HAVING GONE TO BED BEFORE MIDNIGHT, I WAS UP BY EIGHT AND feeling virtuous about it. I joined Mother for breakfast on the porch, and felt suitably rewarded when Dad dropped by with fresh blueberries and Michael with fresh bagels.
“We certainly had a lively time around here last night,” Mother remarked over her second cup of tea. Michael and I both started. I had thought Mother safely out of the way during Scotty’s unconventional visit, the ensuing mad dash around the neighborhood, and the countywide canine convocation that had reportedly dragged the sheriff and the normally underworked dogcatcher out of their beds at 3:00 A.M. Michael had a suspiciously innocent look on his face.
“Could you hear the party all the way down at Pam’s?” I asked.
“Oh, no, dear,” Mother said. “But I think some of Samantha’s friends must have gotten just a little too exuberant.”
“Most of them were totally sloshed, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “But that’s nothing new.”
“Yes, but it really is too bad about the side yard,” Mother said.
“What about the side yard?” I said. Had Scotty and the pack returned to our yard after I dropped off?
“So very thoughtless,” she continued. “And not at all what one would expect from well-brought-up young people.”
“What, Mother?” I asked, beginning to suspect it would be easier to get an answer from the side yard.
“Someone has torn up some of your father’s nice flowers. You know, dear,” she said, turning to Dad, “those nice purple spiky ones.”
“Purple spiky flowers?” Dad and I said in unison, looking at each other with dawning horror.
“Oh, no!” I gasped, and Dad exclaimed “Oh, my God!” as we simultaneously jumped up and ran out to the side yard. Mother and Michael followed, more slowly.
“I’m sorry, dear,” Mother said, looking puzzled. “I had no idea you’d be that upset about it.”
“They were fine when I watered them yesterday afternoon,” Dad said.
“A lot of the damage is trampling,” I said, as Dad and I crouched over the flower bed.
“Yes, but I don’t think all the plants are here,” Dad said. “I think some of them are missing. What do you think?”
“I think a lot of them are missing,” I said. “Whoever did this did a lot of trampling to cover it up—or maybe someone else came along and trampled it afterwards—but there are definitely a lot of plants missing, too.”
“Does it really make that much of a difference whether the vandals dragged them off or not?” Michael asked. “They look pretty well ruined to me; you couldn’t replant them or anything in that condition, could you? And are they really that valuable?”
“It’s not that they’re valuable,” Dad said. “They’re poisonous.”
“Why does that not surprise me, in your garden?” Michael said, with a sigh. “What are they, anyway?”
“Foxglove,” I said. “Which means that if it wasn’t just vandalism—”
“Which I don’t believe for a minute,” Dad fumed, shaking a fist full of limp foxglove stalks.
“Then someone—”
“Someone who’s up to no good—” Dad put in.
“Has just laid in a large enough supply of digitalis to knock off an elephant.”
“Several elephants,” Dad added. “This is very serious.”
“Digitalis!” Michael exclaimed.
“Is it dangerous, dear?” Mother asked.
“Meg and her friends might very well have died if that salsa had contained digitalis,” Dad said.
“It felt as if we were going to anyway,” I said.
“I do hate to criticize, dear,” Mother began. “But we wouldn’t have this little problem if you wouldn’t insist on growing all these dangerous plants.” She looked over her shoulder with a faint shudder, as if half expecting to find a giant Venus flytrap sneaking up on her.
“I’d better call the sheriff,” Dad said, trotting off with Mother trailing behind him, gracefully wringing her hands.
“You know,” Michael said, as we watched them leave, “your mother’s right. Your dad’s garden is rather a dangerous thing to have around.”
“Nonsense,” I said, automatically parroting the Langslow party line. “I’m sure more people die in car accidents every year than from eating poisonous plants.” But I must admit that I said it with less conviction than usual. Somewhere, probably very nearby, someone could be concocting a deadly potion out of Dad’s plants. I had no idea how one would actually do this, but that didn’t ward off the vivid visions of a determined poisoner bent over a black kettle on his—or her—stove, distilling digitalis from Dad’s beautiful little purple flowers. Probably highly inaccurate, but I couldn’t shake the picture.
“Let’s go and find out what you would do with foxglove to make it into a poison,” I said, starting for the door.
“You’re not serious.”
“Deadly serious. The more we know about how the poison is made, the better we can watch for signs that anyone we know is up to no good.”
Dad gave us a highly technical lesson on the chemistry of digitalis. He was partial to the idea of our plant thief distilling the foxglove leaves to extract the poison, but it sounded to me as if almost
any way you could get the plant into someone’s system would be highly effective. Michael and I were both in a depressed state when we headed off to the day’s tasks—the shop for him, and for me, frog-marching wedding participants into the shop to be fitted. Samantha and her friends spent their day racketing up and down the river on speedboats, so I spent most of mine dashing up and down the river in Dad’s not very speedy boat, capturing recalcitrant ushers and bridesmaids and ferrying them back to shore and hauling their wet, bedraggled, beer-bloated carcasses into Be-Stitched.
“No offense,” Michael said, toward the end of the day, “But your brother has highly questionable taste in friends.”
“On the contrary. Rob has excellent taste in friends. These are Samantha’s friends.”
“That would account for it,” Michael said.
“I have to keep telling myself that it would do no good to throttle them; we’d only have to detain and outfit a new set.”
“Let’s hope our foxglove bandit isn’t targeting them too. I’m not sure I could take another day like this.”
Samantha was having another party that night. I passed. I stayed home. I did my laundry, balanced my checkbook, and cleaned the bathrooms. I had a lot more fun than I’d had Friday night.