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.