by Lora Roberts
Carlotta herself stood at one side, her expression an interesting mix of horror and avid speculation. When she saw me watching her, that malicious smile appeared. Perhaps it was one of these nervous reactions people get in moments of stress. Whatever, it drove me far enough out of my self-control to speak.
“There’s nothing funny about this, Carlotta.”
Her head and shoulders pulled back, her eyes widened in surprise. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice huffy.
A couple of people stepped farther away, as if to leave us in the ring together.
Our voices seemed to bring Lois out of a trance. She began tugging at Rita’s foot. “Get her out of here,” she cried, her voice growing shrill. “Get her out of my plot!”
I reached along the well-mulched path, grabbing for Lois’s arm. “You shouldn’t touch the body.” I looked around at the circle of shocked faces. “She is dead, I presume? Did someone check?”
A tall black man, holding himself a little aloof, raised his hand. “I’m a doctor. I heard the commotion and came over, thinking there was an accident. I couldn’t find a pulse, so I left the area untouched.”
“I’ve called 911,” a woman at one side of the crowd volunteered. She held her cell phone to her ear. “The police and paramedics are on their way.”
“Lois is going to be in trouble if she doesn’t get out of there.” I didn’t care if Lois got in trouble or not, but I felt compassion for Bruno Morales, Drake’s partner in homicide investigations. Palo Alto has few homicides, so the two of them mostly work on other cases. This would turn up on Bruno’s plate, and with Drake out of town, he would be swamped.
“She’s not the only one,” Carlotta muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear.
That did it. “As Lois has informed all of you,” I said, “I have been involved in a murder investigation.” A few people gasped. Carlotta narrowed her eyes, sensing that I would steal her thunder. “I wasn’t convicted or even charged with that crime. In fact, Carlotta herself was a suspect in it. Due to that experience, we both know to tell you to keep clear of the area around the victim. Stay in the garden; if the police find out you were here and left before they arrived, they’ll draw their own conclusions. And tell them everything you know or saw. Their job is sorting through stuff till they get to the truth. If you don’t tell them everything, you could make it difficult for both you and them later.”
The circle of gardeners backed obediently away from Lois’s plot. Most of them stayed on the paths, too, although the fava beans in a nearby plot had been severely trampled. The doctor went to Lois, helping her up and leading her away.
“It’s sacrilege, that’s what,” Lois sniffled. The doctor patted her arm, making soothing sounds. “My poor Sidney! Whatever would he think? They have to get her out of there. She’s ruining everything!”
I found that little snippet of conversation puzzling. But the police and paramedics arrived just then, heralded by sirens, and we all had enough to look at while they conferred over Rita’s body, secured the scene, and talked to gardeners.
I recognized Rhea, one of the officers writing down names and addresses. She recognized me, too.
“Liz. I didn’t know you were a community gardener.” She glanced over her shoulder at the forensics team, who had put up a perimeter around Lois’s garden, taking in big chunks of neighboring gardens and paths. The gardeners wouldn’t like that, but death has many unpleasant consequences.
“Yeah, I’ve been gardening here for about four years now.”
Rhea regarded me thoughtfully. “So you know a lot of background. Bruno will want to talk to you.” She grinned. “He’s going to be upset at having to share this one with the county, since Drake is gone.”
“So he won’t be able to do the investigation alone?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Us uniforms are not always on top of how assignments are made.” She looked at the doctor and Lois, who had been joined by one of the paramedics. “That the guy who made the corpse?”
“He said he felt for a pulse, didn’t find one, backed off.” I nodded toward Lois. “She has that plot. It’s really upset her, obviously.”
Rhea shook her head. “Not a nice thing to find.” Her gaze drifted back to Rita’s body. Bruno Morales came around the corner of the equipment shed that concealed the library parking lots from the garden, and Rhea’s attention sharpened. “I’m going to check in with the man. Stick around, now.”
She gave me a friendly smile as she turned to leave.
“Oh, Rhea—” I caught her arm.
“Yeah?” She shut her notebook, looking inquiringly at me.
“There’s a woman over there.” I flicked my gaze toward Carlotta, who was watching my encounter with the police intently. “She was one of the neighbors in that case last fall, and she’s told all the gardeners I was a murder suspect and that there’s something shady about me. I’m sure you’ll hear about that as you take statements.”
“Bit of a bigmouth, isn’t she?” Rhea regarded Carlotta with disfavor. “I’ll certainly want to take her statement. I’ll make sure she doesn’t leave.”
She walked over to Carlotta and said something that made the older woman sputter, then went on to Lois’s plot, where Bruno was in consultation with the forensics team. Seeing Carlotta heading for me, I followed Rhea, trying to stay discreetly in the background, but close enough to the police that I could avoid Carlotta.
Bruno squatted beside the garden plot, studying the scene. I tried not to look at Rita’s livid face, tried not to notice the dead shine of her brassy hair.
I couldn’t hear what Bruno said, but periodically he picked up bits of stuff and handed them over his shoulder, where one of the forensics team jarred or bagged it and wrote all over the container.
Inching closer, I heard the man with the jars address Bruno.
“So whaddaya think, Morales? Accident?”
I felt like an idiot. It hadn’t even occurred to me that it could be an accident. In my recent experience, unexpected death wasn’t.
I looked closer at the scene. Rita’s body lay half in, half out of a foot-and-a-half-deep trench dug across the ten-foot width of the bed. In the French Intensive manner, the surface of the bed rose in a low mound above ground level. Obviously Lois had dug her bed within the last couple of seasons, and shouldn’t have had to do it again. This style of gardening is characterized by keeping the earth aerated, never standing directly on the dirt, loosening the soil to a depth of eighteen inches after first removing the top layer to avoid mixing it in with subsoil. Although the ground in Palo Alto is adobe clay, which most gardeners find undesirable, I think it’s great. When dug while moist, it’s rich and dark as far down as you go. Adding soil amendments makes it friable, and it holds moisture much better than the sandy soils closer to the coast.
One of the uniforms pointed to the rake that lay at an angle on the ground, half in the path, half on the bed. “Maybe she stumbled across that and fell backwards, hitting her neck on the edge of that hole.” He shook his head. “Crazy way to garden, digging big holes.”
“You fill each trench in when you dig the next trench.” Bruno sounded absentminded. I wasn’t too surprised that he knew the principles of double-digging. He knew a lot about a number of things. “You see how loose the soil is at this end, where the gardener has already filled the trenches?” He pushed his fingers into the soil appreciatively, then carefully patted it back down. “The soft dirt takes good impressions.”
“But there aren’t any impressions,” the uniform argued.
“My point exactly.” Bruno looked up at him. “She couldn’t have been in the plot, or we would see the impressions of her shoes.” He nodded at the soles of Rita’s high-top aerobic shoes. “And we would see loose dirt on her soles.” He moved around the plot to put plastic bags over Rita’s shoes, taking them off her feet with all traces and clues safely bagged. I wondered if he knew that Lois had been shaking one of those feet, ma
ybe shaking clues right off it.
“Maybe the rake was in the path.” The uniform wouldn’t give up.
Bruno got his head right down on the ground, looking across the surface of the path. “She stood here.” He touched the fresh bark that covered the path. “This does not take good footprints. But from her position, she was facing away from the trench. She fell backward; might have hit her head on the edge of the trench and so broken her neck. But what made her fall?”
“Or was she pushed?” The uniform shrugged. “Hard to say at this point.”
“I think we will find something in the postmortem.” Bruno stood up. “Have the pictures been taken? Good. You can remove her now.” He stood beside the trench, his face sober, while the paramedics bundled up Rita and wheeled her away.
Turning, he saw me. “Liz. Of course, you have a garden here. Do you know anything about this?”
“I don’t know what happened, but there has been some tension this morning.”
“Of course.” Bruno sighed. “Why don’t you come over here and tell me about it? Then I can let you leave.”
“Maybe you won’t want to, after you hear what I say.”
He stopped in the middle of pulling his laptop out of its case and looked at me sharply. “What are you saying, Liz? You pushed that woman into the trench?”
“No. Nothing like that.” I waited until he got the laptop steady on the nearest fence post, his fingers poised expectantly on the keys, and then I started talking about the visit from Lois the day before, with its vaguely threatening tone. “She said if I didn’t come to the work day, I’d be sorry. I would have thought it was a joke, but she didn’t laugh.”
He stopped typing for a moment and looked at me seriously. “So you came?”
“Yes. She gave me a really hard task—to dig all these postholes. And she was—triumphant, as if she had me in her power somehow.” I glanced across the garden. Lois and Carlotta stood together. They were talking, both frowning. I wondered at their alliance.
Bruno wrote down the rest of the story—Carlotta’s strange harassment, the revelation of my previous suspect-hood. There were certainly worse things about my life Carlotta could have chosen to reveal. I thanked my lucky stars she wasn’t much of a researcher. I wouldn’t have wanted my relationship with my ex-husband spread all over town, or the stint I served in prison for trying to kill him before he killed me. He had lived through that, and for a number of years thereafter, and I wasn’t sorry that someone else had finally induced him to leave this world.
But his death, added to those other bodies that kept tumbling into my life, might have made even a well-wisher stop to think. Certainly they had made me wonder.
Bruno looked at me, his hands on the keyboard. I hurried to finish my story. “Then I went out to my bus to put away my veggies, and when I came back everyone was over at Lois’s plot, looking at the body.” I shivered. “Do you think it might have been an accident?”
Bruno typed a little more before he answered. “At this point I do not think. I merely record.” He closed the laptop. His brown eyes were liquid with sympathy. “I am sorry, Liz.”
I felt even colder. “Sorry for what?”
“For the pain this woman brings you by dragging up that past history.”
I studied him, and he looked away. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You will have to bring up the past history as well. In other words, I’m a suspect again.”
“I would not say that,” Bruno broke in. “You will be involved in our investigation.” He looked around at the steady stream of gardeners, leaving after having given their names and addresses to the police. “Many people will be involved.” His eyes sharpened on Carlotta, who stood with a few others, watching as the evidence specialists sifted through the dirt. Lois was at the gate, waving her petition at the departing gardeners. Bruno sighed. “It will not be easy, evidently.” His gaze came back to mine. “Be very careful, Liz. You seem to have at least one enemy.’’
A few hours earlier, I would have laughed about Carlotta as any kind of effective enemy. But now I had to wonder. How far would she go to get me into trouble?
Chapter 6
Bridget reached across the table and angled the chipped spout of her big teapot, pouring a stream of fragrant jasmine tea into my cup. “Incredible,” she said finally.
“Yeah. Count yourself lucky you left when you did.”
She shivered. “I wish I’d stayed to help you out. If I’d been with you, there’d have been no question—”
“I’m not really under suspicion, any more than anyone else there. I bet most of the gardeners were in my position—working alone, no one able to vouch for them every minute. In fact, Rita’s death probably was an accident.”
Bridget shook her head. “I don’t know. The tension there was pretty thick this morning. With Rita and Lois both throwing their weight around—”
“Surely you don’t think Lois would do this?” Usually, Bridget is the person who defends everyone’s right to be considered innocent until proven guilty.
“I think Lois might be capable of shoving Rita if she lost her temper.” Bridget spoke after taking a moment to think. “But I would be surprised if Rita didn’t push her back, and frankly, I would expect Rita to do more damage. She’s—she was—a hefty woman.”
“So you think it was an accident, and the person responsible got cold feet and hasn’t come forward.”
“Yes, and that doesn’t exactly sound like Lois. She would be screaming away about it, blaming Rita for everything.”
“Maybe.” It was my turn to shiver. “She might have been too shocked to speak or make sense. Committing a violent act can be so surprising.”
“Stop kicking yourself about something that happened years ago.” Bridget’s voice was stern, but she patted my hand. “What you did wasn’t violence so much as self-defense. There’s a difference between trying to save your life and overindulging in a temper tantrum. When are you going to let that old history go?”
She pushed the plate of cookies closer, as if they could, lotus-like, aid me in forgetting that I had once aimed a gun, pulled the trigger, sent a bullet burrowing through flesh, blood vessels, bone. The act had probably saved my life; my husband had been stopped before he could finish teaching me whatever lesson it was I couldn’t seem to learn. He didn’t die—then, at least. I went to jail, where I was, paradoxically, free of him. I got a divorce without the usual peril attending separation from a batterer; Tony couldn’t get at me to make me permanently sorry. And then after my parole, I eluded him for years, while I tried to make his looming threat fill less of my psyche.
No matter how far I came in this exercise, he still took up a dark corner in my head, small but potent, like a black hole waiting to suck everything into itself. His eventual death at someone else’s hands had only decreased the darkness, not removed it entirely.
I took one of the cookies, and Bridget smiled in relief.
The counter behind us was covered with cookies, their sweet aroma filling the air. The Montrose house was relatively quiet, unusual for a Saturday afternoon. The big round table in the kitchen’s bay window had been recently tidied and set with clean place mats and the tea things. In the living room, Moira hummed to herself while involved in her latest accomplishment, fitting fat plastic blocks together to build a lopsided tower. An absence of blasting noises and shrieks indicated that the three Montrose boys were elsewhere.
“These are great.” I took a second cookie, not to make Bridget feel better, but on my own account.
“Preschool work day.” Bridget glanced at the clock. “Emery took the boys over, but I’m not going for another hour. So we have some time to put our heads together and figure out who would want Rita dead.”
“The police are already doing that, and with far more likelihood of success than we’ll have.” I resisted the urge for another cookie. “I don’t know anything about Rita other than her work as the garden coordinator.”
&nb
sp; “Me neither.” Bridget looked smug. “But I know who might know something about her. And she’ll be here any minute.”
“Melanie.” I sat back in the chair, sipping my cooling tea
“She’s coming over to plan the birthday party.”
“Which we haven’t begun to plan.”
Bridget waved that away. “We’ll get to it. Murder is more important.”
“We don’t know it’s murder.”
Bridget sobered. “True. But I’m afraid it is. And that puts you in danger, Liz. Someone may think you make a convenient scapegoat. It’s happened before.”
“You don’t know how special that makes me feel.” I set down the cup a little harder than I meant to. “What is it about me? I just want to keep a low profile and tend my gardens.”
The doorbell rang. Bridget went to answer it. From my chair, I could see through the kitchen doorway into the living room. Melanie Dixon, her streaked brown hair perfectly arranged, led her equally cute little daughter into the house. Susanna dashed across the living room to join Moira, waving her flaxen-haired doll, which promptly nose-dived into Moira’s tower. Susanna screamed with laughter. Moira burst into tears.
“I don’t know what makes Susanna so boisterous here,” Melanie said, frowning at Susanna while Bridget comforted Moira. Susanna, too, patted her back, murmuring, “It’s okay, baby. Don’t cry, baby.” She sat on the floor and took more blocks out of the bin. “I build a big tower. Then she can crash.”
After a few minutes, the moms joined me at the table. Melanie gave me a brief smile. “Hello, Liz.”
“Melanie.”
She accepted the cup of tea Bridget poured, but refused a cookie. I squelched the surge of irritation Melanie always inspired in me. She and Bridget had worked together before having children, and they also belonged to the local poets’ group. I knew they had things in common, but they were polar opposites as far as I was concerned.
“When exactly is Claudia’s birthday? This is a very busy time for me.” Melanie pulled a leather-bound calendar from her Gucci bag. I wouldn’t have known it was Gucci if my niece, Amy, hadn’t educated me on one of our swings through the secondhand stores. “Let’s see.” Melanie opened the calendar. “Is it before Thanksgiving?”
