Death of a Gardener (Book 3 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  “Of course not! Jeez, Mom! I’d hardly be standing here if that were my husband!”

  Mom pursed her lips and shot me a look that said, “There’s no need to shout.”

  If this were anyone else, I wouldn’t have lost my temper so quickly. Nonetheless, part of me wanted to reproach her for having asked me such an inane question. The dutiful daughter part of me, however, managed to say in a softer tone of voice, “It’s Helen Raleigh.”

  “The crazy lady who used to own your house?”

  “Yes. More or less.”

  Tommy raised his eyebrows in a signal that meant not to divulge any information that might compromise his investigation. I raised my eyebrows, to signal him that he didn’t stand a chance of keeping something like this quiet. Medical and police personnel already knew that, within our little town of Carlton, a man had been shot to death while posing as a woman. No chance of that becoming a conversational topic of any interest.

  “Can I help you pack?” Mom asked.

  “Pack?”

  “You’re not thinking of staying here, are you?”

  “Well, actually—”

  “You, Jim, and my grandchildren are moving back home until things settle down.”

  An officer called out from his squad car, “Do you think we’ll need a bulldozer, Sergeant, or just some men with shovels?”

  “Shovels,” Tommy answered.

  Mom gaped at me.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “So, do you need help packing?”

  “Let me call Jim. I’ll leave the decision up to him.”

  “’Fore I let you do that,” Tommy said, again raising his eyebrows at me, “I need to get your complete statement.” He gave my mother a pat on the back. “Sorry, Mrs. Peterson. This will take a few minutes.”

  Promising to call her later, I convinced Mom to go home, then allowed Tommy to usher me inside my house. The elderly responding officer asked Tommy about the need to test my hands for gunpowder residue, but Tommy told him I wasn’t a suspect. A shred of good news, at last.

  Tommy and I took seats in my living room. After I’d related the pertinent events of the day, he asked me to recall every conversation I’d had with Helen Raleigh in the last three. months as best I could, just in case something proved helpful. That didn’t take terribly long, since the bulk of all of our conversations had concerned the upkeep of our home and gardens.

  “Do you think there’s any possibility he’s actually Mr. Raleigh, Helen’s husband?” I asked. “Perhaps he’d killed her and buried her in the garden, and was living a double life as both himself and his wife, so that nobody would suspect she was even dead.”

  Tommy furrowed his lightly freckled brow and considered the question. “I guess that’s....Look, Moll. Just leave the questions to me, so we can move this along, all right?” He paused, then asked, “You did say Helen claimed to have bought this place with the proceeds from the divorce, right?”

  “Right. And we never discussed Mr. Raleigh at all.”

  “Helen ever give you any indication where he was from? Part of the country? Cities relatives lived in, anything like that?”

  “No. I just never wanted to encourage her...him to stay and chat by asking questions about her life.” His life, I mentally corrected. It was hard to keep the gender straight in my mind. All of our previous encounters now had to be reclassified to make sense of the notion that all that time, Helen had been a man. I’d only known Helen for three months. I could only imagine how this would strike the people in the immediate neighborhood, who’d known...him for almost three years.

  “Helen ever talk about having any children?”

  “No, and having children would’ve been physically impossible for him, considering.”

  He glared, and I raised a hand in apology at my flippant remark. “No, I never asked about children. I’d gotten the impression somehow sh-he was childless.”

  “Uh-huh.” Tommy merely stared at me, as if waiting for me suddenly to remember the one clue to Helen Raleigh’s past that I’d forgotten. But there was nothing. All I knew was that Helen was supposedly forty-five.

  At my suggestion, I rummaged through the oak roll-top desk in the living room and located our packet of papers from the closing on the house. We looked at them together, and Tommy commented that everything had been signed simply as Helen Raleigh. “Which tells us what?” I asked. “That Raleigh is our boy Helen’s maiden name?”

  Tommy fought back a smile, but made no comment. He refolded the documents. “Can I take these as possible evidence? I’ll get ‘em back to you soon.”

  I had no reason to object, and Tommy zipped them back into their plastic pouch.

  “Should I move my family in with my mom for a few days, Tommy? Would it be safer?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “May as well warn you. It’s possible this was an accidental shooting.”

  “ What? “

  He flipped through his notepad as he spoke. “Your neighbor,” he paused and referred to his notes, “Simon Smith, has reported seeing hunters in the area behind your homes. Park’s off-limits to hunting, of course, but there are deer in the area. Shell casing we found out back was from a hunter’s rifle.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” I retorted. Even as I spoke, I knew how desperately I did not want to accept that we may have bought a home where my children could be in the line of fire of some renegade hunter. “Helen was wearing an outfit that was so bright she would’ve glowed in the dark. You’re suggesting a hunter could’ve mistaken her for a deer? Wearing Day-Glo clothing?”

  He shrugged.

  “How long ago did Simon report seeing these ‘hunters’?”

  “Couple days back. Sent someone out to check on it, but—”

  “You mean Saturday?”

  He nodded, so I continued, feeling a surge of relief. “Tommy, your sons were crossing my property that day with a pellet gun on their way to the park.”

  Tommy paled a little.

  “As a matter of fact,” I continued, “I stopped them and lectured them. I told them that if they were thinking of shooting in the park to think again, because it wasn’t permitted and I wouldn’t hesitate to call you.”

  “This happened on Saturday?” he asked solemnly.

  I nodded, seeing in his eyes an angry glint that meant his sons were in trouble with Dad. “You need to know about Simon Smith. This is a man who spends almost all of his time peering through his windows with binoculars. “As a matter of fact,” I continued, suddenly remembering, “we almost didn’t buy this place because of him. When we first came to see the house, Jim spotted Simon looking at us through binoculars. We asked Helen about it. She told us Simon was retired from the CIA, and that he was always keeping an eye on the neighborhood. It made me so hesitant, though, that before we bought, I asked another neighbor, Joanne Abbott on the other side of Simon’s house, about him. She also said he was retired from the CIA. She said that he was harmless and kept to himself, and that he was so effective as a one-man Neighborhood Watch team that not one neighbor had had any break-ins or criminal mischief complaints since he’d moved in.”

  Tommy rose and stretched. “Y’ all have got some interesting neighbors, Moll.”

  “Oh, you think your street’s better? Wait till you get to know my parents.”

  Tommy smiled broadly, but not just because he knew I was kidding about my parents. We both realized this was the first time I’d acknowledged the full extent of his relationship, and future, with my best friend. It struck me then that some of the intricacies of dating hadn’t changed from high school, when friends’ bad approval rating of a prospective date could doom the relationship. Even as an adult, Tommy still hoped for my blessings as he courted Lauren.

  Tommy gave my shoulder a friendly’ squeeze, then promptly slipped back into his policeman’s persona as easily as if he were donning his cap. “Gotta help my men knock on some doors. See if we can find a w
itness.” He paused at my doorway, “Don’t tell anyone about Helen Raleigh being a man. We need to keep that under wraps, so to speak, for a few days. Least till we learn Helen’s real name.”

  As soon as Tommy was out of sight, I called Jim at work, pulling him out of a meeting. “Helen Raleigh was shot to death in our yard,” I greeted him.

  “What?”

  “Our former house owner was shot to death. And it turns out that Helen’s a man, wearing women’s clothing.” Oops. Ah, well. Surely Tommy didn’t expect me to keep secrets from my husband.

  After a moment of silence, Jim said, “Could you run that by me again?”

  “I was in my office and heard a bang. I rushed outside, and there was Helen. He must have buried something in our yard, because he’d been digging a hole. So now the police are going to have to dig up the yard and find out what it was.”

  Again there was a long silence. “Could you start over? Where was .... Why....” He sighed. Right about now, poor Jim would be massaging his temples with his free hand. “My secretary pulls me out of a meeting and I think, ‘Uh-oh, bet the car’s broken down or one of the kids is sick.’ But no. You tell me that the woman who used to own our house is a man and is now dead, and the police are digging up the yard.”

  “Did anyone overhear you just now? Because I promised Tommy I wouldn’t tell anyone about Helen being a man in disguise. I’m sure he didn’t mean you, though. There has to be some sort of spousal indemnity clause, since spouses can’t be forced to testify against each other in criminal cases.”

  Jim said nothing. There was no noise in the background. That probably meant no one was nearby. “Could we....” Jim paused, then said irritably, “Start from some point that makes sense. When I left for work this morning, what happened next?”

  The correct answer was: I cleaned up the breakfast dishes. This was an opportunity for me to suggest that instead of soaking his cereal bowl in the sink as he had every morning for the past thirteen years, he put it in the dishwasher. But Jim sounded a little edgy. He would probably not appreciate receiving constructive criticism at this particular moment.

  I launched into a full description, starting with my first encounter with Helen this afternoon. Jim made me repeat nearly every sentence three times. Finally, he decided to leave work early and come home, and that we should spend a couple of nights at my parents’ house.

  That accomplished, I went outside to see if the police had dug up a buried treasure. A tow truck was just pulling away from the curb with Helen’s car.

  Though our cul-de-sac consisted of just four other houses-one of which was currently unoccupied as its owners vacationed overseas-the sidewalk was now filled with gawkers. Most of them had the same, semi-embarrassed posture—arms crossed, staring at my house as if their vigilance had been, against their will, mandated by a higher authority. At least this made the officers’ jobs easier. They didn’t have to knock on doors, since residents were standing in front of them.

  I made a quick scan of the neighboring homes. Surprisingly, Simon Smith, the crotchety retiree who lived next door, was nowhere to be seen. It would kill him to learn that the one time he wasn’t peering with binoculars was the one time something worth watching had happened.

  Stan and Joanne Abbott, who lived on the other side of Simon’s house, were outside. I’d never known Stan to return home from work this early, but then again, I didn’t know him well enough to be familiar with his daily patterns. Joanne, on the other hand, was gradually becoming a friend.

  Stan immediately waved and called to me, “Molly, what’s going on?”

  Nothing like a corpse in your yard and a batch of policemen with shovels to turn your standoffish neighbors into your very best friends. Actually, though, Helen’s body had apparently been removed while I was inside on the phone. The policemen were now purposefully digging away at my empty yard.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I called back, “when I know more.” Too bad I had to honor my promise to Sergeant Newton not to mention the only part that might have been fun to discuss.

  Sheila Lillydale pulled into her driveway and wasted no time before she walked across the asphalt toward me. A startlingly pretty, petite woman, she was smartly dressed in a light blue cotton skirt suit. It brought out the color in her eyes. Her dark brown hair was fastened into a bun. This must be her official attire for court appearances. Her lips were pursed and her high forehead was knitted. She greeted me with “Do you need representation?”

  “Uh, no. I certainly can’t think of any reason to hire a lawyer. After all, I didn’t kill...her.”

  “Kill?” she repeated. “Someone’s been murdered?”

  “The former owner. Helen Raleigh.”

  “Helen? Helen’s been killed? Oh, my God! What happened?”

  She looked deeply upset. Helen must have been a friend, though, on the surface, the two women had nothing in common. Not even gender.

  “I don’t know. I was gardening, and Helen carne over and—”

  “Gardening? Could you be more specific?”

  More specific? Had she forgotten we weren’t in a courthouse? “I was...planting bulbs. Tulips. Red tulips, to be precise. Along the west side of my house, the garden that faces Simon Smith’s property. Then—”

  “You were planting tulips in the middle of June?”

  “Yes,” I answered pointedly, not appreciating her insinuation that I was a gardening ignoramus, which was true, but ill-mannered. “Why? Are you supposed to plant them only in months that contain the letter ‘r’?”

  “Just go on, please.” Her pretty features remained strained.

  “So, as I was saying, Helen Raleigh stopped by and said—”

  “What time was this?”

  “Eight minutes before two p.m. Then—”

  The baby-faced police officer did a double take at the sight of Sheila and me talking and raced over to us. He said to Sheila, “Excuse me, ma’am. We need you to clear the area. There’s—”

  “I’m Ms. Masters’s lawyer.”

  “That’s news to me,” I responded. “I don’t need a lawyer. I haven’t done anything illegal in years.”

  “Of course you haven’t,” Sheila said. “If only guilty people needed lawyers, our workload would be cut by a good third.”

  “Just a third? You have a high opinion of your clients.”

  “We’re all guilty of something at one time or another. Of bad judgment, if nothing else. Molly, I’m serious. You may need me to protect your rights. Did you know that some men are digging up your yard as we speak?”

  “Well, sure. But—”

  “And did you think your property wasn’t going to sustain damage as a result? Or that you weren’t deserving of restitution?”

  “Um....” My head was in a whirl and I was not enjoying any of my current exchange with Ms. Lillydale. Time to change subjects. “How’s Ben doing these days? Is he glad third grade’s almost over?”

  She shot me a queer look and handed me her business card. “We’ll talk later.” She walked briskly back toward her house. Her attitude annoyed me. I felt like calling back at her, “Even though you’re a lawyer and someone’s been killed in my yard, we’re still mothers.” My priorities, at least, were solidly in the right place.

  My husband drove up a minute later. He was dressed casually in gray slacks and a blue-collared T-shirt. He had gorgeous dark-brown eyes. His brown hair was now all but plastered to his forehead. He steadfastly refused to turn on the air conditioner in the car, willing to sweat to save a few pennies on gasoline.

  We went inside and, after assessing each other’s emotional state, which was more one of disbelief than anything else, we began to pack. I told him, “You know what strikes me as the most strange in all of this? Why, if Helen had buried something important in the garden, why wouldn’t he have dug it up before selling? And why would he now have tried to recover it in broad daylight, when he knew I was home?”

  “If this is a contest, I think the fact
that he went around posing as a woman for more than two years is even stranger.”

  I called Lauren to check on the kids, and she told me my mother had already collected them with the explanation that we would be “moving in” with her for a few days. I tried to decide if this was worth getting miffed at, and decided it wasn’t. After loading a pair of suitcases and Spot’s and Tiger’s cages, I grabbed my cut-glass punch bowl, which now housed Karen’s six would-be frogs, and gingerly scooted onto the passenger seat of Jim’s Jeep Cherokee. This had been the first time I’d actually found a use for the enormous punch bowl—a wedding present from my aunt Louise.

  Jim had to drive so slowly to avoid my getting a lap full of pollywogs that a strolling basset hound could have passed us, but we arrived in time for dinner. By then I felt seasick from staring at bobbing frog-faces.

  The children were delighted at the arrival of their pets, and I went off to help in the kitchen. Mom was nothing if not regimented. Every day since I could remember, at five p.m. sharp, Mom started to make dinner, which was on the table promptly at six-thirty. Tonight, we had pot roast, potatoes, and green beans—Mom’s version of light summer fare. It was lucky we were so high-strung. By all rights, my sister, parents, and I should have weighed two hundred pounds each.

  Tonight’s dinner conversation centered on soothing our children’s—and my mother’s—fears. Neither Karen nor Nathan seemed to truly grasp the magnitude of what had occurred. Though we monitored their television viewing fairly closely, they had probably become so inured to murder that it wasn’t real to them.

  Perhaps, too, my apathy that an acquaintance had been murdered had a lot to do with their reaction. I tried to muster some sadness, but failed. According to all of the data currently at my disposal, Mr. Helen had been a miserable, unpleasant, and, probably, crazy person.

  Nathan said it was too bad they weren’t doing show-and-tell during this last week in school, as “I could tell my class about the lady getting killed in my yard.” Then Karen argued that it wasn’t Nathan’s yard, because it was closer to her bedroom window. At which point, Mother suggested a game of Old Maid, and that brought an end to the discussion.