The Garden Tour Affair: A Gardening Mystery Read online

  Green Thumbs Way Up for

  the Gardening Mysteries of Ann Ripley

  DEATH OF A POLITICAL PLANT

  “[A] WELL-PACED TALE … PEOPLED WITH FULLY DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS … HER GARDENING TIPS ARE BOTH INTELLIGENT AND RELEVANT TO THE STORY.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  DEATH OF A GARDEN PEST

  “A HYBRID OF A TRADITIONAL WHODUNIT AND AN UP-TO-THE-MINUTE GARDENING GUIDE.” —

  —The Denver Post

  “GARDENING AND MURDER MAKE A FASCINATING COMBINATION IN DEATH OF A GARDEN PEST. GARDENER-SLEUTH LOUISE ELDRIDGE OFFERS AN ENCHANTING VIEW OF GARDENS WHILE FACING DOWN DAUNTINGLY EVIL OPPONENTS.”

  —Carolyn G. Hart

  MULCH

  “ANN RIPLEY PLANTS CLUES IN UNEXPECTED PLACES, DEVELOPS A PLOT WITH INTERESTING DIRT, AND SEEDS HER STORY WITH COLORFUL CHARACTERS, INCLUDING A CAPTIVATING, NOXIOUS VILLAIN. MULCH IS NOT YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY MYSTERY.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Diane Mott Davidson

  “MULCH IS ONE OF THOSE LITTLE GEMS.”

  —Mystery Lovers Bookshop News

  Also by Ann Ripley

  DEATH OF A POLITICAL PLANT

  DEATH OF A GARDEN PEST

  MULCH

  Coming Soon from Bantam Books:

  THE PERENNIAL KILLER

  TO TONY

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Gardening Essays by Ann Ripley

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  The Joys and Sorrows of Garden Tours:

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Bells, Burbles, and Rustles; The Sound a Garden Makes:

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Make Yourself a Romantic Garden But Think Twice About Planting “Love-Lies-Bleeding”:

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  The Sci-Fi Future of Gardening: Genetic Engineering and Tissue Culture:

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Reconstructing the Garden: Don’t Deconstruct Yourself While You’re At It:

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  How Do You Relate to Your Planet? The Garden As Therapy:

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  The Sexual Lives of Plants and the Disappearing Honeybee:

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Intricate Design and Easy Culture: The Wonderful Iris:

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Jungle: The New Look in Gardens:

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Vegetables: From Utilitarian to Aesthetic:

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  I was inspired to write The Garden Tour Affair after reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s book, The Blue Flower. I thank her for the use of excerpts from her beautiful translation of German Romantic poet Novalis’ Henry von Ofterdingen.

  Thanks also to the many people who assisted me with this book: Stephanie Kip, my editor at Bantam Books; Jane Jordan Browne, my agent; Trux Simmons, KRMA-TV, Denver; Jon W. Galloway; Enid Schantz; Jim and Jessie Lew Mahoney; Irene Sinclair; Margaret Coel; Sybil and Man-court Downing; Karen Gilleland; Nancy Styler; my husband Tony and my patient daughters. For generously sharing their botanical expertise, I’m grateful to Catherine Long Gates, Long’s Gardens, Boulder, CO; Panayoti Kelaidis and James E. Henrich, The Denver Botanic Garden; Biology Professor Gloria M. Coruzzi, New York University; John W. Pohly, former county agent for Boulder County, CO; Professors Harrison Hughes and Whitney Cranshaw, of Colorado State University; and Ramon Jordan, the U.S. National Arboretum. Other valuable background came from Dr. Sarah Conn, of Cambridge Hospital, Cambridge, MA; former horticulturalist for White Flower Farm, David J. A. Smith; Rick Ernst, Cooley Gardens, Silverton, OR; bee expert Thomas Theobald; Randy Burr, B & B Laboratories, Oregon; Lynn Lewis, resident trooper, Litchfield, CT; Gerald Present, New York University; Karl Lauby, The New York Botanical Garden; Andy Ocif, former Connecticut state trooper; Cathy Field, Litchfield Historical Society; and Allan Williams, Acting Director, Natural Resources Center, Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

  Gardening Essays by Ann Ripley

  THE JOYS AND SORROWS OF GARDEN TOURS

  BELLS, BURBLES, AND RUSTLES:

  THE SOUND A GARDEN MAKES

  MAKE YOURSELF A ROMANTIC GARDEN BUT THINK

  TWICE ABOUT PLANTING “LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING”

  THE SCI-FI FUTURE OF GARDENING:

  GENETIC ENGINEERING AND TISSUE CULTURE

  RECONSTRUCTING THE GARDEN:

  DON’T DECONSTRUCT YOURSELF WHILE YOU’RE AT IT

  HOW DO YOU RELATE TO YOUR PLANET?

  THE GARDEN AS THERAPY

  THE SEXUAL LIVES OF PLANTS AND THE

  DISAPPEARING HONEYBEE

  INTRICATE DESIGN AND EASY CULTURE:

  THE WONDERFUL IRIS

  JUNGLE: THE NEW LOOK IN GARDENS

  VEGETABLES: FROM UTILITARIAN TO AESTHETIC

  I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world. For in the world I used to live in, who would have troubled himself about flowers? Such a wild passion for a flower was never heard of there.

  —HENRY VON OFTERDINGEN—

  by the poet Novalis, 1772-1801

  Prologue

  THE TWO CLIMBERS WERE CROUCHED not five feet apart on the mountain summit—a disorderly heap of boulders thrown together in Paleozoic times and made slippery today by a fine mist of summer rain.

  “Ah, here we are at the top,” said the first.

  The other didn’t answer, only stared.

  “Is something wrong? Why are you looking at me so strangely?”

  “I want you to recall some pretty silly things you’ve said. These are your words, your exact words—do you remember? ’It takes so very little, just jour hand warm against mine and our fingers entwined, and I feel as if I’m connecting with jour very soul! You said that.”

  Silence for a long moment. “I see … now I understand. I did say that once, I admit it. I’m not ashamed.” His green eyes held a kind of pagan innocence.

  “And you said, ’You are my very heart’s heart!”

  “I said it, yes. They’re quotations from a poet, but they expressed how I felt. Why are you going into this now, for God’s sake? Let’s discuss that at another time, in another place …”

  “It’s all down in writing, you know.”

  “I—didn’t know that.”

  “But I’m going to destroy it. That it happened at all is bad enough. I know it will get out. And if it does, it will be the biggest disgrace of my life.” The second climber lunged at the other, like a rattlesnake striking. But also skillfully, with one booted foot wedged in a crevice between the rocks.

  The totally unexpected push easily unbalanced the other climber. In the man’s green eyes there was horrified surprise, as he fell far, far down to the rocks below.

  Chapter 1

  IT WAS HOT IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA— 98, with the comfort index at 120. Tropical Washington’s heat monster was loose again, devouring people imprudent enough to step out of air-conditioned buildings. Louise Eld
ridge got out of her air-conditioned car, and hurried up the mossy walk through deep woods where even the trees seemed to be sweating. Within ten steps, she herself was dripping like a stevedore. Quickly, as if evading an attack, she slipped in the front door of her low-slung, modern house and slammed it shut. With a swipe of a forearm she got rid of the heaviest perspiration on her brow.

  For a minute, she just stood there, trembling with relief in the chilly-feeling seventy-five degrees. Life was going to be okay as long as she didn’t absentmindedly open the glass sliding doors and let the beast in.

  “Hi, Ma.” A light voice floated to her from the living room.

  There, her seventeen-year-old daughter Janie was slumped on the couch, as limp as a piece of raw liver. She wore shorts and a halter top and little else. Her blond hair was splayed over the cushion behind her, her bare feet propped up, a glass of iced tea equipped with a bendable straw clasped in her hands. Her dark-lashed blue eyes were fixed warily on her mother. Louise went over and gave her a kiss. “Hello, darling.”

  Janie said, “I’m boiling: I just came in from hanging out my undies.”

  Louise could see two lacy brassieres strung on a collapsible wash line in a sunny spot amidst the tall trees. “It’s beastly, isn’t it?” She went to the refrigerator and poured herself a tall glass of iced tea, then returned to the living room and perched on a sturdy antique chair opposite Janie. “Maybe your hair would be better off in pigtails.”

  Janie’s mouth turned down, as if Louise had failed a test. “We’re not going to talk about the weather and hair, are we?”

  “No.” The only thing on the girl’s mind was the trip with her parents that she didn’t want to take. They had started this debate last evening, and gone to bed with the winner uncertain.

  Janie said, “I’ll be okay by myself.”

  Louise didn’t answer. She thought, Oh, no, you won’t.

  But the girl’s statement hung in the air, waiting like an anxious atom to bond with another to make a conversational molecule.

  “I’ll be okay by myself,” she repeated.

  “Probably,” Louise said carefully. “But you might enjoy coming on this trip with us, seeing how your father wants to come, and Chris’s mom has invited herself, too. Connecticut’s interesting. You can go on a historic garden tour, hike the Appalachian Trail, raft on the Housatonic, Your father will have just come back from Vienna, and I know he would love to have your company.”

  And besides, the alternative was alarming: Janie alone with boyfriend Chris, while Louise and Bill and Chris’s mother Nora went off together for the three-day weekend. No way.

  The teenager was as cool as Louise was trying to be. She gave her mother a calculating look from under dramatic dark brows, then took a long slurp of iced tea. Only after that was she ready to launch her opening argument. “Ma, I’m not nearly as earthy as you are. Garden tours are just not my scene. Anyway, why would you want me there? The three of you can have a nice, quiet weekend together. You and Dad can—you know—do the things you like to do when you’re alone. Nora—why, she can knock off a few poems sitting by one of those rivers. When you’re in the car, you can groove on Dad’s tapes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Frankly, I wanted to do some things around the house—you know, clean out my closet, pack up the clothes that no longer fit me and give them away …”

  Really—is that what you would he doing? Time for the trump card. She had just spoken with Nora. “What if I told you Chris wants to come.”

  Janie sat upright on the couch and swung her legs to the floor. “He does? But what for?” Louise could see the young woman’s visions of an unchaperoned weekend vanishing like a cloud of vapor.

  “I guess he heard about all the neat things to do— mountains to climb, waterfalls to photograph, craggy rocks to hop about on … Being away for his first year of college, he hasn’t seen much of his mother and he thought it would be fun to spend some time with her.”

  “And his dad—what about Ron? Won’t he be home alone then?”

  “He’s been called away to Singapore on business.”

  Janie’s eyes widened angrily. “I can’t believe it. Now you and Dad expect me to go because Chris is going, right? That way, you don’t have to worry about the two of us hanging out together without the ’rents and doing all sorts of terrible things, like having sex!”

  “Janie.” Louise was hurt. Neither she nor Bill deserved that—or did they?

  “Now that you’ve engineered everything the way you want it, I guess I have to go. Or else I’ll be alone in this dank house in the swamps of northern Virginia for three whole days.”

  Granted it was hot in Washington, but did Janie have to describe their home in such a contemptuous way? The size of the mortgage alone gave Louise deep respect for this house in the northern Virginia woods.

  Now the girl was facing her, sitting on the couch like a thin Buddha filling in the ignorant parent. “You realize, Ma, Chris and I could have sex any time—in a closet over at his house, in their garage, in his room—his mother never intrudes, you know—she’s way too busy sending her poems off to little magazines in hopes someone will buy them. We could be doin’ it in the car on the way to the movies, or when you send us out to help you with grocery shopping. Why do you think we need a weekend alone to manage it? After all, it only takes minutes!”

  “That’s all true. But this is our house, and you’re our seventeen-year-old daughter. Both are our responsibilities. And we prefer that you don’t stay alone. It’s called, in the words of your father, who after all was raised Catholic, ‘avoiding the near occasions of sin.’ Or substitute ‘temptation,’ if you don’t believe premarital sex is a sin, which most likely you don’t.”

  “I don’t, you’re right. Okay, Ma. But let me tell you something.”

  Louise sat up straighter and wiggled her back against the old wooden chair, a Detroit chair that had been her grandmothers and which she found particularly comfortable. “Go ahead, tell me.”

  Janie looked right at her and narrowed her eyes a little, as if she were looking at something unpleasant under a microscope. Very odious specimen: Manipulative Mother. Louise could feel the goodwill draining out of their mother-daughter relationship like water out of a leaky pail.

  “You always have to manage everything. You can’t just let Chris and me develop our relationship in a natural way and let what happens happen—you have to put these enormous roadblocks in the path.”

  “As I said before—”

  Janie was not to be stopped. “You’re a control freak, but you don’t have to be, you just choose to be. Life isn’t an eternal crisis here. But you had to manage everything when we came from overseas because Dad got stationed in the States—to make sure nothing went wrong. Then, you’re just a Foreign Service wife in America with nothing to do. So you have a big job crisis: ‘Oh, dear,’” she mimicked, in a falsetto voice Louise found particularly objectionable, “’I must find a career right now!”

  Louise reddened. “So that’s how you think I acted.”

  “Then”—and her gaze veered away from Louise, toward the living room’s big glass windows—“that first crazy murder happens and you, unfortunately, get involved. You did good, Ma, don’t get me wrong …”

  “Thanks.”

  “And then the PBS station hires you for that garden show, and you even get a job as a mouthpiece for some screwy lawnmower company. How would you like kids teasing you about your mother advertising lawnmowers?”

  “It’s a mulch mower …”

  Janie ignored her and continued in a low, menacing voice. This must be the bad part, thought Louise. “All it’s been since you started working is control, control, control. You get involved in more crazy, dangerous things. Nobody else’s mother stumbles on crimes left and right. And you’re traveling to all those botanical gardens and nurseries all the time, so everybody has to do everything you say while you’re out of town—or something will go wrong. But when you are in town, you don�
��t even get home in time to cook dinner. Sometimes I have to cook, and even Dad has had to cook.”

  “Poor Dad.”

  “Worst of all, you have a constant fear that I’ll jump in the sack with Chris, when you don’t even know the first thing about how we feel about each other. Why, I might have a love interest in French class. Chris might have a girlfriend at Princeton …”

  “I don’t think so, from the way you two act.”

  Some of the wind had gone out of Janie’s rhetorical sails. “Act, schmact, Ma. All I have to say is that you can’t control everything. You can’t control my life. You can’t control my love.”

  “Honey, I’m not really trying to. But it’s my job to be your mother until you come of age. I believe that’s next year. Then you can call your own shots. As for the other things, well, I’m sorry I’m not managing my life very well.”

  Janie waved a careless hand, but Louise had no idea what this casual gesture meant—another slam, or a reprieve? It turned out to be a reprieve. “Oh, you’re really not that inadequate,” said her daughter. “Just sometimes.” She threw both hands out, in the same gesture the Pope used when blessing crowds. “Actually, it might be kind of fun to go with you and Dad and Chris and Nora to Connecticut.”

  Louise blinked. Did she hear that right? Was that speech real, or just something aimed at driving her mother crazy? Cautiously, because she didn’t want to let her guard down completely, Louise threw in some travel information: “Litchfield County’s a beautiful corner of the world. The town is a gem: the prettiest in all of New England, they say. Old colonial houses, old barns, a covered bridge or two. We’ll be staying at a wonderful old inn. You and Chris can go off on your own there and do whatever you want.”

  “Will there be anyone under forty at this place?”

  “I’m afraid the youngest people will be a newlywed couple.”

  “What will you guys be doing?”

  “A PBS crew’s driving up from New York, and we’ll be taping a show, but it won’t intrude too much. We want to feature the Litchfield garden tour and Wild Flower Farm, which I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about: It’s a great nursery. They’ll still have their new red iris in bloom. It’s known as the Sacred Blood iris.” Louise smiled. “A gory name, isn’t it?”