Back to the Plot

        Joseph went back to his car and opened the passenger door.  She laboriously climbed off the kneeling cushion. “Here’s your purse.”

       “I suppose they’ve dusted it!”

       “They got it from Bobby’s car. It had your prints, Bobby’s prints and someone else’s.”

        “Theirs, most likely!”

        “No. But after they fingerprint everyone on the island they’ll know whose. Ma?”

         “Yes, Joseph?”

         “You’re going to have to figure this out. For your sake and my sake and Bobby’s sake. And your grandson’s. And for the sake of everybody on the island. They’re never going to be able to do it. And we can’t live like this, suspecting each other.”

         “We mostly do. It’s island tradition.”

         “Not this bad,” said Joseph. “Talk to Bobby. Cook something up.”

         He walked back to the toolshed. She put her purse down on the garden bench and clunked down on it herself.

Garden Club Alert

 NSA leaker Edward Snowden revealed today that he will release documents showing that the intelligence agencies are conducting a huge surveillance on American groups it sees as a far greater threat than Iran's nuclear program or North Korean missiles--American Garden Clubs.
      The documents show that when intelligence sweeps of phone and internet communications were changed a few years back as unrest swept the Arab world, one of the words they keyed on was "spring," as in "Arab Spring." To their amazement, intelligence analysts uncovered a massive "spring" movement in the United States that was centered in garden clubs. Even more disturbing was the number of "plots" they were engaged in, many of them targeted at public buildings and densely populated urban areas.
      The analysts thought the extent and fervor of the groups warranted extensive monitoring and satellite assets were moved from monitoring the middle east, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The results, again, were chilling. Geraniums, begonias, poppies and other tools of the clubs were creating vast red swaths recalling the worst days of the cold war. The colors white and blue, analysts wrote, were significantly absent.
       In one high level briefing before the Senate intelligence committee Arizona Senator John McCain was visibly shaken by the findings. "We saw the devastating impact that Flower Power had on this country once. We cannot let it happen again," he emotionally told the committee.
     Snowden said that he would release the data because General Keith Alexander is arguing his surveillance of US phone and internet traffic had stopped dozens of plots. He said that most of those plots involved flower beds outside sensitive public buildings.
      "The public has to know this," he said.
 —Ed Barnes, reporting from Brooklyn, NY

Meanwhile. . .

The President of the Garden Club could only rue the day her sister introduced Rosa multiflora to the island—and never reveal it to a soul.

the garden plot thickens

They had impounded her purse! Patent leather must take a nice print. Meredith, rather viciously, it must be admitted, clipped the dead stalks of last year’s peonies. They had taken the wheelbarrow, too. The brand new wheelbarrow! Which could prove to be a very unfortunate thing. No wheelbarrow, the very epicenter of a gardener’s existence in the spring, and no way to buy another wheelbarrow—because her credit cards were in her wallet in her purse! Which they had impounded!

       “I am confounded,” she said to Joseph. He had pulled up in the driveway while she was mounding the weeds in a bushel basket—not her wheelbarrow. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t go in my own flower beds. I can’t buy anything. You think I’m in cahoots with a taxi driver to kill some man I barely knew. One would think that after all these years of public service I would be entitled to a little respect.”

morning becomes electra

The morning, along with the ratatatat of nailguns, brought resolve.  Meredith resolved to get the yellow tape out of her flower beds so that she could get them in shape by the time of the Garden Club Tour. Bobby resolved to try to make some money cabbing that day before he was incarcerated. Joseph resolved to get the murder solved by someone other than the officious mainlanders.

      And Catherine resolved to kill her husband.

      Oh, damn. He was already dead. “Fucker, fucker, fucker.”

      She got out of the shower and blow dried her hair. When your hair was this fine, it required both product and blow drying. That took fifteen minutes. Then she pushed her cuticles back with an orange stick. Then she couldn’t help it: She looked at the iPhone to see if there was a message from Jerry. Nothing. Not yesterday afternoon, not last night, not this morning. Didn’t he know what she was going through? “Fucker,” she said aloud. “They’re all fuckers.”

      She took the French manicure kit out of the Restoration Hardware cabinet. No one would be likely to believe that Catherine Adams did her own nails, but no one really knew the sum total of Catherine Adams’s abilities. Even Catherine Adams. Besides, going off island to a nail salon every three seconds was just impossible. She thought of her hasty trip yesterday and shuddered.

     The manicure would have come out better if her hand hadn’t been shaking when she painted the white crescents on the tips of her nails.

later that night. . .

“Holy mother o’ Jesus.” Joseph slammed the door, not against the wind—there was none—but against the outside world which was about to prove taxing, if he was any judge.

     He took off the uniform cap he wore maybe once a year and threw it down on the kitchen table.

      “Hi, darlin’,” said his wife. “Baby’s asleep.”

      “Katie Dougherty, bar the door.”

      “Would that be on account of this murther I hear tell of at the Post Office?”

       “There were nae murther at the Post Office,” he said.

       “Ach, don’t I know it, think on,” she said. “Twas at your mother’s.”

        He dropped the brogue. “That’s the bitch of it. It’s as if she and Bobby were in cahoots to put me on the spot.”

        “You know they’re not.”

        “I know, but it feels like it. I am on the spot. And they are the prime suspects. At least according to some brilliant detective work by the eager beavers who arrived on the island yesterday and know everything already.”

        “Rumor had it Bobby was romancing Malcolm’s daughter Kate.”

        “And rumor had it he was romancing that off-island rich kid the year before. And someone else the year before that. And for that matter, my mother!”

         “Being in a place this small can really be a drag,” said the city girl. “I believe that Bobby truly loves your mother. But sex—no way!”

          “Sometimes I think it would be a good thing. Not Bobby, but somebody. Especially since she retired. The Garden Club isn’t doing it for her. She needs attention. Affection. I can’t give her what she needs.”

          “Nae, darlin’, it’s as much as you can do to give me what I need. But I think you should try. Baby’s asleep.” And Katie wrapped her arms around him.

shell game

Would they come for him tonight or tomorrow? Or, given the island factor, the next day? Bobby turned off all the lights and climbed up the ladder into the loft. The stars out the skylight were really something. He lay fully clothed with his hands behind his head. Well, he had blown the two o’clock boat picking up Merry, and the five o’clock waiting with the freaking cops.  Funny how island life was controlled by the rhythm of the ferry schedule. The newspaper in on the 9:00. The mail on the 11:30.  The Daddy Boat at 6:00 on Fridays. His life particularly. He was going to miss out on Memorial Day weekend taxi business if he read the oracles right. Didn’t need to throw the I Ching to figure that one out.

    “Well, shit,” he said aloud. He’d have to tell Dana to find another driver. But thanks to that last shingling job, he was owed a bunch of money. And the Bakers would pay just as soon as they came out for the season. The cabin was okay forever, assuming the Cooper kids didn’t sell. Which they never would, because they couldn’t agree about anything. They never came out anyway. They had an even bigger spread on the Vineyard, Block Island’s rich cousin.

      He loved his cabin as much as Merry loved her old family house. He had built it himself one summer, while he lived on the boat. And over the years, quite a few now, he had tricked it out with stones and driftwood, sea glass and shells. All delicate, of course; the cabin itself was tiny, just 10 x 20. It was his art house, his finest sculpture, a little decorated box to live in.  Everything was stowed neatly in spaces like a puzzle. You had to be tidy in a small space.

        Bobby was used to living in small spaces. Like boats. And prison.

        Nobody knew about that except Merry. And soon so would her son Joseph and the whole rest of the island.

         Well, at least there was nothing incriminating around the place. He liked to smoke a bone sometimes before having sex, but he wasn’t having a lot since Kate left the island after last summer’s fling. Kate. Katie. Sometimes it seemed like every damn woman in the world was named Catherine. Or Katherine. Anyway.

        The stars were beautiful without. He gazed at them until his pulse steadied and he slept.

fertilizer

Meredith fed the dogs and let them out for five minutes, watching to make sure they didn’t head for the toolshed. When they were back in, she sat at her kitchen table and contemplated a bite of something herself. Maybe some yogurt and a hot cup of tea. Meat didn’t seem at all appealing. Her own spot, the most peaceful place she could imagine, had been violated. She knew rather a lot about death. At her age, one did. But not murder. Would she ever be able to really enjoy those Parson’s Pinks again, knowing what had lain among them?

       On the other hand, she thought later, staring at the floral wallpaper of her bedroom, bone meal was good for roses. Perhaps blood was too.

        It struck her as ironic that someone had planted a body in the President of the Garden Club’s rose garden. Club politics could get pretty vicious, but they had never been a killing matter.

island living and dying

The helicopter with the mainland crime scene people touched down in the big field just outside the rock wall that bordered Meredith’s three acres. Fortunately, the weather was clear and calm for late May.  Had it been the previous week when the purple storm flag was flying at the ferry dock— no boats that day—the island would have been cut off. No crime scene team. No mail, no Amazon deliveries, no prescription drugs, no milk, no newspapers, no visitors, no getting off-island. No contact. In the wintertime it was like that a lot, which was why so many island marriages got reshuffled by spring.  Relentless incestuous togetherness.

        It was full dark by the time they all left, to return in the morning. The body was packed up and taken to the airport to be shipped off island by twin engine to the medical examiners and then, presumably, the funeral home. Other than the cold rooms at the B.I.G. grocery store or the Red Bird liquor store, there was no place to store it overnight.

twenty questions

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” The poise was gone.

         Fortunately, from Meredith’s point of view, her son the Chief had walked in just as she was weighing greetings.

         “Mrs. Adams,” he had said. “I was just about to call you.”

          “Call me?” the perfectly shaped eyebrows arched.

          “Um. Yes. Please sit down. I’m sorry to tell you that there’s been an accident.”

          “To who?”

          “Your husband.”

           “Malcolm?”

           “Yes.”

           “In a car?”

           “No, ma’am.”

           Bigger than a breadbox? thought Meredith, as the questions continued. Bobby was putting the teakettle on the stove.  “Sugar,” she said.

            “I know.”

            They were all hoping she wouldn’t ask to see the body. Because whatever and whoever Malcolm Adams had been, he had been hated. He had been mown down, shot in the chest and head so many times that the only possible explanation was a nutcase with a major grievance and an AK-47. Had Adams not been so readily identifiable with his long silver ponytail and Santa Fe silver-and-turquoise jewelry, you would have been hard put to know who he was.

            “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” Now she was moaning and rocking back and forth.

        Meredith wondered whether Mrs. Adams dyed her eyelashes— her mascara wasn’t running. She couldn’t bring herself wrap her arms around the bereaved woman. The best she managed was to sort of pat her on the shoulder. She really couldn’t abide her.

        Bobby loaded a cup of hot tea with sugar and put it in the woman’s hands. Joseph stood looking serious and rather helpless. The Staties guarded the garden. And, finally, they heard the noise.

Seed Money

      A silver Lexus pulled into the driveway.

          “Oh, Lord, it’s Mrs. Adams. I clean forgot. She told me on the boat she was going to come by.”

      “Interesting timing.” Bobby glanced at the kitchen, where Meredith’s groceries were still sitting on the kitchen table. “Haven’t even put the food away. Bet she hasn’t either.”

      “Pushy woman,” said Meredith.

       Catherine Adams paused on the walkway to inspect the primroses Meredith had set out earlier in the spring. A few were still flowering.

        She was herself past her first bloom. Her hair was a blond helmet that didn’t reach her shoulders. “What we used to call a page boy,” thought Meredith. The khaki slacks and white blouse were calculatedly casual. Business casual. Chanel casual. Several years ago, she had descended on the island like an acquiring angel and started buying up property. Her latest acquisition, after the family’s initial flat refusal to sell to her and three years of working it, was the Surf.  No one would deny that she was a hard worker. No one knew, either, whether the seed money came from her much older and apparently retired husband or whether it derived from her own labors. That was about to become a critical piece of information.

     “Maybe this isn’t just a social call, and Joseph has already called her,” said Meredith, wondering in that case at the leisurely (and maybe slightly critical?) poise with which Mrs. Adams inspected the primrose path. “After all, the dead man is her husband. Was.”

        She knocked on the front door. Meredith glanced at Bobby. “Emily Post didn’t cover this.” She heaved herself up and went to the door.

always a first ime

Bobby went outside too. Meredith had sometimes wondered whether her son was jealous of Bobby, who was so much more assiduous of her comfort. She heaved herself up from the chair and watched through the French doors as the two men talked, heads bowed. Joseph took out his mobile phone and spoke briefly. He had waited to make sure before he called in reinforcements. It wasn’t long before she heard the sirens. The rent-a-cops were on their way to save the day. Idiots.

        Three black and whites parked in the pasture on the other side of her rock wall, gumball lights circling.  A blue SUV pulled in as well. “Oh goodie. Homeland Security is here too. They’ll keep us secure.”

         Bobby came in and closed the door gently.

        “I don’t know how much of the reason I don’t like the State Troopers is because I don’t like cops in general or because they seem so young,” said Bobby.

       “Wet behind the ears. They don’t even look old enough to be Boy Scouts to me.”

        “They bust kids for one joint at a beach party. And the roadblocks for inspection stickers—always in the most inconvenient spots.”

         “Whippersnappers,” she said, pronouncing it whippasnappas. “They very likely learned all they know about murder inquiries on CSI. As for Joseph, he doesn’t know anything about it either. There’s never been a murder on Block island.”

          “He told me not to leave,” said Bobby. “He knew that much.”

The force is with you

“Joseph, you’d better get down here right now,” Meredith told the phone, her Yankee accent pronounced as always in times of stress.

       “I’m sorry about the dogs, Mom. I just forgot. I’m really busy right now. We’ve got the Staties here, and I’m showing them the lie of the land.”

       “Well you can bring them too,” she said tartly. “We’ve got a bloody murder lying on the land right here next to the toolshed. And they tell me you’re the Chief of Police for this island.” She punched buttons on her phone until it seemed to shut off. Didn’t have the same satisfaction as slamming down the receiver.

          “That should fetch him,” she told Bobby.

          They hauled the dogs inside and waited at the house. Not that there was long to wait.  The island was only three by seven miles, and the police station was five minutes away.  Meredith put her feet on the footstool, leaned back in her favorite wingback chair and closed her eyes. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get up. It had already been a very long day.

         “By the toolshed,” she called when Joseph came to the door. “And if you damage my rose garden any further, there’s going to be another murder!”

Smelling a rat

As they bumped to a halt, the President of the Garden Club surveyed her demense. “Could anything be more beautiful?” she wondered aloud. The silvery cedar-shingled structure, inherited from her grandfather, dated from 18xx. Banked with heirloom roses and clematis, surrounded by the stone walls said to be built by Indian slaves, it was, she thought, a jewel, set amid emerald fields, the sea a distant sapphire. It was a storybook cottage. And she the old witch.

     She could already hear the dogs barking. Her son had said he’d feed them and let them out for a wee. But they were likely overdue. And sometimes he forgot; he had other duties. She clambered out and went to the house to open the front door, leaving her purse on the passenger seat.  This time she was going to pay, by gum!

      “Tucker! Get back here! Sister!” The dogs were even crazier than normal, but they weren’t running in circles the way they usually did. They ran directly to the potting shed down at the far corner of the yard, next to the Parsons Pink, budding beautifully now and starting to bloom. Must be an animal there. Rat, most likely. The island was getting overrun with the damn things since the Town Council had decided against putting out poison the way she always had. The rich people’s doggies might be imperiled. There were flattened rats on the roads even in town. She shrugged and went inside to go to the little girls’ room and change. After almost two days on the mainland of appointments and shopping, she was sick to death of wearing hose.

       As she finished changing into slacks and reapplying her signature ruby lipstick, she could hear Bobby carrying in the groceries. After an hour on the boat, she needed to get the cold stuff in the fridge right away.  As he pulled the van around back to unload the mulch, Meredith started putting away what she thought of as the pathetic food, in quality and quantity, that old people were supposed to eat. Yogurt, chicken breasts, cereal that tasted like sawdust.  Prunes, for goodness sake!

         “What did the doc say about your ticker?” Bobby asked, appearing at the back door.

      “Sound as a bell,” said Meredith.

      “That’s good to know,” said Bobby. “Because I think you ought to take a look at what’s behind your tool shed.”

       

Main Man

Bobby boosted her up into the van. Since the knee replacement climbing was easier, but it was still a long way up into the passenger seat.  They pulled out onto Water Street and took the lefthand bend by the Victorian-era Surf Hotel.  A ladder leaned against the porch roof. A painter on break, no doubt. Some of the white paint on the shingles had been scraped off. Pity that the family had sold up. At moments she got maudlin and mourned the passing of the old ways. Then she gave herself a scolding.  It was nice to see the place no longer boarded up, being painted and primped. The hydrangeas, she was happy to see, were thriving. They should bloom nicely.

      “Remind me how long the Surf was closed?” she asked Bobby.

       “Three seasons,” he said.

       Bobby himself was no old timer. Like many others, he had drifted to the Isle of Misfits in his twenties with a surfboard and a six-pack. Meredith had been the first islander who could see beneath the stereotype to welcome him. That was years ago. His long hair and beard were streaked with gray now, and his boards had lengthened too, but he could always supply her with the details of the present that sometimes eluded her. And hoist 40-pound bags of mulch.

       Meredith never tired of the drive up the Neck, the dunes on the right, covered with the magenta and white blooms of rosa rugosa, the beach grass combed by the wind, the sand and the Atlantic stretching forever into heavenly blue sky. It was enough to make you believe in God. Almost. And at this season there weren’t many cyclists to dodge either, another indication of divine providence.

        As the van turned off to bump along her dirt road, she braced herself for her ongoing argument with Bobby over the fare.

        Once she had simply thrown the ten dollar bill out the window when he had refused it. “If you won’t take it then let some silly daytripper find it,” she snorted.

        Bobby had never even slowed down.  He had just looked at her out of the corner of one blue eye and twisted his lip. “Like, almost,” he seemed to be saying, though he was never talkative.

     Now, of course, it was more like a twenty-dollar bill for the short ride.  Never mind the offloading. At her age, she had long since accepted that courtesy.

       She opened her red patent leather purse. “How much do I owe you?”

       “Nothing, Merry. And more than you can possibly pay.”

Home again jiggity jig

Meredith’s favorite taxi driver was waiting for her by the freight area. She wasn’t going to bother her son to pick her up.

       “How was America?” asked Bobby.

       “Tiring.”

        “So I see,” he said as she waved down a forklift carrying a large crate. “You never travel light.”

         “There’s a pallet too,” she said. “Bark mulch.”

         “That time of year,” Bobby said.

          “Yes,” said Meredith with delight. “My first ramblers are already blooming. I do love this time of year.” The forklifts zoomed on and off the boat, carrying refrigerators and dishwashers, flats of annuals and six-foot trees, fencing and cement blocks and pallet after pallet of beer. Getting ready for season. The bright blue metal box from the Post Office sat waiting to be loaded on the next boat.

     “Watch out for the nasturtiums—they’re fragile.” As Bobby loaded—annuals, dog food, groceries, mower parts—Meredith waved to others waiting for freight. She knew most of them, of course, this time of year. Islanders. She knew their children, their siblings, their grandfathers, and who their fathers really were—even if they themselves didn’t. Hells bells, the Winfields had settled the island in 1661, and she was blood kin to most of them.  Not to mention that they had elected her First Warden of the town, term after term for nearly thirty years.

         Retirement was a definite comedown. It was difficult to adjust to being a nobody when she had been the most powerful person on Block Island.  For all those years she had been a monarch. Now she was just the President of the Garden Club. Still, there wasn’t a lot she didn’t know about Block Island and the thousand souls who lived here year-round.

      And what she didn’t know, Bobby did.

Gather Ye Rosebuds

The President of the Garden Club held on to her hat. Okay, not many ladies even of her advanced age wore hats any more, but she was not going to give them up, breeze or no breeze. Neither the picture hats nor the snappy navy suits.

   “Meredith?” A blonde woman shouted into her ear and tapped her on the shoulder. “Meredith?”

    The President of the Garden Club, Meredith Winfield, spun around, still holding her hat. The ferry was making a good 15 knots, and the wind was brisk on the upper deck.

   “I need to talk to you about something. Can I stop by your office later?”

   “I’m no longer at the office, more’s the pity,” said Meredith. “Come to the house. But give me time to deal with the dogs first. They’re probably frantic—I went to the mainland yesterday.”

    “Need anything from town?”

    “No thanks. I have a whole crate of stuff below, not to mention flats from the nursery.”

    “I’ll come by later then. Around four okay?”

    “Sure. That’ll be fine. I’ll see you.”

    With a faint frown, Meredith watched the gulls coasting on the air waves alongside the boat, hoping for tourists and fried clams. The blonde woman made her way below. Her hair must have gotten mussed.

    “I wonder what the hell she wants,” said the President of the Garden Club under her breath.

When she found the seed catalogue in the mailbox, the President of the Garden Club had to sit down right on the snowbank.

Those in her situation might check this garden planning site free for a month.