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.