McMansion (15 page)

“Appreciate the help,” Edwards said, after we had gathered our gear and loaded mine into my car.

“Beats sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring.”

“You didn't say what you were doing here.”

“Delivering a plant from my Aunt Connie.”

“She usually comes out herself.”

“She's not feeling that well, today.”

Caroline came out. “Edward, it's time to get dressed. I'm sorry, Ben, we've plans, or we'd ask you in for a drink.”

“Just leaving. Thanks again for the tea. I'll tell Connie I can personally vouch the plant is in the ground.”

I headed home, fairly sure that Caroline Edwards was the woman who had put the peony on Billy Tiller's casket, but not at all sure why. She certainly hid her grief well, if grief she felt. Edwards, on the other hand, was still only marginally civil even after a couple of hours' work and problem solving of the sort that usually gave a couple of men some sort of bond they hadn't shared before. Either he was congenitally unpleasant, or he was a very jealous husband. The look he had shot at me when he saw me releasing Caroline's hand had cut no slack.

***

When I got home, Alison was waiting in my office, quite excited about something.

“Do you see who wrote you?” She had brought in the mail and put it on my desk.

“All I see is bills and junk mail.”

“This is not junk mail,” she said, extending a UPS Next Day Air envelope. “This is from Joey Girl.”

She tapped a fairly clean finger on the return address.

I asked, “What is Joey Girl?”

“Are you serious? You're joking. You're always joking.” She looked at me askance, tilting her head as if peering into sun glare. “You've never heard about Joey Girl?”

“Now that you mention it, I've seen the name on all that garbage they put on the e-mail screen.”

“You should get out more. Can I open the letter?”

“It is ‘May I,' and, yes, you may.”

“May I?” She grabbed the plastic stiletto I used for a letter opener, slit it open reverentially, and drew out a square envelope made of heavy stock. “See!” she said, tapping a company logo of cat whiskers.

“Open it.”

She slit the square envelope and opened the contents. Her big eyes got bigger. “Oh God. Ohmigod. You are invited to a Joey Girl Party. Ohmigod, ohmigod.”

“I still don't know what Joey Girl is.”

Joey Girl, she explained, was a hot hip hop clothing label prized by fashionable wagamamas.

“Wagamamas? What are ‘wagamamas'?”

Nine- to-thirteen-year-olds, Alison told me. “It's Japanese for ‘naughty little girls.'”

I wondered, not for the first time, how long before I would be dealing with gentleman callers on motorcycles.

“You're so lucky—how do you rate?”

The mystery of that absurdity was solved by a note scrawled on the bottom of the invitation. Joey Girl was owned by Jeff Kimball's straight-arrow businessman father. He hoped I could come to his “First Annual Watercress Picking Party,” to be held at his Fairfield County Estate. (His capital ‘E,' not mine.) But why? If he wanted to talk about Jeff's case all he had to do was telephone, or instruct Ira to send me down to New York.

“Bring a friend,” he wrote, apologizing for short notice.

“I'm your friend,” said Alison.

“You are twelve.”

“It doesn't say what age.”

Alison watched, barely breathing, as I dialed the RSVP number. I didn't particularly want to go, as I would have to juggle Saturday house-showing appointments. But I very much wanted to ask—face to face—why Kimball had neglected to mention that he knew how to drive bulldozers.

A polite secretary answered.

“This is Benjamin Abbott. I'll be delighted to attend Mr. Kimball's Watercress Picking Party at one o'clock on Saturday. Would a twelve-year-old young lady be welcome as my guest?”

I held the phone so Alison could hear. “I'm sorry, Mr. Abbott. The party will be child-free.”

I mouthed, “Sorry.”

“You tried,” she mouthed back, and I said to the nice lady on the phone, “Understood. In that case I'll bring someone age appropriate. Miss Constance Abbott. That's Miss, not Ms., M-I-S-S.”

“Mr. Kimball looks forward to seeing you, Mr. Abbott, with Miss Abbott.”

After we had traded goodbyes, Alison said, “Maybe Connie's a little too old to go to that party?”

“I think she'll enjoy it.”

“You should take Vicky.”

“I'm sure Vicky wants to spend her Saturday with Tim.”

“Tim's doing a seminar in Hartford. He won't mind.”

“I think I'm better off taking Connie.”

“You're just afraid to be alone with Vicky.” Alison loved Vicky McLachlan as only a little girl could love an exciting big sister sort who let her watch her put on makeup and showed her things to do to her hair on the occasions she drifted out of Tomboy mode.

“I am in no position to ask her out.”

“Yeah, but if Connie doesn't feel up to it, Saturday, you have to take Vicky.”

“I'm asking Connie right this minute. Catch you later.”

***

I found her dozing in her rose garden. She blinked awake when my shadow crossed her face. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What happened at the Edwards'?”

“Caroline loved your plant. Her husband loved my comealong.”

“Come-along? You mean come-on?”

“No, he would not have liked me coming on to his wife. He struck me as jealous. No, I helped him cut down a tree. I had the come-along in the car.”

“Working side by side is a good way to get to know someone. What did you think of him?”

“Methodical, precise, a little dull, someone you could count on to keep a level head in a pinch. Brusque, if not downright unpleasant.”

“What did you think of her?”

“I liked her. Liked her a lot.”

“I hoped you would.”

“Why? She is married.”

“Well of course she's married and I don't mean it quite that way, but it is good for you to appreciate other types of women—types different than you usually fall for. It suggests a budding maturity.”

“Why do I think you are not complimenting me?”

“I'm sorry. I'm teasing you, Ben. But she's a lovely woman, isn't she?”

“Very. Very self-contained.”

“Did you learn what you hoped to learn?”

“Not yet. Meeting her, I found it even harder to imagine Billy Tiller seducing her. But I did see ten peonies cut and only nine in her vase.”

“Odd numbers usually look better in a vase.”

“So unless she dropped one on the lawn, it was the one I saw on Billy's casket.”

“When are you going back?”

“First thing tomorrow.”

“Do you want another plant?”

“No, I'll just barge in. He's working at home tomorrow. Listen, I came over to invite to you a party down in Newtown on Saturday. Jeff Kimball's father. A hip hop mogul. It ought to be a scene.”

“Are you sure you wouldn't rather take a date?”

“I tried to take Alison, but they said the party is ‘child free.' Would you like to come? They're calling it a watercress picking party.”

“We'll bring our Wellies.”

***

I drove in the Edwards' driveway right after breakfast and parked by the barn. I heard Edwards sawing branches off the tree we had dropped and walked to him. He slid the saw into its sheath.

“You know we had a phone installed,” he said. “It's handy for calling ahead to see if we feel like visitors.”

“I'm not visiting. I came to show you something.”

“What?”

“It's in your wife's garden.”

“My wife? What are you talking about?”

“Right this way.” I walked quickly around the barn. He followed. I pushed through a gate, hurried along a path, and pointed at the peonies. “Let's talk.”

“About what?”

I did not want to be the one to say that his wife had had an affair with Billy Tiller. I wanted him to tell me. “Well, why don't we start with the lies you told about being with Billy when you weren't.”

“What lies?”

“Your word against Jeff Kimball's. Your word against school bus driver Jimmy Butler. Two against one.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Six or seven years ago you told Trooper Moody the kid attacked you and Billy with an axe.”

Edwards shook his head slowly left and right and left again.

“Last year you told Trooper Moody that Jimmy Butler asked if he could stash a truck in Billy's barn.”

He kept shaking his head.

“That's two,” I said. “Want to hear some more?” I didn't have any more.

He kept shaking his head, slowly, emphatically. Then he said the last thing in the world I would have predicted: “You want to take a sauna?”

“What?”

“I built a sauna out in the woods. I fired it up at dawn. It'll be plenty hot by now. Come on, it'll do us both good.” His lips moved in a semi-smile. “Cool you down. Ironically.”

I hesitated, thinking, Okay, we go out to the sauna and when I turn my back he crushes my skull with a hot stone and buries me in the woods. On the other hand, he was not that much bigger than I, and I could probably take him if I had to. “Okay. Let's have a sauna.”

We walked into his woods, on a path of wood chips. His house and barn and Caroline's gardens faded behind us. Ahead the trees grew dense.

“How many acres do you have here?”

“Eleven. But it's mostly surrounded by Northeast Utility land and some nature preserve.”

Which meant that he was sitting pretty. His eleven acres, and his sauna, were considerably more remote than your average eleven acres, and he had bought a lot of beautiful privacy with the money he earned helping carpet the town with new houses.

“Northeast log it?” I asked.

“They cull about every ten years. Keeps the woods open. The nature preserve is badly overgrown—I worry about fire during Red Flag alerts—but they can't afford to thin it.”

The sauna appeared through the trees, and it was a beautifully proportioned little log house, with a wisp of thin white smoke rising from a stovepipe. “A real wood-fired sauna,” I said.

“Got it on line from Norway. Stove, rocks, and all.”

“Nice-looking structure. You built it yourself?”

“I like building stuff. Good way to unwind.”

He had piped water out from his house and rigged an outdoor shower for cooling off. Inside was a little change room, brightly lit by a skylight, with a bench with room three or four people to sit and take off their shoes, which we did, and ornate brass hooks for hanging our clothes.

For nearly fifty years, no one who ever saw
Psycho
could close their eyes in a shower without recalling Janet Leigh's slaughter in the water. Now, thanks to
Brokeback Mountain
it will be another fifty years before two guys can take their clothes off in the locker room without wondering, Did he see that movie, too? Edwards didn't seem to care. In fact, he looked me over, deliberately, before he finally offered me a towel. It was a severe inspection and I regretted some recent thickening around my waist that I had been meaning to do something about. He was heavily muscled, workout-machine bulked. Or maybe, I thought, he popped steroids, which would explain his prickly manner.

We went through a thick door into nostril searing dry heat. The benches were tiered. I took a cooler one at the bottom. Edwards climbed up behind me. I propped my back casually against the hot wooden wall to observe any move to pluck a hot rock from the rack in the cast-iron stove.

“What shall we talk about?”

“Plenty,” Edwards said, “now that I know you're not wearing a wire.”

“A wire?”

“A recording wire. Don't be dense.”

“Why would I wear a wire?”

“Because you suspect me of something.”

“Is what we're here to talk about?”

“Have you any idea how often I had to haul Billy's ass out of trouble?”

“All I know is your name keeps coming up. And not in a good way. People say you lied to help Billy.”

“Do they?” He shook his head. Smiled. “Do they say why?”

“Because you worked for him.”

“He wasn't the only builder I worked for.”

“That's what I said. People—the people I've talked to—figured you had no choice.”

“Anybody figure why?”

“I'm hoping that the reason we're sitting here sweating is so you can tell me why.”

“Working with Billy was like working with a wild animal. And not a particularly bright one. A stupid one, like a deer or a cow. He did what he wanted, when he wanted. He had a moral compass that always pointed north, and he was north. Which meant that he never thought he was wrong. On top of that, he was impulsive. If he wanted something, he wanted it right now.”

He stopped talking, quite suddenly. I waited a while. Then I said, “I've heard from some people who knew him that he was actually very intelligent.”

“A cow is bright enough to recognize edibles.”

“And yet Billy had a gift for success, didn't he? A lot things he touched turned to gold.”

Edwards smiled. “He was something of an idiot savant. He could look at a piece of land and see the dollar signs.”

“That's just greed.”

“No, I don't mean that. I mean he could see the slopes, water, where the roads would go and the driveways, curtain drains, septics.”

“He built floods, for crissakes.”

“Only on the neighbors' land.”

“He knew they would flood? Those weren't accidents?”

“Like I said, he was the lodestone of his moral compass.”

“Which means,” I said, getting angry when I should have been listening coolly, “that you lied on the plans you drew up.”