The Secret Poison Garden (Rita Calabrese Book 1)

by Maureen Klovers

  “That’s really very young,” Rita chided her gently.

  “Oh. To you, I guess.”

  Given that Hannah had actually read—and liked—her article, Rita decided to let that comment slide. Ducking behind the counter, Rita turned the doorknob to the principal’s office.

  Dr. Walker was standing behind his enormous mahogany desk, his palms splayed out on its gleaming surface. He was bright red, his thick neck was bulging over the tight collar of his starched shirt, and the vein in his temple was throbbing. For a moment, Rita felt a familiar sense of panic welling up in her. But then, remembering that she was not here about Vinnie, she took a deep breath. Dr. Walker wasn’t yelling at her. This time, he was raining invective on the county prosecutor, a colorless, mild-mannered man in his fifties, and a good-looking teenaged boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen.

  They both looked chastened as Dr. Walker alternated between yelling at one and then the other. “This is outrageous,” the principal thundered. “Unprovoked, unprecedented, un—, un—”

  He seemed to be searching for another word that started with “un.”

  “Unprofessional?” the teen offered.

  “Unsportsmanlike?” the prosecutor chimed in.

  “Yes, yes, all of those things,” the principal roared, “and probably un-American. But the purpose of having you here”—he glared at the prosecutor, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat—“is to figure out everything that’s illegal about it and throw these troublemakers in jail. Now!”

  “Well, there’s vandalism,” the prosecutor said mildly.

  “Bah! Vandalism! What does that get? A slap on the wrist! I want cruelty to animals. I want PETA threatening to crucify these little hoodlums. And we know what cruelty to animals leads to—serial killers. That’s right—all those serial killers always start out torturing little kitty-cats. Got to protect the community, give them the maximum sentence.”

  “But, sir, if I charge them with animal cruelty for killing squirrels, what about all the little old ladies who trap the squirrels invading their attics? And what about guys who hunt squirrels?”

  Dr. Walker harrumphed. “Well, then I want breaking and entering. Burglarizing cars. That’s serious, burglary.”

  “Yes, but it’s only cars—”

  “But nothing. Get on it.” The principal pointed an accusatory finger at the student. “And you—you’re supposed to be a leader. What are you leading? I want retaliation.”

  “But, sir, two wrongs don’t—”

  “Make a right? Bah, you’ve spent too much time in Sunday school. You—”

  The prosecutor jumped up. “I don’t think I should be privy to this conversation. Although just for the record, son, I’m advising you to do nothing criminal. Remember that Mount Washington is also in my jurisdiction.”

  Before Dr. Walker could protest, the attorney bolted out of the office with the student body president right on his heels, mumbling, “I’m late for A.P. Physics,” as he scampered out the door.

  Rita slid into his seat and took out her notebook.

  “Ah, Mrs. Calabrese,” Dr. Walker said in an entirely different tone of voice—calm and reasonable—as if he had just realized that she was there. He re-arranged the piles on his desk. “How’s Vinnie?”

  “Oh, fine,” she said warily.

  “Not getting into any trouble?”

  “Oh, no. Just helping his dad at the nursery and working on his degree.”

  Technically, Vinnie hadn’t taken a class in over a year. But since he had started his associate’s degree but not finished it (“yet,” as Rita was careful to always add optimistically), Rita thought it was fair to consider it “in progress.”

  “Good to hear. Yes, very good to hear. But now if he were to go looking for trouble—”

  “Oh, but he isn’t.”

  “Of course not. But if he were, it sure would be nice if he could look for it over in Mount Washington.”

  “Dr. Walker!”

  “Oh, I’m not suggesting anything, Mrs. Calabrese. Since he is, uh, as you say, reformed.”

  Straightening in her chair, Rita fixed her best icy stare on him. “I’m not here to discuss Vinnie, Dr. Walker. But I am here to get some information about this string of pranks. Or crimes, as you say.” She tapped her pen impatiently on the notepad. “Now you can start by giving me a timeline of today’s events and a list of the teachers affected.”

  Chapter Eight

  By noon, Rita was seated in a sunny corner booth at the Sunshine Café, munching on a chicken salad sandwich and typing up her story. Sal had exaggerated a bit, which didn’t surprise her. It wasn’t nearly every teacher who was affected. Miss Simms and Miss Van Der Hooven, for example, didn’t encounter any such mischief. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the teachers selected, although Rita noticed a preponderance of younger faculty members and English and history teachers. Was that significant? She wondered.

  Every fifteen minutes or so, she was interrupted by a friend, neighbor, or fellow parishioner at St. Vincent’s. They wanted to remind her about the quilting circle’s new Tuesday night meeting time, or tell her about her book club’s latest selection, or ask for her recipe for pasta alla norma or cantucci or chicken parm.

  “You are going to sing at Sara DePalma’s funeral, right?” the choir director pressed her, eyebrows all scrunched together in concern. “You see, it conflicts with the middle school play, and so Marcia and Nancy and Bella won’t be able to be there….”

  “You are making your chocolate almond mousse cake for the cake walk, right?” Marion Von Beek asked, clutching the table. “It just won’t be a success without it.”

  “We’ll see,” Rita replied sweetly to each petition. “You must excuse me, but I’m on a deadline. I need to file this story by three. Breaking news, you know.”

  “Oh, but we need you, Rita,” each one implored her.

  She gave them an apologetic little smile and went back to typing, thinking that’s funny, they never said that before. At two forty-five, she hit “send,” made a quick detour to walk Luciano and Cesare, and then drove over to Hudson Valley Chocolatiers in Mount Washington.

  An hour later, she had eaten her way through all of the samples on offer—milk chocolate caramels, almond bark, turtles, pralines, and white chocolate fudge—all in the name of research. “These are delicious,” she said to the doe-eyed, freckle-faced girl behind the counter as she savored an apricot-infused dark chocolate truffle. “So rich and creamy,” she continued, as casually as possible. “But you see, I’m just not sure what Coach Stiglitz likes. I know he loves chocolate. Especially from your store. Why, just before he got sick, he told me he had spent one hundred and fifty-two dollars on chocolate! He said he might as well just sign over his paychecks to your store.”

  The girl leaned forward eagerly and lowered her voice. “I’ve never seen anyone order that much chocolate.”

  “What does he normally order?”

  “Oh, different types. Mostly dark chocolate, but sometimes filled with caramel, sometimes with macadamia nuts, sometimes with almonds or pecans.”

  “Does he say who it’s for? I mean, do you really think he eats it all himself?”

  The clerk furrowed her thick eyebrows. “You wouldn’t think so, would you? I mean, he’s not exactly fat.” She sighed. “He never says who it’s for, or what the occasion is. But the one constant is that it’s always a special order. He always wants them in the shape of lizards.”

  Rita felt her mouth go dry. Miss Van Der Hooven’s words to the tinny male voice on the phone echoed through her head. Bring chocolate, my love, lots and lots of chocolate. She recalled the biology teacher’s seemingly inexplicable antipathy to Angelica, her cruel and cutting remarks about their upcoming wedding. And she thought of the little silver object under the tub, which—she’d bet anything—was a tail.

  “A bearded dragon?”

  “Yes, now that you say it…that was it. I didn’t even know what it was until he show
ed me a picture on his phone.” The girl looked at her in astonishment. “How could you possibly know that?”

  Rita smiled weakly. “Lucky guess.”

  Returning to her car, Rita started the engine and turned up the heat. The farmer’s almanac said it would be an early winter, and she believed it. She’d bet they’d have snow before Halloween.

  Just as she was about to pull away from the curb, her phone rang.

  “Rita Calabrese, Morris County Gazette.”

  “Rita, it’s Susan.”

  Her soon-to-be (or, Rita hoped, never-to-be) daughter-in-law’s voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Oh, Susan.” Rita realized that her voice sounded flat and disappointed, so she tried to compensate with a sudden burst of amiable chatter. “Were you and Marco coming to dinner tonight? Or did you want to talk about the bridal shower?”

  “Oh, no. I’m not calling about—Rita, I’m calling from the hospital.”

  “How’s the coach?”

  “Well, he seemed to be improving rapidly. He was talking, joking around. We were able to disconnect the tubes. But then—but then—when I was completing my rounds—I—I—”

  “What is it?”

  “I found him dead.” Susan’s voice quavered, then broke.

  “Dead?” Rita could hardly believe her ears. “But I thought you said this morning that he was improving—”

  “He was. He was, Rita. That’s the problem. I don’t think he died from the ketamine. I think he—I think he—”

  “He what?”

  “Was poisoned. By something else. On purpose.”

  Rita sped along the winding country roads back to Acorn Hollow, past apple orchards, corn fields, and the occasional herd of cows. Fat and happy, they ambled slowly through the fields, stopping to nibble now and then on a particularly tasty blade of grass. Rita found herself envying their carefree existence. Why had she ever wanted to be a journalist? She had bought into the whole romantic nobility of it all. The truth will set your free, and all that claptrap.

  But the truth hadn’t set Coach Stiglitz free.

  It had killed him.

  She had a knot at the bottom of her stomach. Something told her that it was no coincidence that Coach Stiglitz was poisoned right after she wrote the story on Miss Simms’s garden.

  Speeding past the cheery little sign that announced “Welcome to Acorn Hollow, population 2,507,” which had been erected just last month, Rita gritted her teeth. “It’s 2,509 now,” she muttered, mentally tallying up the recent births and deaths, “and at least one of them is a murderer.”

  Turning down her own little street and pulling into her driveway, she collected Luciano and Cesare and then headed to the cemetery.

  She and the dogs were just approaching the little bench beside her mother’s grave when she heard a familiar voice behind her.

  “Oh, Rita, dear, there you are. I was just reading your excellent article to Thomas here.”

  Rita spun around to face what looked like an enormous crow partially obscured by a wall of newsprint. Two spindly little ankles jutted out from beneath a black crepe dress, then flared out into a pair of short, stubby feet stuffed into high-heeled buttoned boots that were last in style when the Titanic sank.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Schmalzgruben.”

  As Rita came closer, her heart sank. Miss Simms’s smile was plastered across the page three of the Morris County Gazette, beneath the lurid headline “Mild-Mannered Teacher with Assassin’s Toolkit.” The newspaper lowered far enough to reveal a face that reminded Rita of a contour map of the Adirondacks—endless crags and peaks, the sort of higgly-piggly landscape that reminds you that the mountains were created over eons.

  As, perhaps, was the widow Schmalzgruben. No one could say exactly how old she was, but she was old enough to have voted for Herbert Hoover—a fact that was mentioned every time she called the local Republican Party meeting to order.

  “You see, Thomas was a druggist, and he was so interested in botany.” As always, the widow enunciated every word in her rich, plummy voice, as though she were channeling a well-bred society woman from the thirties. “Now Thaddeus”—she shook her head disapprovingly and shot a dark, piercing gaze in the direction of her second husband’s rather more modest tombstone—“was not an intellectual. He wouldn’t be interested at all, so I’m not reading it to him. And Leonard, well, he really was just interested in sports. He likes hearing all about the football team and the swim team. Oh! And definitely the baseball team. That’s his favorite. There was so much to read to him last year, when our team went to the state championships.”

  “And how do you know what stories they prefer?” Rita asked, trying not to look too dubious as she joined the widow on the marble slab.

  “Oh, a woman knows,” she said with feeling, peering at Rita over her bifocals. Her eyes were as intelligent and lively as ever. “A wife knows.”

  “Does she? I’m not sure what I’d read Sal if he went first. I suppose the sports page. Maybe something about gardening. But he’s not much of a reader. Maybe I’d just bring some lasagna and narrate the whole experience of eating it.”

  “There, you see?” Her companion nodded encouragingly, her dry lizard lips broadening into a toothy yellow-brown smile. “I think you’ve got the hang of it.”

  Luciano and Cesare lay their heads on Rita’s lap. Scratching behind their ears, she said grimly, “There’s going to be another body here soon.”

  “There always is, dear.”

  “I meant someone in particular. Coach Stiglitz. He died a couple of hours ago at the hospital.”

  “Oh, yes, I read about that. I mean, not about his death, but that he was very ill. Something about horse tranquilizer. Heavens! What will people come up with next? When I was a child, it was just regular old alcoholic spirits. It was an excellent bit of reporting on your part, though. I felt positively transported to that hospital room. I could almost smell poor Angelica’s desperation.”

  “But that wasn’t what he died of. At least according to my son’s girlfriend”—she caught herself—“fiancée, I mean. She says he was poisoned with something else.”

  The widow arched a wispy eyebrow. “By something that grows in Miss Simms’s garden?”

  Rita shuddered. “I don’t know, but that would be my guess.”

  Slipping the flask off Cesare’s collar, she took a swig of limoncello, then offered some to her black-clad companion, who took a polite, ladylike sip.

  “You feel guilty.” The widow phrased it as a statement, not a question.

  “Of course. If I hadn’t written the article—”

  “Don’t feel guilty, my dear.” The old woman squeezed Rita’s arm with surprising strength. “It’s so cliché. Eve, Pandora, midwives in the colonial era—so many hanged as witches. Women get a little knowledge, and the world wants to cut them down to size. My dear, whoever killed Coach Stiglitz would have killed him anyway—it’s just that they used poison rather than some other weapon.” She gave Rita’s arm another squeeze. “Call Chief D’Agostino by all means, but don’t expect him to solve it. This case is going to take a woman’s intuition and a reporter’s keen eye.”

  Rita gulped. She wished she shared the widow’s confidence in her. “Do you have any advice about how to do that?”

  “Just this. If over one hundred years of living has taught me anything, it’s no one is quite who he or she seems. Not Coach Stiglitz, not Miss Simms. No one. And second, I learned quite a bit about poisons from Thomas. So if you get stuck, I’m happy to offer my opinion.”

  Rita glanced uncomfortably from tombstone to tombstone. Three husbands, she thought. All belonging to an eccentric woman who admitted to being an expert in poisons. A woman who always wore black, but with some sort of red accent—like the crimson belt she was sporting today. Black with a spot of red—rather like a black widow spider. Did all of her husbands really die of natural causes?

  “Uh, thanks,” Rita mumbled, struggling to her feet. With
a wave, she headed back down the hill, towards her mother’s grave, Luciano and Cesare in tow.

  “Oh, and Rita,” the widow called after her, “don’t worry what Sal or your children say. I always knew you were cut out to be more than a lunch lady.”

  For a moment, Rita stopped dead in her tracks. This woman—vecchia come Matusalem, as her grandmother would have said—did not miss a thing. They had exchanged pleasantries over the years, but little in the way of real conversation, and yet this woman knew her, in some ways, better than her own family. No one is quite as he or she seems.

  Brushing a stray tear out of her eye, Rita and the dogs turned back towards the river bank, towards her mother’s grave. She sprinkled a few drops of limoncello on the rosebush, resplendent in the midday sun, looped the dogs’ leashes around the shaggy gray trunk of the hickory nut tree, and then crouched down beneath its limbs. Above her, the breeze rustled through the deep yellow-brown leaves; below her was a carpet of golden leaves dotted with the mottled green and brown husks of the tree’s precious nuts. For the first time all day, she felt a sense of peace envelop her as her fingers curled around the ridged golf ball-sized husk that concealed each nut. She would gather as many as would fit in her little plastic shopping bag and then take them home to dry in the sun. Eventually, she would remove the husks, crack the shells with a hammer (always a good way to release pent-up aggression), remove the edible parts, and roast the nuts. They would replenish her rapidly dwindling supply from last year, which she would later use as a garnish for her pumpkin ravioli. Sal would be ecstatic—he liked the version with walnuts, but absolutely adored this version—and she would be filled with the quiet satisfaction that came from eating something that sprang from soil fertilized by her mother’s remains. She always took the host reverently each Sunday and tried earnestly to believe in the miracle of transubstantiation, but this truly was her most intimate Communion. She felt nourished by her mother and comforted by her, in a way that she could not explain to anyone. No one—not Sal, not her children, not even Rose—knew the source of her hickory nuts. It was a secret she planned on taking to her grave. Of course, she thought as she looked over her shoulder at the small black figure on the crest of the hill, it might not be as much of a secret as she had thought.