing two others, and she hadn’t started out poor in the first place. Chunky in build and deceptively bland of feature, she possessed an agile wit and a caustic tongue, and pronounced herself far too devoted to having things her own way to contemplate any future joint-housekeeping arrangements. She’d never worked formally that I knew of, but was always busy on this or that project, usually a bunch of them simultaneously. The common component, Willem liked to tease, was that they all gave her a chance to bug somebody. She was outrageous enough about it that most of her targets still invited her to their parties.

  The senior Etlingers had stopped speaking to her over the Hudson Heights controversy, a decision that must have spiced up a few social gatherings and garden club meetings before it became old news. Mariah was amused, Willem initially distressed, but he soon shrugged it off. While his sense of family was strong, he managed to call his own shots when it came to friends. It didn’t offend him that Mariah found Hudson Heights an abomination or his plantings there altogether too flowery. She was entitled to her opinions, and it wasn’t for shared artistic tastes that they valued one another’s company.

  That morning she stood watching for a while from the spa patio before ambling over. “Those,” she pronounced, pointing to several Harry Lauders, “would look better without their leaves.”

  “Not in August—they’d be dead. Aren’t you too old for membership in the instant gratification generation?”

  “My, we sound perky this morning! May I take this as a sign the summer’s work here is going to get finished?”

  “If you mean by me, that’s a yes and/or no. As far as Ryan’s murder goes, I’m off the hook—officially speaking, that is. They’ve established a time of death I couldn’t have figured into. This wasn’t what the Etlingers were anticipating. Rodney ordered me off the premises this morning. How that’ll shake down financially, who knows? I’m not feeling disposed to get stiffed.”

  “No problem, you can work for me. We’ll figure out what they owe you and I’ll divert it from my final payment. Well, that went fast. I’d projected you for at least one more day of high drama.”

  “Can you guarantee only one? About an hour ago I browbeat Sheriff Dye into making an announcement to the effect of ‘Hey, guys, it wasn’t her.’ The spotlight did not instantly turn off. I’m still a major player.”

  “Naturally. Your yard, your weapon, your enemy. Most people really aren’t very bright, you know—they love those easy answers. Of course it was obvious from the beginning you’d been set up. I mean really, your elevator would’ve had to be stuck in the subbasement. You were so convenient, though,” she added thoughtfully. “Now some folks will be taking hard looks at one another. Assuming they need to.”

  I left Mariah’s a little before noon, shrubs installed, and picked up the Star-Journal and an Albany paper at the village drugstore. Coming out, I ran into Thurman Haynes and Matt Conroy. They didn’t look pleased. I probably shouldn’t have either, since both were on the Hudson Heights branch of my suspect list. But hell, I knew something wonderful that they apparently did not, yet.

  Considering those two as individuals, you wouldn’t expect them to seek out one another’s company, but they often lunched together. Thurman, a tall, gaunt man with thinning gray hair and washed-out blue eyes, regularly wore work clothes on-site, but never looked comfortable in them. Matt, on the other hand, looked miserably out of place in the suit he was occasionally required to don. His barrel chest threatened to pop the jacket buttons, and even good tailoring could not entirely hide the beer belly. The men were probably no more than a few years apart in age—late fortyish to early fiftyish seemed about right—and they’d both grown up in the area, yet it seemed u
nlikely they’d ever paid much attention to one another before Hudson Heights.

  Matt had been Clete Donnelly’s construction boss for going on twenty years. He was a master at bringing together the necessary men, materials, and equipment at the right time and place. Given the complexity of the project, Clete’s notorious second thoughts would’ve made Hudson Heights construction scheduling a nightmare for most people. Matt handled it. A few drinks into Friday night he’d been known to slide into the “let’s step outside and settle it” mode, but on the job he kept his cool. His men liked and respected him. No matter what the pressures or how much he was banking to handle them, he remained the genial baseball-following, beer-guzzling, Jeep-driving one of the boys he’d always been.

  Thurman was more standoffish, neither sports fan nor beer drinker and hardly one of the construction boys. Definitely a group member, though—like Mariah and Willem he’d been born into the local aristocracy. I couldn’t imagine him sparkling at all the cocktail parties in which that set indulged, but he regularly attended. His wife had been dead for over a decade, and his daughter Molly, now in her late teens, was by Mariah’s account one of those people who get described as “different.” Not retarded, not mentally ill in a way that could be labeled—a fragile soul who needed sheltering. That, the group gladly provided; Molly knew she belonged.

  At Hudson Heights I’d worked more with Thurman than with Matt and had found him helpful though not much fun. We shared an alma mater—he had a doctorate in geology from Cornell, with a concentration in soil analysis. He’d worked his way up to number two man on New York’s geological survey team, only to see the entire unit abolished in one of the state’s periodic budget crunches the year before I came to the area. A victim of middle age and overqualification, he’d been out of work for over a year when Clete offered him a job helping put Hudson Heights together. It was an off-course career move, he’d confided to me once, but the money was adequate, the work more interesting than he’d expected, and most important, he could stay in the area and not have to uproot Molly.