Murder in the French Teacher's Garden

by Andrew Culver

  “So you just sat there all night?”

  “Until two. I bring my tea, and my chair, and I just sit.”

  “Anything happen?”

  She stopped walking and looked at me.

  “He drive by and look in my eyes.”

  “What happened?”

  “He pass by, like a coward. I stare at him with all of my hatred. I am a peaceful person, but I am afraid I will kill him if he try to mess my garden.”

  We arrived at the bakery and ordered. She got a latte and a chocolate croissant, and I got a cup of coffee and the ham and cheese croissant, and we were sitting down when a tall, cowboy-looking guy walked up and, without noticing Pauline, walked to the door of the bakery. Pauline exploded, jumping out of her seat.

  “You! You have the nerve to come here!”

  The guy whirled around. “Pauline, I’m allowed to come to the bakery,” he said with a western twang. “Look, I know we’re competing against each other, but I think we can be civil –”

  She let loose a volley of French epithets, and then switched back to English.

  “You cannot cheat your way through this competition again, Meester Screbbles. I think that you have funny business with the judges.”

  “Pauline, that’s outrageous and you can’t make accusations - ”

  “To win one year I understand – but to win every year is not making sense. Your campus does not recycle, there are not drought tolerant plants, the whole place is covered with cement, there are no solar panels, you have a massive carbon footprint, there is no way you are winning this competition with honesty.”

  “Pauline, can I just get my breakfast and go home? I don’t want this to get ugly.”

  “You have made it ugly. Stay away from my garden.”

  “I’m allowed to come look at the garden, Pauline. I want to see what you’re planting, see how you do things. That’s all.”

  “In the middle of the night? With threats?”

  He gave a wide smile. “Well, now I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He turned to me and stretched a hand out. “I’m Jim Screbbles, and I’m sorry we had to meet this way.”

  “Hi,” I said. “Tom Jenkins, I teach English at Ignatius.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” he said, and walked inside.

  Walking back with Pauline, I told her that he didn’t seem so bad.

  “Ah, yes, exactly,” she laughed ruefully. “He seem like the consummate gentleman, very nice. That is not the real Jim Screbbles. He will do anything to win this competition.”

  “And you? Will you do anything?”

  She looked at me, her eyes fiery. “Almost.”

  2

  A couple of nights later I got up at about 2 AM to go to the bathroom, and walking back to the bedroom I noticed that the cat was outside, meowing at the sliding glass door. “Dumb cat,” I muttered, and went to let her in. I absentmindedly walked outside to get some fresh air and see if the rain had stopped yet. It was dry, and I smelled smoke.

  Weird. This wasn’t the summer fire season. The mountains were all wet from the winter snow and spring rain. Nothing should be burning this time of year.

  I went back to bed and forgot about it until the next morning, which was a cold and foggy one. From my front porch I could see the plume of smoke about a half mile away. What would catch fire in weather like this? I left for work a few minutes early so I could see what was burning – I’d developed the small town habit of being nosy, even going out of my way to pry into other people’s disasters. I followed the smoke to the east side of town, and ended up…at Kennedy High School. It wasn’t any of the buildings that was on fire, I noticed as I drove past the fire engines and the crowd that had accumulated. It was an area behind their gym where, if I remembered correctly from a football game I’d attended between our two schools, that was…the prized Kennedy High School garden. With its rows of roses, its herb and vegetable garden, the corn and bean patch, the fifty-year-old apple trees. It was generations of work gone up in flames.

  As I drove past I saw a man I recognized as Jim Screbbles talking to one of the firefighters, gesticulating wildly, apparently yelling. The firefighter was nodding patiently and attempting to calm him down to no avail. I was tempted to get a closer look, but I had to get to school in time to make my morning coffee and get set up in the classroom.

  I walked into the faculty lounge to find Madame Gallard making a cup of tea by herself, fuming as she dipped a tea bag into her cup of hot water.

  “You see what happens at Kennedy?”

  “I drove past it.”

  “Already they are blaming me. I get a phone call from the police – he give them my name.”

  “Screbbles?”

  “Yes, that maniac. Can you believe?”

  “Well, what do you think happened? It looked like someone set fire to their garden specifically.”

  “They can pin nothing on me,” she said, heading to the door. “There is no proof.” She turned back to face me dramatically. “They will find nothing, you can be sure of this.”

  And she stormed out. I went to teach my classes that day, and struggled to stay focused on Hamlet with my AP Lit class – was my new work friend an arsonist? Was this charming, harmlessly eccentric French woman a psychopath? It was just a gardening competition, for Pete’s sake! It wasn’t worth going to jail for!

  Later that day she emailed me to remind me that today was the Gardening Club’s day for gardening after school, and that she had something special to show me when I came to help out.

  I showed up to the garden behind the gym, and noticed that her students were all back behind a giant wooden fence that I’d barely noticed before. There was a small gate open, and I heard her voice lecturing the students on something. I didn’t even know that this was school property – I thought it belonged to the neighbors or something. Her “Ratatouille Garden” was here, in development, where anyone could come and see it – but there was something going on in this forbidden spot. I arrived at the gate and looked inside. What I saw was astonishing. This was a garden in development that was about the size of my whole house. Students were bustling around, wheeling wheelbarrows full of soil, carrying plants, gathered around Pauline as she lectured. I couldn’t quite get a grasp on what I was seeing. In one corner, a group of kids were building what looked like a large planter. There were apple trees, maybe pear trees, and the makings of a French country garden that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Provence at some nobleman’s estate. There was a…a kind of symmetry taking shape.

  She looked at me and smiled slyly.

  “This is the real garden. Do you know, this was an old storage yard for fifty years? We cleaned it out and now it will be a garden. The other students don’t even know. We have been working on this for a long time now. Allow me to give you the grand tour.”

  She waved to the fence. “As you enter the garden, you will be greeted with the smell of sage. You will help us plant them, I hope.” She gestured to the fence. “All along the fence here. They will be aromatic and they will attract pollinators.”

  “Are those native?”

  “Yes, they are native to the area and they love this climate. So perhaps you will pause,” she said, “and take in the pleasant aroma. Next, you will notice in front of you, these three planters, which as you can see, we are filling with roses.”

  There they were. The kids were in the midst of planting them.

  “They are all aromatic roses – the kids chose the varieties. We went to the Huntington Library to look at their rose garden and from that they chose. So you see we are building the trellises between the rose bushes, so that you will walk through a shady pathway of overhanging vines. Maybe you pause to look at a rose, have a smell of one or two of them.”

  We proceeded. Past the roses were three more planters, also graced with trellises, upon which some kind of vine would be crawling eventually.

  “Here we will plant beans, kale, tomatoes, and
onions and garlic. When they are ripe we make a French feast to sell in the quad to raise money for Gardening Club,” she smiled. “Come.”

  I followed her to a final row of three empty planters. “Here we will have blueberries; here blackberries, and here chard and spinach.” A couple of students were putting the trellises in place, hammering away and bickering amongst themselves. All around me was the sound of kids talking, laughing, planning and discussing as they put their garden together.

  “Who decided on what to plant?” I asked.

  “The kids have a vote. And come, see our fruit trees.” She led me to the side of the garden, where, up against a fence, there was a row of small fruit trees.

  “Here is a cherry tree, here is Golden Delicious apple, and here is Fuji apple. And in between these we plant herbs – tarragon, oregano, basil, rosemary.”

  In between the trees were benches, where the kids would sit some day beneath the shade of the fruit trees and chat during lunch or after school.

  “On the other side is another row of trees,” she added, pointing to the opposite fence. “Cherry and two pears.”

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  “You are impressed?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is not what it will be. This is but a shadow. We do it all for the students. So they have a better environment. All this will still be here long after I am gone.”

  I smiled. “Can’t wait to see the final thing.”

  “You will help us build the final thing, Mr. Jenkins.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “But I forget myself – the most interesting part of the garden.” And she walked toward the back, where the creek passed through the campus. She gestured to a large pump on top of an old brick well.

  “Do you know that this school was once a seminary? Before they turn it into a school.”

  “I heard that.”

  “They built a well. It still work, can you believe!”

  “What is this? Did you build a pump?”

  “The Robotics Club build it, with Mr. Herschel’s help! This is our irrigation! We hook it onto a drip system and everything gets watered, and we bypass the city and their exorbitant water prices. Do you ever look at your water bill? It is a reeep-off! In a town like this, with snow three months of the year! No, I tell the students, I will not pay for municipal water when we have a well on school property.” And she gave me a look like she had gotten away with murder.

  I spent the next few hours loading dirt into the planters, helping put the trellises together, planting herbs and helping put the drip system in, all with Madame Gallard’s firm and specific guidance. The kids loved her, and they loved getting their hands dirty. This was Pauline’s great wisdom – she knew it wasn’t enough to just give a kid an iPad. They need to get outside, they need to build stuff.

  AROUND this time I noticed that one of my students was having problems. I had a kid in my AP Lit class named Gabriel, and he was an okay student at the beginning of the year, getting B’s and A’s on his assignments. As the year dragged on he started missing class and blowing off assignments, and by second semester he had derailed. I had waited too long to intervene, as usual, and it was past the time to say something. After class one day I told him to hang out and talk to me after everyone else left. He sat there, waiting glumly in his seat, and when everyone left I propped the door open according to school policy (never be alone in a room with a student with the door closed). I called him over to my desk and said, “Gabe, let’s look at some of your missing assignments.”

  He came over and looked at the gradebook on my computer, which showed about five missing assignments.

  “Yeah, I know about those. I’m sorry, Mr. Jenkins. I’m just going through some distractions and problems at home. My dad kind of left all of a sudden and we didn’t know where he was for awhile. And he called the other day and said he’s in Michigan with his girlfriend and he’s not coming home.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Gabe.”

  “I don’t really have a ride home or anywhere to go after school, so I just hang out here until like six, and I can’t really concentrate on my work.”

  Something tugged at me.

  “What are you doing, just playing video games or something?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “Well, all these assignments are for Hamlet. Did you read it?”

  “I tried to, but I couldn’t understand it.”

  “But we watched it in class and I explained it. Remember, I kept stopping the movie and explaining everything?”

  “I missed a lot of those classes. I missed a bunch of classes because of family stuff.”

  “Well, after school I work in the garden out behind the gym. Why don’t you come over there and sit on one of the benches, and start reading the play, and when you have a question, just come ask me. If you do that, you’ll be able to understand all these assignments and I won’t take off points for turning them in late.”

  He thought. “Okay. I’ll check it out. It might help me concentrate.”

  That day after school when I got to the garden, there was Gabe, sitting at one of the benches as the kids planted, watered, and built planters and trellises.

  “Who is this?” Pauline said to me as I walked in, gesturing to him.

  “He’s failing my class. I told him to come here and do his work so I could check up on him.”

  “Okay. I may ask him to help.”

  “Go ahead. It’ll be good for him.”

  Later he came up to me as I was digging a trench for the drip line and asked for some help. I stood up and he showed me the book. It was Act 2 scene 2, where Claudius is talking to Voltimand and Cornelius.

  “Okay,” Gabe said, “I understood everything that was happening up to this point, but what is all this stuff about Norway?”

  “Okay,” I wiped sweat off my face, “remember that this takes place in Denmark, right? And the Norwegians are building a huge army under the guidance of Young Fortinbras, whose father was killed by Hamlet’s father many years ago. Young Fortinbras has told his uncle that he was preparing for war against Poland, but his uncle then figured out that he was really preparing to invade Denmark. So Voltimand has just returned from Norway, where he talked to Fortinbras’s uncle, who promised that he persuaded Fortinbras not to invade.”

  “Ohhh…”

  “It’s just a subplot. The whole question is, will Fortinbras invade Denmark? Everyone is preparing for it in Denmark, so everyone is kind of paranoid and freaked out.”

  “And the king now thinks that Fortinbras wants to just pass through Denmark on his way to Poland?”

  “Yeah, so he’s going to consider whether to let him do that.”

  “So this is all just happening while Hamlet is going through his whole drama about his dad getting murdered by his uncle.”

  “Yeah, exactly. And he doesn’t even know if his uncle really did it or not. He just thinks he saw his father’s ghost, remember. We’re not sure if he imagined it or not.”

  He went back to the bench and became engrossed in the book again, and later I saw him talking to another senior named Daisy, who was in the Gardening Club, and they were both laughing. Well, I thought, this will keep him coming back. It just might save his grade.

  IT was several days later that I got to school a little earlier than usual just so I could make my coffee and stroll through campus. It was another misty, drippy morning, and I relished the quiet on campus during these days. A handful of kids usually arrived early for whatever reason, and they would sit in the quad waiting for the classes to open up so they could come in out of the cold. The day before I had been in the garden with Pauline and the kids, weeding and working on the drip lines. As I came out of the faculty lounge with my coffee a sophomore named Samantha called to me from over by the gym.

  “Mr. Jenkins,” she said, “someone left the garden gate open.”

  “That’s weird,” I said, walking toward her. “I thought Madame G
allard would have closed it.”

  Samantha and I walked over towards the garden, past the gym, and Samantha, who was running ahead of me, stopped when she got to the gate.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said. “Look.”

  “I wonder if those kids from Kennedy came in here to mess with the garden!” Samantha said, running inside. Before I could say anything, she was in the garden, running around, and then she stopped and screamed. She was at the other end of the garden, by the apple tree, and she was standing next to someone who was lying on the ground.

  “Who is that?” I yelled, running toward her. She looked up at me, her face ashen.

  It was Jim Screbbles. He was lying face up on the cold, damp ground next to a spade. His eyes were open and there was a giant bruise on his forehead. And he was dead.

  DETECTIVE Dave Roberts was a big guy and a St. Ignatius graduate, and before he entered the case, I already knew quite a bit about him. The thing is, it takes a while to get used to small town life, in particular the fact that you know a lot about the people around you. Most of the stuff I know I’ve learned from Katie’s mom Gretchen, who has lived here her whole life. She’s the kind of person who remembers everything about a person after hearing their life story once. Like a journalist, she will put the pieces of someone’s story together from as many sources as she needs to, until she has the full picture. She can then recall this information at a moment’s notice when prompted. It’s a skill that seems to be common among small-town people. She actually went to St. Ignatius with Detective Dave, as I call him sometimes. The thing is, it’s kind of important to understand this guy, because he was in charge of the case. And it’s part of the reason I got so involved.

  Dave was a basketball star at St. Ignatius and went to Gonzaga on a full-ride basketball scholarship. He played a couple of years, tore something, and couldn’t play anymore. It was devastating – but he finished at Gonzaga and ended up back in Cold Creek after “some crazy years” according to Gretchen, and married his wife Jill soon after that. They had three boys, and they have all been friends with my wife’s family for probably thirty years or so. I see Dave at weddings, funerals, get-togethers, 4th of July, the yearly Christmas party, and other times. He and my wife’s dad, Gene, will be sitting together somewhere away from the women smoking cigars. Sometimes I’ll join them, until the smoke starts making me sick. They are both pretty conservative politically, and they will start ranting about this or that, and I tend to just listen and report back to my wife, who chuckles and says, “That’s dad for you!”