Pushing Up Daisies

Diana the huntress, and the little peasant woman I'd barely noticed before. She wore a full skirt and petticoats, and a scarf held back long curly hair. On her shoulder was a basket filled with wheat, and she stood guard outside the door I hoped was still unlocked.

The door handle squeaked from disuse but clicked open. Neil and I bent down under the hydrangea and entered a small mudroom with an old Formica table, a sink, and floor-to-ceiling shelves. The shelves were empty, except for a few mildewed needlepoints. An inner door led to the main house. It, too, was unlocked.

My first impression was of a hodgepodge of stuff. Different styles, different eras, giving it the appearance of an upscale flea market. The Peacock house was furnished in an idiosyncratic style not unlike its garden: mostly New En gland, some Italy, a touch of France.

We tiptoed around, as if there were someone there to disturb. In the main entrance, at the top of the stairs, a stained glass window featured an ornate vase overflowing with pink cabbage roses. To the left were various bedrooms and sitting rooms. To the right was the room we were looking for.

The library had a large bay window, with a window seat overlooking the entire garden. A great wooden table in the middle of the room was covered by a patterned dark green velvet throw, moth-eaten in spots. A dusty floor globe stood in one corner.

More framed needlepoints shared the shelves with Dorothy's books, which were in no order I could instantly recognize. Most were gardening books ranging from 1840's Mrs. Loudon's Gardening for Ladies to Martha Stewart's Gardening. They even had a copy of The Temple of Flora, a very rare nineteenth-century book of flower illustrations. I wondered if Richard knew about this small gem.

''What shall we do for our sister? Come into my garden, my sister.' Sounds familiar,' Neil said, reading two of a series of needlepoints.

'Not to me.'

In the same way one's eyes eventually adjust to low light, my eyes adjusted to the unique arrangement of the books—some by author, some by subject, some by country of origin. After a while, it made sense.

Then I found them: two bays devoted to herbs and herbal remedies. One entire shelf held books with the words Materia Medica in the title. There was a hardcover copy of the ginseng book I'd read about and a personally inscribed first edition of Jethro Kloss's classic Back to Eden. Alongside King's American Dispensatory, I saw the Culpeper's. Unlike my cheap paperback edition, Dorothy's was a well-thumbed, leather-bound copy printed in 1906, and stuffed with bookmarks and crumbling sprigs.

We searched every inch of the library for Dorothy's journal, but found nothing.

'I've got to get back. I have a client at five,' Neil said, checking his watch.

'I'm leaving, too. And I'm borrowing this,' I said, shoving the Culpeper's in my pack. 'I don't think Dorothy will mind.'

CHAPTER 23

When I got home, I found O'Malley on my doorstep. Given my recent, unauthorized exploration of the Peacock house and the book I'd snatched, I thought he was there to read me my rights. Then I noticed the grocery bag, a plastic bag from Shep's Wines and Liquors, and a ten-pound bag of charcoal leaning against the door.

'At the risk of sounding inhospitable, why are you here?'

'You didn't strike me as a gas grill person.'

'You must be a detective. Let me take something.' I reached for the charcoal, but he handed me the smaller bag.

'Salmon okay? Wild, not farmed.'

'Is this an official call?'

'Officials have to eat, too.'

Upstairs, he unloaded everything onto the island in the kitchen. I dumped my stuff in the bedroom, buried the book under my pillows, and went back to see what Mike was up to. I watched silently while he made himself at home, unpacking bags and whipping up a respectable sesame-soy-ginger marinade for the salmon. He stuck it in the fridge, then opened the wine, picked up the charcoal, and started for the deck.

'I'm a sucker for anyone who wants to cook for me, but is there a legitimate reason for this visit?'

'Got a laptop?' he asked.

'Do bears go in the woods?'

'Get it. I'll start the fire and meet you back here in ten minutes. And bring your candy notes.'

Uncharacteristically, I did as I was told, retrieving my laptop from my office, and clearing a spot for it on the kitchen counter. Mike came back with a flash drive and a detailed picture log, presumably so I wouldn't have to look at any of the more graphic shots.

'Candy, little girl?'

Instantly, a picture of the crumpled candy wrapper appeared. 'Okay, you're on,' he said.

Even at 500 percent magnification, it was impossible to see a date on the package, but we were able to see one thing clearly: Cadbury. I shuffled through my research.

'Okay, Cadbury merged with Schweppes in 1969, so this package predates that.'

'Can you make out the name on the bar?'

It was difficult to read; the wrapper had spent the last few de cades crumpled in a box, and the cops' efforts to flatten it out only served to hasten its disintegration.

'I don't know,' I said. 'It looks like one word, starting with a P . '

'Does it say Paula?' he asked, leaning in.

'Idiot. It probably says Picnic. If the package says Picnic, and doesn't say Cadbury Schweppes, it was made and buried sometime between 1958 and 1969. If the mother was a teenager when she gave birth . . .' I noodled with my next calculation.

'Let's say, for the sake of argument, the childbear-ing years are fifteen to forty, all we have to do is look for a woman who was born between 1918 and 1953. Your candy wrapper may tell us who isn't the mother, but it doesn't tell us who is.'

He did the math so fast it made my head spin.

'If the child was buried in 1958,' he explained, 'and the mother was forty, she would have been born in 1918. If the body was buried in 1968, and the mother was only fifteen, she could have been born as late at 1953. Too large a group. Why are you smiling?'

'Nothing. My aunt Jo used to say, 'and if my Grandma had wheels she'd be a trolley,' or something like that.'

'There's a rude version of that.'

'Aunt Jo knew that one, too. So virtually every woman in Fairfield County over the age of forty-five is a candidate. That narrows things down.' I tried to sound optimistic. No one's as optimistic as a gardener.

'And why limit it to Fairfield County?' he said. 'She might have moved. She might be dead. Look, it's an interesting exercise but it doesn't prove anything.'

'Someone once said that when you have eliminated the impossible, what ever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

'Was that Aunt Jo again?' he asked.

'I think it was Arthur Conan Doyle—Sherlock Holmes, wise guy. Any ideas about the other stuff?' I asked.

'More annoying than dangerous. Anna's encounter could have been a prank. And bunking down in the green house isn't life threatening, even if it isn't fun.'

No, but it could have been, I thought.

'What is it? Has something else happened?'

'No, no.' If O'Malley knew about my near miss with Felix, he did a good job of hiding it.

'We don't know that your incidents are remotely connected to the body. It could be a business rival or someone who's ticked off at you.'