Bobby stared into his beer and shook his head in the time- honored body language of men discussing women. "Obviously I'm not good enough for her," he said. "Well, I know that. Anyone can see she could have the King of England if she wanted him. But I swear to God that's not what she wants."
"What does she want?" Wyler couldn't help asking.
"Whatever it is she don't have," Bobby said flatly. "Which is why you lasted so long in her fancy, by the way," he added with a wry glance at Wyler.
Bobby slugged down the rest of his beer and signaled the barkeep with a patting gesture in front of the empty glass. "She's been that way ever since she was a kid," he said. "If you had Pepsi and she had Coke, she'd want the Pepsi. But if you offered her a choice, chances are she'd say root beer."
"Yeah," said Wyler, sipping his scotch. "She just hasn't found the right soft drink yet."
"She never will. It's the searching and the sampling that interest her." He shrugged stoically. "So what's with Meg?" he asked Wyler. "Is she still hung up on trying to put Camplin behind bars?"
"You know about that?"
Bobby shrugged again. "Word gets around. She shouldn't mess with them types, y' know. They're all a little wacko — because they're so desperate to hang on to what they've got, y' know? They want things done their way or no way."
Wyler nodded. Despite himself, he was beginning to take a shine to Bobby. He was turning out to be just another kid in need of a shave and a high school diploma. He seemed smarter, more reflective than most: too bad he was hiding those brains under a red bandanna.
"Believe me," Bobby said, still ruminating. "I know. You live in a schizo town like this — rich, poor, hardly no one in between — you learn which ones to avoid. Gordon Camplin's one tough buzzard. Friend of mine was doing some carpentry for him — wahn't even my buddy's gig; he was workin' for someone else — and Camplin went and got him fired."
"Didn't like the look of him?" Wyler suggested.
"You got it. Wife's the same way. I had this job in Ellsworth before I went out west. Franklin Foreign Auto, you heard of it? They do good work. Anyway, that summer, Dorothea Camplin brings in her Mercedes for a tune-up. Her granddaughter shows up at the same time, in her Lexus, to take the old lady back home. Well, the granddaughter's comin' on to me the way them richbitches do, and I don't mind. We're fooling' around, talking', no big deal."
Bobby sipped his beer, smiling at the memory. He was a good-looking hulk; Wyler could understand why richbitches came on to him.
"At some point I look up," Bobby went on, "and there's old Dorothea, giving' me the evil eye. Scared the shit out of me. Less than a week later I'm walking along the road at dusk, and I recognize her Mercedes in oncoming traffic. She veers — purposely, I'll bet my life on it — and clips me with her outside mirror. Just about breaks my arm. I'm tellin' you — you don't mess with those people," he repeated, toasting his glass to them.
Wyler hardly heard the moral of the story. His mind was suddenly in overdrive, racing past the useless pieces of information that had littered Meg's case from the start, zeroing in on the one bit that mattered, a line from Gordon Camplin's letter to Margaret Mary Atwells:
God help me f I am caught writing it.
Wyler had slid right over it, focusing where Meg had told him to focus: on Gordon Camplin's threat in the last paragraph. What an idiot he'd been.
"I mean, here's a woman once slapped her twenty-one-year-old grandson in front of half the town for using the F word in public," Bobby was saying with a wry smile. "Where does that leave me on the true-value scale? Somewhere between the grandson and just above a deerfly, I figure."
What had his brain been doing, while Meg was waving the letter in front of him? Figuring out whether her bra unhooked in the front or in the back, that was what. God, what an idiot.
In a panic, Wyler looked around for a phone: occupied. "Bobby, look—I gotta go," he said. "Catch you later." He threw a fiver on the bar and took off, praying to God that Meg was at the Inn Between.
****
Dorothea Camplin was in her terraced rose garden, humming a ditty to herself, when her Cuban gardener arrived carrying a galvanized bucket filled with foul-smelling, dark- stained water.
"Here you are, señora. All the butts since we are at Tea Kettle. I am sorry — not so many as other summers. I am trying to cut back. My cousin, in Havana? He has, how you call, the cancer of the throat. Larrin ... lar ..."
"Laryngeal cancer, Manuel," Dorothea said, stirring the tobacco-infested mixture with a twig. "Yes. That doesn't surprise me. Tobacco is poison; that's why it does such a good job on our aphids. How many cigars did he smoke a day?"
"His wife say, too many. Eight, ten. Puros fuertes," Manuel murmured, shaking his head. "Strong, strong, cigars, the Cubans."
"Ten! Heavens!" Mrs. Camplin said, shocked. "Much too many. I'm glad you're cutting back, Manuel. I want you to live a long life, in good health."
"Gracias, señora. You wish something more ... ?"
"No, no, you go and enjoy yourself. I'll see you back here on Monday. Don't forget to leave the gates open for Mrs. Hazard."
The gardener nodded and left. Mrs. Camplin peered into the bucket and sighed, then went into the house. She came out carrying a plastic kitchen caddy containing a pair of yellow rubber gloves, a small bottle colored ruby red and stoppered with a cork, a fine-mesh tea strainer, a Pyrex glass measuring cup; and a pretty, crystal vial of amber-colored oil.
She put the caddy on the ground next to the galvanized bucket, then knelt in front of them on a gardening pad. She slipped on the rubber gloves, picked up the Pyrex cup, and dipped it gingerly into the galvanized bucket, filling it with the murky, tobacco-shreddy liquid. The ruby-red bottle had a wide base; it stood without tipping on the mulched ground as she held the tea strainer over its neck, then poured the bottle two-thirds full from the measuring cup of tobacco liquid.
After that she untwisted the cap of the amber oil, passed it back and forth under her nose with a dreamy smile, and decanted some of its contents into the little red bottle. She held the red bottle up to her nose and grimaced, then, with a worried frown, poured the rest of the fragrant amber oil into the tobacco mixture. Once again she sniffed the red bottle, thought about it, sniffed one more time, and, with a considering nod — as if she'd finally got the sweet-sour balance for a stir-fry exactly right — popped the cork back in.
After that Mrs. Camplin reloaded the caddy and carried it back to the house. She had a tray of fresh-baked brownies to frost before her guest arrived.
****
The only vehicle that Tom Wyler found at the Inn Between was Lloyd's rusted pickup. Lloyd himself was in the graveled parking area, which had been turned into a kind of disaster-relief station. There were pans of oil-soaked Speedy-dry that looked not too different from pee-soaked kitty litter; wet oil-absorbent pads and blankets; and three twenty-five-gallon drums filled with rescued fuel oil.
"Whatta mess, huh?" Lloyd said as Wyler rolled down the window of his car.
"Where's Meg? Where is she?" Wyler said, not bothering to hide the urgency in his voice.
"Meg? I dunno. She left a little while ago with a camera bag and a tripod over her shoulder."
"Dammit! Why'd you let her go?" Wyler said irrationally.
"Go where?"
Wyler threw the Cutlass into reverse and tore out of there, sending gravel flying into the wheelwell of his rented car. This was it, the ultimate nightmare of any cop: rushing to an ambush where the one you love is about to be ambushed.
Dorothea Camplin: old woman, old money, old values. If she could lock a rival in her husband's bedroom and leave her there to burn, if she could crush a peon like Bobby Beaufort for looking at her granddaughter the wrong way ... then what the hell was she capable of doing to an amateur sleuth who was tiptoeing ever closer to a dangerous truth — that Dorothea Camplin was a psycho, a puritanical, possessive, murderous psycho.
If anything happens to Meg ... if one ha
ir on her head is touched .
****
Meg arrived exactly on time and was met at the open gates by Mrs. Camplin, wielding a pair of pruning shears. The old woman was standing fearlessly on the top step of a folding ladder, slashing through thick English ivy that had overgrown the wrought-iron lamp fixtures that served as finials atop the brick pillars that supported the heavy iron gates. A heap of long, cut-back ivy tendrils lay on the ground at the foot of the stepladder.
She waved cheerfully to Meg and said, "Go right on up to the house. I'm going to close the gates behind you; a couple of dogs have been just itching to get past me for the last little while. I'm blessed if I'll have them digging up my garden. Not before it's photographed, anyway," she said, laughing.
Meg waved an acknowledgment and drove slowly down the landscaped drive, enjoying the smells and sights of the superbly tended grounds. Huge clumps of pink cleome, unseasonably early, and tall stands of purple coneflower filled the sunny patches between the towering trees that lined the path to the house. Black-eyed Susan and bee balm and phlox — everything was at peak. The summer sweet, too, was in full bloom, filling the air with its delightfully cloying fragrance. How had she missed it all the day before?
Because I was upset then, and today I'm not, Meg told herself. She'd replayed that last moment of yesterday's interview over and over and over in her mind, and she was convinced: Dorothea Camplin was about to lend Meg the money herself. The woman's exact words had been, "Maybe I can manage" — something or other. What else, if not a loan?
Okay, so the money wasn't coming from Gordon Camplin, and okay, so it looked a little like a blackmail payment, even to Meg. Too bad. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Besides, Meg was going to pay off every cent, with interest. With any luck, she might even be able to hold on to the dollhouse — although she wasn't sure why that was important any longer. She had a profound feeling that the little house had done its work and that Gordon Camplin, despite his evil bravado, would never sleep soundly again. It was probably the best that Meg could hope for.
In the meantime, she had to keep on with this silly charade about a magazine piece on Dorothea Camplin's gardens. Maybe she'd actually write the thing and submit it. There were worse careers in life than doing articles on gardening.
With a sense that she was making progress at least on the financial front, Meg pulled up in front of the charming facade of the absurdly modestly namedTea Kettle Cottage and began unloading her equipment. Mrs. Camplin joined her and they walked together to the rose garden, the first and obvious "room" to be photographed.
"Your roses are so healthy," Meg said admiringly.
"Because I don't tolerate the ones that give me trouble," Mrs. Camplin said bluntly. "Over the years I've winnowed out all the prima donnas. You'll notice there are no red roses, for example; I've yet to find a fragrant one that'll stand up to the moods and rigors of Maine."
"That's all right," said Meg. "The pale ones will show better in this gray light. We could use a breeze, though," she added, swatting at a mosquito on her shoulder. "The bugs are fierce today."
"They nearly always are. Do you want something for them?"
"No, no, I'm fine. I try to avoid chemical repellants." Meg swatted her calf, and then the back of her knee. This was going to be misery; why hadn't she thought to rub herself with lemon balm before she came?
And why wasn't Dorothea Camplin talking money? She was acting as if yesterday had never happened. It was very disconcerting. Meg swatted again at her leg, irritated; this one had drawn blood.
"My dear, you're being eaten alive. Let me give you what I use; it's my own brew, completely organic." She held up her forearm under Meg's nose. "Smell," she commanded.
"Nice. Lily of the valley?"
"For fragrance. You set up and get started. I'll bring some of this out for you. And meanwhile, I'll brew us a pot of tea to wash down the brownies I made. We can have tea out here while we chat."
Chat. Good. They were going to chat. She hadn't forgotten, then. Meg grinned enthusiastically and began walking around the raised beds, looking for the best vantage point to begin shooting. She settled on a trio of pink-and-ivory multiflora roses just breaking into bloom. In the far background was the greenhouse attached to the silver-shingled cottage, an irresistible scene that was sure to excite the fancy of any gardener who saw it. Yes. Definitely, she'd do the article, and hopefully more.
She was shooting and swatting away when Mrs. Camplin returned with a gorgeous red bottle and handed it to her. "Use as much as you like; I can easily make more."
Meg pulled out the cork and laid it on a stone bench tucked in a little bend of the perennial border filled with clouds of baby's breath in fading bloom. Everywhere she looked, everything she touched, was beautiful, including the blown-glass, ruby-red bottle. She poured some of the golden liquid into the palm of her hand and rubbed it over her left arm and her legs, then switched and did her remaining arm.
The brew seemed a bit fishy under the lily-of-the-valley smell; but then, it was organic.
Mrs. Camplin smiled and said, "The water's boiling by now. I'll pour the tea and bring out a tray. You keep on working."
"Sure," Meg said, assuming they'd be nailing down an interest rate during teatime. She returned happily to the task and thought, People get paid for this?
Ten minutes later, her eyes were tearing and she had the beginnings of a pounding headache. She was allergic to something in the garden, apparently: mold spores or pollen, maybe. She thought about returning to the house, but Mrs. Camplin seemed so intent on having tea in the garden; Meg hated to disappoint her. Still, the damn tea was taking forever to brew.
She became restless and jumpy, swatting at the mosquitoes that seemed more interested in her than ever, and still — still! — no tea. This was stupid. If she was promised tea, then she should have the damned tea. And a brownie — what about that brownie?
No, no. No brownie. The mere thought of it made her suddenly nauseous. She fought back a rising tide of vomit, looking around frantically for somewhere discreet to puke. But there was no place; everything was planted, tended, flowering. She couldn't defile the site. Oh, but she was becoming deathly ill. She had to find a place. She turned and ran to one corner, then another, dizzy from her frantic maneuvers.
There was one little spot without flowers; she ran toward it and found it was filled by a big stone frog. Two stone frogs; or else she was seeing double. One frog or two, she couldn't wait. She was sick all over it or them, and then she fell to her knees, breathing rapidly, her heart still pounding furiously, struggling to stand and make her way back to the house for help.
She couldn't get up. She lay there awhile, and it seemed to her that she must be getting better, because her heartbeat began to slow down, and then it slowed down some more ... and then ... some more ...
And then it seemed to her, in her lethargic but not unpleasant stupor, that help did come. Mrs. Camplin did come. And Meg had been sweating, she knew she was still dripping wet, and Mrs. Camplin must have felt sorry for her, because through a haze Meg watched her pick up a galvanized bucket from somewhere and pour water all over her. It was very cool ... it felt very refreshing ... but it smelled awfully fishy.
Chapter 25
The gates were locked, but that didn't stop Wyler. By stepping on the iron scrollwork of the bottom gate rail, he was able — just — to get a footing mid-picket and haul himself over the gate without — quite — impaling himself on the spear points. Cursing himself for not taking his physical therapy more seriously, he dropped to his feet, then to his knees, before he recovered and went charging, despite his aching leg, down the drive.
He didn't think about guard dogs, he didn't think about alarms; he only thought, she's here, and if she's here, she's in danger. It seemed incomprehensible to him that with all she had on her plate, Meg was still pursuing this sham photography scheme of hers. Didn't she have enough to worry about? When he found her, he was going to take
her in his arms and kill her.
The driveway seemed to go on forever; the grounds were vast, ringed by thick woods. His cop's eye noted that there were plenty of places to hide the results of a crime. His heart, pounding hard, turned away from the thought. At the head of the drive and in front of a flower-covered house too picture-perfect to be true, he saw Meg's old Chevy parked alongside a Mercedes. He should've felt relieved but didn't; Bobby's words were too fresh in his mind: They're so desperate to hang on to what they've got.
He found Meg almost by instinct, lying unconscious on a mulched path near a big stone frog. Her shorts were wet; a knocked-over galvanized bucket lay next to her. The bucket was filled with soggy, half-shredded cigar butts; why, he didn't know. All he knew was that nicotine was one of the most toxic natural substances in existence. Panicking that he might be too late, he dragged a nearby hose over to Meg and rinsed her off quickly, then made a beeline for the house and phone. Two things were on his mind: Get an ambulance. Get the gate open.
He was in the front hall when Dorothea Camplin emerged carrying a large brass tray laden with a yellow teapot, two matching cups in their saucers, and a yellow plate of frosted brownies cut into two-inch squares. She looked absolutely shocked to see him there, but she didn't drop the tray or act hysterical, and he didn't wait for her to say something first, a fact that later he regretted.
"Where's your goddamned phone?" he demanded. "I've got to call an ambulance."
"An ambulance? What's happened? A car accident? Who are you? I've seen you before. How did you get on the grounds?"
He saw a phone on a small butler's table in front of a chintz-covered sofa and ran to it, then dialed an ambulance. The call was brief; he had another to make, still in a state of anguish, to the poison control center. All the while, Dorothea Camplin was watching him with a look of horror on her face.
When he hung up the second time, she said, "What should we do? What can I get?"
He ignored her and looked around, then ripped a soft cashmere throw from an arm of the overstuffed sofa and ran out with it, with Dorothea Camplin hard on his heels, saying, "I know what happened. I know just what happened. I had a bucket of cigar-water sitting on an old stump; I was painting my rosebushes with the solution, to kill the aphids. She must have knocked it over on herself."
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