Death of a Gardener (Book 3 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  The question caught me off guard. “No, but she did mention she’d worried about your relationship with Helen.”

  “Our relationship? “ He clenched his jaw, his eyes fiery. “In other words, she told you Helen and I had been having an affair?”

  I made no answer, but he grunted in disgust.

  “That’s so like her. She’s the—” He broke off abruptly, then leaned toward me and said in conspiratorial tones, “I met Sheila when I was still trapped in a lousy marriage. So now, Sheila thinks I’m a proven philanderer; I cheated with her on my first wife, so I must be cheating on her with someone else.” He clenched his jaw, then said, “I’ve started divorce proceedings, but it’ll be a good six months till I’m free.” He fisted his hands. “Like the song says, I should’ve married an ugly woman. Both Sheila and my ex are real lookers, and it got me no place. At least my ex didn’t cheat on me.”

  I had to struggle to mask my surprise, which was all but impossible since I’d nearly dropped my cup. “Sheila was cheating on you?”

  He nodded, his features still contorted in anger. “Next she’s going to take me to court and try to get money out of me.”

  “I’m so sorry. Since she’s a lawyer, you’re—”

  “Not now, she isn’t.” Roger’s voice was rife with bitterness. “She had her license to practice law revoked last month.”

  “But...she offered to represent me.”

  “She is not an honest woman. Certainly not a happy one.”

  My head was spinning as I tried to make sense of all this. “What’s going to happen to Ben? Are you taking custody of him?”

  “You’d better believe it. Think I’d trust Sheila with my son?” He rose. “I gotta run. Sorry.”

  I murmured goodbye and a few words of consolation at his marital predicament, then drained the last of my tea and joined my mother, who took my standing up for a sign it was time to hightail it out of there so we’d be home in time for the school bus. So much for unraveling the mire of the Lillydales’ relationship. I glanced at my watch and realized we had time to make a quick stop at Kessler’s Plants ‘n’ Flowers, which was just a block away from the mall, to pick up a new pumpkin plant.

  When I mentioned our destination in the car, Mom said, “Uh-oh. Wasn’t Nathan’s pumpkin plant all right?”

  “No, we lost Peter. Cut down in his prime by a heartless shovel.”

  “Speaking of heartless, it’s been weeks since you’ve mentioned that miserable PTA president you used to go to school with. What’s she up to?”

  “Stephanie and her kids are spending the summer in Nantucket. She left last weekend.” That woman had long been the bane of my existence, and I didn’t even like to think about her, let alone talk about her, so I changed subjects. “Is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?”

  “I’m not sure. We could always call Bethany and ask. Her undergraduate degree was botany, you know.”

  “Right.” I sighed. I was painfully aware that my sister had been a botany major and, like Mom and my son, had an affinity for all things green and leafy. “If we can just buy a pumpkin plant that’s roughly similar, maybe I can convince Nathan that Peter just looks different in all that upturned soil.”

  “You’re going to try to trick Nathan into thinking Peter’s the same plant?”

  I pulled into the parking lot of the nursery. “I realize it’s not the noble thing to do, but Nathan is so sensitive and gets so attached to things, he’ll accuse me of intentionally murdering Peter.”

  We got out of the car and I held the door to the shop for her. “Whew. It’s like a hothouse in here,” I said as a wave of tropical-like air hit me.

  Mom ignored this last comment. We made our way down the main aisle of ultra-expensive potted plants. “Well, it worked with that goldfish of yours,” she said.

  “You mean my pet goldfish we had for a couple years? You replaced it with an imposter?”

  Mom nodded. “It died almost immediately. As did the next three replacements.” She chuckled. “Then remember those pet mice your father brought home for you and your sister?”

  “Yeah, though we only had them for a week or two. You told us raccoons must’ve gotten their cage door open, and the mice all escaped.”

  “It wasn’t raccoons. Your father and I let them out. The pair that lived after the shower incident, that is.” I raised my eyebrows, and Mother continued, “You used to let them run around in the bathtub, and your father turned on the shower and stepped in without looking.”

  All the years I’d envisioned my pet mice running happy and free through the woods. Death by shower.

  “Thanks. You just convinced me. I’m telling Nathan the truth about Peter.”

  We found a plant that was a reasonable Peter facsimile, and I handed it to a woman at the checkout counter.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  “Just some information. Is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?”

  “A fruit. Despite its size, it’s actually a berry.”

  “Ha! I was right! Would you be willing to come to my house for dinner tonight? I need you to tell that to my husband.”

  She laughed and rang up my small purchase, mistakenly assuming I was kidding about the dinner offer.

  We still had nearly fifteen minutes until the bus arrived, so my mother insisted we drive straight to my house so she could “plant Nathan’s pumpkin properly and give it a fighting chance.” Apparently she didn’t see my knowledge about the genus of pumpkins as a sign that I was capable of turning over a new leaf, so to speak.

  I got her my spade and gardening gloves, and she set to work while I went out to the mailbox. The cliche about turning a new leaf had caught my fancy. As I strolled down the driveway, I envisioned a cartoon depicting a branch of maple leaves with faces. The eyes on the smallest leaf would be crossed, with dizzy whirls surrounding it and its stem twisted in circles. The little leaf says to its fellow leaves, “Maybe it’s just because I’m so new, but it’s driving me nuts the way people keep turning me over!”

  Just as I’d grabbed a handful of letters, I heard a distant noise that sounded like a cork being popped from a champagne bottle. This was instantly followed by the sound of a window shattering in my house.

  I dropped the mail in alarm.

  A gunshot from the woods!

  “Mom!” I screamed.

  She was sprawled face first on the ground.

  Chapter 8

  Ask a Stupid Question...

  “Mom,” I panted as I reached her. “Are you all—”

  “Get down!” she hollered, gesturing frantically at me. “Somebody’s shooting at us!” She’d lifted herself up a little in the process. She had no immediately visible injuries.

  Where had the shots come from? I glanced up at the house to see what had made the sound of breaking glass. Nothing was broken on this side. I peered around the back corner. One pane in an upstairs window in Karen’s room had shattered.

  “Did you—” I intended to ask Mom if she’d been hit by any falling glass, but a violent rustling in the bushes from the woods caught my attention.

  Some high-pitched voice wailed, “Holy shit! You just shot Mrs. Peterson!”

  Without thinking, I charged toward those bushes as fast as my thirty-six-year-old, non-aerobically and irregularly exercised legs could go. As I dashed past, I heard what sounded like a creaky gate hinge from Simon Smith’s property. A moment later, Simon’s screechy voice cried out, “Caught ‘em on my camera, Molly! It’s those damned kids! Don’t let ‘em get away!”

  That was, of course, my intention, though I certainly wasn’t going to waste my breath on Simon. The loose topsoil slowed the onset of my fifty-yard dash across my lawn, but I managed to get into the woods with quite a bit of speed. Briars and bristly weeds tore at my bare legs. I crooked an arm in front of my face to protect it from the whip-like branches and fought my way through the first thicket.

  Two boys who looked to be roughly my height had gotten a head
start and were picking their way through the underbrush in an attempt to head in the opposite direction from my house. Though they wore backward-facing baseball caps, telltale red hair was visible beneath the bills.

  I grabbed hold of a sturdy branch blocking my path and yelled, “Stop right there, you Newtons! I’m calling your dad unless you can convince me not to!”

  The lead runner stopped, glanced back at me in horror, then chucked his gun behind him in the direction of his brother and took off at a dead run. In the dense foliage, he was soon out of sight. These woods were the one part of Carlton that hadn’t changed much from my youth. He would soon reach the “nature walk,” a five-mile path that wound through the area and had at least a half-dozen outlets. His brother, who appeared to be a young teen, stood frozen with indecision. I lunged toward him.

  When he caught sight of my charge, he let out a “Who-o-oa,” then started to run away.

  I leapt over a pair of ankle-twisting fallen branches, only to land on a patch of marshy, uneven ground. My sneakers made “thwock” noises with each step as the mud only reluctantly released my feet. Yet my fury at the thought of my mother almost being shot had me so motivated I wasn’t about to let a-mud hole slow me down.

  Just when it felt as if my lungs would explode from overexertion, I caught up to him and managed to get a firm grip’ on his T-shirt. He grabbed on to the nearest tree trunk, which caused me to lose my grip and stumble sideways into some bushes. I scrambled to my feet, expecting to have to resume my chase. But, with a flopping gesture of resignation, Tommy’s son held his ground. He was standing among the trees in a spot relatively free from underbrush.

  He was panting hard, and I had to double over to catch my breath myself. The leafy, mushy ground swam in my vision. I had to battle the urge to collapse in exhaustion.

  “It was ...Joey...not me,” the boy said in little bursts of breaths. “Joey pulled the trigger.”

  “Why were...you trying to shoot my mother?” I asked in my own indignant puffs of air. I gathered all my energy reserves, took a huge breath and straightened, glad to see that I had an authoritative inch of height on him. “What the heck were you thinking?”

  He looked up at me, briefly caught the full force of my furious glare, then averted his eyes. Though he and his brother now spent considerable time at Lauren’s—right next door to my parents—I had yet to be formally introduced to either of Tommy’s sons. Aside from the hair color and the faintly freckled complexion, he didn’t look like his father. He had that blobby, undeveloped appearance of a young teenager, his shoulders and chest narrower than his waist and hips. He had a receding chin and a mouthful of braces.

  “We, um, thought she was a raccoon.”

  “My mother? A raccoon? Oh, come off it!”

  “But that’s what happened.” With his gray eyes open wide, he held his palms out in a gesture of innocence. “We were just messing around with the gun, and we spotted a coon, so we followed it, and we fired at the next gray and white thing we saw. Turned out to be Mrs. Peterson’s hair.”

  “And I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear her hair described that way. But there was an entire person attached to the hair. So even if she’d been wearing a Daniel Boone cap, it’s inconceivable that you could have made such a mistake. Especially not during full daylight. When no self-respecting raccoons would be traipsing through people’s yards, I might add. What’s your name?”

  “Jasper. But like I said, it was Joey who pulled, the trigger.”

  “How old are you, Jasper?”

  “Thirteen. My older brother is fourteen.” He emphasized the word “older,” as if that let him off the hook for his role as accomplice.

  “Molly?” came my mother’s voice in the distance.

  “Over here,” I called back. “Are you okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Simon answered.

  I gritted my teeth at the sound of his voice. “I helped her up.”

  A regular Sir Galahad. With James Bond delusions. I returned my attention to the boy. “Well, Jasper, thirteen is certainly old enough to know better than to fire a gun at another person. You two just shot out the window in my daughter’s room!” I retrieved the pellet gun from where Joey had chucked it. “I’m taking this thing, and I’m not giving it back to you. I’ll turn it over to your father, but as far as I’m concerned, you two aren’t responsible enough to ever use it again.”

  Jasper stuck out his unimpressive chin in defiance. “It’s Joey’s gun. Besides, all we can kill with that thing is blue jays and starlings. It’s too weak to even shoot through a squirrel’s hide.”

  “My mother’s hide isn’t as thick as a squirrel’s. And you could have given her a heart attack, or she could have been injured from falling glass! I have two young children. I can’t allow every idiot with a gun to be shooting into my yard. Somebody already got shot to death. Don’t you realize that?”

  Jasper nodded. He now appeared to be on the verge of tears, but I was on a roll.

  “What if the police had been back here, watching my house? They could have spotted you and Joey with this pellet gun and shot you dead on the spot.”

  “Where are you?” Mom called. I could see the top of her head above some foliage she was pushing aside. And it looked nothing like a raccoon.

  “Right here,” I answered.

  “I helped her up and she’s all right,” Simon called a second time. Did he expect a merit badge?

  “I’ve got one of the shooters with me.” I put my hand on Jasper’s shoulder and said firmly, “Come into the house. We’re calling your father.”

  “But what about Joey? He’s the one who—”

  “We’ll leave that to Sergeant Newton to handle.”

  When our paths intersected, Mom was in the process of brushing Simon’s hand off her arm. She spotted us and promptly leveled one of her patented glares at Jasper. “What do you have to say for yourself, young man?”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Peterson. I mistook you for a raccoon.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Mom said, which was stunning, as this was the first time she’d ever cursed in my presence. “What were you doing?”

  “I....We....” Jasper paused, his self-composure breaking to pieces in front of us. “Joey did it. We were keeping an eye on the place, because it was all so weird the way that Helen Raleigh turned out to be a man in women’s clothing, and we—”

  “What?” my mother cried, looking right at me. “A man in—”

  “Let him finish. I’ll explain later.”

  Simon Smith, I noticed, had not flinched one iota at Jasper’s revelation. Simon was currently separating his plaid short-sleeve shirt from the thorny grip of a bramble. The fabric was so thin and worn-out that if he wasn’t careful it would rip. _

  “We couldn’t see very well from where we were hiding;” Jasper continued. “We thought you were one of his friends and were digging up something important. So Joey fired over your head to scare you off. He didn’t mean to hit the window. My dad said last night that Mrs. Masters was gonna be staying over at your house, so we thought nobody’d be there. When we saw somebody, we kind of freaked out.”

  I glanced at my watch and groaned. “Mom, the school bus has arrived by now. I’m sure they’ll go over to Lauren’s house, but the kids will be confused and won’t know why nobody’s at your house.”

  “I’ll go,” Mom offered. “By the way, in addition to the new window, we’ll need yet another pumpkin plant. When I dove down—” she glared at Jasper—” I landed right on top of it.”

  I tossed her my car keys, and she loped out of the woods.

  Simon Smith, who had been watching all of this with considerable interest, now stepped forward to place his pale, bony hand on Jasper’s shoulder. Though Simon was a tad taller, Jasper was so much sturdier than the old man that if Jasper chose to, he could plow right over him. The three of us were soon out of the woods and heading across my chewed-up lawn. Jasper shrugged Simon’s hand free and led the way.

&nbs
p; “What’s all this nonsense about Helen Raleigh being a man?” Simon Smith asked me under his breath.

  I studied him in profile. His professed ignorance was not convincing. “You already knew that, didn’t you?”

  “No, I most certainly did not.” Simon’s outrage at my suggestion was clearly phony.

  “Oh, right,” I grumbled. “You have all of this high-tech surveillance equipment on Helen’s house, but you never realized she was a he.”

  Simon pursed his thin, wrinkled lips, then said, “Didn’t have cameras inside his house. Never saw him with his• clothes off.”

  Jasper awaited us on my front porch, but I still wanted to learn more about Simon’s relationship with Helen. Simon had concocted this whole front of being a retired CIA agent rather than admit to his ordinary background. Hoping to use his fragile ego to spur him into revealing something, I asked casually, “Not much of a spy, are you?”

  “What’s that?”

  I crooked the gun under one arm and opened my door. Jasper went inside ahead of me, but Simon stopped on the top step, staring at me wide-eyed. I stepped out of my muddy shoes and set them on the porch, then retrieved my mail from where my mother must have stacked it by the door. While flipping through the bills and ads, I said with a shrug, “I mean, here you are, a trained professional spy, watching this person. And you don’t even figure out which gender the person is?” I turned my back on him and went inside.

  “So what if I did know? What of it? I didn’t have a damned thing to do with the murder.” He stood in the doorway, holding open my screen. He lifted his chin proudly. “I take it you can handle things from here, so I’ll be heading home now. Call if you need me.” He let the door bang behind him.

  I turned toward Jasper, who immediately met me with “You’re not really gonna call my dad, are you? He’ll kill me. We won’t ever do anything like this again, and you can keep Joey’s gun to guarantee it.”

  Jasper looked like a scared little boy, and it was all too easy to imagine my son in his shoes, which were, I noted, muddy and were leaving dark brown marks with each step.