“Dad died when we were babies. Mary-Anne and I ran off when I was fourteen and she was sixteen. We had been in temporary foster homes in the past when Mom was in the hospital; but we ran away when she wasn’t. She didn’t seem to notice we were gone so nobody knew to look for us.
“I’m not blaming my Mother, it wasn’t her fault, but it was too hard living in a war zone. Mom was always fighting some imaginary foe. Mary-Anne and I had big plans to go to the east coast, but we found living on the street not as glamourous as we thought. I started stealing radios, cd players and graduated to cars. I had a warm place to sleep, a full belly and a group of people I thought were my friends.
“Mary-Anne wasn’t as lucky as me, she overdosed our second month out on our own.”
He heard Gracie gasp.
“How tragic. At fourteen be all alone in the world. It must have been tough.”
“It was; but I made my choices, it was nobody’s fault but my own. When I phoned Mom to tell her about Mary-Anne, she was too busy telling me about her new babies; apparently she bought a bunch of houseplants.”
Gracie stood up, brushed imaginary lint off her slacks and asked, “Have you eaten?”
“I had a Danish here at the coffee shop.”
“I’m going to pack you a lunch and come and pick you up. We are then going over to your Mom’s house. Which shop are you at?”
***
“Hello, Lila Jeffries? It’s me, Gracie Noseworthy!” Gracie shouted as she pounded on the front door.
The large man beside her whispered, “Do you know her?”
Gracie shook her head. “No, I just figured a friendly greeting might encourage her to open the door.”
Together they walked around the large house. Gracie unabashedly peered in as many windows as she could, but like Conrad, she found plants blocked her view.
“I’m afraid something is really wrong here, but I don’t know what,” she told Conrad. “Look at the moisture on the windows. She’s got the heat up so high; I can feel it out here. I’m going to call the police. Don’t worry Conrad, I have friends on the force.”
When Dave and Ted arrived, Ted greeted Conrad Jeffries with a firm handshake and Gracie with a kiss on the side of the cheek.
Conrad smiled. “I see what you mean by friends on the force or is that the customary greeting in Huckleberry?”
“It most certainly is,” said Dave as he puckered his lips towards Gracie.
“In your dreams, Romeo,” Gracie said. “Mind you, if your bowling average improves, I’ll drop Ted in a heartbeat!”
Ted rolled his eyes and then reviewed Conrad’s identification and other documents.
“So you told your Parole Officer you were coming here? Good. In fact, Conrad, he contacted us a couple of days ago to let us know you were on your way. I like this open communication we have, let’s keep it that way, okay?”
Conrad nodded and watched as Constable Dave picked the lock on the door.
The smell hit them as soon as they opened the door. Conrad was told to wait outside. In no time at all, Ted and Dave were outside again.
“We are sorry to tell you, we have found an older female, deceased. Do you feel able to make an identification?” Ted asked.
Conrad nodded and went inside the house.
“Yes. That’s my Mom, Lila Jeffries,” he said quietly.
She was on the couch, almost buried under blankets. Her skin was stretched thin over her bones like parchment. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in days.
“What is with these dried-up sandwiches?” Dave asked. He had turned the furnace off and had finished searching through the house for any other occupants, dead or alive. There was nothing living in the house.
Gracie had stepped into the foyer and watched Conrad as he slowly raised his eyes from his Mother and looked at the myriads of potted plants. Every plant was covered with a thick layer of dust.
Conrad looked closer at a plant.
“What the hell?” he yelled. He grabbed the nearest plant, barged by Gracie and stormed outside.
Ted, Dave and Gracie quickly followed.
Conrad ripped the plant out of its pot.
“It’s fake. It’s plastic.”
He went back inside the house and brought more plants out.
He started ripping the plastic leaves off a plant.
“They’re fake. They’re all fake. Her damn plastic plants were more important than her daughter.”
He crumbled into a heap and started sobbing.
***
It was several hours later. Gracie and Ted were talking quietly in Gracie’s living room while Conrad snored in the spare bedroom.
“He’ll be fine. The cats have given him their stamp of approval.”
“Well, if Zoey and Frank approve, who am I as a Policer Officer to offer my opinion?” Ted grumbled.
“It’s only until the house is cleared out. Apparently, Lila banked every pension check and every disability check she was ever sent. While she had her bills paid through the bank and had a meager amount of groceries delivered each month, she managed to save a sizeable sum. Julia down at the grocery store told me she mainly bought bread, and peanut butter and jelly. What was I saying?” Gracie was on her third rum and coke and was a little sleepy.
“Conrad now has the money to update the house and until its livable, he’ll stay here, rent free. Now that I think about it, he has shown a real depth of forgiveness. Imagine, he has already made arrangements for a small service and a decent burial. That speaks to his character for sure.” Ted shrugged. “I guess it’s okay if he lives here for a month or two.”
He thought Gracie was asleep, but she piped up, “And speaking of depth, how far down was Emma Bartlett? Imagine, two dead bodies in one day.”
“Not far.” Ted sipped his drink. “And what a difference in Mothers. Trudy-Faye sent her son to get the best education money could buy, and Lila Jeffries didn’t even know her son was gone or even care that her daughter died.”
Gracie had filled Ted in on what Conrad had told her about his family life.
Ted continued, “So one boy has all the material advantages in life you could ask for and the other has none. Both end up in the gutter, but the one with the roughest start in life was able to eventually turn his life around.”
“With the help of many taxpayers financing his stay in one of our more gated communities,” Gracie added. “But what is this about Trudy-Faye’s Son; hasn’t he been working in Dubai for years?”
“As usual, I’ve told you too much. I may as well continue. Firstly, Mr. William Lawrence Gervais has never held a passport in his life.”
Gracie sat up and blinked her eyes repeatedly.
“Secondly, you knew him as Crackhead Billy. He overdosed the night he dragged Emma Bartlett’s body into the gazebo. We don’t know if he killed her or someone else did, but we do know that Trudy-Faye refuses to believe he is dead. She thinks he’s in Dubai.”
Gracie was processing this information by continuing to blink her eyes rapidly.
“How can a Mother be so out of touch with her children?” she asked.
Ted thought about this for a bit. “We really can’t blame Lila Jeffries; she had a long history of mental illness. Yes, she abandoned her children in every way imaginable, but when it comes down to it, she intentionally did nothing wrong. Trudy-Faye, on the other hand…”
“Trudy-Faye is a bully. She bullied William Senior into marrying her when she was pregnant by someone else.”
Ted raised his bushy eyebrows at this.
“Oh Ted, the things we women talk about at our little wine parties. Anyhow, she had the baby and then got bored with it. Excuse me, not it, but with William Junior. She wanted him to be presentable, seen but not heard. And it seems to me she was on every committee ever. Anything to keep her name in the limelight so she could grow her real estate business. She was just too busy for a child. She figured she would just hire the right Nanny, send the child to the right schools a
nd everything would turn out right. If anyone abandoned their child emotionally, it was Trudy-Faye.”
“Comparisons,” Ted mused. “Trudy-Faye treated her child like a potted plant whereas Lila Jeffries thought her potted plants were her children.”
Gracie settled back down with her drink. “There’s that old adage, you reap what you sow. But is Trudy-Faye really reaping what she’s sown? She ignored her child most of his life and she’s still doing it. His death hasn’t touched her.”
“It will.”
“And let’s look at Lila Jeffries. Is she really worthy of a Son who not only checked up on her by phone every week, for the three years he was in prison but who now gives her a decent burial? You know Ted, he’s already paid for everything with the small amount of money he was paid working in prison. He won’t get any inheritance for weeks. Is Lila really reaping what she’s sown?”
“I think we have to look at this in reverse. Is Conrad really reaping what he has sown? He’s worked hard to turn his life around. He worked hard to establish a relationship with his Mom despite her fog of mental illness. He came all the way out here as soon as he could to place her in a care home where she would be well looked after. Is he reaping what he’s sown? I say yes. Despite his meltdown today, he’s finally found peace. I mean, Gracie, listen to that man snore!”
On cue, Gracie started in with her own imitation of a chain saw.
She dreamed about planting seeds that grew into three big cabbages. She gently parted the leaves and found a beautiful baby in each cabbage. Somehow she carried all three babies close to her while she and Ted looked for a place to live. They were suddenly in a shopping Mall searching for a home among the stores. Ted found an empty store and they moved in. The cats were there now, and they were hungry, and the children were hungry. Everybody was crying.
Gracie told Ted, “I’m never leaving my children. Go out and bring back some bottles for the babies.”
Ted chuckled as Gracie continued to talk in her sleep as they sat snuggled on the couch in her home.
“Go to the food court. If they won’t give you anything, just shoot them and steal it.”
Ted felt a little teary. It was a shame Gracie never had any children. She would have made one hell of a fine Mom.
Gracie then added, “And you gotta teach the kids how to shoot people too.”
Maybe not, thought Ted.
Mr. Pitre, Pickled And Potted In The Garden
“Eighty-sixsh bottles of beer on the wall, eighty-sixsh bottles on the wall, one fell off and…”
The singer stopped bellowing the old drinking song and began muttering.
“Now what a waste of alcohol. No thatsh not it. Where was I?”
Julia Smith opened her window and sang, “Fifteen. Fifteen bottles of beer on the wall.”
The singer started his drunken serenade again. “Fifteen bottles of beer on the wall, fifteen bottles of beer!”
Julia slammed the window shut again. It was Friday night and Mr. Pitre was in especially fine form and, as per his routine, would be all weekend.
It was times like these that she really wished her husband was still around. He had disappeared a few months ago. The popular opinion was that he took off with that chick at the tanning salon, but Julia was pretty sure he hadn’t.
If Brett was still around, he would have marched out there and yelled at Mr. Pitre as he had done in the past.
Actually, it didn’t really make a difference if anyone yelled at Mr. Pitre. He’d simply smile and agree to stop singing and hold out whatever he was drinking for the irate neighbor to sample. And then invite the neighbor to join him in song. And he would sing even louder than before.
But Brett trying to get their neighbor to simmer down, made Julia feel better. With him gone, she was too frightened to yell at anyone, because they could get angry and she had no one to protect her.
The young woman went back to what she was doing; finding her center. She wanted to be a ‘go with the flow’ kind of person and read that to do this she must ‘find her center’, but every time she tried to look inside herself, she didn’t find much.
She rolled up her yoga mat and stashed it behind the couch. Now, on to her real passion; gardening!
Thankfully, Mr. Pitre had passed out around the emptying of the fifth bottle of beer from the wall so Julia dead-headed her marigolds in peace. It gave her so much joy to look at her new garden beds.
She had read about such a thing in an article on-line, but Brett had always said no to her ideas. A week after he disappeared it occurred to her that she could do whatever she wanted!
First, she went out and bought white sheets with a sateen stripe and put them on the bed. Without Brett and his dirty feet, the sheets stayed pristine!
Then she got all of her stuffed animals out of the suitcase Brett told her to put them in. She placed her doggies and bears and stuffed hearts all over her bed and took several photos and posted them on her social media account. She felt like she was sleeping in a penthouse suite in some fancy hotel.
And that’s what she did next. Julia had woken up one morning and decided she wanted to stay in a hotel. So she did. And she ordered sushi to boot!
Because of that stay, Julia would carefully fold the ends of her toilet paper to make it look like a maid had just cleaned her bathroom. She would always giggle after she did this and say aloud, “I must leave a tip for the maid; she always does such a fine job!”
Julia also realized she could now buy home and garden magazines to leave around the house, so she went to the thrift store and bought several dozen. The garden projects described inside the magazine pages were well within her financial reach and she did as many of them as she could fit in her yard.
Julia was nailing brightly colored gumboots to her fence when the garden bed project re-surfaced in her mind. She quickly filled up the gumboots with dirt, planted petunias and watered them, then hopped in Brett’s truck.
Brett had disappeared without his truck. That’s why she figured he was dead. He might leave Julia, but never his truck. And if he was somewhere hiding and watching her, well, he would pitch a fit if he saw her driving his truck. So, she was pretty sure he was dead.
As for the tanning salon woman? Julia had seen her working at another store over in Munson. The woman was just locking up the store, when a man in a minivan pulled up. Julia could see a toddler in a car seat when the woman got in the vehicle. They looked like a nice little family.
Brett was not the man driving. He would not be caught dead in a minivan! Wouldn’t it be funny though, if Brett was dead and the murderer transported him in a minivan?
Julia was thinking about all this when she drove to the landfill to look for metal bedposts. She found four of them, loaded them up and planted them that night.
They looked a bit funny at first, too close together, so she went in the house, found a tape measure and measured the length of her bed and adjusted the bedposts. They still looked like they were going to fall over at any minute. It was a big day, so Julia cleaned up and went to bed, happy at the progress she was able to make. In the morning, the bedposts had sunk deeper into the dirt and now were straight and plum. They looked fantastic.
Even though she had plenty of money, she decided to go with marigolds. They were cheap, but so gorgeous! She planted one of her garden beds with densely packed yellow flowers while the other had the orange kind with red centers.
Of course, stuffy old Trudy-Faye Gervais had complained to other people, but Julia didn’t care.
Even Mr. Pitre loved her flowers. And now that the bedposts were even more rusted, it all looked so beautiful. Julia was in heaven, except for one little thing.
Mr. Pitre’s singing. It wasn’t that he was drunk and loud; it was that he was out of tune. Completely tone deaf.
Julia had perfect pitch. It was what Brett noticed about her at the karaoke bar. Well, that and her legs. He always told her that her legs almost balanced out her face. He used to say, “Looks like
you fell out of an ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”
Julia sat and continued to dead head the flowers. She even loved putting the withered flowers in the basket as she worked in the cool night air. Somehow it made her feel pretty.
She was really doing some deep thinking tonight. She felt much better about herself now that Brett was gone. When they were together, she used to ask herself over and over again if Brett meant those things he said. Was Brett just joking or was he really mean?
Julia now knew that Brett was mean.
***
Mr. Pitre woke up the next morning with another killer hangover. It was odd, he thought, that his hangovers were always worse on the weekend. Probably get a crick in my neck from sleeping on the couch and it cuts off the blood flow to my brain and gives me a headache, he reasoned.
He sat up and massaged his neck.
“Oh look who has finally decided to grace us with his presence!”
“Mrs. Pitre, why don’t you go and take a long walk off a short pier,” he retorted.
“Oh aren’t we the funny one this morning. What time did you get in last night?” his wife said.
“As if you care!”
“Your nephew called. He wanted to know if you were still going fishing with him this weekend.”
“Well, what did you say woman?”
“What could I say? You weren’t here. That was the first I ever heard of any fishing trip. If you were home you could have answered the phone yourself.”
Mr. Pitre was angry. “You’re the one who ‘repossessed’ my phone! How the hell can I answer the phone if I don’t have one!”
“You’re the one who racked up hundreds of dollars drunk dialing your buddies all over tarnation! I tried shutting off the cellular data when you went out, but you still broke the bank account with your phone bill!”
“Heah, Evelyn, my name’s Cliff. Why don’t you drop over some time?”
Mrs. Pitre gave a long-suffering sigh from the kitchen. “You want coffee or not? Your mug is here. I’m not serving it.”
Mr. Pitre drank his coffee at the kitchen island and looked out the window at Julia Smith’s house. She was in her kitchen doing the dishes.
Gore in the Garden Page 9
