3
Detours and Delays
“Stupid full-of-herself historian!” sputtered George as he and Nan drove back home. “How can they have somebody like that running the Historical Society and dealing with the public? You’d never know when she was telling the truth and when she was playing her little joke at your expense.”
George and Nan decided to make their way home via a slow detour down hidden, winding residential streets in tucked-away neighborhoods, rather than going straight back along the most direct route—34th Avenue West. This was their scenic tour. Now that the Livia gardening season should be in full swing, it was time to see what some of their favorite gardeners were up to. But their mood, which would ordinarily have been bright and expectant—or at least moderately curious, in George’s case—was colored by what Nan referred to as the “ugly incident” at the Historical Society.
“The nerve of her!” Nan said. “Getting us going the way she did. I should have known from the moment she started talking about pirates. Who ever heard of pirates in Livia? Or on the Big Turkey River! You can barely get a kayak down that thing. Too bad for Jim. It would have made him so happy to find something really big with his whatchamacallit.”
“Metal detector.”
“Yah, metal detector.”
“Well, we did what he asked,” George said. “We checked it out and found nada. Jim and his stupid buried-treasure story! What a bunch of baloney! No more digging up the yard to find maybe a few screws and some flattened cans, like he did last year.”
“Just hold on, dear,” Nan said. “I’ve been doing some revisionist thinking about this. It’s a big yard. I wouldn’t be surprised if he missed a few spots, front and back. We’re just starting our big front yard gardens, so what’s the harm in him rooting around before Mary and Shirelle get planting? Heck, he can still dig around a little in the backyard under where the new angel’s trumpets will be.”
George’s stomach churned at the mention of the angel’s trumpets.
“I probably won’t get around to planting them for another week or two,” Nan continued. “And, speaking of which, I’m still trying to figure out whether we should plant them at all since you get so freaked out every time you look at the ones that are there already. It’s a nice sunny spot. Maybe I’ll transplant some of those volunteer spirea there.”
“I have made my peace with the angel’s trumpets,” George huffed.
“No, you haven’t. I bet you won’t come within ten yards of them, even before they bloom. They’re really not that poisonous, you know. Could they cause some mild hallucinations? Maybe. But you’re already hallucinating in your advanced middle age anyway.”
“Could we continue on this Jim-digging-up-our-yard line of conversation, Nan-bee? You might recall that Jim said he wanted to dig up our beautiful blue hydrangea, too. Remember how hard we worked at that to make the blasted soil more alkaline? And now we’re going to, what, dig it up, plant another hydrangea, and hope that it turns out as blue as the one we’ve got now?”
“I know.”
“Those peonies and astilbe that finally started to bloom last year would get dug up, too. They were some of your best cross-cultural communicators, or whatever it is you call your little plant buddies. I guess you’ll be getting a real earful once they pop up through the soil and find out what you’re thinking about.”
“I know, George. I know. I’m willing to say now that’s all moot since there’s nothing to this buried-treasure talk. I just wanted to find something to get Jim’s mind off Alicia. He’s so sad these days with her gone and taking the dog and parakeet and his baseball card collection and all.”
George chuckled. In doing so, he elicited a brief, icy stare from Nan. As bad as he felt for Jim, he couldn’t help but admire Alicia for running off with the baseball cards, especially the Phil Croxton rookie card. Why, that card must be worth a mint!
“I feel sorry for Jim, too, but listen, will you, Nan-bee: Those won’t be dinky little pick-and-shovel jobs Jim was proposing, like last year’s. He wants to dig down six or seven feet and ten to twelve feet across. That means you bring in the heavy equipment. How long would it take those scars to heal? And how could your little flower friends ever forgive you? You’d be just another flower murderer in their minds.”
Nan blanched at the thought of having to break the news to some of her flowers that they were to be sacrificed for the sake of filthy lucre. But, hard as it might be to believe, there were other, more pressing matters to consider.
“Listen here, buddy, a few stray gold coins wouldn’t have hurt us any, especially since I’m guessing our current financial situation isn’t looking all that rosy. Eh?”
George didn’t respond. He bit his lip and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He had begun to fret that they’d been burning through their recent first-place Burdick’s Best Yard prize earnings at a clip they couldn’t keep up. Maybe he should start paying more attention to their bank accounts and mutual fund balances. Hang on—what mutual fund balances? Oh, yeah, he had cashed those out a couple of months ago.
“Did you hear me, George? Huh?”
George jerked the steering wheel violently to the right to turn onto Old DanTroop Drive. The tires squealed and the car tilted a few degrees as the left-side wheels lifted an inch or two above the road. Nan froze in rigid attention as she heard the squeal and felt the lurch, then leaned against the tilt of the car with a leering grin.
Nan was always excited and sometimes transformed when he took that right-angle intersection at forty, actually speeding up into the turn instead of slowing down. George figured it was because it gave her the sort of adrenaline thrill she didn’t often feel among the more subtle attractions of their gardens. Could it be that for those few seconds she was actually inhabited by the spirit of some dangerous woman from times gone by? Annie Oakley, for instance? Whatever it was, it would occasionally create in Nan a trance-like state. That would last about fifteen seconds. Then, once she came out of it, she started with a fresh slate, and anything said or seen during the previous five minutes might as well have never happened.
“Whew!” she gasped. “That was rockin’, Pops!”
George chuckled. After a few seconds of silence, he knew he had passed the crisis point; there would be no contentious discussion about the family finances on this drive.
They only had a few blocks to go to one of Livia’s finest and most extensive stretches of residential gardens. This, along with Waveland Circle and the Billings Lake neighborhood, was where Livia’s gardening bluebloods honed their craft. It was a place that was hallowed—like Gettysburg or a Sagelands merlot vineyard—and through which you traveled awestruck: respectfully, quietly, and attentively.
But they weren’t quite there yet.
Nan smiled and rocked her head back slightly. She’s lost in appreciation of her own ingenuity, thought George. Brace yourself, buddy, ’cause here it comes.
“Knock-knock,” Nan said.
“Who’s there?” answered George for whom Nan’s plant jokes and riddles had all the appeal of a prickly sow thistle–induced skin rash.
“Phlox.”
“Phlox who?”
“Phlox of luck getting those marigolds to grow in that shady place next to the rock border.”
“You watch, Nan-bee,” sputtered George. “You just watch. That spot gets six hours of sun a day.”
“No, it doesn’t. It gets two and a half hours max. Besides, you were looking at it before the silver maple leafed, and even then it was only getting four hours of sun. Those marigolds will produce no floral display of note. Lord knows, I tried to warn you. Slow down, George.”
They had turned onto Cabot Drive.
George lifted his foot off the accelerator and gently applied it to the brake. Their new, gun-metal-gray Toyota Avalon slowed to five miles per hour—Fremont garden cruising speed.
There were signs of the messy, unattractive beginnings of gardening activity everywhere. Husbands and wives were out in their shorts and T-shirts, baseball caps and broad-brimmed straw gardening hats, working the soil in their flower beds, and carefully inserting little blobs of color into them with their gloved hands. Flats of petunias, alyssum, pansies, coleus, and impatiens seemed to be lying around everywhere, as did gardening forks, shovels, hand trowels, and two-cubic-foot bags of pre-fertilized soil.
But so far, only one week short of Memorial Day weekend, there was little to show for it. Everything seemed to be going so slowly this year. That troubled Nan, for whom bloom bursts of lilacs—both of the regular and dwarf Korean variety—ajuga, irises, and bridal wreath spirea typically marked her favorite holiday, which was by common accounting in this neck of the woods to be the first day of summer. She watched in sullen disappointment as the passing front yards slowly slid by.
About halfway down the block on the right was the Knights’. Here was a sign of encouragement: The Knights’ dwarf Korean lilacs were leafing nicely!
“I wonder how they’ll look in a week or two, after all that extreme pruning they did last year,” Nan said. “Bleeding hearts are out, but just barely. Must have been the long winter. I mean, jeez, ours just poked through the ground a week or so ago. They’re going to get all covered up by the hosta before they even get going.”
Livia’s winter had lingered into the first week of May, and it wasn’t until late April that the ground finally thawed. The last showers of snowflakes had come in two quick, sloppy bursts just a week and a half earlier. There followed a period of cool, showery weather that had kept everyone indoors. Already it was May 19, and the temperature had just nicked 60 the previous Saturday.
The result of all this was that Livia’s gardening season had been set back two to three weeks. Sure, the crocuses and tulips had come out a few weeks ago—bright, shiny medallions of purple, white, red, and yellow punctuating the last watery snow-scapes of the season—but not a sign of hosta. There wasn’t even any spring phlox yet.
“Okay,” Nan said. “Time to go check out Waveland Circle. Let’s see what Marta Poppendauber’s up to this year, assuming she’s even started.”
The Burdick’s three-foot-by-two-foot wooden sign stood right next to the driveway of the house on Waveland. It trumpeted the news: CONGRATS! MARTA AND HAM P., RUNNERS-UP, BURDICK’S BEST YARD CONTEST!
“Hmmm,” said Nan. “How come they haven’t put ours back up? We won the stupid contest.”
George and Nan gazed into the yard that had so dazzled them last June. Everywhere, there were signs of beginning cultivation, with freshly planted annuals dotting the yard and filling numerous flowerpots—both hanging and on pedestals—of all sizes. Gardening tools and bags of fertilizer were everywhere. Clearly, here was a work of art in the making.
A middle-aged couple stood behind their picture window watching them. They waved. George and Nan waved back to Marta and Ham Poppendauber, and pulled out of the cul-de-sac.
“Time to go check on last year’s biggest loser,” Nan said.
About a mile to the south, Dr. Phyllis Sproot was outside, squatting over a large patch of freshly turned dirt. She was wearing a big woven-straw sun hat encircled with a black leather band that George couldn’t help but imagine emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, sunglasses with oversized lenses that made her look as if she were part praying mantis, and a bandanna knotted into strangulation tightness around her neck. She clawed violently at the ground with a hand cultivator.
“Scary,” Nan whispered.
“Yeah,” George said. “I wonder if she’s planning a big comeback this year.”
“Even if she does, who cares? There won’t be another contest like last year’s to get people all riled up. And there won’t be another for four more years if my math’s correct. Burdick just said they’d have it every five years, correct? With any luck, we’ll all just quietly tend our gardens this year and everyone can keep out of the news. Even a proven gardening thug like Phyllis Sproot might have to behave herself this time.”
Dr. Sproot looked up briefly as they approached, her eyes turned into big black caverns by the capacious sunglasses, a deep scowl painted on what there was of her face that they could see, then resumed viciously attacking her soil.
“Why couldn’t someone have been murdered in her yard?” Nan said as they drove off toward home. “Step on it, George, before she comes over and kills us or something.”
The drive home continued in its dawdling manner, with occasional short detours to view the beginnings of gardens the Fremonts had only just discovered last year, when they were scoping out the competition for the contest. Not surprisingly, signs of this year’s activity were much harder to spot. Livia’s fair-weather gardeners had obviously been thwarted by the drawn-out winter and the lack of any high-stakes gardening competition to match last year’s.
“Down to the hardcore this year, I guess,” said Nan. “Livia’s true-blue gardeners, the ones in it for the long haul. Speaking of which, we’d better get crackin’ ourselves. We don’t want a couple of girls showing us up, do we?”
George didn’t respond. He was stewing about someone getting murdered in their yard, however long ago that might have been.
The Fremonts were intermittent Christians belonging to the Please-Redeem-Me Lutheran Church, an offshoot of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that allowed a little pagan-flavored nature worship to enter into its doctrine. While that was plenty good enough for Nan, George occasionally entertained extreme spiritual notions more in line with his druidical antecedents. For instance, he thought it was quite possible that malevolent spirits of the unsettled dead rattled around and created mischief in the places where they had died.
Nan, though she had become an accomplished plant whisperer and had petitioned the synod to add an epicurean element to the tenets of their faith, had no doubt that the dead went to abide blissfully with Our Lord and Savior unless they were real creeps. In that case they just turned into the fossil fuels of tomorrow, and were quite incapable of oozing up through the earth.
George turned on the radio. The exuberant babblings of Milo Weavermill and Bernie “Bad Dog” Simpson, the voices of the St. Anthony Muskies, salved his nagging anxieties. So did the fact that the Muskies were hammering the Pelicans, 12–2, and Johnny “Smokestack” Gaines had already jacked two out of the park.
“Turn that down, please,” Nan said.
From a block away, they couldn’t see daughter Mary and Shirelle, their gardening intern, who were supposed to be hard at work prepping the soil in their front yard for the new gardens that Shirelle had purportedly been designing for them over the winter and spring. No sign of any turned-up soil, the rototiller, or burlap-encased shrubs or bushes. In fact, there was no sign of any activity at all.
But there was something else that caught Nan’s attention, something new, big, and artificial sticking out of the yard.
“Look, George, they put it back!” Nan beamed.
On the rounded corner of their lot, at the little grassy spot where their unshaded bluegrass, rye, and fescue tended to cook brown by late July, the Burdick’s sign had reappeared. Made of wooden planks and posts sunk deep into the turf, it measured six feet wide by four feet tall. Most important was what the sign said in dark letters branded boldly, yet tastefully, into the knotty pine boards:
CONGRATS, G. AND N. FREMONT, 1ST PLACE PRIZE, BURDICK’S BEST YARD CONTEST. The G. AND N. FREMONT part was on a little raised panel, detachable, so that when the next contest came around in four years it could be replaced by a similar panel with the new winners’ names on it. George cringed, then made a manly effort to give Nan some positive support.
“Oh, boy,” he said. “It’s back.”
“Last year’s sign was better,” said Nan, as she leaned forward, squinting and knitting her brow. “The letters are too big. Gee whiz, they couldn’t even make the room to spell out our first names. What’s going to happen if Jocelynbower Ker-plunkinpoof Wimblybones wins next time? Ha-ha! I mean, hey, they’re giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes, and they’re going to skimp on the sign design?”
George didn’t answer. He was too busy trying to figure out who had just hit that double while he honed all his senses to be alert for any signs of dead-guy activity.