Garden of Dreams

by Patricia Rice

  “Yeah, I’m supposed to stir it every fifteen minutes,” Jackie yelled back, still pounding away with the joysticks. He gave a yip of triumph as he apparently hit whatever target the computer game had thrown him.

  In the kitchen, viewing the sauce spurting in volcanic eruptions, spewing molten lava down the side of the pot and across the stove, Nina estimated the pot hadn’t been stirred since the game started. She stirred the sauce, turned the range down, then tasted the contents. Not bad. She should pick some fresh lettuce from the garden and fix a salad later.

  Not knowing what to make of a man who could cook real marinara, Nina wandered back to the front room. She noticed JD’s door was closed and could hear the frantic clicking of his keyboard over the noise of Jackie’s game.

  “Monster House?” she asked, sitting on the couch and watching the game flicker over the computer screen.

  “Nah. This is a new one that’s not out yet. Da—” He hesitated. “JD said as long as I’m grounded, I might as well do something useful and test it for him. It’s really cool. Wanta play?”

  She knew next to nothing about computers. She’d played with a few at school just to see what they were all about but couldn’t find any particularly good use for them in her life. She didn’t need them for her classes, thank goodness, since the school scarcely had enough to go around. But as much as she hated technology, she couldn’t contain her curiosity. Dropping down to the floor beside Jackie, she let him show her how to play the game.

  ***

  His stomach rumbling in anticipation of the meal ahead, JD emerged a few hours later to find Jackie and their landlady totally enraptured by a computer treasure hunt. Leaving them engrossed in the game, he strolled back to the kitchen. From the stains on Jackie’s shirt and the dirty plate in the sink, JD assumed his son had eaten. From the pot of cold, gluey pasta in the sink, he assumed Nina hadn’t.

  Cursing the lack of a food disposal, not to mention the absence of a dishwasher, he scraped the mess into the garbage and put on another pot of water to boil. Food obviously wasn’t the way to his landlady’s heart, or her bed. Remembering her slender arms wrapped around him, her slight weight pressed into his back, he’d stayed awake half the night planning ways to seduce her. Maybe he should invent a romantic computer game.

  ***

  James MacTavish sat in his swivel office chair with the smoggy skyline of Los Angeles behind him, contemplating the depths to which a Monday morning could sink. He’d thought last week bad enough when it started out with JD wrecking his lovingly restored Chevy pickup and DiFrancesco turning the R&D department upside down before he’d taken off in pursuit of JD.

  Now he sat here with Harry’s paranoid telephone messages about stolen plans, a letter demanding repayment of the loan to DiFrancesco’s company, and a message from JD saying the software program had hit a snag. And across from him sat a beautiful, tearful woman demanding he find her son or she would call the police.

  Jimmy briefly contemplated a quick trip to Hawaii until JD got his ass back here. Then he studied the streaks of tears down a soft, creamy cheek, blue eyes glittering with as yet unshed moisture, and his guts twisted into a knot.

  He’d finally figured out this was the mother of JD’s son, the son his partner had known nothing about until a few weeks ago. JD sure had damned good taste in women. This one had endless tanned legs, golden curls clinging to a slender neck, and ruby lips that trembled when she spoke. She also had a purple bruise beneath her right eye.

  “I’ve left my husband, Mr. MacTavish. JD was right. I should have left him when he started smacking Jackie around, but I couldn’t bear to admit another failure. Now I realize I that made me a victim, and I refuse that role. I want my son back, Mr. MacTavish. I must have been out of my mind to agree to letting JD take him away. I’ve been out of my mind for some time now, it seems, but I’ve come to my senses. Where has that irresponsible idiot taken my son?”

  Jimmy could tell her. He’d received the police report on the wrecked truck. But Harry’s psycho messages had made him slightly paranoid, also. What if this woman was just a front for DiFrancesco’s organization? JD had sworn him to secrecy.

  Something had happened to send his partner careening off into Nowheresville. He and JD went back a long way, and Jimmy loyally supported JD’s decisions, even if he didn’t understand them. Without JD, this company wouldn’t exist, he wouldn’t have the hefty paycheck he took home every two weeks, or that lovely bonus at the end of each year that had bought him a house in Beverly Hills, a series of red Corvettes, and the attentions of a female like Barbara.

  But this woman had a right to her son.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Walker. JD sends me messages, but there’s no way of identifying where they’re coming from. He said he was heading to Myrtle Beach, but he hasn’t arrived yet. He said the boy’s with him and doing fine. He wanted me to pass that on to you so you wouldn’t worry. Could it hurt for them to take a small vacation and get to know each other?”

  “For all I know, that damned JD Marshall is teaching him devil worship and using Jackie as a front for a car-theft ring. I wouldn’t put anything past that man. I want my son, and I want him now. I didn’t mind him bringing Jackie here for a weekend or so, but I never agreed to their taking off across the country where I couldn’t find them. I’m calling the police, Mr. MacTavish. I’m sorry. I thought you might help me—”

  The intercom buzzed. With an apologetic glance to Nancy Walker, Jimmy grabbed the receiver as if it were a lifeline. Swiveling his chair so he looked out the window and away from the weeping woman, he whispered harshly, “What is it?”

  “Harry Marshall is on the other line. He sounds rather odd, almost hysterical, and he insisted I interrupt whatever you were doing. He says it’s a matter of life and death.”

  Jimmy knew JD’s terrifying automaton of a secretary too well. If she interrupted him, it could only be a matter of utmost importance. He had her make the connection.

  “Jimmy?” The voice over the line sounded weak and terrified. “Jimmy, you’ve got to find JD. They want the program. They’re out here looking for JD, and they’re not happy, Jimmy. They may come after you next. Find him—” The rapidly rising hysterical note in his voice cut off when the line went dead.

  Jimmy stared at the plastic receiver until it started beeping at him. Pulse pounding, he lowered the phone. He wasn’t a fast thinker or impulsive by nature. JD had the ideas. Jimmy carried out the meticulous details. But something told him he’d better think fast and make his own decisions right now.

  “Do you have a car, Mrs. Walker?” he inquired. Mentally, he wrote off Barbara without a single regret.

  JD’s ex-wife looked up at him, startled, but she nodded.

  “It wouldn’t happen to be a Chevy, would it?” he asked hopefully.

  When she nodded again, he resigned himself to fate. “How would you like to tour the USA in your Chevrolet?”

  ***

  “Damn! Damn, damn, and double damn!” JD flung the hematite paperweight against the wall. The blue rock he’d found at the lake had fascinated him, but it shattered now from the force of the blow.

  He couldn’t believe he’d run into a snag he couldn’t solve at this late date. He had the world by the ear with this program. A secured loop from consumer to business to bank and back again via the Internet had been impossible until now. He’d be richer than Gates if he completed this. But he couldn’t fix the snag.

  Swearing, pacing back and forth, JD finally stalked out of the room he’d closeted himself in since last evening. To his surprise, sunrise crept through the wide mullioned windows in the front room, illuminating old-fashioned braided rugs and that monster couch with all the pillows he could learn to appreciate, should he ever have enough time to lie on it again.

  Suddenly tired, he rubbed his eyes and staggered down the hall toward the kitchen. Maybe coffee would refresh his brain. He was so damned close. He could taste success. He just needed to unravel that one lo
usy knot.

  A vision in white poured water into the coffee-maker as he entered the kitchen. The ironic lift of a cinnamon-colored eyebrow warned he had not encountered an angel. Feeling gritty in wrinkled jeans and torn shirt, JD ran his hand through his hair, realized it probably already stood on end, and grimaced.

  “Good morning to you, too,” she said, reaching for the refrigerator door. “If this is the way you always wake up, I’ll set the timer so you can have the coffee before I get up.”

  He thought he discerned more of her breasts than hitherto revealed beneath a T-shirt advertising the one hundredth Fancy Farm picnic, but he wouldn’t let himself fall into that trap. Grumbling about taking a shower, he stumbled back down the hall, wishing he were in his antiseptic modem home where spike-haired fairies didn’t materialize at dawn.

  A little later, he returned to the kitchen, his hair washed, his clothes in respectable order, to find the kitchen empty except for the fresh pot of coffee. Frustrated that he’d cleaned up for nothing, he poured a big mug of coffee and wandered outside. Somehow, he knew the sprite had disappeared into the morning dew. He had the unreasonable belief that he deserved her company after going to the trouble of showering and changing clothes.

  He found her frowning up at the supposedly dying birch tree while she ran water from a hose at its base.

  “Isn’t it a little early in the morning for playing nursemaid to a tree?” He wanted to woo the damned woman, not snap at her, but lack of sleep made him grouchy.

  “Aunt Hattie planted this tree for my twenty-first birthday. Do you suppose it knows that I’m declaring her incompetent? Maybe it’s dying in protest.”

  JD squinted at her through the bright glare of the morning sun. He thought Miss Nina Toon might be a twig short of a full tree. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. Then what she said finally sank in. The famous Aunt Hattie had been shuffled off to a nursing home, and this sprite meant to have her declared incompetent. Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs, he studied her more carefully.

  “Alzheimer’s?” he guessed.

  She shrugged. “Senile dementia, whatever you want to call it. She’s closing in on ninety. She has a right to check out of the real world, I suppose. I had just hoped to take care of her the way she took care of me.”

  JD sipped his coffee and contemplated the brilliant dawn and the mockingbird singing its foolish head off in the holly tree. Anything was better than feeling this diminutive female’s pain.

  How was it that he could feel her pain when he never noticed any other’s? He had been known to work through an earthquake while people ran screaming from the building around him. Hell, his alcoholic old man had taught him all about ignoring pain, including his own. Trees died. People got old. Life went on. Why worry?

  For some reason, his usual careless attitude didn’t work this time. Watching his landlady gnaw her bottom lip and frown, JD had the ridiculous urge to console her.

  “From what you’ve said,” he ventured tentatively, “you are taking care of her. That tree is your Aunt Hattie. This house, this land, everything around it. They’re all your aunt. You’re doing what she wanted you to do.”

  She gave him a brief, unhappy look then nodded. “Maybe. I can live with that, I suppose. I just hate going into court and declaring her incapable of taking care of herself or her property. But it’s the only way I can keep it.”

  “You’d lose it otherwise?” He told himself it was just an idle question, something to keep the conversation rolling while he rested his brain and drank his coffee. Once he solved his little snag, he’d be on the road to California.

  He snorted. Sure, and who was he fooling? That’s why he’d dived headfirst into her idea for a botanical garden—because he was bored and needed a hobby. First thing he’d do when he returned to California would be to hire a shrink.

  ‘The cell phone company wants a tower on Hattie’s Hill. They’re threatening to have the land condemned if I don’t give them right-of-way. I can’t fight them unless I have power of attorney.”

  Hattie’s Hill. What in hell was Hattie’s Hill? And that’s when it came to him. He only knew the bare bones of law as it affected him. But phone companies and powers of attorney struck a chord, and all the little pieces of one of his problems began snapping into place.

  “Don’t worry,” JD informed her, his mind already back at the computer. “If you don’t have power of attorney, you can’t sign their damned right-of-way either.”

  With that, he strode off, leaving her staring after him.

  Chapter 11

  “Yeah, JD’s not bad,” Jackie replied noncommittally to an earlier question as he swung his weed hook through the vines and brambles beneath an old pin oak. “He’s only grounded me for the week. This work stuff stinks, but there’s not much better to do.”

  His companion in travail stopped and wiped the sweat from his brow with a filthy rag, then rested on his long-handled shears. “Why doesn’t Miss Toon just hire a bulldozer? That’s what my dad would do.”

  Secretly relieved that the other guy had quit first, Jackie stopped working and took a deep drink of his bottled water. He glanced around at the small dent they’d cut in the thick undergrowth and gave a mental groan. “I don’t know. She’s pretty weird.”

  “Yeah. I remember last year she ran out of the classroom and yelled at the guys topping the trees in the school yard. Told them they were murdering the trees. She threw a fit when they wouldn’t stop, and she got the principal. My dad said she told him that even if they didn’t stop murdering the trees, the bucket truck was about to break down and the guy could get stranded up there.”

  Jackie grinned. “Yeah, she’s got a thing about trees, for certain. What happened?”

  His companion shoved the rag in his pocket and reached for the water. “The bucket broke down, and it took the volunteer firemen an hour to get the guy out. And the trees they topped died the next year. My dad says she’s a witch.”

  “My dad would say she put sugar in the gas tank.” Jackie promptly shut his mouth, remembering he shouldn’t talk about JD that way. Reluctantly, he swung the weed hook at the next stand of brambles. He had mixed feelings about JD. The man had abandoned him and his mother and left them living on the limited generosity of his grandfather. It looked like a man ought to know when he had a kid. But he was angrier at his mother for not telling JD in the first place, so they could have been living in luxury all these years. The angers kind of balanced out. He just knew JD had rescued him from the rotten old man his mother had finally married. That didn’t square things exactly, but it helped.

  Of course, now JD thought he should act like a father, yelling at him to pick up his room and eat his meals and help out around the house, grounding him for drinking a little beer. But it wasn’t any worse than what his mother had him do. His mom would have killed him for the beer thing. And living out here was pretty cool with the lake and all. He just wished Miss Toon would get air-conditioning. He was about to croak from the heat.

  “Sugar in the tank. Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. Miss Toon is weird enough to do something like that,” Laddie agreed. “What’s she gonna do with all these old trees when we get the junk cleared out?”

  “Make a garden. She wants a tourist attraction like they’ve got down in Florida. JD said he’d take me to Disney World if we had time, but with the truck broke, I guess it ain’t gonna happen.”

  “She’s gonna make a Disney World here?”

  Jackie gave his friend a look of disgust. Brains weren’t the biggest part of Laddie’s character, he was discovering. “She’s gonna make a garden, like Cypress Gardens, I guess. A place where all the rich people go and ooh and aah over the flowers. I heard her talking to JD. They think it will draw enough people that the town will need hotels and McDonald’s and things like that. Miss Toon gets all excited when she talks about it.”

  “McDonald’s! Cool. This place ain’t got anywhere to go. Wait till my dad hear
s that. Maybe he’ll let me work there so I can buy my own truck.”

  Vaguely uneasy that he might have said too much, Jackie swung his hook a little harder. It didn’t matter what Miss Toon did about the garden or McDonald’s or anything else. He and JD would be out of here before anything interesting happened.

  Not certain how he felt about that, he gave the sapling in front of him a particularly vicious cut.

  ***

  Nina was cleaning the spaghetti sauce off the burner when Jackie slumped in, clothes drenched and forehead dripping, stinking to high heaven of sweat and cut grass. She raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Did you jump in the lake, clothes on?”

  “Nah. We shoulda.” He reached in the refrigerator and helped himself to a can of root beer. “Can me and Laddie get paid so we can go into town and have a pizza?”

  “I don’t think JD plans on cutting payroll checks until Friday. That’s how business works. You have to hold out until payday. Is Laddie still outside? You both need to write down your hours so he’ll know how much to pay you.”

  “He’s out sticking his head under the hose.”

  Nina watched Jackie gulp the foamy soft drink, and her own stomach heaved in protest at the thought of the gas intake. Grimacing, she reached in the freezer and pulled out a couple of Eskimo Pies. “Why don’t you take these down to the lake and cool off? Mama Rosa’s isn’t open until four, anyway.”

  Looking surprised, the boy accepted the ice cream. “Mom doesn’t let me eat dessert until I’ve had lunch.”

  “So, you’re on vacation. You’re probably too hot to eat right now anyway. Cool off, then come back up here for hot dogs later. You’ll be more ready to eat then.”

  Brightening, Jackie swiped his face with the kitchen towel and loped out the back door holding his prize. It didn’t take much to please teenage boys sometimes. Food and a physical task worked wonders.

  The hair on the back of Nina’s neck prickled, and she realized JD had entered the room. She supposed he wouldn’t approve of her sending his brother out with just ice cream for lunch, but she didn’t care. After the strange comments he’d made this morning, she wasn’t certain what to expect.