The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery Read online

  Green Thumbs Way Up for the Gardening Mysteries of Ann Ripley!

  THE GARDEN TOUR AFFAIR

  “A riveting whodunit … a wonderful way to pass those gray days when you can’t get into your garden.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A killer serpent among the guests … and the extra benefit of good gardening tips.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  DEATH OF A POLITICAL PLANT

  “The next time your yard calls out for a good weeding, nurture the gardener first. Plop down on the lawn chair, ignore the june bugs, and enjoy the read.”

  —USA Today

  “[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 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

  THE GARDEN TOUR AFFAIR

  TO TONY

  Acknowledgments

  A FEW DETAILS OF BOULDER COUNTY’S LAND-scape, that is, an occasional hogback, stream, and cliff, had to be altered for this story. And the public officials described herein in no way are meant to resemble the real people holding these jobs. Many thanks to staff members of Boulder County and its Department of Parks and Open Space, with special thanks to Tina Nielson; Rich Koopmann; Michael Sanders; Cindy Owsley; and Nancy Dayton. The chief of the Lyons Sub-Station, Sergeant Pamela Housh, provided valuable details, as did Dr. Anngwynn St. Just and Dr. Peter Levine, experts in post-traumatic stress. The Denver Botanic Garden’s librarian, Susan Eubank, was, as always, a tremendous help. Trux Simmons of KRMA-TV, Denver, guided me again through the realities of public television; Richard Romeo, LL.D., through the legal questions. Karen Romeo added her expertise on Colorado ranches. Michael Ogden of Santa Fe, who designs wetlands, generously shared his knowledge. Others who deserve sincere thanks are Judy Visty, park ranger at Rocky Mountain Park; Andy Amalfitano of the Boulder Rescue League; Bob Tanem; Enid Schantz; Margaret Coel; Sybil Downing; Karen Gilleland; Beverly Carrigan; James Hester; Carol Dow; Dr. Robert A. Sammons, Jr.; Jessie Lew Mahoney; Irene Sinclair; Win and Jane Brunner; Kay Brunner; Allison Sauer; Jim Munson; David Barnes; Rose Linan; and my six perceptive daughters. Particular thanks to my agent Jane Jordan Browne, and my editor at Bantam Books, Stephanie Kip.

  Gardening Essays

  by Ann Ripley

  OPEN SPACE: FOR PLANTS, HUMANS … AND PRAIRIE DOGS

  SUSPICIOUS INTERLOPERS: WEEDS IN AMERICA

  IF ONLY THE STONES COULD TALK: GARDENING WITH ROCKS

  DARK WATER … AND HOW TO MAKE IT PURE AGAIN

  LIKE CLUES, GARDENS CAN SPRING UP ANYWHERE

  A DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS

  COVER-UP: WHAT’S NEW IN MULCH, MANURE, AND COMPOST

  A BUTTERFLY’S VIEW OF LIFE

  JUST LIKE PLANTS, DETECTIVES MUST SHOW THEIR METTLE: PERENNIALS THAT KNOW HOW TO SURVIVE

  WANTED: A BOLD SOLUTION (THE JUNGLE LOOK REVISITED)

  Chapter 1

  WITH ALL THE HYPE SHE’D heard about Colorado and its perfect climate, Louise Eldridge had no idea the place would make her ill. She thought longingly of her home in Washington, D.C., overgrown with vines, sticky, hot, almost unbearable in August. Truly, a muggy hellhole. But Washington was her muggy hellhole—something she was used to. Colorado was a bust so far, with lots of stark, treeless land under a glaring hot sun. It was so hot that the so-called lawn at her rental house had turned into cracked adobe. Three days out here alone, and every single day, she’d wakened with a headache and a queasy stomach. “Altitude sickness,” a local druggist had diagnosed airily, “And the heat could be a factor—we never have heat like this.”

  “Never? You have it now.”

  “It’ll all go away in a day or so—the heat and the altitude sickness.” It was two days ago that he’d said that. Louise’s head still ached, and the temperature still ranged around ninety-eight degrees.

  But things had improved—or had they? At least she was no longer alone, having just collected her family at the Denver airport. Inside her rental car, the air-conditioned atmosphere was cool, actually downright chilly, as she and her husband, Bill, sat in the front seat, carefully not looking at each other. Barely speaking.

  The chill didn’t affect their ebullient daughter, Janie, who sat in the back seat enjoying her first look at Colorado.

  “Ooh,” cooed Janie, peering out the window, “look at those darling little creatures.” A cluster of tan, foot-high animals stood together in the field, perched erect as if attending an afternoon kaffeeklatsch.

  “Prairie dogs,” said Louise.

  “Yes, prairie dogs,” said Bill, as if he had to reconfirm it to make it true. “And what you have to remember, Janie, is that you can’t fool around with them, as much as you like animals. They’re not like those baby lambs you used to want to take home with you. They’re loaded with bubonic plague. When you go to that wilderness camp, better watch out for rock squirrels, too—I read there’s a plague epidemic among them as well.”

  “Gee, Bill,” said Louise shortly, “let’s not make everything out here seem terrible for her. Besides, what you’re saying about prairie dogs is not exactly true.” In preparation for her location shoots for Gardening With Nature, Louise had read all there was to read about these little animals, whose unique human qualities of verbal communication were so engaging that they had volunteer groups fighting to save them from extinction. Bill could know only a fraction of what she knew.

  Her husband looked at her with hurt surprise, and she wished she could take back her words. Suffering from another headache, she knew she was crotchety. Fighting over facts about prairie dogs wasn’t the way to treat a husband with whom she had hoped to reconcile. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s-just that when they have plague, they don’t last long enough to bother anyone.”

  He looked at her strangely. Poor man: Everything he had said since he got off the plane with Janie had grated on her nerves.

  What a difference from the way she had pictured their time in Colorado. The late-night phone call he received in Washington last week had started it, changing everything, throwing the family’s future into doubt. Instead of resigning from the CIA as he had intended, Bill was being suckered in again, persuaded to help with some crisis he hadn’t even had time to tell her about before he hustled her onto the early plane to Colorado the next morning.

  She had only heard the placating words, “One part of the problem is in Boulder County, right where you’re going, so I’ll be out there to join you Friday.” She bit her lip to keep herself from crying.

  Louise couldn’t believe it at first: his business was right here where hers was. But naturally, his business was much more important than her fledgling broadcast career. He must have told the CIA that she was touring some of
the western states, and they had decided to use her trip as a pretext for his assignment. The perfect cover.

  But the trip wasn’t the whole problem. The next step her husband would take now that he was not resigning, she thought darkly, would be just what the CIA had wanted for some time: a move to Austria. As CIA station chief in Vienna, she knew, his primary task would be to keep nuclear and biological materials out of the hands of rogue states.

  What should she do—trail after him like the loyal wife, or put her foot down and declare her own rights? The whole topic made her feel hollow inside.

  By the time Louise had made her way across the arid plains to pick up the two of them at Denver International Airport, she had developed another headache—or was it Bill who made her head ache this time? It flattened her usual jovial spirit, so that even the sight of DIA’s jolly white multiple roofs, like an explosion of small white tents up in the sky, failed to cheer her up. And it didn’t help when her husband greeted her with averted eyes and only a small peck on the cheek. Now, he continued to be polite but distant in the car, while carrying on a lively conversation with Janie. Plague-ridden prairie dogs, indeed, she thought gloomily.

  When they arrived at their rented house north of Boulder, near the little town of Lyons, Louise went straight to bed with codeine-laced Bufferin. That meant Bill still hadn’t had the chance to explain himself. She lay with a cool washcloth against one side of her head and brooded. What a passive person she had been over the years. She had leeched onto Bill and lived his life—not her own. Now, she was paying the price. As her job made her more and more independent, she felt the close union with the husband she so dearly loved tearing apart.

  It started when she began to work in television—and succeeded at it. And began establishing strong roots in Washington, where she was making a name for herself. That phone call had made the future clear. Bill would never quit his infuriating job as a spy. He would expect her to continue living in his shadow as he traveled from country to country.

  They were two people with careers on a collision course—or was her drug potion making her overdramatic? With this unhappy thought, she lapsed into a restless sleep.

  “Feel better?” asked Bill. He sat on the edge of her bed and gently kneaded her shoulder in the spot that usually hurt. He hoped it would work. A massage had helped to clear up little marital storms before.

  “Thanks,” she murmured. “It’s as if someone stuck a knife in there.” Bill knew her body almost as well as she knew it herself. As he worked on her back, he felt her relax. He hoped, but wasn’t at all sure, that relations between them would soon be back to normal. He felt quite guilty about the recent turn of events in their lives.

  His wife smiled at him. “That giant lid that was pressing on my skull has lifted. Maybe I’m over my altitude problems.”

  “Good. Then how about a little dinner?”

  “That sounds great,” she said. But when she climbed off the bed, he had to catch her before she fell. He steadied her with a protective arm and gently led her into the comfortable living room.

  Janie slouched on the floor, a pile of pillows cradling her blond head, looking supremely bored. She had been ambivalent about this trip. Smitten with hormones, the seventeen-year-old had opted to stay in Washington with Bill the extra few days his job had suddenly required. This had given her more time to say good-bye to her boyfriend Chris Radebaugh, before an unthinkable separation of two weeks.

  “Ma, you’ve returned from the dead,” said the girl, with a big smile. “It’s a funky house—I like it. But it’s dullsville around here. Super quiet. C’mon and give us the skinny—what’s there to do?”

  Bill chided his daughter. “My dear, you’ve only been here two hours. Give your mother and me a little time.”

  Janie slowly got up off the floor and flipped her magazine onto a rustic table near the Taos-style sofa, reaching out with both slim arms in a mighty stretch. “Okay, I get it. You two are still on the outs. You need to talk, so I’ll get out of here, maybe take a little walk in the neighborhood, if you can call these fields a neighborhood. See if I can find any human beings, or a dog or a horse, at least.”

  “Janie,” said Louise, “how did you leave Chris?”

  “Alone,” she shot back, then smiled in spite of herself at the sound of his name. Bill noted she was unusually happy for one who had just said good-bye to her boyfriend in Washington. “He’s great. He drove us to Dulles Airport.”

  Louise sank into an overstuffed chair and smiled weakly at them. “I missed you guys—even my job-obsessed husband.” She gave him a challenging look, and he knew things wouldn’t be completely back to normal until she got a full explanation for why he had re-upped with the agency. Especially when he had just intimated he was quitting and taking a job offer with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

  He wished their daughter would come through on her promise to give the old folks some needed privacy. But now the girl was clucking over her mother, and in a flash Bill could imagine what a compelling mother Janie would be herself. “Ma,” she said, full of sympathy, dipping down and encircling Louise with a surprisingly strong hug. “I can tell what you need—a cup of coffee. Dad figured out how to use the coffeemaker.”

  “You’ve read my mind,” Louise called after her, as Janie scampered to the kitchen.

  She brought each of them a steaming mug, then left by way of the broad back porch that faced the nearby foothills. Bill sat down at the base of Louise’s chair. The light was so strong out here that it was as if he could see Louise more clearly than usual. Her face seemed a little lined, perhaps from the brutal sun—and her skin rough to his touch. Her eyes were tired and bloodshot from the headaches she had been experiencing since she arrived. He felt a pang of guilt for not having shown up earlier.

  She seemed just as concerned about him, reaching out a hand and touching his cheek. “You’re under a strain, Bill, I can tell. I’m so sorry for being a bear. Forgive me. It’s just that I’ve been so distracted that I haven’t even paid much attention to my scripts.”

  He bent his head toward her, so that her hand moved across his cheek. “I’m sorry I was delayed—sorry this whole thing came up at the last minute.”

  She removed her hand from his face. “Bill, remember the day when you and I first knew we were in love with each other? We sat on the grass on top of the hill at the lake and read love poems?”

  “I remember.”

  “One of the poems—Shelley, was it?—talked about two souls so close that they were like one.”

  “I remember. It was Epipsychidion.”

  “‘We shall become the same, we shall be one Spirit within two frames…

  One hope within two wills, one will beneath

  Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,

  One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,

  And one annihilation.’” She smiled self-consciously. “My God, Bill, we were melodramatic. We looked in each other’s eyes and pledged that this was how close we would become.”

  He put aside his coffee mug and clasped her hand in his. “That was real,” he assured her. “We have become that close.” His eyes sought hers, but she avoided looking at him.

  “But something’s happened to us. I feel so apart from you—it’s just plain scary. I feel like more of my own person, and that’s a good thing, isn’t it, for a person to feel strong—independent—not afraid to succeed? But I’m so worried about us. It’s as if the bottom were falling out of my life.” She was on the verge of tears.

  He squeezed her shoulder with a gentle hand. “I’m damned proud of you, Louise—and don’t you ever forget that.” Then he got up from where he was sitting and moved to the windows to stare out at the foothills. Seldom had he been this uncomfortable. His new casual clothes, stiff and strange. This place, Colorado, too bright, too barren of trees. Relations with the wife he loved better than himself, perilously strained. He had better say this right.

  “Th
ere have been too many changes,” he said, “too fast. And I’ve sent you mixed signals, telling you I wanted to quit my job, then reneging. I apologize.” He turned around and his face was grim. He crossed the room in two big strides and crouched in front of her.

  “They need me again.” He whispered the words. “I just can’t walk away when I can help with something that affects all of our futures. Can you understand that?”

  “But it will always be like that, Bill. Next, they’ll need you back in Europe. I spent twenty years being a foreign service wife while you were leading your double life. Now I have a career of my own; what am I supposed to do, give it up?”

  “Let’s just take it one step at a time. Louise, the situation out here has to be resolved or there’ll be hell to pay. I hate to overemphasize it, but each situation we’re finding has terrible potential consequences. Think of Chernobyl. As for moving to Vienna, it would not be a covert job. It would be wide open for all the world to see and know about. Working on disarmament, and—”

  “Chasing nuclear pirates,” she finished.

  His eyes pleaded for understanding. “Could we put off talking about that until this emergency is over?”

  She reached out and grabbed his hand. “Of course. Just tell me you won’t make any more decisions without talking to me first.”

  He heard Louise’s words, but he couldn’t quite understand how they’d come to this, and why she was so desperate. It used to be that the exigencies of his job came first, no questions asked. Now, he realized, with some of the same emotion that Louise felt, that the whole equilibrium of their lives had shifted, leaving them both unsettled and anxious about the future.