The Secret Poison Garden

by Maureen Klovers

  Chapter Two

  As luck would have it, the Morris County Gazette was hiring a reporter. Rita sat with her laptop—a gift from Sal that, until now, she’d never had much use for—in the back booth at The Sunshine Café, mulling over her qualifications. At first blush, she might not be the most attractive candidate. She did not possess a journalism degree and while she technically had “clips,” they were in St. Vincent’s Italian-language newsletter, which, despite being very popular with blue-haired ladies of a certain age, did not have a wide circulation.

  Frowning, she arranged the articles in the center of the table. She needed three that were hard-hitting. They were mostly personal interest stories, fluff pieces about the priest’s beagle Principessa Lea (what else would a Star Wars-loving Italian priest name his dog?) and the Catholic school principal’s cake decorating hobby. But then she remembered that she was going to have to translate the articles anyway. And translation could be a very creative process.

  She scrutinized a faded yellow story about Giorno dei Nonni and decided the white-haired grandparents pictured could pass for grizzled Holocaust survivors. Then she fished a story about the eighth-grade biology project out of the pile, and decided that yes, a photo of a girl in a plaid jumper with a test tube in her hand could be the centerpiece for a story about the impact of open pit mining on stream quality. For good measure, she turned an interview with Mrs. Palermo, just back from a fabulous genealogical research trip to Sicily, into an incisive commentary on the influence of the Mafia in Italian politics.

  Rita checked her watch. She had just enough time to run home and whip up some pasta alla norma before Sal got home.

  Rita could barely contain her excitement. After thirty-six years of housewifery (excepting, of course, the “lunch lady” interlude), she had her first real interview. At one o’clock, she was going to walk into the offices of Morris County Gazette, résumé and clippings in hand, and confidently say she was there for an interview with Sam Porter. Rita had been practicing this in the mirror all morning. “I’d like to speak to Sam Porter, please,” she had practiced saying, in what she imagined to be a low, pleasantly authoritative tone. She thought it sounded as though she were a smoker, which was her intention, since it seemed that most journalists—serious, hard-bitten journalists, anyway—were smokers.

  But perhaps that sounded too formal. Perhaps the request should be shorter, more perfunctory. After all, journalists were very busy people. No time for niceties. “Sam Porter,” she had bellowed into the mirror. “Tell him it’s Rita Calabrese.”

  She had squeezed into her one and only suit, a yellow double-breasted number from the late eighties with huge shoulder pads. Thinking that it made her look rather like a linebacker, she had ripped the shoulder pads out, and then decided to “update” the look, as Gina would say, with a saucy red belt. She had arranged her hair in a neat bun, dabbed a little rouge on her cheeks, and headed out the door.

  She arrived at the office thirty minutes later, announced herself, and got a rather strange look when she delivered her “tell him it’s Rita Calabrese” line.

  “Um, she’ll be with you in a moment,” the teenaged receptionist said.

  Mortified, Rita skulked over to a chair in the corner and buried her face in that day’s newspaper.

  “Ms. Calabrese?”

  She looked up to see a plump young woman. Her blond hair was cut short, with the tips dyed blue, as if to match the thick frames of her glasses. She wore a shapeless black dress, and Rita caught a glimpse of a silver tongue ring flashing in her mouth. This could not be Sam Porter.

  Except it was.

  “Why don’t you come on back to my office so we can chat?”

  Rita followed Sam into her cluttered office and settled into a coffee-stained armchair. Sam perched on an enormous red exercise ball behind her desk, picked up a framed photo of herself with her arm around another woman, and tapped it lightly. “My partner,” she said loudly. “I caught you looking at it and thought I’d get that out of the way.”

  Rita shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “What a lovely young woman,” she chirped, unsure of what else to say.

  “You have an interesting writing style. Really flowery. Kind of old school.” She took a sip of coffee, and Rita thought she detected a hint of a smile. Or was it a smirk? “I have to say I had no idea that St. Vincent’s parish newsletter was in the vanguard of environmental journalism, plus political commentary and heart-wrenching personal interest stories. Good thing it’s in Italian. Otherwise I think the Morris County Gazette would have some formidable competition.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rita mumbled, unsure what else to say.

  “I like how you dig below the surface. I’ve only been here four months, and I gotta tell you, it seems like such a sleepy backwater. Boring. I’m from Buffalo, where murder and mayhem is pretty much the order of the day. Suspending someone’s car over the pool? Are you kidding me? My classmates had better things to do, like holding up the 7-Eleven or building their crack empire.” She leaned forward. “But I minored in women’s studies. People in small towns—especially women—live lives of quiet desperation, right? Right?”

  On any normal day, Rita would not have been able to think of much desperation, except maybe Fay Galloway’s exasperation that her lazy husband had still not found a job. But now that she had been mocked by her own children, she too felt a little desperate.

  “Exactly,” Rita said.

  “Can you show me the desperation?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I like your enthusiasm,” Sam said. “So here’s your first assignment. We’re coming up on the thirtieth anniversary of the Challenger disaster—”

  “And you want me to interview Miss Van Der Hooven?”

  Sam looked deflated. “How did you know?”

  “Trust me, if there’s one thing Miss Van Der Hooven doesn’t let anyone in this town forget, it’s that she was a finalist for the teacher slot on the shuttle.”

  Chapter Three

  Rita had a spring in her step as she swung open the door to Acorn Hollow High School and was assaulted by the stench of teenaged boy sweat—the worst kind there is, she thought—mingled with chlorine and bleach. As she strode down the hallway, she took particular satisfaction in the way her black patent leather pumps click-clacked across the mint green floor. Today she would not be going to the principal’s office as a frumpy hausfrau clad in sneakers, submissively seeking lenience for yet another of Vinnie’s infractions and then skulking off beneath the glare of the office staff, convinced she was the World’s Worst Mom.

  No, today, she was a professional journalist, and she was quite sure they would be the ones kowtowing. After all, no one wants to risk bad press.

  “Rita Calabrese,” she announced as she approached the secretary’s desk, thumping it for good measure. “I’m with the Morris County Gazette, and I’m here to see Miss Van Der Hooven.”

  To Rita’s grave disappointment, she found herself delivering this line to a purple-haired wisp of a girl who quite possibly had not even been born when the Challenger exploded.

  “Where’s Mrs. Hughes?” Rita stammered. She had been looking forward to a reunion with the old battle-axe now that she was no longer just Vinnie’s mom, but a bona fide career woman.

  “Dead.” The young woman must not have enjoyed her own interactions with Mrs. Hughes either, because she didn’t look the slightest bit perturbed by the old lady’s demise. “She was old, though. Like seventy, maybe even seventy-five.”

  “Oh,” Rita murmured, suddenly chastened. She felt as though the Good Lord would send a lightning bolt to smite her at any moment. There was nothing like death to make her feel petty. “What a shame.”

  The girl shrugged and tapped a clipboard. “Just sign in here,” she said. “Then stop by on your way back to sign out. She’s in room 207.”

  Rita signed her name and then trudged up the central staircase, clutching the well-worn bannister. She remembered how she had b
ounded up these same steps as a girl, full of energy. If only she had that energy now, she thought, as a group of cheerleaders came down the stairs, the pleats in their short little skirts bouncing with each step.

  She was just reaching the top step when she felt something scratch at the pantyhose on the top of her left foot. Rita looked down just in time to see a blur of gray fur scamper out of view. Behind her, she heard a high-pitched shriek and then the sound of laughter. “Well, at least he’s alive,” someone said.

  A tall girl with long, freckly legs caught up to Rita, her shorter, plumper friend in tow. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  Rita smiled. “Yes, thank you, girls. It’s kind of you to ask.” She bit her lip, hesitating for a moment. But then she remembered she was not being nosy, just a good journalist. “Might I ask what you meant by ‘at least he’s alive’?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” the shorter one said. “Every football player woke up this morning to find a dead squirrel on his doorstep.”

  “That’s a pretty sick prank, don’t you think?” her friend said.

  Rita just shook her head. What was the world coming to? She continued down the second-floor hallway, passed the music room, turned left at the entrance to the science wing, and rapped on the glass door marked 207.

  “Come in.”

  Miss Van Der Hooven’s voice was exactly as Rita remembered, deep and authoritative, slightly world-weary, and with more than a hint of irritation.

  Rita pushed the door open and smiled brightly at the hulking figure behind the desk. “Hello, Miss Van Der Hooven. It’s wonderful to see you. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  This was a bit of a stretch. Elizabeth Van Der Hooven was considerably grayer than she had been at Vinnie’s last parent-teacher conference and she had grown even stouter. If Rita’s shape resembled a butternut squash, Miss Van Der Hooven’s resembled a cantaloupe. But her helmet of hair was still shellacked into a gravity-defying beehive, and she was still apparently partial to purple polyester pants and custom-made sweatshirts emblazoned with bearded dragons. Miss Van Der Hooven was President of the Mid-Atlantic Bearded Dragon Rescue League and she often had as many as forty scaly friends crawling around her house. The scuttlebutt around town was that she was using it as a cover for conducting top-secret genetic experiments, but Rita suspected these rumors sprang from the overactive imaginations of disgruntled students.

  “So you want to talk about the Challenger,” she said as Rita squeezed into a surprisingly tiny wooden desk and slid her notebook out of her purse. Miss Van Der Hooven pushed her thick black-rimmed glasses further up the bridge of her nose, and Rita thought she glimpsed a twinkle of pride in her deep-set hazel eyes. “I was three years old when President Kennedy announced we would send a man to the moon, and I remember thinking, why not a woman?”

  “Why not indeed,” Rita found herself echoing indignantly.

  Miss Van Der Hooven nodded emphatically, and the bearded dragon on her chest wiggled disconcertingly. “Then when I was a young biology teacher right here in Acorn Hollow, I heard that NASA wanted to send a teacher on the next space shuttle. I spent hours preparing my application. I got a glowing reference from the principal. I had a master’s degree from MIT; my students had won the state science fair three years in a row. I thought it was my big break. Rounds of interviews and fitness tests followed, and I was one of the final ten.” Her shoulders slumped. “But they picked cute, perky Christa McAuliffe instead.”

  “Well, wasn’t that a blessing!”

  Miss Van Der Hooven just stared at Rita. “In what way?”

  Rita blinked and shifted uneasily in the creaky little desk. “Well, she died.”

  “So?”

  Miss Van Der Hooven, it seemed, lived in a perennial state of despair that cute, perky Christa McAuliffe had been selected instead. She reminded Rita of that thick-headed British terrorist who couldn’t manage to set his underwear on fire and was subsequently crestfallen that he failed in his quest to join the pantheon of Islamic martyrs carousing with their hundred virgins. Miss Van Der Hooven apparently yearned to be in some sort of Valhalla for science martyrs. Perhaps, Rita thought, there really was something to the phrase “mad scientist.”

  “That’s when I decided that I was done with mammals,” Miss Van Der Hooven concluded darkly. “They always disappoint you.”

  The phone rang, and Miss Van Der Hooven picked it up, her plum-colored Lee Press-On nails tapping the console. “Come over at seven,” she cooed in a voice that was uncharacteristically syrupy. “And bring chocolate, my love, lots and lots of chocolate.”

  The voice on the other end was tinny and indistinct, but definitely masculine. Rita could hear a cough now and then.

  “Well that certainly sounded like a mammal,” Rita said as Miss Van Der Hooven hung up. “A new boyfriend?”

  Miss Van Der Hooven’s lips curled into a tight little grimace. “Let’s just say someone who wouldn’t dare disappoint me.”

  Chapter Four

  Rita was disappointed to see Miss Van Der Hooven alone at the Athletic Boosters party hosted by Coach Stiglitz that weekend. There was no mysterious lover in sight, no silver-haired gentleman rushing to bring her a slice of Rita’s chocolate almond mousse cake (which, Rita noted with satisfaction, was disappearing faster than any other dessert) or tripping over himself to sing the praises of bearded dragons.

  Miss Van Der Hooven didn’t seem to mind, however. Comfortably ensconced in the football coach’s recliner and deep in conversation with her acolyte Julia Simms, Acorn Hollow High School’s other biology teacher, she was plowing through a thick slab of Rita’s cake with gusto. Every now and then, she stabbed her fork in the air for emphasis, and Rita winced, hoping a blob of almond mousse wouldn’t suddenly go flying through the air and land on one of the oil paintings that lined the walls. Rita wouldn’t know a Monet from a Modigliani, but the heavy gold frames and expert lighting told her that they must be expensive.

  Not that she was surprised. Coach Stiglitz had inherited money—lots of it. His family had hobnobbed with the Roosevelts and Vanderbilts at Hyde Park, she had heard. They had been railroad magnates, or made a killing in the opium trade in the Far East, or discovered oil on their ranch in Texas. It was all a little vague, but believable enough that no one questioned why a high school football coach who doubled as the study hall monitor owned one of the largest houses in town.

  But not necessarily one of the classiest, Rita thought as she cast an appraising eye around the room. She could see why his fiancée wanted him to sell it. It was very much a bachelor pad, with gloomy wine-colored walls, mismatched furniture clearly chosen for comfort rather than style, and sports memorabilia filling every spare nook and cranny. Yet the kitchen was top of the line, with custom-made cherry wood cabinets, white marble countertops, and stainless steel appliances.

  “How much is he asking?” Rita asked her twin, who was squeezed beside her on a tangerine couch. While Rita had poured her energies into childrearing, childless Rose had focused on her career. She had been the town’s top-selling realtor every year for the past decade, and everyone knew that if you wanted your house to sell, you called Rose. Coach Stiglitz was no exception.

  “Eight seventy-five.”

  Rita was aghast. She had thought that only penthouses in New York City cost that much. She could not fathom anything in Acorn Hollow going for half that. “You think he’ll get it?”

  “Eventually. But I’m not sure if that’ll happen before they move into their new house.”

  New monstrosity, Rita was on the verge of saying. Coach Stiglitz and his fiancée were building an enormous contemporary house on the side of the mountain. Rita had driven past the construction site the other day and was shocked to find the workmen painting it a nauseating shade of blue. Smurf blue, as she had described it to Sal.

  She was glad that she held her tongue, though, for just then the happy couple approached.

  “I’m glad you all could make it,” Coach Stig
litz boomed. Every inch the former high school jock, he was tall and ruggedly handsome, with a thick neck, enormous biceps and just a hint of an incipient beer belly. There was something dangerously thrilling about him. Perhaps it was the slightly crooked nose or the scar over his left eyebrow that hinted of past athletic glory. Or maybe it was his flashing blue eyes that glowered at you one minute and winked the next. Whatever it was, Rita had seen that rugged charm work time and time again. Coach Stiglitz never failed to reduce some middle-aged matron—normally so sensible, so unflappable—into a state of giggly adolescent wonder.

  Hovering at his side, gazing adoringly up at him, was his fiancée, Angelica. She shot Rita one of her dazzling smiles and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “Your cake is delicious as always,” Angelica gushed. “I’ve already had two pieces and I’m trying to resist a third.”

  Miss Van Der Hooven looked up from her plate. “Oh, go on and have a third,” she grunted, scowling. “Put some meat on your bones.”

  Angelica tittered nervously. Nearly forty, but somehow retaining the effervescence of youth, she was sweet and guileless and clearly not cut out for battle with the Miss Van Der Hoovens of the world. She bit her lip, and two dimples appeared on her cheeks. “I have to fit into my wedding dress,” she said, somehow making it sound more like an apology than an explanation.

  “Is this a new wedding dress, or are you just recycling the old—?”

  “Really, Elizabeth,” Coach Stiglitz cut in, with more than a hint of warning in his voice. “Be nice.”

  He shot her a murderous look, slipped an arm around Angelica’s waist, and steered her to the kitchen, where Sal was regaling a rapt circle of middle-aged fathers—and Dr. Walker, the high school principal—with Marco’s exploits as the Fighting Squirrels’ star quarterback. Rita shook her head and smiled ruefully. Two decades later, Sal was still telling the same old stories.