I love nurseries, no matter what time of year it is. My new favorite was D’Angelo’s, forty minutes west of Springfield, on the other side of the Paradise. The owners did their best to make the place a destination even though gardening season was winding down. They geared up for Halloween with hayrides, a haunted house, mountains of pumpkins and ornamental kale, and a fall sale on perennials that would save me dough and time next season. As long as everything was well watered, fall was an even better time to plant than spring because it gave plants the chance to establish themselves before the growing season kicked in.
I pulled out my shopping list and dragged around a flatbed dolly with uncooperative wheels, piling on threes and fives of my favorites. I stalked the false lamiums.
No matter how hard I tried not to, I invariably fell in love with some plant or shrub that wasn’t on my list and would put me over budget or, worse, that I didn’t have an appropriate place or client for. Early in my gardening career I’d killed a few spectacular plants by making rash purchases. I still had their sap on my hands and mourned them every time I went to the nursery and saw a magnolia ‘Edith Bogue’ or a hibiscus ‘Lord Baltimore’ like the ones I’d killed-as if these shrubs knew what I’d done to their brethren, and would somehow punish me for it if I took one of them home.
I was struggling to lift a lovely but totally unnecessary Japanese cutleaf maple onto my cart when a white pickup pulled into the garden center. Was it the creepy guy from the diner? I hunkered down and hid behind the tree, kicking myself for not having chosen a wider shrub that would have made a more effective screen. I left my cart where it was and crawled on all fours behind a lush, and thicker, miscanthus. I peered around the plant and saw first, work shoes, then a pair of denimed knees, and a beaded belt that claimed the wearer loved, or more precisely “hearted,” Guatemala.
“May I assist you with something?” The man’s T-shirt identified him as a nursery employee. What could I say? “No, thank you, I’m hiding because I think I see an ex-con who doesn’t know a countertop from a kayak?” Nah.
“I think I lost something,” I lied and patted the gravel, which had by then had stuck to my hands and made little pockmarks in my palms. The nursery employee bent down to help me look.
“What was it?”
Yeah. What was it? Wallet? Keys? Nope, too big and too noisy.
“An earring…No! They’re both here! Boy, that’s lucky.” I grabbed both of my ears.
He stood and was polite enough not to ask the obvious question: Why are you still crouched on the ground if you didn’t lose your earring?
I mumbled something about my back, my age, my sciatica, and my inability to stand up fast without the blood rushing to my head and making me dizzy. I rattled off so many fictitious ailments it’s a wonder the man didn’t ask where my caregiver was.
I made a show of getting up slowly, eyeballing the garden center and looking for the white pickup that I thought belonged to Countertop Man. I saw one idling, all the way to the right in the back lot where pros were shoveling mulch and compost into their trucks.
“Are you taking the maple, senorita?” the man asked when he was sure I was okay.
“No, I’ve changed my mind. I was looking for the false lamiums. Are they in yet?” Right…I mistook a tree for a perennial.
“Maybe our next shipment,” he said. “Try again in a few days.”
“Just these plants, then.” The man pushed my cart to the checkout desk for me, walking at a funereal pace in deference to my wretched physical condition until we reached the outside counter, where yet another employee would tally my purchases and hand me a slip to take inside to the cashier. Everyone’s a specialist.
I glanced to the right and saw the white pickup turn around and come barreling toward us. I leaned back slightly so that my face was hidden behind a scarecrow and a towering stack of baled hay.
The Guatemalan nursery employee who had helped me saw me lean backward and must have thought I was fainting. He screamed for someone inside to call 911, and in a clumsy attempt to catch me wound up knocking over the hay bales, the scarecrow, and me on top of them. From my horizontal position in the driveway, I saw the truck pass, with two Hispanic garden workers and what looked like a mixed-breed Lab inside, none of whom I’d ever seen before. All of them, even the dog, appeared to be laughing.
Six
I laughed myself the next morning as I drove to Babe’s, thinking about the disturbance I’d created at the nursery, but as I approached the diner, I saw a cluster of Springfield police cars with their lights flashing. All the cops I knew walked across the road to the Paradise. Either someone was having a retirement breakfast or something bad had happened, and I was afraid it was the latter.
I pulled closer and saw a man being handcuffed and led over to one of the cars by Sergeant Mike O’Malley, a Springfield cop I’d gotten to know in the last few years. Not in the biblical sense, but Lucy and Babe still gave it a fifty-fifty chance.
I instantly recognized the vest and sweatshirt on the person now being helped into the patrol car; it was Countertop Man. With all the official vehicles in the lot, the only parking space still available was at the far end near a hair salon that I’d never seen anyone enter or exit. I took it, then jogged to Babe’s private office in the back of the diner, where I met Babe and Mike O’Malley.
“What’s going on? You okay? Was that Countertop Man?” I asked, pointing to the man in the patrol car. “I knew there was something fishy about that guy.”
“I thought you didn’t know him,” O’Malley said to Babe.
“He said his name but I don’t remember it. I know he likes black coffee and fried eggs and he asked me if my name was Brittany. He’s been in the last few days, that’s all. Said he worked for a countertop company downtown. I just feed them, Mike. I don’t ask for references.”
Then O’Malley asked what I knew about the man, but I didn’t have anything substantial to contribute other than my gut feeling, which didn’t seem fair to share with the police given that it was based on the guy’s inability to tell Formica from limestone, which was not a crime, although perhaps it should be. I spared Mike the nursery anecdote, since it no longer seemed all that funny.
“So you think he lied about being in the countertop business and he flirted with Babe and you thought that made him weird? Doesn’t everybody flirt with Babe?”
For my benefit Babe repeated what happened. “I closed up around 7 P.M. last night-business was dead, so I came in early today, to make up for it. When I got here, I found that guy, whatever his name is, in my office, curled up on my inflatable bed. He scared the crap out of me, so I backed out of the room as quietly as I could, locked him in, and called the cops after I looked myself inside the diner.”
“It’s lucky he didn’t just wake up and run away,” I said.
“He did wake up, and busted my lock in the process, but I’d blocked the door with my SUV. He couldn’t get out. Even the windows are painted shut. I’ve been after Neil all summer to scrape them. Now I’m glad he didn’t get around to it.”
Countertop Man claimed to have left his ID in his other suit which was kind of funny since he didn’t strike any of us as a suit-and-tie kind of guy. All he’d said was that his name was Chase McGinley. He was babbling in the back of the police cruiser, his head rocking back and forth in an animated argument with himself. Against the odds, he appeared to be losing.
McGinley said he’d just been sleeping one off someplace warm, but apparently he’d gone through Babe’s garbage, her files, and a bottle of Bombay gin before passing out on her sofa. When the cops cuffed him, he had bits of receipts, mail, and a picture of Babe and Neil crammed into his pockets.
“Identity theft?” I asked. “That’s a pretty low-tech way to do it, isn’t it?”
“Could be. Back in the day, people used to steal the carbon copies of credit card transactions. Not all the bad guys are computer savvy,” O’Malley said. “Some of them are just thieves.”
Identity theft was another thing I rarely thought about that had surfaced lately, along with convict labor, backsplashes, and my old dentist. The list was getting longer. I wasn’t even as fastidious as my eighty-seven-year- old aunt, who scrupulously shredded all her documents including sales flyers and newsletters from her congressman. I knew identity theft happened, but there were so many things I worried about before that-like my
