Murder Crops Up

by Lora Roberts

  “Lucky snails,” Bridget muttered, not loud enough for Lois to hear her. Struggling with a smile, I felt better.

  “Well, it’s none of my business anyway,” Lois said, pinching her lips together. “I just came over to thank you for coming to the work day, and remind you to sign the petition.”

  “What petition?” Bridget looked puzzled.

  “Really, Bridget.” Lois pounced on this evidence of flightiness. “I outlined it in the flyer I sent out. The petition about the low-income housing and the library.”

  “Well, I’m certainly for those things.”

  Lois stiffened.

  “Um, Biddy—” I tried to warn Bridget, but she kept talking, certain I was on her side.

  “You know how it is around here now, Liz.” She turned to me. “Our neighborhood is getting filled up with Beamers and Mercedeses. The houses cost so much, nobody with children can afford to buy them. Corky’s best friend moved away last year, and we got a two-income couple who are never home. Not much contribution to the neighborhood there.”

  Lois’s face slowly turned as purple as the leaves of the plum trees. “The petition is against a plan to put that housing here, right on top of our gardens!”

  “Oh.” Bridget blinked. “I didn’t know about that. When did they decide to do that?”

  “They haven’t.” I could see that Lois was too full of indignation to talk, so I filled Bridget in. “Evidently the city has the garden down as a possible housing site, or as a place to expand the library. The petition is to ask them to remove the garden from their use inventory and dedicate it as community agricultural, or some such thing.”

  “I see.” Bridget nodded. “I do remember hearing something about that before.” She looked around. “It would be a shame to put houses here where we’ve worked so hard.”

  “Exactly.” Lois allowed her thin lips to smile. “You can see how important it is that every gardener sign.”

  “I know you want me to, Lois,” Bridget said apologetically. “But I have to think about it. I love the garden, and it’s an important resource, but people are more important. Palo Alto needs some affordable housing.”

  “You—have to think about it?” Lois’s jaw dropped open.

  “Yes. I might not sign.” Bridget picked up Moira, who was trying to insert her small body into the hole I’d dug.

  “You—might not sign.” Outrage gathered on Lois’s face. I did the heroic thing and distracted her.

  “Are you sure the postholes aren’t deep enough?” I tried to put a bit of whine in my voice, and succeeded all too admirably.

  Lois vented her anger on me. “They certainly are not. You’ll have to go down at least another foot in all of them. We want a fence that won’t fall down this time. Do you know that all but one of my pumpkins was stolen last week?” She eyed me as if she suspected that I did know, and had the aforesaid pumpkins stashed in my VW bus right then. “All but one!”

  Bridget put herself in the line of fire. She said innocently, “A stronger fence won’t keep out people who want to plunder our plots. They can just climb over it, or come in through the gate.”

  “We are making it tall. Tall and very, very strong.” Lois glared at her, then at me. “That’s why the fence postholes need to be deep.” She took a breath. “And I’m expecting each of you to sign that petition. This is very important to all of us, and we must present a united front.” She wasn’t finished yet. “As for your garden plot, Bridget, if you don’t clean it up this fall and plant a cover crop—”

  “Hello, fellow dirtbags!” The cheery voice came from Rita Dancey, the twenty-something part-time manager of the community gardens. She was her usual perky self, wearing a sports bra and cycling shorts despite the cool weather. She didn’t really have the behind for cycling shorts, and a bulge of too, too solid flesh followed the bottom of the sports bra around her midsection, but I gave her an E for effort. Her blond hair bounced on top of her head, confined by a bright purple scrunchie and a soiled white visor advertising Pete’s Wicked Ale. “Are we having fun yet?”

  I wasn’t. I didn’t like Lois’s nagging and shoving to get people to execute her agenda, but at least she was usually straightforward about it. Rita was so bouncy and cheerful, she set my teeth on edge. Although she talked a good game, she only showed up at the work days. The rest of the time she was out of there, not even returning telephone messages, according to some grumbling I’d heard. There were those who wondered what she did to earn her tiny salary. Looking at her now, I wondered if she was the person behind Lois, urging her to make people offers they couldn’t refuse.

  Lois pinched her lips together. “I was just explaining to Bridget that she needs to clean up her plot if she wants to retain the right to use it.” She glared at Rita. “You are going to start enforcing the rules, aren’t you? As we agreed at the last steering committee meeting? Gardeners who don’t tidy their plots over the winter will forfeit them.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” Rita turned to Bridget. “You’re going to get your plot fixed up, right, Bridget? I wouldn’t want to have to take it away.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Bridget said meekly.

  “After all, you folks just love to grub in the dirt, don’t you?” The unnerving thing about Rita, I decided, was that her expression didn’t change. She was always smiling, sparkling, upbeat. There was something wrong with her, obviously.

  “Whatcha up to here?” Her voice was loud and cheerful. “New fence postholes? Good work.” She nudged the old chicken-wire fence, flat on the ground after being detached from its rusty metal posts. “This stuff is good for a little more time, huh? We recycle, right?”

  Lois unpinched her lips to reply to that. “That wire is worse than useless. We’re building a proper fence today.” She glanced over at the pile of wood next to the Dumpster.

  Rita followed the glance, and her gaze turned a little steely. “This wasn’t in the list of approved projects, Lois. You know we agreed—”

  “I got all the lumber donated.” Lois sounded aggrieved. “And what thanks do I get?”

  “You couldn’t possibly have gotten enough lumber donated to go all around the garden.” Rita spoke with cold authority. “Certainly not in that little bitty pile there. That’s barely enough to do a few feet on either side of the gate.”

  “It’s enough to start with,” Lois said stubbornly. Bridget and I looked at each other, and I could see we’d had the same thought. The fence postholes I’d dug fronted Lois’s own garden, a few feet away from the gate. The new board fence would primarily benefit her. “And who made you such an expert, anyway?”

  “My stepfather is in construction. I know how much wood it takes to build a fence.” Rita looked at the postholes again. “I’m afraid you’ll have to clear this with the committee, Lois. We haven’t obtained the right permits for a new fence. If you want to repair the old one, go right ahead.”

  What she said was reasonable, but the tone of her voice made it clear that scores were being settled. She tossed her ponytail, gave us another of her wide, meaningless smiles, and bounced off.

  Lois didn’t say anything else, just pursed her lips angrily and stalked away down the bark-delineated path, stooping to yank up a hapless mallow plant that had the audacity to grow in her way.

  “Whew.” Bridget put Moira back down again. “Rita sure steamrolled Lois, didn’t she? And Lois is really wearing her underwear too tight.”

  “She’s been this way since her husband died last summer.” I took a swig from the water bottle I’d brought with me. “He kind of mellowed her out, I guess. Anyway, I’ve noticed that ever since then she goes around the garden finding fault with what people are doing. Like what she said about your garden.”

  Bridget looked worried. “I know my plot isn’t very tidy, but it’s not so bad, is it?”

  “You’ve got Bermuda grass. There’s nothing good about that.” I shouldered the posthole diggers. “At least Rita has saved me from more of this.
I’m going to put these over with the rest of the tools.”

  Bridget brightened. “And Lois didn’t stick around long enough to give me a horrible job. I guess I’d better go fight the Bermuda grass for a while.” She picked up Moira.

  “I’ll help you. We can talk about Claudia’s party.”

  “Won’t Lois be mad if you quit your job?”

  I glanced over at the Dumpster. Lois had cornered Rita. The way they scowled at each other, it was clear they weren’t having a friendly conversation.

  “I think Lois is going to be busy being mad at someone else right now.” I dumped the posthole digger on the pile of tools and followed Bridget down the path.

  Chapter 3

  Bridget turned over the dirt with her shovel and I pulled out long, white roots of Bermuda grass. There was a lot of it, especially since her plot marched with the boundary fence on one side. Just outside the fence was a lush crop of the noxious weed.

  “We really should dig all that up, too.”

  “Oh, please.” Bridget pushed her shiny brown hair away from her face. “People are rabid about Bermuda grass around here. If I get it out of the paths and common areas, what difference does it make if it’s in the garden bed? That’s my problem, right?”

  “Not according to Lois.” I grabbed another handful of roots, stuffing them into a plastic five-gallon bucket, one of many I scrounged from construction sites. They were useful for everything from weed patrol to hauling compost from the city’s periodic giveaway program.

  “She says that when you get a plot, you agree to keep it free from invasive weeds, like sow thistles and Bermuda grass.” I added reluctantly, “She has a point, you know. This stuff has a long reach.” I held up one of the foot-long underground stems; its fleshy segments were delineated by hair-like feeder roots, like tiny beards, at every joint. I was careful to pull the stem out of the ground gently, hoping to get the whole thing, not break it off and leave one of the segments to regrow.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Bridget went back to digging. “I don’t know how people keep this stuff out of their gardens without digging full time, you know?” She pointed her shovel at the next-door garden before stomping it into the dirt again. “Like Webster Powell, for instance.” She took another breather, glancing around the garden area. “Did he come to the work day? I notice he doesn’t need to tidy his plot.”

  The resentment in her voice made me smile. Bridget is so easygoing, it’s unusual when she lets loose with a complaint. “He can get on your nerves, for sure,” I agreed, looking over the bender boards that divided Bridget’s plot from Webster’s. “He’s probably the one complaining about your Bermuda grass. Not a speck to be seen in his garden.”

  “I see.” Bridget leaned on her shovel, taking deep breaths. “Moira, don’t put that in your mouth. Yes, he’s even gotten rid of it outside the fence. Does that guy have a life?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, after due consideration. “He’s here a lot, even on weekdays.” I reached over and removed the tasty-looking grub from Moira’s grasp, handing her a rounded pebble as a substitute. “Dirty. Don’t eat it.” Moira wanted the grub back, but I managed to squash it underfoot before she could figure out where it went. “Isn’t he a software engineer? He has that nerd look.”

  “He’s a consultant.” Bridget abandoned her shovel and came to squat beside me, combing the long roots from the soil. “He’s done some work for Emery, that’s how I know about him. But he’s not married, hardly dates or anything. I guess he must spend all his spare time here.”

  “Too bad he has to be next to you.” I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the two plots.

  Bridget’s was still a haphazard mass of dead cornstalks, expiring tomato plants, and mildewed vines punctuated with bloated, yellow cucumbers. Webster had already cleared his raised beds; fava beans were a foot high in precise geometric formation on several of them, with one bed given over to winter greens. He had installed a big, lidded compost container, and had a large, shiny, new wheelbarrow padlocked to the fence post—a good precaution, since even my rusty, garage-sale wheelbarrow had recently rolled mysteriously away.

  Not a blade of Bermuda grass, not an overlooked cluster of purslane or sow thistle, marred the perfection of Webster’s garden. All the paths between his raised beds, as well as the one in front of his plot, were thickly mulched with wood chips from the mountain of them that the city had piled outside the garden fence.

  We were silent for a moment, raking our gloved fingers through the soil and putting the endless supply of roots into the bucket. Bridget’s soil was very nice, actually; she wasn’t a tidy gardener, but she did throw in a lot of chicken manure and compost and rock dust whenever she planted, and the result was a dark, crumbly loam that contained many happy worms, to Moira’s delight.

  “I read somewhere that leaving the cornstalks and bean stalks up over the winter is good,” Bridget said, rising and dusting the dirt off her knees. “I was going to try it, but I guess I’ll just haul everything down and make everybody happy.”

  “Okay.” I started pulling up the bean carcasses. “We could break them up with our hands and dig them in, you know. That would be good, too.”

  “Let’s.” Bridget cheered up at this iconoclastic view. “So what if it doesn’t make perfect beds.” She cast a disparaging glance at Webster’s garden. “His beds look like graves, anyway.”

  “Maybe he’s got a few enemies buried there.” The moment I said it, I wished it unsaid. Given recent events, I was afraid to make even a mild joke about death.

  Bridget’s thoughts, too, were driven in that direction. “Did you know that Melanie and Hugh are in counseling now?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Melanie Dixon, along with birthday girl Claudia, was a member of a local writers’ group that Bridget and I belonged to. The body that had been found recently under a sidewalk had ended up affecting Melanie’s life; evidently her marriage was feeling the strain.

  “At least they’re working it out.” Bridget took some rusty shears from her gardening basket and attacked a cornstalk. Moira, attracted by destruction, started pulling the withered leaves off the cornstalk and tossing them into the wind, laughing with delight, her little white pearls of teeth gleaming in her rosy mouth. Bridget smiled indulgently, her bad mood lightening. “I’m sure they’ll get it together. I hate to think of families being torn apart by divorce.”

  “At least you know that won’t happen to you.” Bridget and Emery had a pretty solid marriage, it seemed to me. Of course, I don’t know much about achieving success as a couple. My one experience with marriage had not been good, and I was shy of making another attempt at intimacy.

  Once again, Bridget’s thoughts paralleled mine. “So, are you missing Paul?”

  “Not really.” I stabbed a few bean stalks, getting my expression in order. “He’s only been gone a couple of days.”

  “Have you heard from him? How’s his dad?”

  “He called last night.”

  “And you just happened to be there in his house?”

  I could feel the color washing my face. “We arranged before he left that he would call at eight each night if he could. I go over and water his houseplants and stuff anyway.’’

  “So just tell me, why don’t you get a phone?” Bridget moved on to a second cornstalk. “I could understand your not wanting one while that slimy ex-husband was around. But now—”

  “It’s an expense.” I couldn’t really explain to anyone in affluent Palo Alto how I felt about expenses. My income was so marginal. The house payment Paul Drake made to me on his house was the first steady income I’d had in a long time. At the age of thirty-five, I felt the necessity of saving for the uncertain future—there was no pension fund in my life. I was currently without a writing assignment and losing a bit of sleep over that. I earned a little by teaching a writers’ workshop at the senior center, and another dribble of income from selling the gourmet salad greens I grew in my yard to upscale re
staurants in the area. That income would literally die when the first hard frost killed the lettuce and arugula in the raised beds I’d built at home. Then any sudden need for money would necessitate a jump into the temporary workers’ pool, which is not a pleasant experience for me.

  All in all, I made a point of not spending more than I had to. Perhaps it was an obsession. But I could do without a phone—it’s intrusive, and it puts you at the beck and call of solicitors. While waiting for Drake to call the previous evening—all right, I had been sitting in his living room, reading his magazines, listening to his stereo, and waiting for him to call with an uneasy combination of anticipation and impatience—I had dealt with two rival telephone companies wanting to pitch their wares to Drake. That would drive me crazy if it were happening in my house. One of the solicitors asked me if I was Mrs. Paul Drake. All in all, it had been annoying.

  “We haven’t discussed Claudia’s birthday yet.” My feeble effort to change the subject failed.

  “So what did Drake say when he called? Is his dad okay? Will he be back soon?”

  “His dad is still in the ICU. Drake gave blood yesterday and they transfused his dad. As of last night, he was stabilized, but they want Drake to stick around in case they need more blood or bone marrow. He and his dad are compatible.”

  “That’s not what I heard.” Bridget shook her head. “I thought he never forgave them for naming him what they did.”

  “He’s a grown-up. He’s learned to live with that. Illness changes things.” I thought about how Drake had looked when he’d gotten the call from his mother that his father, a retired Seattle policeman, had collapsed and been taken to the hospital. He’d been stunned by the possibility that his dad was at risk of dying. “He might be away through Thanksgiving if his dad doesn’t respond to treatment quickly. His mom is devastated, evidently. He’s gotten a leave from the police department until the first of December.”

  “That’s hard.” Bridget was quiet for a moment, hacking up another cornstalk. Moira grabbed more leaves and tossed them up. The breeze obliged her, seizing the leaves and swirling them off.