18 Deader Homes and Gardens (22 page)

“I’ll take care of it, Jordan. If your aunt has gone, I can clear it with Nattie. Wait for me by the statue.” I took a peek around the corner of the building.

Her voice dropped. “What are you doing? If you want to steal ornamental trees, you ought to wait until dark. The root balls are heavier than you think. Do you want azaleas or anything like that? I can grab a couple and carry them to your car for you.”

She was clearly in the throes of mall withdrawal and cell phone deprivation, both potentially fatal to teenagers. I shook my head. “Thanks for your offer of assistance, but I’m not here to steal anything.” I would have elaborated, but nothing came to mind. To distract her from asking the obvious question, I said, “Have you seen Pandora Butterfly this morning?”

“No, and I’d better not!”

“You have a problem with her?” I did, but I wasn’t going to proffer it as a topic of conversation. As much as I appreciated Jordan’s efforts to join civilized society, I didn’t trust her.

“No, it’s nothing,” she replied hastily. “We’re fine. It’s just that, uh, her kids made off with a book I left outside. It’s probably in shreds.”

“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t a poker player, but I could read the mendacity in her eyes. I chose not to pursue it. Pandora’s fan base was small, and I wasn’t surprised that Jordan was not a member. Since Ethan was otherwise occupied, it seemed logical that Pandora was at home with her wee beasties. “Jordan, if you want me to arrange for you to come home with me, you need to wait for me at the statue. I’ll be there in no more than half an hour. Got it?”

Her upper lip started to curl into a sneer, but she caught herself. “Okay.”

Once she’d trudged away, I wound my way through the saplings and stayed at the edge of the field until I found a well-beaten path that I assumed led to Ethan and Pandora’s house. The path was littered with sodden piles of discarded clothes and muddy shoes. A headless doll had been nailed to a tree. I did not allow myself to conjure up horrific images of pagan rituals.

The beasties were not in sight when I reached the yard. Pandora was seated on a railroad tie, her head lowered. When I stepped on a particularly crunchy leaf, she looked up. “Are you stalking me? Go play with Dearg Due. He’s got a thing for scrawny, meddlesome redheads.”

I politely overlooked her lack of appreciation for the difference between scrawny and svelte, as well as between meddlesome and inquisitive. In sunlight, my hair has red highlights, so I couldn’t accuse her of total ignorance. “You look dreadful, dear. Do you have a hangover?”

“From one glass of wine?” Her laugh was nasty. “You must be a cheap date.”

“Zeppo took you to a church revival? Charles will be tickled pink.”

She nearly lost her balance as she stood up. “What are you talking about? The guy on the motorcycle owed me some money. I got off at the highway and came home, if it’s any of your business. I don’t even know his name, and I’ve never heard of anybody named Zeppo. That’s stupid.”

“I don’t guess he took you to the Devil’s Roost,” I continued, refusing to flinch as she glowered at me. “Jimmie John said you’re not welcome there anymore.”

I had her full attention. Her fists tightened as she turned away, and I could hear her cursing in a low voice. “My cell phone,” she said abruptly.

“It begged me to hit the redial button, and I didn’t want to hurt its feelings. Jimmie John had quite a lot to say about you, Pandy.”

“That’s a violation of my privacy! It’s like reading somebody’s diary or opening their personal mail.”

“Equally enlightening, too. Does Ethan know about these little jaunts with Zeppo? For the record, I do agree that it’s a stupid name. He should consider changing it to Harpo or Chico.”

“What do you want from me?” she asked with a groan.

“An explanation would be a good start.” I sat down on a splintery railroad tie and waited for her to fabricate a remotely plausible story.

The hangover was too much for her. She sat cross-legged in the grass and sighed. “You cannot believe how boring it is out here. Yeah, Jordan whines all the time, but she’s only been here a month. I’ve been here for ten tedious years. All Ethan talks about is the nursery, and he’s up there all day and half the night. Am I supposed to have intelligent conversations with Rainbow and Weevil? All they do is snuffle and snort like filthy little pigs. What am I supposed to do? If I didn’t get a break, I’d lose it.”

“What happened to the free-spirited lily of the valley? Can’t you commune with the goddesses, or have they cut you off? They may not approve of your participation in the drug business.”

“Jimmie John’s full of it. He’s a runty old alcoholic who runs a bar for losers. I may have been there once, but I didn’t stay. I dance and flutter and act like an idiot because it keeps the rest of the family away. The last things I want to do are drink tea with Nattie and listen to her talk on and on about poor, confused Winston. It gets old. There were times I wished that I could drown her out with a mantra.”

“What were you doing at an ashram?”

“There was a warrant out on me, and it was a safe place. Then Ethan showed up in his tree-hugger sandals, all eager to meditate and starve himself on brown rice and seaweed. He was so squishy and sincere that I wanted to puke. Then he started talking about his inheritance and the nursery, and he looked a helluva lot more attractive.” She shoved her hair back and closed her eyes. “We had this wonderful scheme how we’d take over one of the greenhouses and get serious about growing pot. He wove my wedding ring out of slivers of bamboo. We mumbled a lot of nonsense out in a pasture, with goats nibbling on the hem of my dress and a monk in a purple robe.” She held out her hand to allow me to swoon over an emerald ring surrounded by diamonds. “I replaced the bamboo thingie with this. I can always sell it if I need to. It’s worth eighteen thousand.”

“Your grand scheme didn’t work out so well. There’s no marijuana in the greenhouses.”

“Once we got here, Ethan got all excited about growing trees and flowers. He said we couldn’t put the nursery at risk. It has to comply with state regulations and be inspected at least once a year. Then there’s dear old Uncle Charles. Ethan didn’t tell me about him until we got here. He does his own inspection several times a week. Felicia trots behind him with a notebook, assiduously writing down his grumbles and complaints. One of these days I’ll bake him a batch of brownies that will make his toenails tingle!”

“How are you planning to do that without marijuana? As fond as I am of Duncan Hines, he doesn’t seem like the sort to arouse tingles.” I paused for a moment. “You’re growing it out in the woods, aren’t you? Did Ethan give you any suggestions for an irrigation system, or is he unaware of your horticultural endeavor?”

“He may suspect, but he wouldn’t dare take a hit and imperil his karma. Then again, he gets totally drunk when it suits him and boasts about all the money he’s stashed away. We could be living in Florida in one of those ridiculously expensive houses with plate-glass windows looking out on a white sand beach. You know, hurricane bait. Who cares how much it costs after your roof tiles end up in the Everglades?”

“You can’t convince him to move away from here?” I asked. “He can’t be having too much fun if he puts in so many hours at the nursery.”

Pandora’s mouth curled. “He swears we’ll leave every year, but then there’s the spring planting season, and the fall planting season, and the rush at the beginning of the summer, and the rush before Christmas. ‘One more year’ is his mantra. I’ve heard that for a bloody decade!”

Nattie had told me that the nursery did well, but Pandora was talking big bucks. It didn’t sound like the family members were scraping by on their shares of the profit. They did have expensive cars: Charles’s new Cadillac, the Mercedes, the Mustang convertible. The sleek, cocoa-colored Jaguar parked on the far side of the yard had not come from a used car lot in Maxwell County. Pandora’s kimono had been hand-embroidered with silk. I hadn’t realized that holly berries were worth their weight in dollars. Living in a duplex does not require extensive expertise in landscaping. Weeds bewilder me, and grass is grass.

“I need water,” Pandora said suddenly. “Don’t say anything to Ethan about last night, and I’ll bake you some brownies.” She struggled to her feet in preparation to escape my stare.

I had principles, but one of them involved using whatever worked. In this case, blackmail would do nicely. “Wait a minute, Pandy,” I said, laying emphasis on her alias. “I’ll agree to forget about the Devil’s Roost and Zeppo, but you have to give me something more helpful than a vague promise of brownies. Don’t bother to offer me a little plastic bag of pot. My husband’s a cop, and he might ask me where I got it.”

“What do you want? I can have the children’s bags packed in three minutes. You can deliver them to whatever agency will take them. I can tell Ethan they’re hibernating under the house. He won’t care.”

I do not hold grudges, but I was still rankled by her attitude in the library. “Let’s start with Winston’s death. Tell me what you know.”

“I don’t know anything,” she said, rubbing her temples. “He fell, he jumped. I didn’t like him or Terry. They were always polite, but I knew they were laughing at me. I wouldn’t have sold them a friggin’ aspirin.”

“What did Ethan say about it?”

“He said it was suicide and not to worry about it. To be honest, I wasn’t paying much attention. It’s not like I’m a member of the family. To them, respectability is like the Nobel Peace Prize. When a journalist comes here to do a piece for a magazine, the kids and I aren’t allowed to leave the house because we don’t fit into the image of a wholesome, family-owned business. I tried to leave once, but Charles and Ethan came after me like drooling bloodhounds. They’d put computer chips under everyone’s skin if a veterinarian would do it. Esther’s the only one who escaped for real.”

“You know Esther?” I asked, trying not to sound as perplexed as I felt.

“I know about her,” she said. “Charles gets on his pulpit and carries on about her treachery and sinfulness at least once a year. He intersperses that rant with ones about homosexuals, promiscuous teenagers, drunks, dopers, disobedient wives, unruly children, and whatever other bug he has up his butt. We all sit there with our hands in our laps and nod on cue. What a jolly time to be had at Hollow Valley!”

“They can’t force you to stay here.”

Pandora looked in the direction of the nursery. “I know that. This is my final year to tiptoe through the tulips. I’m out of here on January first, with or without Ethan and the kids, and I’m cleaning out the bank accounts before I go. You know what this place needs? A flash flood that carries everybody downstream all the way to whichever ocean is handier. Maybe they’ll end up on an island where they can grow coconut trees and sell them to the cannibals.”

I’d gotten more information from Moses than I had from her. I scratched a red bump on my ankle, then got up. “Does the nursery really make that much money?” I asked bluntly.

“There’s half a million dollars in Ethan’s savings account,” she said as she started for the house.

“Your children ate one of Jordan’s books,” I called to her back.

“Let’s hope it wasn’t a cookbook. They get diarrhea if they eat anything with meat in it.” The front door closed.

I deftly inferred that she no longer desired to talk to me. Instead of wading through the woods to my car, I walked down the driveway to the blacktop and turned in the direction of the Old Tavern. As I ambled, my mind was racing. Two of the dots on the scribbled notes found a possible connection. Jordan and Pandora Butterfly made an odd couple, but I was willing to bet they had one thing in common.

Jordan had climbed the statue of Colonel Moses Ambrose Hollow and was sitting on his shoulders. She waved her arms at me. “Mrs. Malloy!”

I felt like a ship coming to the rescue of a dehydrated traveler adrift in a lifeboat. “Yes, Jordan,” I said with minimum enthusiasm. “You can come down now.”

She slithered down his back. “You can’t see anything from up there, except at night. Then I can watch Nattie put on pajamas and putter around her bedroom. If she was having a mad, passionate affair with one of the workmen, that’d be worth the bird poop on my butt. Mostly she reads. Aunt Margaret Louise left five minutes ago. When you talk to Nattie, don’t tell her about what I said or anything, okay?”

It seemed as though potential blackmail victims were flinging themselves in my path. Pandora had Zeppo, and Jordan had a nocturnal affinity for the Colonel. “I won’t bring up the subject, but I never lie.” I could almost hear Peter’s brays of laughter. “Unless it’s in the best interests of the community, and it usually falls into the category of omission, not commission.”

“Whatever you say, Mrs. Malloy.”

I knocked on the heavy door. Nattie opened it and tried to hide her dismay. “Claire … do come in. Moses and I have finished eating, but you’re welcome to a piece of chocolate cake.” Her mouth fell open as she spotted Jordan. “Oh, my goodness, what have you done with Jordan? Did you replace her with a real child?”

“I’m fourteen years old,” Jordan said sullenly.

Nattie shook her head. “You’re attractive. Who would have thought it? Let me have a closer look at you, Jordan. Are those your real eyelashes?”

I let Jordan squirm while Nattie fussed over her, then poked her. “Go ahead and ask her, dear.”

She stammered out a convoluted but mostly coherent request that covered Aunt Margaret Louise’s absence, Caron and Inez’s maturity, and her solemn promise to behave impeccably the remainder of the summer and pick gallons of blackberries or raspberries or blueberries or whatever Nattie wanted. She finally ran down. “Can I, Nattie?”

I expected Nattie to smile and send her off with me, so I was a bit mystified when she said, “I don’t know, Jordan. Aunt Margaret Louise is the one who should make that decision. Discuss it with her tonight, and maybe you can spend the night at Claire’s house later in the week. I hope you understand, Claire. Jordan’s parents made the arrangement with Margaret Louise.”

When Jordan turned around, her face looked almost as contorted as it had with the garish makeup. She swept past me, cut across the mill’s lawn, and disappeared into the woods.