“This is incredibly nice of you,” Mitch observed, sorting through the trays of seedlings.
“Nonsense,” she clucked. “After a storm is the best time to plant. I can help you get started-unless you have something else you need to do right now.”
He needed to work on his damned book. But he was thrilled to have such a good excuse not to. Besides, she seemed downright anxious to get at it. She’d even brought her own fork and spade. A true garden zealot. “There’s nothing else I need to do,” Mitch assured her. “Let’s get cracking.”
The vegetable patch that Niles Seymour had tended was out behind the barn. This was the sunniest spot on the property when the sun happened to be out, which it was not. It was roughly twelve by sixteen feet. A crude, homemade chicken-wire fence served as an enclosure.
“That’s to keep the rabbits out,” Bitsy informed him as she nudged the rickety gate open. “Although, to be perfectly honest, nothing can keep them out if they want in.”
The patch was in a state of serious neglect-lumpy, furrowed and weedy. Wild berry bushes and small volunteer trees had begun to take hold. Bitsy knelt and pierced the muddy earth with a trowel, inspecting its composition with an expert eye. She fetched her spade and dug deeper, sifting the dense soil through her fingers, muttering under her breath. She reminded Mitch of Walter Huston studying a gold vein in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
“As my son Jeremy would say,” she concluded, “it’s totally bogus.”
“Bogus how?”
“All Niles did was dress the top layer, that’s how. If you go down six inches it’s thoroughly compacted. Look at this-there’s zero drainage. Nothing will take root here. Nothing. Either he hasn’t a clue how to garden or he’s just plain lazy. Probably a bit of both.” She leaned back on her ample haunches, sighing. “Mitch, we’re going to have to double dig.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“Going down two spade-lengths. Removing the rocks. Enriching the soil with compost and manure, adding peat moss for drainage. Then, and only then, can we plant.”
“I didn’t realize it would be so much work,” Mitch said doubtfully.
“This is what proper gardening is, my young friend. Soil preparation is everything. We can take your truck to my place for the organic matter. But first…” She thrust a chubby index finger in the air. “We dig!”
A nut, Mitch reflected. This woman was a nut.
He went to the barn for a shovel and a fork and returned with them. She was already at it, turning soil like a demon.
And so they dug. Soon they began hitting rocks. Some of these were small. Some could be loosely classified as boulders. They piled them just inside the fence, Mitch quickly working up a sweat in the damp morning air. Fine pinpoints of perspiration formed on Bitsy’s upper lip, but she was surprisingly fit for such a round woman. Downright tireless. And raring to gossip.
“You are probably filled with a million questions after last night,” she said gaily. “In answer to what is no doubt your first one, Mandy is the only one on this island who has any real money. The girl’s filthy with it, actually. Her family started a brewery in St. Louis back in the eighteen-hundreds. What the poor dear hasn’t got is any social class. The women in town loathe her-she wears too much gold and not enough clothing. She didn’t go to Miss Porter’s. She didn’t graduate from Smith.”
“Did you?”
“Sure,” Bitsy said offhandedly. “Believe me, if you met her father you would think he drives a truck for a living. That’s why she married Bud.”
“She seems to want kids,” Mitch said, puffing.
“Desperately,” Bitsy confirmed. “Or so she says. I’m never quite sure whether I believe her. She’s one of those women who is always telling people what she thinks they want to hear. I also suspect she has a young hunk of a boyfriend in New York. Bud only keeps that apartment at her insistence.”
“He watches her like a hawk.”
“Why do you say that?” Bitsy asked eagerly. “Did she hit on you?”
“Not really. I doubt I’m her type.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Mitch. You’re a very nice-looking young man.”
“Are you hitting on me?”
“Stop that!” she commanded, howling with laughter. “Now, as for Jamie and Evan, Jamie will play the village queen role just a teensy bit-to rile Bud, mostly. But he’s a good-hearted man. And he’s been so good for Evan, who was just the lostest little bunny before Jamie came along.”
“Did Bud have a hard time accepting Evan’s gayness?”
“As you can well imagine,” she affirmed. “Bud has a hard time accepting anything that isn’t what he knows. Actually, Bud has been something of a puzzle to me. He’s still so devoted to Dolly. And acts so crushed by what happened. Yet he let Niles steal her away from him.”
Mitch’s shoulders were starting to ache from driving the spade into so many chunks of granite. “He did?”
“Of course. A good woman like Dolly isn’t lured away from her husband. She has to be driven away. Bud didn’t want her anymore. When Niles came along, she was feeling unloved and unattractive. Believe me, it can also get a bit lonely out here. Look at my own situation. Red makes four flights a month to Tokyo. He’s four days on-two days to get there, two days to get back-then he’s three days off, asleep mostly, the poor lamb. And then he’s gone again. Poor Red was such a disappointment to his parents. They wanted him to carry on the Peck political legacy. But he doesn’t like giving speeches. Or mingling with strangers. He likes peace and quiet. His cockpit. His little island. We’re hoping our boy, Jeremy, will show a taste for public life. He is talking about law school after he… Oh, beans!” Her spade had collided with yet another solid object. It didn’t give off the sharp clank of metal upon stone. This was more of a dull thud. “I was afraid of this,” she said.
Mitch leaned on his spade, catching his breath. “What is it?”
“Tree root.” She gazed around them with a critical eye. “One of your garden’s worst enemies, Mitch. It will hog all of the soil’s moisture and nutrients.”
“Is it from that oak?” There was a fine old one over next to the barn.
“No, they have a tap root-straight down. It’s probably that mulberry over there. I’ll fetch my pruning saw. We’ll make short work of it.” She went waddling off toward her place, swiping at the mud on her overalls.
Mitch started digging out the soil from around it so they could get a clear shot at it-when suddenly the smell hit him. It was powerful. It was putrid. It was so sickening he gagged and very nearly threw up.
The solid object was not a tree root at all. It was somebody’s leg.
CHAPTER 6
IT WAS A THIRTY-MINUTE drive straight south on Route 9 from Meriden to Dorset. Des had worked a case down there once before. A sixteen-year-old named Ethan Salisbury had smacked his mother upside the head approximately one hundred times with an aluminum baseball bat, stuffed her body into the trunk of her BMW and dumped it into Uncas Lake. It had not been pretty. Des had the charcoal sketches to prove it. The Salisbury murder had garnered quite a bit of attention. They were bluebloods. They had lived in a $1.8 million home with a sauna and a pool. Things like that weren’t supposed to happen to people like that in places like that. But they did.
The same way dead bodies weren’t supposed to be unearthed in the vegetable patch on Big Sister Island. But one had been.
Des marveled at the historic village’s lushness and calm as she steered her unmarked Crown Victoria slicktop cruiser toward Peck Point. It was so quiet she could hear herself breathe. And so spotless it had the sanitized unreality of a theme park. There was no graffiti, no trash. There was no ugliness whatsoever.
At least none that showed.
As she eased on past the Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, her gaze lingered longingly. There was no postmodern fakery at DAFA. They still believed in the same rigorous, classical training that produced the Renaissance masters. Years and years of study on the human anatomy, on perspective, on materials. It was a private dream of hers to study there someday. Make that a fantasy.