“I guess I did flood it, dear,” I called out, “but if we wait a few minutes it’ll turn over.”
I dragged Dorothy over to the corner and covered her with the burlap bags we had accumulated over the years for covering new seed. J climbed in behind the wheel, pulled the door quietly onto the first latch, and started the motor. I headed in the general direction of the railroad station, but just outside of town I detoured to the town dump where small mountains of refuse were smoldering. Dorothy never spent money on anything but her garden, so the suitcases were nothing but composition-board and would be ashes by morning. Just to be sure, I had brought along the gallon can of gasoline we used for fueling the lawn mower. I poured gasoline over the opened suitcases and her clothes, and touched them off with a match.
When I got back to the garage, Marion Gorton was putting out a milk bottle.
“Hi, Miller,” she said, “Dorothy off to the flower show?”
The first thing I noticed about the little detective with the gray and saffron walrus mustache was that no one else seemed to notice him. But I knew, right off, that he was the one I had to be careful of. He was on the front walk with Detective Lieutenant Delaney and the other two plain-clothes men. When they arrived, they didn’t come right up to the house. I watched through the blinds of the window in the front bedroom as the lieutenant huddled with the other two. Little Whiskers stood offside a few feet, peering at the clusters of azaleas Dorothy had set out as a skirmish line in front of the house. He held a small open notebook in one hand, a pencil in the other. The way his left arm was crooked, I was surprised not to see an umbrella hooked on it. When the huddle broke up, Delaney turned to Whiskers while the other two went to the front doors of the houses flanking mine.
As I came down the stairs I heard the knock on the front door.
“Mr. Davis?” Delaney asked, showing his identification card. I was surprised that he didn’t recognize me, for I had noticed him sizing me up when I was at headquarters reporting Dorothy missing. That was on Thursday, only two days ago. I opened the door all the way and he walked in. Little Whiskers hung back, then noticing that I kept holding the door open he nodded sharply, broke loose from where he was standing with a little jig step, and walked briskly in and past Delaney.
“I know you told Missing Persons that Mrs. Davis didn’t make any hotel reservation,” said Delaney, “but Newark police checked and they report she didn’t register at any hotel there. So that brings us right back here, to start looking from where she was last seen.” I almost waited for him to add alive.
Dorothy never reserved a hotel room when she went to the flower show. She always found a room somewhere. Maybe I should have made a reservation for her this time, but I was afraid to introduce any action contrary to her normal habit. That may have been a mistake on my part, for even when I had told them down at headquarters that she never made advance hotel reservations, they obviously hadn’t been convinced.
Delaney wanted some answers about Dorothy’s habits, hobbies, and whether she had any friends or relatives in other towns. I said her habits and hobbies were all dirt gardening, and gave him the address of her sister and male cousin, both in California. Then he asked did I mind if they looked around the premises.
Little Whiskers had been standing at the dining nook window, looking out at the back lawn. When Delaney and I walked to the side door in answer to a knock, Whiskers executed an about face with that little break-away jig and trotted over. I opened the door and the other two detectives were standing in the driveway. Delaney beckoned them in. All except Whiskers went down into the basement. With his grimy little notebook in his left hand, the little man went out the side door and walked around the back. I went over to the window where he had been standing, and from there I watched his movements.
Whiskers was careful to stay on the slates and not step on the new grass. I watched him circle the back lawn twice, slowly. Then the lieutenant’s voice, right at my shoulder, made me jump.
“What’s that mound out there?” he asked, pointing to the southeast corner of the backyard.
“That? Uh, why, uh, that’s a compost heap.”
My stuttering did it. He looked at me — I guess you’d call it piercingly. “Compost heap, hub? I think we’ll take a look at it.”
I tried not to look too relieved, for I didn’t want him to realize that what had actually made me jumpy was Whiskers squatting and peering at different sections of the new lawn.
Delaney got a rake and shovel from the garage. While the compost heap was brought down to ground level, I tried to appear nonchalant and disinterested. I gazed everywhere, but at the digging operation. I looked at the houses surrounding our three-quarter acre plot, and could imagine slats of window blinds being held apart for inquisitive eyes.
“Want us to keep digging, Delaney?” one of his men asked.
I was surprised by how close to me the lieutenant was when he answered. He was studying my face, and I guess my confidence was showing. “No,” he said. “Knock off.”
The two men leaned on the handles of their shovel and rake and looked unhappily at the several small piles they had made of the compost heap. I felt sorry for them and gallantly offered to take care of the mess later.
“No,” said the lieutenant. “Leave it just as it is. We’ll send out some men to shovel it hack. Or we may be out again.”
The three men walked out front, while Little Whiskers hung back. So did I. He lifted his notebook to within eight inches of his nose, and made some marks in it while he mumbled, “did... quad... S four... first.” He peered again at my new lawn, then suddenly pocketed his notebook as though surprised to find the others had left. I was so close to him that his break-away jig dumped me smack into the zinnia patch.
Another too frequent and maddening chore I usually got out of my wife’s gardening was transplanting her zinnias. As Whiskers apologetically helped me to my feet, I realized my wife was still capable of making me dig dirt. Now I had to transplant Dorothy, because Whiskers had made a map of the lawn and gridded it like a road map. I didn’t know where S four might be, but I knew for certain that the whole lawn would be torn up until the police either found Dorothy or gave up.
I was thinking of my precarious situation, standing there where Whiskers had left me, when my nervous system got jolted again by a voice beside me saying, “Can’t see any sign of the old crab, huh Miller?”
“What? What’s that?” I whispered hoarsely, turning, seeing the grinning face of Herb Gorton.
“The crabgrass. You finally got it licked. I don’t see a sign of the old crab.”
Some people never are convinced that turning over a lawn sends the crabgrass underground, millions of seeds waiting for next year. I never could convince Dorothy of that — “You’re just lazy!” she’d always say — so we still turned over one or both Davis lawns every fall. The Gortons and their crabgrass, on the other hand, lived amicably side by side.
Herb had come over to ask, “What’s with the two carloads of cops?” Of course, he and the rest of the neighborhood knew what the police were looking for, but I was glad to see Herb. I wanted to find out whether my staging of Dorothy’s departure had fooled his wife. It had. Herb told me that Marion swore that she had seen me take Dorothy off to the station and that Dorothy had waved to her from the car as we backed out. That bonus cheered me up plenty. But I was still facing the problem of “S four.”
I couldn’t risk transplanting Dorothy to a spot under the compost heap. I wasn’t sure whether Delaney had been considerate or suspicious when he’d discouraged me from shoveling the small heaps back into a single mound. I walked around the lawn and in and out of the garage without getting any inspiration. Inside the house I paced through all the rooms, but it was in the basement that I found the ideal spot. We had two of those old wood barrels, used by movers and so hard to find these days. Dorothy had intended to have me plant strawberries in them some spring, but right now both were half full of miscellaneous junk. The old cotton-crepe bedspread that Dorothy used to cover them was inside out, and Dorothy would never have covered them that way, so I knew the detectives had uncovered the barrels and probably had searched carefully through their contents.