The Red Garden (27 page)

T
HERE WAS A
week of driving rain. Spring rain, spitting against the windows, flooding the lanes. During that time the
blackflies, which anyone might have imagined would have been washed away by the deluge, multiplied. Louise was irritated beyond measure. She went back to the hardware store and found a sort of zapping machine that was said to make an area undesirable to insects. The zapper cost almost two hundred dollars, but she didn’t care. Despite her mosquito netting outfit, there were dozens of raised red bites on her skin.

“My brother said he never was in love with you,” Allegra, who’d recently been promoted to store manager, revealed to Louise as she deposited the zapper in a shopping bag. “He said I was very much mistaken.”

“That’s good, since I have no idea who he is.” Whenever Louise got flustered or felt insecure, her demeanor became haughty. Anyone might suppose she thought she was better than they were just because she lived in that big, falling-down house. But her redhead’s complexion gave her away. She was blotchy with anxiety. All of a sudden she recalled that sunny afternoon when she was still in the Blackwell Elementary School. She remembered someone hitting her on the head. Johnny Mott. “Tell him to drop dead,” she said tightly, gathering up the bug zapper.

“Will do,” Allegra said. “Gladly.”

The next week a few of the new plantings died, withering, it seemed, overnight. That seemed like a rip-off. It didn’t seem fair that after all those hours of hard labor she’d wind up with nothing. Louise drove back down the Mass Pike to Harvest Hill to complain. They said anything could have ruined the plants—not enough fertilizer, too much rain, shade, aphids. This made gardening seem like a much more precarious endeavor than Louise had imagined. She didn’t have her receipts, so they wouldn’t return her money. They suggested she buy more. Something heat
tolerant, bug tolerant, water tolerant, she assumed. She chose lilacs, a hardy variety, and a few small azaleas, along with some beans and tomatoes. She kept the receipts this time.

She put in all of the new plants in a single day, wrenching her back in the process. When she was done, she was not only filthy, but famished as well. She really could have used a drink. She realized she had no food in the house, no wine. Nothing but macaroni and cheese and sedatives. She had the sense that she was becoming her mother in her saddest period, and she was only twenty-two, not sixty. Louise braved the town and went out, driving her mother’s Jeep, which was nearly rusted out through the floor. There was the pizza kitchen, the coffee shop, and the Hightop Inn—the nicest place in Blackwell, mostly filled with tourists who couldn’t find suitable accommodations in Lenox or Williamstown. Louise switched the radio on. Prince’s “When Doves Cry” was playing. She felt old and out of it, no longer a college student and nothing else instead. She hastened over to the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. It would be her first time inside.

The Jack Straw was a casual, wood-paneled place, busier in the summertime and on weekends. On Friday nights there were dart games that had once or twice ended in tragedy when fights flowed out into the parking lot. Louise realized that she was both under- and overdressed. She had grabbed a light Chanel jacket from her mother’s closet, but was wearing it over a white undershirt, along with denim shorts she’d had since high school and a pair of knee-high rubber gardening boots. She didn’t have on a lick of makeup. Her red hair was hooked up with a thick rubber band, whirled into a crazy-looking ponytail with bits of grass threaded through the strands.

“Hey,” she said to the bartender when she sat down. She
figured it was better to be alone at the bar than at a table meant for two.

“Hey,” the bartender said back, not bothering to look away from the Red Sox game on the tube.

“I’ll have a glass of sauvignon blanc,” Louise told him.

“Chardonnay,” the bartender offered. He turned and saw it was that girl everyone expected to go crazy. He quickly backtracked. “I could look for sauvignon blanc in the storeroom if that’s what you really want. Like if you had to have it or something.”

“Chardonnay,” Louise said agreeably. She ruefully noticed mud streaking her arms. “And a grilled cheese sandwich with fries.”

That had been her favorite meal when she was a little girl, only her drink of choice had been chocolate milk instead of white wine. She went to the toilet to wash up. There she learned that people in Blackwell seemed to fall in and out of love fairly often, and they could be vengeful when their romances didn’t work out. Names and phone numbers were written all over the wall, along with several nasty remarks about the length, or lack thereof, of one gentleman’s private parts. On this several women seemed to agree.

When Louise got back to the bar, her dinner was waiting for her. The place had begun to fill up. The Eel River Kayak Company had just let out and several of the boatmen were there. The hospital was changing shifts, and Kelly’s repair shop had just shut down for the day. Someone had fed the jukebox. “When Doves Cry” yet again. Several men stood in a group at the end of the bar. One of them gazed at Louise, then whispered to his buddy, and they both laughed.

Louise hated being a redhead. She blushed to the roots of her hair. She signaled the bartender over. “Why don’t you tell that guy to go to hell for me,” she said.

“Tell him yourself,” the bartender suggested, clearly not a believer in chivalry. “He’s a cop.”

Louise paid and stood to leave. She’d only eaten half her grilled cheese sandwich. She knew she looked ridiculous. Maybe that was why she felt so reckless.

“Go to hell,” she called to the last man at the bar.

He turned to her, stunned. All conversation at that end of the bar stopped. There was a play being called on TV. The Red Sox were down one.

Louise suddenly thought that the man at the bar was too handsome to have ever bothered making a lewd remark about her. He was tall and lanky with dark hair, just gorgeous. Even a shy person like Louise could feel the heat he cast. She must have misunderstood. Who did she think she was anyway? She felt transparent and foolish. She turned and rushed out of there. No wonder she’d never come to the Jack Straw before. It was a dump. She was breathing hard when she got behind the wheel of her mother’s old Jeep. There were thousands of blackflies in the air, so many that you’d probably choke if you tried jogging out there. Dusk was the hour they loved best of all. Louise’s heart was pounding stupidly. That handsome man was staring out the window, watching her, but she sped away. If he wanted to give her a ticket, he’d have to find her first.

I
T TOOK QUITE
a while before Louise realized what was happening in the garden. Whatever she planted was turning red.
When she phoned about the lilacs, which she knew were supposed to be a pale purple—she still had the receipts and they were called Twilight Mist—the fellow at Harvest Hill said some of the new pink varieties glazed reddish in the sun. It was getting to the point that she couldn’t believe a word anyone at Harvest Hill said.

By then the roses had opened to reveal crimson-colored flowers. Louise knew for a fact that the tag had said Sunburst, which were meant to have yellow blooms with deep coppery centers. She’d asked for butter lettuce, but it looked to be coming in ruby tinged. And then early one evening, when she was harvesting the first of the reddish string beans, something odd happened. It was a pretty summer evening, very quiet and blue. Louise looked more carefully at the garden, the one her mother and aunt always said to avoid. The vegetables had grown fast. The garden was doing quite well considering she was a novice. The peepers over at the creek had begun their mournful calling at night and the mosquitoes were out in full force. But now Louise noticed there was some other natural force to be worried about: the soil itself looked crimson. She reached for a handful and rubbed it between her fingers. When she let the soil fall, her hands were stained bloodred. There was a small bone sitting in her palm.

Louise left the garden and closed the gate. She went inside her house and phoned the police station.

“There’s blood in my yard,” she said to the operator who answered. After that got around, people in town thought she was pretty close to losing it and that anyone who had put his money down on a full-fledged crack-up by August would win the betting pool.

Frank Mott, who was the chief of police, sent his son Johnny to take a look.

“Remember,” he said. “She’s related to Hallie Brady. Be nice.”

Johnny grinned and drove over to the Brady house. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. He ambled around toward the yard. He was going over all of the things he might say, stupid lines like
Funny meeting you here
or
Where have you been all my life?
as he came upon her in the yard. When he did, he stared and didn’t say a thing.

“Are you kidding me?” Louise said when she saw him. The handsome man from the bar she’d told to go to hell. “Is this a joke?”

“Are you going to hold my hitting you on the head in kindergarten against me forever?” Johnny asked.

“I think you said ‘knock-knock’ when you did it,” Louise said.

“I was just trying to get your attention.”

Louise had been pacing off the garden when Johnny stumbled upon her. It was a surprisingly large space. She now stood by the fence she had recently painted white. It looked iridescent in the fading light. “Have there been any murders in town?” she asked.

Johnny came to stand next to her. The garden, he noticed, was quite beautiful. He’d never seen anything like it.

“You’re a gardener?” he asked.

“Anyone missing, kidnapped, decapitated?” Louise wanted to know. “This could be a mass grave, a killer’s depository.”

“You’re very single-minded,” Johnny Mott said. When Louise turned to him, she had a hurt look in her eyes. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he was quick to amend. “Believe me—I’m single-minded, too.”

“Then check all the records and get back to me. Check Lenox, too. There might have been someone killed there, with the body later brought out to Blackwell.”

“There’ve been no murders, kidnappings, or decapitations. Trust me on this one.”

“Then why did I find this?” Louise held up the tiny bit of bone.

“A dog came through?” Johnny guessed. “Tim Kelly’s basset hound killed a rabbit? I could have him arrested. The basset hound, I mean. Not Tim.”

Louise backed away, shamed. She started at him. “You’re making fun of me.”

“I’m not.”

Johnny noticed she was wearing some sort of mosquito netting tossed over her and a big pair of boots, the kind people used to go eeling in the river.

“Well, maybe a little,” he said.

“You think I don’t know there’s some kind of betting pool about whether or not I’ll go crazy? I heard people talking at the gas station. And your friends were saying something about me at the bar.”

Louise’s face was getting pink. In no time it would be red. That had happened in kindergarten after Johnny had hit her. He’d felt especially bad when he saw how blotchy she was. Afterward he used to watch her take the bus to the Mills School. She got picked up right outside her house.

“Actually, the pool isn’t whether you will. It’s when.”

“What’s your bet?”

They had come round to the front door. It was the original one, the very first door in town. In the winter, snow came through the cracks. In summer, hornets nested in the wood.

“I don’t make bets,” Johnny Mott said.

“Go to hell,” Louise said to him again, and again he was stunned. Louise couldn’t care less. She felt insulted and something more. She hurried inside and locked the door, not once but twice, even though everyone in town knew that the door to the Brady house was so unstable every time there was a storm it got knocked down.

S
OON AFTER
, L
OUISE
went to the Blackwell Museum, which was right across the street from the bookstore. The museum was in an old house, and one energetic elderly woman sold tickets, ran the gift shop, and gave guided tours twice a day. Louise remembered going there as a child, examining the few items still left from the Brady expedition, their spoons and forks, some pots and pans, a tilted wooden wagon wheel. There was also an exhibit of taxidermy, a glass case of local wildlife trapped a hundred years earlier: beavers, red squirrels, foxes, a wolf that was so poorly sewn together you could see the black crisscross of thread down his back, some old moth-eaten bats.

In a corner there was a case of fossils. One of the bits of bone looked very much like the one Louise had found.

“Were there dinosaurs around Blackwell?” Louise asked the ticket taker, who was having a tuna salad sandwich at her desk. She had the same thing for lunch at 10:30 a.m. each day.

“You bet,” the old woman said. She was Arlene Kelly, whose son, Tim, and three grandsons ran the Kelly Gas Station. Someone from the Kelly family had always owned the station, and Arlene had bought it from her cousin Carla when Carla retired early on disability to Delray Beach. “Louise Partridge, right?
How’re you feeling, hon?” Arlene had put her money on September 7, which happened to be her birthday. She herself always went a little crazy right around then, and she figured Louise might flip out on that day.

“I’m fine. Thank you. What kind of dinosaurs?”

“Eubrontes. They were carnivores. We’ve found tracks. It’s all over there in the prehistory case.”

After she took a look, Louise got back in her mother’s Jeep and drove home. Lately she had been getting the kind of phone calls where someone hung up as soon as you answered. At first she thought it was someone calling from
The Blackwell Herald
, trying to sell her a subscription. But more recently she had come to believe it was Johnny Mott. Why a good-looking man who thought she was about to go crazy would be calling and hanging up, and acting crazy himself, she had no idea. But she could feel something through the phone, a kind of yearning. When she realized she was the one doing the yearning, she stopped answering and let it go on ringing.