Pushing Up Daisies

She lost herself in her thoughts for a moment, then recovered.

'You must have seen them in pictures, right? You couldn't have seen them yourself.'

'Of course I did, flatterer. Dorothy Peacock was one of my teachers, and an old'—she waited for the right word to come, '—an old beau of mine used to cut their grass. Not recently, as you can probably tell.' She nodded at the overgrown meadow behind me.

'Really? I'd be very grateful for any advice or information you could give me.' I whipped out one of my cards and handed it to her, still searching for a pen and paper to get her info. 'E-mail is always the easiest way to reach me. Now, if I can just get your coordinates, phone number, maybe an e-mail address . . .'

I jogged back to my car for a pen. By the time I'd finished rooting around in my backpack, she'd silently wandered off.

'Thanks a lot,' I muttered to the late March air.

Well, it wasn't the Pine Barrens. She was around here somewhere; I'd catch up with her later. I wondered how she knew I was here to work on the garden. Guess I wasn't dressed for anything else, although in this getup, I might have been a burglar.

Whoever she was, she was right about one thing: I had to get cracking. I got out my pad and Richard's file. At some point I'd make a detailed map of the garden, but for now a rough sketch would do.

The magnificent elm in the photos was gone. Dutch elm disease, I was guessing. Sometime in the 1930s a boatload of beetles stowed away in a shipment of veneer bound for the United States. The beetles carried a fungus, and the rest, as they say, is history. By the sixties, over fifty million elm trees in the United States were dead.

The pines were in good shape. Removal of a few broken branches was really all they needed. The rest of the shrubs in the front garden—rhododendrons, azaleas, andromedas, viburnum, forsythia—and the lawn were wildly overgrown but nothing that couldn't be pruned into submission or fertilized back to life over time. Very few things in the garden were stone-cold dead. Plants have this incredible will to live and if there's even a glimmer of life in something, I always think I can coax it back to good health.

Oriental bittersweet and euonymus burning bush, the Connecticut equivalents of kudzu, were running rampant. I had a love-hate relationship with the burning bush, but the bittersweet would have to go. Labor intensive but not impossible. I was counting on Hugo Jurado's help. Hugo was my own part-time gardener. Going from a fat regular income to a slim irregular one had forced me to make some economies, but I'd sooner give up food than give up Hugo. He was from Temixco, a small town about two hours south of Mexico City. A tireless worker, Hugo juggled three jobs and sent almost every penny back home to his silver-haired mother. He'd probably own the town, or be its mayor, in a couple of years.

Although a complete restoration of the garden would take numerous growing seasons, I knew Hugo and I could make a dramatic improvement in as little as sixty days. Things were looking up. I started designing new business cards in my head and thinking of an easier, less obscure name for my soon-to-be-successful company.

The Peacocks' wraparound porch had been filled with containers and window boxes. I couldn't tell from the faded black-and-white photos what kind of flowers they'd held, but if I stuck with the classics—sweet alyssum, petunias, nasturtiums—I'd be fine.

Like a happy puppy, I lumbered around to the back of the house. It was like slamming into a brick wall. What ever confidence I'd had a few moments before totally vanished. The back garden was a disaster area. And so much of it. A large herringbone brick terrace, cracked and choked with weeds, held about a dozen moldy planters. Guarded by two moss-covered stone dogs, a short flight of stairs led down to an allee about ten feet wide and a hundred feet long, lined with dead or dying boxwoods. The path looked like pea gravel, but upon closer inspection I saw it was crushed oyster shells, much of it ground to dust. At either end was a garden, each approximately one thousand square feet.

The first was walled, with a central raised bed. According to the file, the other had been an herb garden; only the rampant mint betrayed its former use. Beyond them, there was an overgrown privet maze; half a dozen spindly hemlocks barely screened out the neighbors.

On the far side of the allee was a freestanding stone wall covered by espaliered pear trees. Behind the wall stood a row of cypresses, at least two dead, separating the garden from a lawn that sloped down to a rickety floating dock. Broken statuary, a falling-down greenhouse, a tiny shed, and a musty-looking cottage completed the picture. Only the gnomes were missing.

I retraced my steps and sat down on the brick terrace, somewhat shell-shocked. I checked the pictures again. It had been impossible to appreciate the size of the job from the photos I had. On paper it looked like a few manageable beds, in person—Monticello. No wonder those old ladies hadn't kept up with the landscaping. What was I thinking when I said I could do this? What was that idiot Stapley thinking when he gave me the job?

Tears were welling up, but I willed myself not to cry. My attack of self-pity didn't last long; it couldn't. Otherwise it was back to sucking up secondhand smoke at film and TV markets and feigning interest in yet another documentary on the Kennedys or World War Two, and I definitely didn't want that.

I walked to the walled garden on the left side of the property. The walls were about eight feet high with arches and openings in the style of an Italian giardino segreto, or secret garden. In the corners were medium-sized understory trees and shrubs, including a fifteen-foot leatherleaf viburnum, bursting with health, and an evergreen magnolia covered with fat golden buds. Overhead, the dogwoods were still beautiful and looked vigorous, unusual since they don't have a very long life span. In a month or so, they'd explode, some pink, some creamy white. Underneath were hostas and peonies, their pointed, reddish crowns just starting to break through the crusty top layer of soil.

I shuffled through the papers in the file. The walled garden had been Renata Peacock's contribution. It was a white garden. Moonflowers, clematis, bleeding hearts, nicotiana, spirea—anything white that would catch the waning light and shimmer in the evening. A few crumbling columns and stone benches lined the walls of the garden room, which were covered with wisteria, Virginia creeper, and a thick mat of English ivy. I sat on one of the cool stone benches, imagining the property sixty or seventy years ago, beautiful and as serene as its name would suggest, a place where well-heeled young ladies sat with their tea and cakes, oblivious to the world outside the boundaries of their cozy retreat.

There'd be no shame in going back to Richard Stapley to tell him the job was too big for me. I could do that, or I could simply dig in and see how far I got.

I'd get Hugo and anyone else I could shanghai into working with me. Tools would be a problem, but I knew where I could borrow some heavy-duty equipment. It would require some hair flicking, a skimpy tank top, and industrial-strength lip gloss, but I'd make the sacrifice. And the Historical Society would have to hold more than a 'small event'; I'd need at least a hundred plants, probably more. I added to my already voluminous notes and lists.

Making a quick sketch, I named all the different garden areas. Then I labeled the Baggies I'd brought. Call me crazy, but I love taking soil samples. All you do is dig up some soil, ship it to your local extension university, and for five bucks they analyze the soil's texture and structure; make fertilizer recommendations; and, most important, determine the pH factor—something no serious gardener would consider proceeding without.

Okay, where to start? The center of the white garden was as good a place as any. I reached into my backpack, like a doctor going into his medical bag, and got out my favorite trowel and my thinnest goatskin gloves. I regretted not bringing a tiny airplane bottle of booze to have a little groundbreaking ceremony.

With my first stab, I hit something. When you garden in Connecticut, this is not an unusual occurrence. We grow rocks here. But this didn't sound like a rock. I plunged my trowel into the soil again, this time scraping a surface that was definitely metal. Ten minutes later, I had unearthed a box. Eleven minutes later, a small body. Stone-cold dead.

CHAPTER 2

Until that moment my involvement with the local constabulary had been minimal. Three years of summers and eight months of full-time residence had netted only a few brushes with the law—once when my neighbor had an unusually rowdy party and another time when my flag was stolen. (What kind of lowlife steals a flag?)