Death in the Orchid Garden

by Ann Ripley

  She and John and the Corbins had been placed at a prime table under the stars. Lighted torches helped them see their dinners. Marty and Steffi were shiny faced and dressed in bright resort clothes. Big people already, the clothes made them look even bigger. Marty was in a shirt embossed with palm trees and Steffi in a sleeveless gown festooned with cockatoos, bamboo stalks, and hibiscus. Louise, feeling almost dowdy in her beige outfit, realized that the first thing the Corbins had done on arrival was to hit the trendy shops in the vast marble-and-carpet halls of Kauai-by-the-Sea. The clothes were quite in character, thought Louise, for Marty was talented, flamboyant, and sometimes over-the-top. His wife was just as colorful. Equally in character was the drink they’d both ordered, called a “Lava Flow,” a creamy pina colada with a dramatic swirl of red crushed strawberries running through it.

  “So that’s the skinny on that big old cliff out there,” said her producer.

  “Yep, Shipwreck Rock. I wouldn’t have done it, but the concierge told me it’s a pussy-cat of a climb and it was,” enthused John. “There are a few volcanic rocks to clamber over midway up the trail—you’re on all fours then. But man, what a view when you reach the top—you can see for miles. And it gives you this feeling—”

  Marty waggled his brown-haired head and laughed. “—that it might all collapse and you’d fall into the ocean?”

  Faintly rebuked, Louise’s enthusiastic cohost turned his amber eyes to her. “Louise, you’ll love it. We’ll go up there tomorrow, okay?”

  “I’d love to.” She thought about telling them about the monk seal on the beach, but decided not to take attention from John’s story.

  Marty said, “Glad you enjoyed your climb, John. That’s what we’re here for—relaxation—part of it, anyway. Maybe we’ll listen in on this botany conference—anyway, you can, Lou, you plant maven, you.” He grinned at her. “We’ll just swim and relax . . .”

  “And shop,” added Steffi, turning her big, dark eyes Louise’s way. “Louise, when will you be free tomorrow to shop? We need to go to Koloa, and we’ll stop at the Poi Pu Shopping Center on the way.”

  Unlike some women, Louise thought of shopping as a punishment, not a pleasure. But she said, “I’ll be free in the afternoon.” Steffi was a good-hearted woman whom Louise didn’t know that well, but enjoyed on those occasions when they did get together. She didn’t envy Steffi for having to live with Marty, for not only was her producer temperamental, but he hadn’t always been true to his marriage vows.

  “You ladies go off any time you get a chance,” said Marty, “but first, let’s get down ’n dirty and review what we came here for. So we’re going to the National Garden.”

  “National Tropical Botanical Garden, it’s called,” Louise said. “Or you could shorten it to NTBG.”

  Marty waved a big hand. “Yeah, whatever.” They’d already been given a heads-up about the shoot from the PBS associate producer from KHET-TV in Honolulu; he’d scouted the site for them. But Marty always liked to review preparations.

  “Joel Greene is our so-called ‘associate producer,’” grumbled Marty. “I don’t how he’s gonna work out. He’s a film major from the University of Hawaii and probably gets paid squat. He doesn’t sound like he’s more than twenty years old, though he does come highly recommended by Bob Squires, the guy who runs the Honolulu station. Heaven only knows who they’ll send as shooter and audio engineer. Well, it seems first Joel had this great guy to interview, but he’s much in demand and something came up and then he didn’t have him. But now Joel has him again.”

  “Has what great guy?” asked John, his brow furrowed in confusion.

  “You must mean Dr. Tom Schoonover,” said Louise, “another of our reasons for coming to Hawaii. He’s the foremost expert on Pacific Island plants. So Schoonover’s back in the picture?”

  “That’s what Joel says,” said the producer.

  “We’ll get him walking through the garden, showing us all the endangered species,” said Louise. “Nobody could know their way around there better than he does.”

  “Yeah,” affirmed Marty. “It seems Schoonover just got back from one of his plant explorer trips to the southern Pacific. Apparently the guy’s pretty famous.”

  John raised an officious finger. “I’ve only heard this mentioned as a possibility. But since he wasn’t in the plans initially, we need a separate program segment—or maybe he could be our lead-in to the program. Show him taking a solitary walk down the botanic garden trails as he describes the fate of all those, uh, species.”

  Marty, who’d almost demolished his mahi mahi main course, sat back, his large brown eyes twinkling at John. “Just what Lou said. Have her walking with this guy through the gardens and descending cliffs to capture orchids or somethin’. Then you and Lou together will be handling the ‘Three Tenors’ and their conflicting agendas.”

  The Three Tenors. That was Marty’s cynical moniker for the trio of Doctors Bruce Bouting, Matthew Flynn, and Charles Reuter, the stars of their upcoming shoot. They were not expected to be easy to deal with; Louise had already confirmed that in her conversation with Bouting while swimming in the lagoon.

  “Now here’s what else I would propose . . .” continued John.

  Louise took a bit of square-cut seared ahi, dipped it into a delicate sauce, put it in her mouth, and let her mind wander. Later, she learned it was a mistake to daydream when John Batchelder was talking.

  When Marty had called two months ago with the long-awaited confirmation of the trip to Kauai to produce two Gardening with Nature shows, Louise had been busy. She’d been peering into a mirror in the harsh light of a January afternoon. To her surprise and horror she had discovered a change in her face.

  “So the trip’s set,” she’d said to Marty, while still examining this unsettling change.

  “Yeah. “You, me, Steffi, John Batchelder—we’ll all go together.”

  So Marty’s phone call had been a double whammy. At the same moment that she’d found that down line—that wrinkle—on the left side of her mouth, she’d heard that her younger cohost was coming on this location trip, the most important one in her four-year career as a TV garden show hostess.

  Louise was forty-seven—almost forty-eight—and married with children. She wouldn’t have cared about the wrinkle if she weren’t a TV personality with a video camera trained on her face. Not that she was a sex goddess by any means, but even garden show hostesses were supposed to uphold some standard of good looks, except for the occasional British crone who made it big on TV on the basis of outrageous quips and a deep knowledge of horticulture.

  Leaning into the mirror, she had taken three fingers and shoved the down line upward in hopes of banishing it forever. Then she’d remembered she was talking on the phone with her producer.

  “Marty, sorry,” she’d said. “I got distracted.”

  “Hey,” Marty had said in an injured tone, “wassamatta wid you?” Marty was born and raised in Philadelphia and hadn’t bothered to change his way of talking just because he’d moved to Washington, D.C. “I was gonna hang up on ya. Where ya been anyway?”

  “I’m right here, thinking. I thought you said John Batchelder wasn’t coming. Why does shooting two shows on Kauai require his presence?”

  “We don’t use him that much and I thought it only fair to give him a perk. God knows, as a part-time employee, he gets few enough perks. And he’s newly engaged to some dame named Linda. That makes him anxious to get ahead.”

  Suddenly, Louise had known the truth. “He threatened to quit on you, didn’t he?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did,” said Marty, “and I didn’t find it handy for him to do that right now. But Lou, dear, don’t get your nose out of joint because he’s honed in on this trip. We’re gonna have fun. We can even take a little side trip to the Big Island—I hear there’s lots of lava action developing over there. And the programs are all about your favorite kind of people, plant explorers.”

  “Yeah,” she mutt
ered. “The last time I met one, he was murdered immediately afterward.”

  Marty had given forth a big, uncertain laugh. “That can’t happen this time, can it?”

  “How do you know that? We’re featuring three prima donna botanists.”

  “Tough,” said Marty. “Bouting, Flynn, and Reuter will just have to learn how to get along. The ones I’m worried about are you and John.”

  She had given a last glance at her face in the mirror and turned determinedly away. “Don’t worry. I’ll get along fine with John. Heaven knows I try to like him. It’s just that he sets up this phony competition with me. I wish he’d get over it.”

  “He will in time,” Marty had assured her. “He needs to grow.”

  “The other thing about him is—well, never mind.” The other thing that rankled Louise about John Batchelder, something she needn’t share with her producer . . . his extreme good looks. Sometimes she wondered if it didn’t unbalance the show. Here she was, a mature, only nominally pretty woman—and with a down line that some day would help form a jowl! And there was John, ten years younger and too darned beautiful for words.

  The only hope for her was that she’d heard Hawaii, with its moist island air, was beneficent on the skin. That would remain to be seen. But for insurance, she’d brought with her on this trip a little jar of cream in a mauve-colored glass jar with gold lid. She’d purchased the anti-aging cream a couple of years ago for an outrageous price. It had languished, unused, in her and Bill’s medicine cabinet, but its time was now at hand.

  Hawaiian music, courtesy of three ukulele players, started in the background. Louise blinked and quit woolgathering. She looked over at John, sitting across from her at the table. Bits of golden light from the bold torches flickered on his wavy brown hair. His dark-lashed eyes flashed with sincerity. Although the light was dim, Louise was sure that John had no lines in his face.

  John was leaning into Marty Corbin’s space, selling him an idea, while for some reason slanting the occasional stealthy glance her way. Had Louise been in her normal stamping ground, the competitive atmosphere of greater Washington, D.C., she would have been wary of her younger cohost’s overt attempts to impress and co-opt her producer. But something strange was happening to Louise; she felt it. The air around her was pure and balmy, the fragrant flowering shrubs that crowded the edges of the terrace perfuming the air. It was all a sheer joy to the senses. She sat erect but at ease, feeling for the first time in a long time like a whole, integrated person who was completely relaxed and content with life. Even her skin felt moist and young, almost dewy. . . .

  Surely, there was no dark side in this sunny land and not even the ambitious John could make her uneasy. The greatest danger was hurricanes, which had been known to ravage Kauai’s hotels and beach properties, the last one, Hurricane Iniki, more than a decade ago. But this was not hurricane season, so why worry? The island was well protected against tsunamis, such as the horrible one experienced on the rim of the Indian Ocean. Here, sirens housed in yellow or green boxes perched high on steel poles squealed out warnings to islanders who were familiar with their killing power.

  John was now opining on how to handle the segment with the three difficult scientists. He said, “What we might do is keep them separate, maybe til the very end.”

  Marty, sitting across from Louise, looked properly impressed. Even the dark-haired Steffi, not normally interested in the production details of her husband’s WTBA-TV shows, was paying close attention to the vivacious John.

  Why should Louise care? Why feel insecure about her own career when it appeared to be going fine? And then a great guilt settled on her: perhaps her own ambition was too strong and she ought to yield to her husband. Bill, who’d relinquished his undercover work for the CIA in lieu of working at the Department of State as a consultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency, had been hinting that they should move to Europe for his job’s sake.

  She bent her head and put down her fork. A woman of forty-seven ought to be able to sacrifice her own career plans for the sake of a hardworking husband. Yet the thought of leaving the States again, as she’d done at least five times before while raising their family of two daughters, was not that appealing. Yet the girls didn’t need her—daughter Martha was married and Janie was ready to go off to college.

  It was time, perhaps, for Louise to quit this TV career and go with Bill.

  Having decided this, she shed her moment of guilt. For some reason, she found herself feeling almost warm and fuzzy toward John Batchelder. He was not her bête noire, she realized now, but more of a friend than she’d realized.

  It was almost as if she’d become intoxicated after landing on this beauteous island only five hours ago. She was overcome with its beauty, its moist and welcoming atmosphere, altogether co-opted by the sense of well-being around her.

  Marty Corbin reached a big hand over and grabbed her forearm. “Lou, what’s with you? Here we got John throwing all these ideas at me and you’re sittin’ there daydreaming.”

  Steffi bent toward her, the cockatoos, bamboo, and hibiscus on her ample bosom bending with her. “Honey, are you feeling all right?”

  Louise smiled back at her. “I feel wonderful. I’ve never felt better in my life.”

  Her producer said, “Then you don’t mind the fact that tomorrow you and John will go to the National Tropical Botanical Garden and meet Joel. And John will take charge of laying out the scenario for the segment we’ll do with this Schoonover fellow.”

  “Oh?” Her good feelings toward her coanchor dissipated like one of the zephyrs that danced across the terrace. She looked at Marty in surprise. While she’d been dreaming, John had been working.

  Marty leaned in toward her. “He’ll be calling the shots on this one. Wants the experience, he says. And he might know more than this whippersnapper Joel.”

  She straightened and felt a little twinge in her back. “That’s fine, Marty, just fine.” She looked at John across the table. He had the expression of the cat that ate the canary. “I’ll be happy to help you, John, in any way I can.”

  Sure, help you. Maybe help you fall off one of those steep cliffs at the garden . . . or maybe shove you into that fast-moving river that runs through it . . .

  Louise forced her mind off these silly, murderous thoughts. “So, anyone going to the Main Ballroom to hear Dr. Schoonover speak?” Her companions shook their heads. She clutched her purse and rose from her chair. “Me neither, since we’re talking to him tomorrow. Now please excuse me, I need my beauty sleep.”

  She could have kicked herself. The remark instantly revealed her fear of aging.

  4

  Thursday morning

  Louise put on sturdy denim pedal pushers and a sleeveless khaki-colored shirt for what would probably be a vigorous day in the tropical gardens. On her feet she wore her waterproof sandals. Meeting John in the lobby, they agreed she’d drive the rental car, since she had studied the road maps. Their first stop was the Kilohana Golf Club down the road from their hotel. They’d heard breakfast at the club restaurant, Joe’s on the Green, was not only fabulous, but a bargain, especially when compared with the $22 tab for the morning buffet at their own hotel.

  Sipping her first cup of coffee, Louise began to forgive John for being John. After all, being in Kauai was, as the man on the beach had said, like being in paradise. Weather perfect after a spate of torrential rains, surroundings gorgeous, people friendly, and driving manageable, a world away from the paralysis of cars in metropolitan Washington. She didn’t want to ruin the trip by scrapping with her colleague as if she were still on a grade school playground.

  “Man-oh-man!” exclaimed John, sounding like a little boy. “Look at that! For $6.95 you get the whole works—sausage, eggs—or how about ‘Josephine’s Ultimate Banana Macadamia Nut pancakes’? They’re only nine dollars.” He slapped the menu shut. “And they have coconut juice to run over the pancakes.”

  Her stomach contracted in protest. She
was a purist who would never under any circumstances run coconut juice over her pancakes. Maple syrup and only maple syrup for her.

  Louise took another sip of coffee and looked out on the emerald green fairway backing the restaurant. “You’re going to have fun today working with Joel and blocking out this interview with Schoonover.”

  John looked acclimated to the Hawaiian environment in a turquoise knit shirt and tan slacks. He reached a hand up and smoothed his healthy head of wavy brown hair. Louise realized that if he were a bird, one would have called this preening. “You know, I’m ambitious, Louise, probably a little more so than you in your particular . . . situation. I want to be a producer one of these days, a Marty Corbin, if you will.” Her cohost fastened his amber-eyed gaze on her and held it unflinchingly.

  They both knew Marty had a solid if not brilliant reputation in the Public Broadcasting System world. Her show, Gardening with Nature, was his most widely syndicated product.

  “I guess I sensed your ambition. It sounds like a logical move for you. Keep all your options open—you can be an on-air personality and a production expert as well.” She couldn’t help inserting a little jab. “Then, if you should lose your looks, you can always go behind the camera.”