Murder Crops Up (2 page)

Lois came bustling up, her eyes full of that strange, hard triumph. “You aren’t finished already, are you, Liz? Nice to see you at one of our work days, Bridget.” She gave Bridget a Look that said as plainly as words that she was usually more conspicuous by her absence than her presence.

I wielded the posthole digger for one more scoop. Lois had met me at the gate that morning with the digger and the job of putting in a row of postholes on the west side of the garden, near the main gate. “Seven holes doesn’t look like a lot,” I said, catching my breath. “But they’re hard to dig.”

Lois walked over to one. “This isn’t nearly deep enough.” Her firm voice brooked no back talk. “They need to go down at least three feet.” She walked on down the line of the fence, checking out the other holes I’d dug.

“You really got a bad assignment here,” Bridget whispered, keeping one eye on Lois. “Does she have it in for you, or what?”

“Who knows?” I stuffed the bandanna back in my pocket. “Why were you looking for me?”

“Hmm? Oh, Claudia’s birthday. I’ve been meaning to plan something, and now it’s really getting late.”

“When is Claudia’s birthday? I didn’t know she had one. Thought she sprang out of the earth, fully formed, like the other goddesses.”

Bridget laughed. “She has a birthday. Just doesn’t want anyone to make a fuss. But I’m going to. Make a fuss, I mean. After all, it’s not every day a woman turns sixty.” She frowned at me. “Now Lois is going to stick me with some job or other that will take a while, and Emery will be mad. If you had a telephone, this would never have happened.” She broke off her tirade and looked at me closely. “What? What did I say?”

I pulled my face together, not wanting my expression to show so clearly what I was thinking. For years my survival had depended on keeping a poker face, revealing nothing of my inner life on the surface. It wasn’t good to let my guard slip, let myself be so easily read.

“I just get tired of being picked on for not having a phone,” I said, when it became clear that Bridget would wait forever if necessary for me to answer her. “Lois already tore a strip off me for that.”

Bridget frowned. “She didn’t call to remind me.”

Moira squatted down to sift through the dirt I’d dug. She squealed with delight when she found a worm. Watching her, I drew in a few breaths of the crisp fall air, and tried to tell myself that it was all my imagination—the dark miasma that seemed to fill the air, the sense of being whispered about, the looks that evaporated when I met them. Just being treated normally by Bridget went a long way to allay the paranoia Lois had roused in me the previous day, and which seemed to have reached full flower that morning.

All the same, I knew it wasn’t my imagination. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t talking about you.

I willed myself to shake it off. I looked up at the pale wash of sky, at the dark red branches of the Japanese plum trees that marched around the garden on the other side of the perimeter path. The trees shifted gently in the wind, their falling leaves animating them. The bite of approaching winter flowed beneath the surface of the sun-warmed air, like the constant stir of dry leaves beneath the sounds of people working and talking.

I wanted back the sense of well-being I had grown used to over the past few months, the feeling that it was good to be alive, instead of just surprising.

Californians pay attention to karma, to the meddling of fate in their lives. I was just waiting for fate to decide not to pick on me anymore.

Lois came back from her inspection. “Those postholes all need to be at least a foot deeper,” she said, her sharp nose quivering with displeasure. Beneath her shady straw hat, locks of gray hair straggled around her face. She pulled off her sunglasses and let them dangle around her neck by a cord. A single clear drop at the end of her nose succumbed to the tissue she dabbed at it, then slowly collected again. She gave it another swipe while she surveyed Bridget and then stared at Moira.

“Didn’t you get the flyer, Bridget? I asked that parents only bring children old enough to be helpful.”

“Moira’s helping,” Bridget insisted stoutly. “She’s disposing of snails.”

Moira opened her grimy paw and held it up to Lois, her smile beatific. A snail made a slow, desperate break for it across her palm. Before it could escape, she closed the prison door again.

Lois recoiled in horror. “Don’t you know snails carry viruses? I never touch them with my bare skin.”

“Lucky snails,” Bridget muttered, not loud enough for Lois to hear her. Struggling with a smile, I felt better.

“Well, it’s none of my business anyway,” Lois said, pinching her lips together. “I just came over to thank you for coming to the work day, and remind you to sign the petition.”

“What petition?” Bridget looked puzzled.

“Really, Bridget.” Lois pounced on this evidence of flightiness. “I outlined it in the flyer I sent out. The petition about the low-income housing and the library.”

“Well, I’m certainly for those things.”

Lois stiffened.

“Um, Biddy—” I tried to warn Bridget, but she kept talking, certain I was on her side.

“You know how it is around here now, Liz.” She turned to me. “Our neighborhood is getting filled up with Beamers and Mercedeses. The houses cost so much, nobody with children can afford to buy them. Corky’s best friend moved away last year, and we got a two-income couple who are never home. Not much contribution to the neighborhood there.”

Lois’s face slowly turned as purple as the leaves of the plum trees. “The petition is against a plan to put that housing here, right on top of our gardens!”

“Oh.” Bridget blinked. “I didn’t know about that. When did they decide to do that?”

“They haven’t.” I could see that Lois was too full of indignation to talk, so I filled Bridget in. “Evidently the city has the garden down as a possible housing site, or as a place to expand the library. The petition is to ask them to remove the garden from their use inventory and dedicate it as community agricultural, or some such thing.”

“I see.” Bridget nodded. “I do remember hearing something about that before.” She looked around. “It would be a shame to put houses here where we’ve worked so hard.”

“Exactly.” Lois allowed her thin lips to smile. “You can see how important it is that every gardener sign.”

“I know you want me to, Lois,” Bridget said apologetically. “But I have to think about it. I love the garden, and it’s an important resource, but people are more important. Palo Alto needs some affordable housing.”

“You—have to think about it?” Lois’s jaw dropped open.

“Yes. I might not sign.” Bridget picked up Moira, who was trying to insert her small body into the hole I’d dug.

“You—might not sign.” Outrage gathered on Lois’s face. I did the heroic thing and distracted her.

“Are you sure the postholes aren’t deep enough?” I tried to put a bit of whine in my voice, and succeeded all too admirably.

Lois vented her anger on me. “They certainly are not. You’ll have to go down at least another foot in all of them. We want a fence that won’t fall down this time. Do you know that all but one of my pumpkins was stolen last week?” She eyed me as if she suspected that I did know, and had the aforesaid pumpkins stashed in my VW bus right then. “All but one!”

Bridget put herself in the line of fire. She said innocently, “A stronger fence won’t keep out people who want to plunder our plots. They can just climb over it, or come in through the gate."

“We are making it tall. Tall and very, very strong.” Lois glared at her, then at me. “That’s why the fence postholes need to be deep.” She took a breath. “And I’m expecting each of you to sign that petition. This is very important to all of us, and we must present a united front.” She wasn’t finished yet. “As for your garden plot, Bridget, if you don’t clean it up this fall and plant a cover crop—”

“Hello, fellow dirtbags!” The cheery voice came from Rita Dancey, the twenty-something part-time manager of the community gardens. She was her usual perky self, wearing a sports bra and cycling shorts despite the cool weather. She didn’t really have the behind for cycling shorts, and a bulge of too, too solid flesh followed the bottom of the sports bra around her midsection, but I gave her an
E
for effort. Her blond hair bounced on top of her head, confined by a bright purple scrunchie and a soiled white visor advertising Pete’s Wicked Ale. “Are we having fun yet?”

I wasn’t. I didn’t like Lois’s nagging and shoving to get people to execute her agenda, but at least she was usually straightforward about it. Rita was so bouncy and cheerful, she set my teeth on edge. Although she talked a good game, she only showed up at the work days. The rest of the time she was out of there, not even returning telephone messages, according to some grumbling I’d heard. There were those who wondered what she did to earn her tiny salary. Looking at her now, I wondered if she was the person behind Lois, urging her to make people offers they couldn’t refuse.

Lois pinched her lips together. “I was just explaining to Bridget that she needs to clean up her plot if she wants to retain the right to use it.” She glared at Rita. “You are going to start enforcing the rules, aren’t you? As we agreed at the last steering committee meeting? Gardeners who don’t tidy their plots over the winter will forfeit them.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” Rita turned to Bridget. “You’re going to get your plot fixed up, right, Bridget? I wouldn’t want to have to take it away.”

“I’ll do my best,” Bridget said meekly.

“After all, you folks just love to grub in the dirt, don’t you?” The unnerving thing about Rita, I decided, was that her expression didn’t change. She was always smiling, sparkling, upbeat. There was something wrong with her, obviously.

“Whatcha up to here?” Her voice was loud and cheerful. “New fence postholes? Good work.” She nudged the old chicken-wire fence, flat on the ground after being detached from its rusty metal posts. “This stuff is good for a little more time, huh? We recycle, right?”

Lois unpinched her lips to reply to that. “That wire is worse than useless. We’re building a proper fence today.” She glanced over at the pile of wood next to the Dumpster.

Rita followed the glance, and her gaze turned a little steely. “This wasn’t in the list of approved projects, Lois. You know we agreed—”

“I got all the lumber donated.” Lois sounded aggrieved. “And what thanks do I get?”

“You couldn’t possibly have gotten enough lumber donated to go all around the garden.” Rita spoke with cold authority. “Certainly not in that little bitty pile there. That’s barely enough to do a few feet on either side of the gate.”

“It’s enough to start with,” Lois said stubbornly. Bridget and I looked at each other, and I could see we’d had the same thought. The fence postholes I’d dug fronted Lois’s own garden, a few feet away from the gate. The new board fence would primarily benefit her. “And who made you such an expert, anyway?”

“My stepfather is in construction. I know how much wood it takes to build a fence.” Rita looked at the post-holes again. “I’m afraid you’ll have to clear this with the committee, Lois. We haven’t obtained the right permits for a new fence. If you want to repair the old one, go right ahead.”

What she said was reasonable, but the tone of her voice made it clear that scores were being settled. She tossed her ponytail, gave us another of her wide, meaningless smiles, and bounced off.

Lois didn’t say anything else, just pursed her lips angrily and stalked away down the bark-delineated path, stooping to yank up a hapless mallow plant that had the audacity to grow in her way.

“Whew.” Bridget put Moira back down again. “Rita sure steamrolled Lois, didn’t she? And Lois is really wearing her underwear too tight.”

“She’s been this way since her husband died last summer.” I took a swig from the water bottle I’d brought with me. “He kind of mellowed her out, I guess. Anyway, I’ve noticed that ever since then she goes around the garden finding fault with what people are doing. Like what she said about your garden.”

Bridget looked worried. “I know my plot isn’t very tidy, but it’s not so bad, is it?”

“You’ve got Bermuda grass. There’s nothing good about that.” I shouldered the posthole diggers. “At least Rita has saved me from more of this. I’m going to put these over with the rest of the tools.”

Bridget brightened. “And Lois didn’t stick around long enough to give me a horrible job. I guess I’d better go fight the Bermuda grass for a while.” She picked up Moira.

“I’ll help you. We can talk about Claudia’s party.”

“Won’t Lois be mad if you quit your job?”

I glanced over at the Dumpster. Lois had cornered Rita. The way they scowled at each other, it was clear they weren’t having a friendly conversation.

“I think Lois is going to be busy being mad at someone else right now.” I dumped the posthole digger on the pile of tools and followed Bridget down the path.

Chapter 3

Bridget turned over the dirt with her shovel and I pulled out long, white roots of Bermuda grass. There was a lot of it, especially since her plot marched with the boundary fence on one side. Just outside the fence was a lush crop of the noxious weed.

“We really should dig all that up, too.”

“Oh, please.” Bridget pushed her shiny brown hair away from her face. “People are rabid about Bermuda grass around here. If I get it out of the paths and common areas, what difference does it make if it’s in the garden bed? That’s my problem, right?”

“Not according to Lois.” I grabbed another handful of roots, stuffing them into a plastic five-gallon bucket, one of many I scrounged from construction sites. They were useful for everything from weed patrol to hauling compost from the city’s periodic giveaway program.

“She says that when you get a plot, you agree to keep it free from invasive weeds, like sow thistles and Bermuda grass.” I added reluctantly, “She has a point, you know. This stuff has a long reach.” I held up one of the foot-long underground stems; its fleshy segments were delineated by hair-like feeder roots, like tiny beards, at every joint. I was careful to pull the stem out of the ground gently, hoping to get the whole thing, not break it off and leave one of the segments to regrow.