by Joan Hess
I left her hissing into her phone and went outside. The terrace was made of worn bricks in a herringbone pattern. The metal table, chairs, chaise lounge, and glider were nineteen-fifties retro in cheerful colors echoed by flowers and ornamental trees. A lovely place to sip a little something and watch the sunset (if my mental compass was accurate). I continued to the pool, which had a few leaves and sticks in the deep end. It wasn’t Olympic sized, but there was a decent chance it was as large as that of Caron’s nemesis, Rhonda Maguire.
The apple orchard had been there for decades; limbs were gnarled but strong enough to support the abundance of small green apples. The grass between the rows of trees was green and freshly mowed. The aroma was intoxicating. I continued to the far end, where a meadow led down to a lazy stream. Clumps of trees created shady patches that begged for a quilt, a picnic hamper, and a slim volume of poetry.
Indeed, it was the perfect house—if it was available. Even if it wasn’t available, I thought morosely as I walked back to the terrace, it was the perfect house.
Angela was not waiting outside, so I opened the French doors and called her name. I looked in the kitchen, living room, dining room, and master suite. She was not in any of the upstairs rooms, including the bathrooms. I came down the stairs slowly, more irritated than concerned. Irritation turned into annoyance when I opened the front door and saw that her car was no longer there. At least I could stop searching for her, I told myself as I glared at the vacated space. Why on earth would she have driven off, effectively stranding me? To give me time to admire the placement of the linen closet? To stare in awe at the cabinets above the marble countertops? To dance with glee in the laundry room?
I harrumphed for a few more minutes, then went back inside. I’d left my purse in the kitchen, and I was trying to recall if I’d brought my cell phone when I reached the doorway—and froze.
The man standing in front of the refrigerator beamed at me. “Why, hello, hello. You’re early, but do come in and have a seat. Do come in and have a seat. I was about to open a bottle of very nice Bordeaux. Will you join me? Won’t you join me?” He waved a corkscrew at me.
I kept my distance. He appeared to be well over eighty years old, with etched wrinkles, liverish blotches, a nose ineptly carved out of blood sausage, and floppy wet lips. A grungy baseball cap covered most of his bald head. He wore a bowtie and a loosely tied plaid bathrobe.
“I am,” the man continued as he took a bottle of wine out of the rack and attacked it with the corkscrew, “Moses Hollow, great-great-grandson of Colonel Moses Ambrose Hollow, who bought this valley in eighteen sixty-six from President Ulysses S. Grant, despite being a colonel in the CSA. There may have been some funny business with the paperwork.” He cackled as he filled two wineglasses and pushed one across the island. “A thousand acres of prime hardwood. Ol’ Moses built hisself a lumber mill and made out like a bandit during Reconstruction. Let’s toast Colonel Moses Ambrose Hollow!” When I failed to comply, he gave me a disgruntled look. “You a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union? Why, when I wasn’t more than eight years old, I’d go in the wagon with my grandpappy to deliver moonshine to the local saloons. Dodged the revenuers, Grandpappy and I did. Dangerous business, Grandpappy used to say when he was sober. Dangerous business.”
His expression was darkening, so I picked up the glass of wine and took a swallow. “This is a lovely Bordeaux.” I wasn’t afraid of him, since I could topple him with one finger; I was curious. Also stuck at the house until Angela returned from her errand or whatever. “So you live in the valley?”
He turned around to open the refrigerator. He stuck his head so far inside that I wondered if he intended to find a nesting spot, but he emerged with a round wooden box of Brie and a bag of grapes. He located a cutting board, a knife, and a box of crackers. “Where do you think I live? Chattanooga? Chattanooga-choo-choo?”
I was quite sure a dormouse would waddle out of the microwave and request a cup of tea from the man, who was mad if not the Mad Hatter incarnate. “How many members of the Hollow family live here?” I asked.
He stuffed half a dozen grapes in his mouth and chewed vigorously. “Hard to say,” he mumbled as grape pulp dribbled out of the corners of his mouth. “Moses had three daughters and seven sons. Five of the boys survived and got two hundred acres each, but a lot of it got sold over the years. These days most of it’s for the greenhouses. Big greenhouses. Acres of greenhouses. I keep waiting for brimstone to hail down, so’s all those pompous asses will find out what happens to people who live in glass houses. Or earn their living from them, anyhow.” He drank the remaining wine from the bottle, belched, and ducked out of sight. “I tried to warn him, you know, but he thought I was a fool,” his voice continued.
“Warn whom?”
“Love can be lethal. Even a fool knows that.”
I stealthily opened my purse and took out my cell phone. Since I rarely used it, I rarely remembered to charge it. Peter insisted that I carry it, but he and Caron had long since stopped bothering to call me on it. Amazingly, life went on. At this point, however, I was disappointed to note that only electronic resuscitation could help it rise from the dead.
Moses had no such problem. He popped up from the far side of the island, holding another bottle of wine. “Let’s try the merlot, shall we? My dear, you haven’t touched the cheese and crackers. If we’re going to continue our wine-tasting adventure, you really should eat something. We don’t want to get tipsy, do we?”
He seemed to be more dedicated to getting sloshed. I said, “Merlot will be fine. If you’ll excuse me for a moment…” I left before he could refuse to excuse me. There were no landlines in the rooms downstairs or upstairs. I peered out a window in case Angela might be parking in the driveway. Alas, she was not. Reminding myself that sobriety was my only hope of survival, I returned to the kitchen. The merlot bottle was half empty. I followed a trail of cracker crumbs to the living room, where I found Moses asleep on a wide leather sofa.
The situation was ludicrous, I decided as I went into the kitchen for Brie, crackers, and a glass of wine. I took my bounty out to the front porch and sat in the swing. Angela’s phone call must have involved Danny, although if she was on the way to their lake house, I might have a lengthy wait. By no means was I panicky. Other people lived in Hollow Valley, some of whom operated a successful business. They might even have phones.
I decided to give Angela half an hour to reappear before I pondered my next move. I wandered around the yard, admiring the elegant simplicity of the landscaping. It helped, I supposed, to have a nursery nearby. Pine bark mulch kept the beds free of weeds, and even though the house was vacant, the grass was mown. I straightened up and eyed the house. It was whispering seductively to me, encouraging me to put my books in the library and my favorite bits of pottery on the mantel in the living room. Peter would have room to hang up his silk ties and align his Italian shoes on a shelf in his dressing room. Caron could have pool parties under my diligent yet dignified supervision. Cocktail parties on the terrace, and formal dinners abuzz with witty repartee and the clink of crystal (catered, of course).
Peter and Caron might object to the minor commute into Farberville’s downtown area. I would suggest that they live in one of the generic houses and visit me on weekends and holidays. If Angela couldn’t convince the buyer to sign over the house, my revenge would make her divorce seem like springtime in Paris.
It was approaching the time to take action of some sort. Unless Angela had communicated with her office, she was the only other person (besides Moses and me) who knew where I was. I wasn’t all that sure myself. Hollow Valley had been inhabited since the post–Civil War era, but I’d been in Farberville for twenty years and I’d never heard of it.
Moses had rolled over but was still breathing. I picked up my purse and headed down the lane that led to the paved road. I did so at a leisurely pace, listening to birds and keeping an eye out for snakes and other evils that lurk in the d
arker fringe of nature. I was alarmed when a woman popped out from an unseen path. She was trim, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and had a frizzy brown ponytail restrained by a shoelace, and a broad face.
“Oops, I hope I didn’t startle you,” she said.
“I hope I didn’t startle you.”
“Nothing could startle me around here,” she said, laughing. “I’m Natalie Hollow-Brown, but please call me Nattie. And you?”
“Claire Malloy. I came here with a real estate saleswoman to look at the house. Now she’s vanished and I’m stranded.”
Nattie raised her eyebrows. “Winston’s house is on the market?”
“I’m not sure about its status, but Angela told me that she spoke to the owner.”
“How very, very interesting,” she murmured, “but none of my business. Have you happened to see an elderly man wandering around? I’m afraid I’ve lost him.”
I gestured at the house behind me. “He found some wine and decided to take a nap on the sofa. I really need to make a phone call. Can you help me?”
Nattie glanced back at the house. “Let that old coot sleep it off where he is. He’ll show up for supper. Or he won’t, which is fine with me. You’re welcome to come home with me and use the phone.” She hesitated. “Are you going to call the police?”
“Actually, I am,” I said, “in that my husband’s the deputy chief of the Farberville Police Department. I need him to come pick me up. That way, he can have a look at the house. I hope he’ll be as excited as I am.” I would see that he was, if it meant we had to make love on the dining room table. And in the meadow, and again on silk sheets. Whatever personal sacrifices were necessary.
As we started walking in the direction of the paved road, she said, “I’d better warn you about your potential neighbors. I talk to my plants and read half a dozen fantasy novels a week, but I am by far the sanest of the lot—even though the petunias talk back. It may be a genetic flaw. Old Moses Ambrose Hollow was purported to be a drunken tyrant. He was acquitted of murder charges twice due to expeditious financial exchanges with judges and juries. Before he died, he ordered a bronze statue of himself to be placed in the area in front of the Old Tavern. It’s still there, since nobody in the family has the nerve to even suggest that we remove it. It gives me the creeps whenever I’m near it.”
“Because it might come to life?”
“Wait until you get a look at his seriously ugly face. The gargoyles at Notre Dame are a damn sight more handsome than he was. I doubt he’ll stumble down from his pedestal to terrorize the countryside and incite the peasants to riot and burn down the mill. No, I worry that a gust of wind will topple him when I’m too close.”
When we reached the pavement, I pointed at the road I’d noticed earlier. “Is that a driveway?”
“Yes, it leads to the Elysian Fields, where the wonders of nature are constrained only by the horizon,” Natty said. “It ends at the home of Ethan Hollow and his wife, Pandora Butterfly Saraswati. When they got married, Pandora changed her last name from Kumari.” She tried to contain her amusement, but her effort was less than convincing. “Kumari is the Hindu virgin goddess, you see, and Saraswati is the divine consort of Lord Brahma. I don’t think we should assume Pandora was a virgin, much less a virgin goddess. She and Ethan met at an ashram in Oregon.”
“So she’s a Buddhist named for Greek and Hindu goddesses? The theology seems a bit tangled,” I said as I tried to visualize a woman dressed in traditional garb from three religions, along with gold wings and a tinsel halo.
“She’s an egotistical flake,” Nattie replied, “but harmless. Her children, on the other hand, are vicious weasels. Pandora believes in allowing them to run free in order to expand their consciousness to become one with the universe, or some nonsense like that. Their names are Rainbow and Weevil. Don’t be fooled by their innocent smiles and guileless eyes. Remember the movie Village of the Damned?”
“I’ll watch out for them. What about Ethan?”
Nattie thought for a moment. “He was a rather ordinary boy until he went away to college. He got involved with a radical environmentalist group and dropped out of school to save whales and hug trees. When his parents died in a car crash, he showed up with long, greasy hair and grubby clothes and a contemptuous smirk. I noticed that he spent a lot of time talking to his uncle, Charles Finnelly. I later found out it was about the family business, although I don’t know the details. Six weeks after that, Ethan arrived with Pandora and they moved into what had been his parents’ house. That was seven years ago. Now he supervises the production end of the business, while Charles and Felicia handle the commercial side. Margaret Louise does the bookkeeping and all the paperwork concerning taxes, licenses, and employees’ paychecks. Hollow Valley Nursery is a big enterprise.” She pointed at an area of pine trees and undergrowth on the right side of the road. “The greenhouses are over that way, along with outbuildings, cold storage facilities, pumps, irrigation systems, and a garage. There are four delivery trucks, but they won’t be a bother because they use a road that leads east to some highway. HVN delivers to Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Five years ago Ethan and Charles decided to start a twenty-acre Christmas tree farm. The first harvest will be this season. Each year they’ve planted four acres of seedlings, so there will always be a fresh crop for Christmas. I suspect it will be very lucrative.” She picked up a rock and threw it in the direction of the greenhouses. “As if it matters anymore.” Her cackle splintered the bucolic serenity. Unable to respond, I kept my eyes on the pavement and cursed my cell phone’s untimely demise.
We turned left and continued up the road. I learned that the second driveway on the left led to the home of Felicia and Charles Finnelly, Felicia being the Hollow descendant. According to my guide, they were in their fifties, very conservative in matters of politics and religion, and tedious. “They both prance around like royals, looking down their snouts at those of us who are mere peasants. I keep waiting for them to whinny,” Nattie said. “Beyond their acreage is the green, if you will. Margaret Louise lives in the mill. The exterior is original, but the interior has been remodeled and has two bedrooms upstairs and a lovely sitting room. Presiding over the green is the Old Tavern, where Moses and I reside. It’s a dreary place, but I don’t have the energy to do anything about it. At night, I hear voices from the original taproom. Nasty, sullen voices. I keep my bedroom door locked and a shotgun next to my bed. There were dozens of murderous brawls over the years, and—”
She broke off as we caught sight of the statue in the middle of the green. Colonel Hollow had his bronze arm raised to send his troops into battle or to order pioneers to go west. The body dangling on a rope tied around his arm did not appear to be going anywhere soon.
2
Before I could so much as gasp, Nattie took off like a dog after a squirrel. A greyhound, to be more specific. I followed as fast as I could, although sprinting is not among my many talents. By the time I reached the grassy circle delineated by whitewashed stones, Nattie had her hands on her hips and was shouting, “Get down from there before I start paddling your fanny, young lady! We’ve had enough of your shenanigans! When I tell Ethan about this, he’ll have you planting seedlings for a month of Sundays!”
I looked more closely at the body dangling in the breeze. It proved to be that of a teenaged girl dressed in a skimpy blue shirt, denim shorts, and sandals. Her hair was shaved on the sides and stood up in bright purple spikes from her forehead to her nape. She seemed to have a fondness for body piercings; she had silver rings through both of her eyebrows and nostrils, her lower lip, and her navel. The tattoo visible above her waist was a purple dragon with black wings. Her makeup had been applied with vigor. Her eyes were outlined in black, and her lips were purple (to coordinate with her hair, I assumed).
“I mean it, Jordan!” Nattie continued. “Undo that rig right now. Do you realize you would have given Aunt Margaret Louise a heart attack if she found you like that?”
When Jordan raised her head to scowl, I could see that the noose did not go around her neck but merely under the back of her collar. She unbuttoned her shirt and slid her arms out of a harness made of rope. It looked dreadfully uncomfortable, I thought, ordering myself not to appreciate her ingenuity. “Yeah, yeah,” she said as she jumped off the pedestal and rubbed her armpits. “It was like a joke, okay? It’s so friggin’ boring out here that I decided to lighten things up. If Aunt Margaret Louise had a heart attack, at least we’d have some excitement. An ambulance, paramedic hunks, everybody screeching.” She gave me an appraising look, dismissed me as boring, and saluted the statue. “Good work, Mo, but you need to do something about that bird poop.”
“Put on your shirt, you fourteen-year-old hooligan!” Nattie said. “You’d better be here when Ethan and I get back. Or would you prefer to explain yourself to Uncle Charles?”
Jordan flopped down. “Like I care. Why don’t you go ahead and flog me right now—or better yet, send me home. Banish me for life from the hallowed Hollow Valley prison camp.”
Nattie shrugged. “Sorry, Claire, but I need to find Ethan. While he flogs Jordan, I’ll take you in the Old Tavern to make your call.”
“No problem,” I said without enthusiasm. There was little point in returning to my dream house in hopes that Angela eventually would remember where she’d left me. The only other option was to wait where I was, despite the proximity of a sulky teenaged girl with a macabre sense of humor. I’d had more experience with pubescent lunacy than I’d ever wanted to have—and then some. Caron and her colleague in crime, Inez Thornton, had stolen frozen frogs from the high school biology lab, been arrested while wearing gorilla suits, broken into a local celebrity’s house, and hidden an ancient Egyptian artifact in a hotel room closet. Peter’s intervention was the only reason they didn’t have rap sheets longer than those of Bonnie and Clyde.
