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June 1985
Harlan worked for his father and uncle all the way through high school, but left three weeks after graduation for army boot camp. He was very bright, but he was not interested in college. He loved to work with his hands. He could listen to an engine and sense where the balance was off, just as he could look at a forest glade and gravitate toward the ideal vantage point, the best hiding place for getting the perfect camera angle. College was books, mostly. Not for him.
The army hadn’t been his cup of tea, either. For one thing, they taught him how to shoot people. Luckily he hadn’t been called upon to perform that service in any sort of combat situation. He’d made a few friends, including Buddy Olsen who had come from Martinsville, the little town fifteen miles down the valley from Garner Creek, on the other side of Hastings, where Harlan’s mother’s cousin owned a car dealership. The two had known each other by sight at Keagan High, but hadn’t become friends until they’d been stuck in the same platoon, sleeping across the aisle from each other in the spartan dormitory at Fort Jackson in the center of South Carolina.
They had both been assigned to the same post out of basic training, and had left on a bus for Fort Knox, near Louisville, Kentucky, with the high spirits of the young off on an adventure. Buddy, who had almost flunked the typing class that was a requirement at Keagan County High School, became a clerk assigned to the Paymaster’s office. “Heaven help the army,” he had joked to Harlan when the assignments were posted. Harlan ended up working in the motor pool. “Maybe there’s hope for this outfit yet,” Buddy quipped.
Harlan soon found the base newspaper and volunteered to be the photographer, to fill in for a young sargent who had just been transferred. The editor of the Post News was delighted, especially once he saw that Harlan knew his way around the darkroom. So, for the next couple of years, Harlan’s life ran in the same predictable pattern. After a day of motor oil and engine noise, he took up the Nikon F-1 that his parents had bought him as a graduation present, and headed out to photograph parades and tanks, flags and softball teams, lines in the mess hall, cooks at work, pilots lounging in the hangars, infantry drilling in full battle gear, and MPs directing traffic on and off base.
He usually got together with Buddy for dinner at the mess hall, and there was a group of “regulars” that gravitated around them. Harlan dated some of the WAC’s, but never got really serious about any of them. He felt shy around women. Buddy, on the other hand, dated most of them and wasn’t shy at all.
Buddy Olsen, Private First Class, had red hair, a gift from his Irish mother who had died when Buddy was fifteen. He was as full of blarney as anyone Harlan had ever met. The two balanced each other. Buddy provided the lift and Harlan the stability. Buddy the corny goofing around, and Harlan the thoughtful assessments. Buddy knew all the tunes, and Harlan knew all the words. Buddy was curly haired and cute, while Harlan had the aristocratic bearing of his mother’s Indian heritage and the blond good looks of his Austrian great-grandfather.
Harlan loved to photograph people listening to Buddy. They were usually laughing or singing along boisterously, but occasionally Buddy would bend over his guitar and launch into an Irish fisherman’s lament that would bring tears, quickly brushed away, to the eyes of the young servicemen and women in the lounge at Fort Knox.
~~~~~
FROM THE STATEMENT of Bartholomew “Buddy” Olsen to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
He was my best friend ... I can’t believe this happened.
... It’s my fault ... Why? Because if I hadn’t asked him to feed Mr. Fogarty, he wouldn’t be dead now ... My dad’s parakeet. That’s his name ... Yes, sir, we’ve been friends for something like ten years now, ever since we got to know each other in boot camp ... Library? No, I don’t know why he was in the library.
~~~~~
SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 1996
Martinsville
“Were there other people working in the library when he was killed?” Glaze asked me.
I was startled out of my reverie by my sister’s question. The Saturday morning sun was shining in the east windows of the kitchen, and I had to shift mental gears before answering her.
“No. The volunteers weren’t there that day.”
“Volunteers?”
“Yes, bless their hearts. The first week I was here I was the only staff, and it was overwhelming, but then three women came to me one day and said that they were charter members of the Martinsville Ladies Book Reading Society. They stood there in their flowered housedresses looking like a collection of petunias, and when they offered to help me sort and label all the library books, ‘free of charge, my dear, because we just love literary things,’ I agreed immediately.
“One of them, Rebecca Jo Sheffield, the one I thought of as the Head Petunia, turned out to be Bob’s mother. That day she was wearing a white dress with lavender flowers and green leaves all over it. At the beginning she was there all the time, but now she’s pared down to just Fridays and Saturdays.”
“Who were the other two?”
“The second Petunia was Esther Anderson. She helped the most with the cataloging. I shouldn’t use past tense. She still volunteers two days a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The woman’s a walking memory vault. Thank goodness she was there almost from the beginning.”
“What color was she wearing that day?”
“Sort of a bilious orange background with marigolds and sunflower designs all over.”
“Amazing,” Glaze said to her teacup. “They didn’t get arrested?”
“For the murder? Of course not.”
“No, I meant for the clothing.”
“It wasn’t that bad. Sounds worse than it looked. They were kind of cute standing in a row. I truly couldn’t have gotten all that work done without them.”
“My sister, Miss Patience ...” Glaze started, then switched to a question. “Who was the third Petunia?” That finger must have been hurting her. She kept rubbing the splint and massaging up and down her arm.
“Sadie Masters was the third one. Don’t worry. You’ll meet her. She is simply a card. First of all, she wears yellow all the time. Doesn’t own a single piece of clothing that isn’t yellow. Even her car is yellow.”
“Sort of like that guy in the water skiing show at Cypress Gardens?”
“Who?”
“Some guy who wears yellow all the time. He started trick skiing in the water show when he was fifty years old. Last I heard he was still doing it, and that’s been almost thirty years. The guy must be pushing eighty.” Doesn’t it amaze you to learn what tidbits of information some people hold in their heads? “Glaze, how on earth do you know that?”
“I heard it on public radio once. They interviewed the guy. Really interesting. Anyway, tell me more about Sadie.”
“Thanks for keeping me on track,” I commented dryly. Taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I conjured up a picture of Sadie in my mind as I poured yet another cup of tea from the blue-ringed white teapot my mother – our mother – had made as a gift for me when Scott, her first grandson, was born.
“Well, Sadie rattles on to herself in an undertone all day long. Works at the library every Wednesday and Friday, and we can hear her muttering happily away as she trundles around with her shoelaces invariably untied.” I nodded at Glaze’s unspoken question as she raised her eyebrows. “Yes, her shoes and shoelaces are yellow, too. She can’t drive worth a tom turkey, but she refuses to walk anywhere. Once she had to go to Brighton Montgomery’s house ...”
“Brighton Montgomery? That sounds like an English butler. ‘Brighton, serve the scones in the parlor.’”
I would rather have fish.
I reached out to stroke Marmalade, who had just jumped up on my lap. “Wouldn’t it be ‘Montgomery, serve the scones in the parlor’? I thought they called them by their last names.”
“Brighton sounds better. Who is he, anyway?”
He is the one with the black tomcat.
“He sells insurance. Sadie had a payment due that day. He lives two houses down from her, and I’ll be darned if she didn’t get in her Chevy and drive there, pay her bill, and then drove back home. Bob saw her do it, since he was parked across from Brighton’s house at the time. She almost clipped his fender on her way back up the street. It’s a miracle she’s never killed anybody.”
“At least if she’s all yellow, she’ll be easy to spot.”
“Yes,” I agreed readily, “we all tend to pull aside when Sadie drives by.”
As often happens in relaxed conversations, we roamed off to a discussion of the weather patterns for awhile, then returned to the topic of the new library.
“Mrs. Sheffield was a great help. She filled me in on a lot of the history of the house. Miss Millicent had been an avid reader, just like her parents. They’d all lived together in that house ‘Simply forever, my dear, there were always Millicents here.’ That family must have saved every book they ever bought. The house was absolutely stuffed with books.”
And mice.
“Sort of like my bedroom when I was a kid?” Glaze asked innocently, as she reached for a croissant.
Did you have mice in your bedroom?
“No. Nothing could be as stuffed as your room. Where on earth did you collect all that junk?” I asked as Marmalade licked a flake of croissant off the front of my purple polo shirt.
“It wasn’t junk. Well, not exactly junk. I liked it at the time, but now I live in a Danish Modern sort of townhouse, with a roommate who likes the Japanese style. You know, one small table, a few cushions, and a perfect vase with three stalks of bamboo in it.”
Any windowsills?
“Sounds lovely.”
“Well, Yuko did shame me into throwing out a big bunch of clutter.”
“Yuko? Is she Japanese?”
“Third generation. Yuko Tanaka.” Glaze shifted in her chair, stood up to take a quick stretch, resettled herself, and said, “Tell me more about your Petunias.” Two of them make a lot of sense, and the other one forgets to tie her shoes.
“They helped me go through the house, room by room, usually with Marmalade here leading the way.” I stroked the soft fur bundle that was purring loudly in my lap. Patting a cat reduces blood pressure, I’ve heard. “It didn’t take us long to figure out the reading patterns of each of the Millicents. Old Mr. Millicent had filled his office and his den with histories and mysteries, while old Mrs. M leaned toward the sciences and biographies – and more genteel mysteries, with fewer bodies and much less blood than the mister’s.”
But they did not have a cat.
“Old Mrs. M was still reading avidly well into her nineties. At her eighty-sixth birthday someone in the book club gave her a lurid romance novel as a joke. Turned out she loved it. The next week, she got a friend of hers to drive her to the bookstore in Hastings, where she bought about fifty more of the things. ‘The steamier they are, the better I like them,’ she’d told Mrs. Sheffield. ‘They keep me warm on winter evenings.’ I think we both would have loved her, Glaze. From everything I’ve heard about her, I guess she was a real hoot.”
But she did not have a cat.
“Too bad she didn’t have a cat,” I commented. “That would have cut down on the mouse population.”
You are right.
“Even without a cat, she sounds like a great role model,” Glaze suggested. “I love hearing about older women ...” she paused with a rueful grin on her face. “That means older than I am.”
“That includes me, then.”
“Older women who stay active and alert as they age. That’s the way I want to be.” She twisted a strand of her silver hair around her left index finger. “I consider my gray hair a mark of wisdom, not of age.”
“Well, between the two of us, we must be pretty wise. I’ve got a fair amount of gray too.”
I stick to orange and white myself.
“Did you know I’m the only woman in my office who’s never colored her hair?”
I thought back to my stint in corporate life in Boston. “I guess I was the only one in my office, too. Most of them were blondes, although the last two months I was there, the redheads seemed to be gaining favor.”
I know what you mean. We have two Irish Setters in town now. Talk about red...
“So tell me about the old lady’s daughter,” Glaze asked as she got up to refill her teacup. “Was she as much a reader as her parents?”
“Yes, but she was more the intellectual type. She deplored her mother’s plebeian tastes, although she was quite careful about mentioning that. Of course, I heard that once she told the book society women, it was all over town – but discreetly, which simply meant that people talked about it in pairs rather than in groups.”
“Typical small town gossip?” asked Glaze.
“We prefer to call it sharing of information.” When Glaze snorted that humph, she sounded just like our Grandma Martelson.
“The daughter’s contribution,” I went on, “was mostly in the realm of philosophy and literature, leaning heavily toward essays, plays, and poetry. We still don’t have all of it catalogued. It’s only been a year. There’s a lot of Shakespeare, Milton, the transcendentalists, although she didn’t particularly approve of Thoreau, and certainly not of Whitman, whom she once described as far too racy. She did have some books of Persian poets in there, though, which seemed pretty racy to me, although those might have been acquired by the old Mrs. M. What a shame she had to die when she was only 98, the year before her daughter died. About two years before I was hired.”
About six months before I was born.
“Biscuit, I want to hear the rest of this, but my rear end’s going to sleep with all this sitting. Can we walk around the back yard or something?”
Good idea. I will show you the bird feeder.
“Sure. Great idea. I’ll show you the garden. Mrs. Hoskins was so glad to have a gardener move into her house. No wonder she gave me such a good deal on it. She and her dog used to spend hours out there every day. Even in the summer, they’d be outside right after dawn to get in a couple of hours of gardening before it got too hot.” As I slipped off my sandals and pulled on the tennies that were parked beside the back door, I said, “I’ll show you the compost bin I built. First, let me put on some more water to boil so we can have fresh tea when we get back inside.” I think I drink way too much tea ...
Try drinking just water. It is good.
... Maybe I should drink more water.
“Garden, yes,” Glaze proclaimed, “but I may want to pass on the compost pile.”
“Ouch, you hurt my gardening heart. Don’t you know a compost bin is the central pillar of a garden?”
Actually, it is the bird feeder.
“Lead me to the pillar, then,” said my sister, the city dweller, slipping on a pair of loafers as I refilled the tea kettle.
Once outside, we passed the bird feeder that sat a few feet from the back steps. Marmalade paused there while Glaze and I gravitated toward the vegetable garden that I had inherited from Mrs. Hoskins, bless her heart. “While we’re here, we might as well do some weeding,” Glaze volunteered. Would I ever say no to an offer like that? Even from a city girl? Luckily the spaces between the rows are well mulched, so it never gets muddy. So here we were, two young-hearted women, squatting amongst the rows of pepper plants, pulling up odd weeds, and running our hands over the nearby tomato vines. After Marmalade checked out the bird feeder, she joined us in the garden.
I held my fingers up to my nose, inhaling the summery smell of tomato leaves. “Is there anything more wonderful than this?”
Yes. Fish.
“Too bad the tomatoes aren’t grown yet,” I said. “It would be great to have some for ...”
“Are you already thinking about eating? We haven’t digested breakfast yet!”
“Guilty as charged. Come on. Let’s pick some of the snow peas, a few cucumbers, and a bunch of lettuce. Maybe we could have a pizza and a big salad tonight.”
“I give up,” Glaze said. “Can we have a milkshake to go with it?” We left the veggies there in a pile beside the garden to gather up on our way back into the house. I love this time of year when the dogwoods, azaleas, and Yoshino cherries are in full bloom along the edge of what I call my forest at the back of the yard. This lot is huge. The fenced-in back yard takes up almost the whole center of the block. Of course, a lot of it is a woodsy area at the back, but I like trees. Maybe someday I’ll clear a little trail to wind through there.
“Anyway,” I said, as we started to wander along the line of tall Leyland Cypress that separates this back yard from Mr. Olsen’s to the west, “to get back to the library ... we didn’t have many books for children, and we were sadly lacking in mathematics, physics, and such. The Petunia Brigade put fliers in all the businesses in town, and in the church bulletins, asking for donations of ‘gently used’ books. I don’t know whether it was generosity, or whether a lot of folks just wanted to clean out their bookshelves, but we were inundated. After that the Petunias and I had several busy months of trying to get everything catalogued. What we didn’t get to is still piled up in the third floor office.”
Thank goodness I had gotten rid of most of the intruders by then. Otherwise you would have a real mess on your hands.
“The body showed up about a week after the Petunias started helping me out, so of course they had to be questioned, which thrilled them no end and caused quite a flurry in the ladies’ book club ...”
Would you believe they asked Looselaces, but they did not ask me?
“... Eventually everyone in town was questioned one way or another, but, as I said, nothing much came of it.”
“Were you scared?”
“Scared?”
“Well, you had a murderer running around town. And it sounds like you still do.”
Her comment made me pause in my tracks. I hadn’t really thought about it. “Maybe I’m just naïve, Glaze, but I don’t think I was ever afraid after I met Bob.” Glaze is really very good at rolling her eyes.
“I have to ask this, Biscuit. Why does a little town like this have a cop? We didn’t have one in Braetonburg.”
“Good question. Watch out for that little clump of poison ivy,” I interrupted myself, pointing to the bright green leaves poking up through the grass.
“What? No Latin name?”
“If you must know, it’s Toxicodendron radicans, but if I’d taken the time to say that, you would have stepped in it already.” There was a long pause.
“What were we just talking about?”
I’m glad I’m not the only one who forgets a conversation within three seconds if something else comes up. But this one I did remember. “You asked me why we have a town cop. Well, the answer lies in the town library. The families that built this town wrote it into the charter that the town has to maintain an officer of the peace.”
“Why?”
“Nobody knows. They must have thought it was important. They also stipulated a town jail, so we have one cell in the little house on Juniper that’s been called ‘city hall’ as long as anyone can remember.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, how can the town afford their own cop?”
“They can’t. The salary’s diddlysquat. But Bob’s grandparents were really well off, and they left modest trust funds for their one child – Bob’s father – and all of the grandchildren. Bob has done some pretty successful real estate developing down in the Atlanta area. It’s a fast-growing area, and he’s making sure that the land he buys is treated respectfully. He won’t allow the contractors he hires to clear-cut the land. So his houses end up selling for scads more money because of the beautiful old trees and the fact that each house is unique and suited to its site.”
“How can he build houses in Atlanta if he lives way up here?”
“He travels there periodically. And his brother lives there and oversees the operations. They’re partners.”
“You said ‘all of the grandchildren.’ Who else is there?”
“He has a sister, too. You’ll meet both of them at the wedding.”
We had just about circled the fence line, and we paused for a moment behind the shed. In our purple and yellow shirts, we probably looked like a big johnny-jump-up to any birds passing overhead. I smiled at my compost bin.
A three-section compost bin is a gardening work of art. All the kitchen peelings and trimmings go into it, along with any grass raked up out of the yard. Never add meat scraps or dairy stuff to a compost bin. That might attract rats and neighborhood dogs. Bob and I usually leave the grass trimmings on the lawn to work their way down between the living grass blades to form mulch. He’s a dear about helping me with the mowing, but once in a while a lawn needs a good combing, too, and all that dead grass will go into the right hand side of the bin.
I sprinkle in some dirt, add any veggie peels on hand, toss in some shredded leaves from the pile in back of the tool shed, and maybe water it lightly if we haven’t had much rain. After a couple of weeks of “cooking,” the pile’s ready to be turned over into the middle bin. I use a pitchfork, which helps to aerate the pile. Of course, the sides of the bin are heavy chicken wire, to let air in so it won’t just rot.
Actually, if you have enough dead leaves to counteract all the nitrogen in the green grass clippings, it shouldn’t get slimy and smelly. It just begins to cure into wonderful dirt. I start adding all the new stuff to the first bin, on the right hand side. When it’s time once again to turn that first bin, I pitchfork the middle bin into the left side, turn the right bin into the middle one, and start all over again. Does this make sense?
This bin, of course, is just getting started, since I built it only a month ago when I moved in. Hopefully, it will be ready for its first turning by the time Bob and I get back from our honeymoon in Savannah.
Ideally, with enough sun, a little bit of rain, and good earthworms working their way up into the pile from the soil below, the third bin becomes usable compost that I add to the topsoil around plants or mix into the planting hole for shrubs or veggies.
“Biscuit, your compost pile is beautiful, I admit it. Now stop staring at it. Don’t we need to get the peas and lettuce inside and washed off before they start drying out too much in the sun?”
“Oh my gosh, I forgot the veggies!”
As we gathered up the garden pickings, Glaze returned to our earlier conversation. “Whatever happened to the dead man? Who killed him?”
The guy who sneaked out the back door.
“Don’t we all wish we knew ... nobody ever confessed. Nobody ever got caught. It certainly wasn’t the perfect crime, there were clues, but they just didn’t seem to point to anyone in particular. Bob called in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, too. They sent someone up even before the body was taken out of the library. There was a detective who thought that Margot Schuss did it, but she had a cast-iron alibi.”
“Nothing came of it?”
“No, but I think it was someone in this town.”
“Why a local person?”
“Only someone who’d lived around here for a while would have known that there was a back entrance that didn’t look like a door. Even I didn’t know about it, and I’d worked there for three weeks.”
That is because you did not look carefully.
Glaze perked up her ears at that. “What do you mean – didn’t look like a door?” She stepped around Marmalade, who had stopped on the stairs and looked at us rather pointedly. I wondered what that was about. In the kitchen we dumped the peas in the sink. I’d forgotten about the boiling water, which was filling the room with steam – not what I needed on a warm April morning. Glaze turned off the burner as I carefully laid the lettuce on the counter beside the sink. Then, before answering her question, I stepped through the office into the powder room to grab a big hair clip from under the sink so I could wind my hair up into a loose twist on top of my head. Much cooler. Even in April, sometimes we get 80-degree weather. I hope it’ll be cooler for the wedding next week.
By the time I got back into the kitchen, Glaze was already rinsing off the cucumbers in the sink, using her left hand to keep the bandage dry. I never use pesticides, so we didn’t have to worry about heavy poison removal. Just rinsed off the dirt and the worm poop. She handed the rinsed ones to me so I could lay them out to dry off on an old tea towel. “You were getting ready to tell me about the door that didn’t look like a door,” she prompted, as she looked out the side window at the swing on the porch. Verandah.
“Oh, there was some sort of old conservatory room out back that we’d turned into a reading area. It had some trompe l’oeil wallpaper, and it turned out that the door that looked like it was just part of the wallpaper actually opened into a little space behind a big Ligustrum lucidum.”
“Biscuit, would you please speak English?”
I decided to tend to the tea making rather than retort to such a sophomoric complaint. I agree with the British, who contend that drinking hot tea in the summer opens the pores and actually cools one off. I think it has something to do with sweating, but I’ve never been afraid of a little perspiration. Actually, sweat doesn’t smell too much if there’s no fear involved, since the apocrine glands under the armpit are responsible for removal of fear toxins. Interesting, isn’t it? On the other hand, there’s not a lot of evaporation when the relative humidity is 97%.
“It’s a big Glossy Privet bush,” I explained as I rinsed the teapot to warm it, added some oat straw and chamomile, and poured in the boiling water. “All anybody had to do was duck behind the bush, open the door and walk in. They checked there for fingerprints, but there were only smudges. The ground didn’t show any footprints, but that didn’t mean anything, since the Vinca minor was fairly thick and springy, unusual for that shady an area. It generally needs more light.”
“My sister, the botanical encyclopedia,” Glaze moaned, crossing her eyes.