Summer Garden Murder

by Ann Ripley

Genres: Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Garden show host Louise Eldridge finds her career and life in danger when she is accused of murdering a former mental patient who harbored a grudge against her, and as she sets out to dig up the truth, she unearths dark secrets about her neighbors.

Release date: August 1, 2005

Publisher: Kensington

Print pages: 304

Sample

Saturday, August 4

Returning from the bar with a drink in either hand, Louise Eldridge made the mistake of trying to slide through a narrow space between a wall and a cluster of people.

One of them turned and confronted her, his eyes lighting up like a fisherman who’d snagged a trout. “Hey, Louise, you’re lookin’ good,” said her new neighbor, Mike Cunningham. “And I sure like your bling-bling.” He reached out a hand and fondled the gold chain at the neckline of her sleeveless black dress.

Louise brushed his hand away. “Last time I heard, Mike, a flat gold necklace on a black sheath wasn’t ‘bling-bling.’ Now, would you please let me pass?” She took a step away from him, and her rear end bumped into the wall. Trapped.

Cunningham didn’t move. They stood eye to eye, she being a tall woman, he, a not-so-tall man. His eyes clamped on her breasts. Steadying the two drinks, Louise considered throwing them into her captor’s face. It was a strong face, just short of being jowly, but with good features—languid brown eyes and a nicely formed nose, most likely the product of a nose job somewhere in his past, she thought. The blown-dry hair, however, was a tribute to juvenility, which she knew was a good thing in plants, but not in people. But clients of a high-priced Washington lawyer might like that blown-dry look. On his finger, Louise noticed, he wore his own bling-bling, a gold pinkie ring set with an eye-catching diamond.

“Get three or four more necklaces,” Cunningham said enthusiastically, “and wear ’em with this one. Then it’ll be bling-bling for sure,” once again touching the chain.

She gave him a quick stare, then shoved by, only to bump into a knot of people. The liquid bounced in the glasses and half the contents sloshed onto the flagstone floor.

“Damn,” she murmured, and looked down at the puddle she’d created.

Cunningham stood about eight inches away now, both hands up as if to deny responsibility for the spill. “Now, now,” he said, “don’t get mad, Louise. I was just trying to have some fun with you. You take things much too seriously, do you know that?”

Just in time, Louise spied Bill out of the corner of her eye and headed to her husband’s side. She didn’t want Bill to see Cunningham cornering her. The man had attended his first neighborhood party a couple of months ago, shortly after he moved into the house two doors away from the Eldridges. He seemed pleasant at first, but as the party wore on, he became tiresome. First he teased her about her job as host of the PBS show Gardening with Nature, as if there were something inherently humorous about hosting a nationally syndicated TV garden show. Then, to Bill’s annoyance, he began to come on to Louise. By the end of the evening, he’d had the nerve to sweep her into his arms, swing her back and give her a big kiss good-bye. Bill had been about to deck him, but Louise managed to talk him out of it.

She intercepted Bill with a smile and handed him his depleted drink.

“Everything all right?” he asked her, sending a suspicious look at the attorney.

“Oh, sure,” she replied. She needed a moment to calm down. They stood in a space in the center of the living room. Ron and Nora Radebaugh’s home, like others in woodsy Sylvan Valley, was spare and modern, with lots of floor-to-ceiling windows and a flat roof, a sharp contrast to the prim colonials that populated adjacent northern Virginia neighborhoods. The huge windows were bereft of drapes, serviced instead by nearly invisible blinds that almost disappeared when opened. In this room, Ron and Nora had extended minimalism to a fine art. Two modern white couches, an ottoman or two and half a dozen Charles Eames contour chairs were insufficient to seat the twenty or so guests, so some with tired feet, like Louise, who’d been shoveling dirt in the garden all day, were obliged to stand, or if lucky, lean against a wall.

“I do have to admit,” said Louise in a quiet voice, “the man is a piece of work.”

Bill looked down at her and frowned. “What’d Cunningham say to you?”

Louise paused. How to explain the offensive touch without inflaming her husband? He clutched her arm and said, “Don’t tell me he got fresh again. I’m gonna tell him a thing or two.”

“Please don’t, Bill,” she said, and blocked his path. “He didn’t insult me, he just annoyed me. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.” This party was already a bummer, not flowing and filled with goodwill the way a party should. All it needed now was fisticuffs between Bill, a high-level State Department official, and Cunningham, who was with the prestigious firm of Wilson and Sterritt. “Look at him now,” she said lightly. “He’s annoying someone else.”

Cunningham had brought his house guest, Lee Downing, a business associate of some kind from Texas. A silver-haired fellow, Downing was shorter and stockier, but as glossy looking as his companion. Now the two of them lounged against a couch and smiled down at a long-legged young woman perched on the couch’s edge. She looked back at the men with wide eyes, like a doe contemplating flight from imminent danger.

“Oh, brother,” murmured Bill. “The two of them have pounced on Hilde.” Hilde Brunner was new to the neighborhood. She had come from Europe for an apprenticeship, but Louise wasn’t sure from which country. “Mike can’t stand the fact that you won’t flirt back, so he looks for someone who will.” Bill smiled. “Of course, I can’t blame him for coming on to you, or to Hilde... .” He gave the young woman an appreciative glance.

“She’s as lovely as our own daughters,” said Louise, noticing how Hilde’s long hair, brown with rosy highlights, swung gracefully as she turned her head to and fro. “How old do you suppose she is, twenty? Twenty-two? And yet I don’t see anyone besides Mike and his friend acting like horny teenaged boys. Too bad they don’t have wives to keep them in line.”

While his silver-haired companion focused his attention elsewhere, Cunningham had slid down onto the couch next to Hilde. Louise sympathized, for she knew Cunningham—he wanted to sweep every woman he met off her feet. She could hear Hilde telling Mike how she had come to Sylvan Valley to work as an apprentice to the area’s foremost potter, Sarah Swanson. That seemed a safe-enough subject; Louise turned her attention away.

Bill was surveying the crowd. He said, “Parties are supposed to be happy occasions. But I don’t see many here who look like they’re in a celebrating mood.”

“Except them.” She nodded at the cheerful group she and Bill had been talking to earlier: Frank and Sandy Stern and their next-door neighbors, Roger and Laurie Kendrick. The three couples had joked about how their kids’ college tuitions were impoverishing them. Louise had shared details of her kitchen renovation, joking that the addition of new granite and tumbled marble might make her a better cook. They challenged her to invite them over for a meal so they could find out for themselves.

“To become a better cook,” Sandy Stern had dryly replied, with a shake of her red hair, “would require you to use a cookbook other than that one entitled Twenty-Minute Dinners. I intend to give you one.” They’d all laughed, even Louise, who knew she was a mediocre cook. She’d confided to the group that the old-world look of the marble tiles had inspired her to buy French accessories for the room: a butter dish inscribed with “Beurre,” some dishtowels with the Grand Hotel logo and a heavy milk pitcher with the word “Paris” stenciled on it.

“You’re like an American tourist gone overboard, aren’t you?” teased Roger Kendrick, peering at her over his eyeglasses. An internationally traveled news correspondent for the Washington Post, the scholarly Roger would never deign to buy foreign trinkets, she was sure.

“Don’t laugh,” Louise had warned him, “or I won’t come through with that dinner.”

As Louise stood companionably with her husband, her gaze passed over the room and settled on a man whose long, oval face was set in a morose pout. “Bill, look at Richard Mougey. What on earth is wrong with him?” Richard, like Bill, worked in the State Department, though until recently this was a cover for his actual job as a CIA operative. Richard languished on a second couch. His petite blond wife, Mary, her wide-skirted dress puffed out attractively beside her, cuddled next to him and held his hand.

“I know what’s wrong,” said Bill. “Richard’s suffering buyer’s remorse.”

“What did he buy?”

“He decided to take early retirement; don’t ask me why.”

“Mary doesn’t look happy, either,” said Louise, “and Mary is always happy.”

“She’s still working at her job in Washington,” said Bill. “I suppose her success is hard on Richard’s ego, now that he’s retired.”

“What a shame. I always thought a retiring husband should be a moment of great celebration.” She put an arm around Bill so that no one else could hear what she said. “I know what’s wrong with Nora,” she said, tilting her head toward their hostess. With her dark hair, flowing mauve-colored caftan and regal manner, Nora Radebaugh was the most striking woman in the room.

Bill chuckled. “ ‘What’s wrong with Nora?’ We’ve had to worry about that from the day we met her and Ron. You can sure tell he’s a guy with something heavy on his mind.” The handsome host was a very tall, elegant man with a shock of graying hair. He carried out his hostly duties with the air of a dignified servant, not even looking at his wife as he moved about the room. Nor did Nora acknowledge he was there. “Don’t tell me it’s that same old problem.”

“ ’Fraid so. Ron’s refused to go to another of those awareness seminars in California. I thought the first one helped, but now Nora ... Oh, well, maybe someday she’ll settle down.”

Bill laughed. “Don’t count on it. Poets like Nora are that way. She’ll probably still be writing love poetry when she’s ninety, if she doesn’t throw herself from a bridge onto a frozen river.”

“Bill, that is so unkind, so ...”

“I know—loathsome. Forgive me. It was a joke. I don’t really want or expect her to follow in the shoes of John Berryman.”

“Did John Berryman really—”

“Yep, and it must have been a damned hard landing.”

She winced.

“Aw, sorry, Louise, no more jokes. Anyway, Nora will recover from whatever’s ailing her. She always does.”

Their hostess was crossing the living room to respond to the door chimes. The late guests were the Eldridges’ next-door neighbor, Sam Rosen, with whom Louise had spent the entire Saturday afternoon, and his friend Greg Archer.

Sam, a short, dark-haired, friendly-faced man, gave Nora a big hug. Greg, who knew her less well, settled for a handshake. Sam was a congressional aide who had been Louise’s gardening buddy for years. Today, they’d labored side by side, double-digging a vegetable garden in a crevice of land that lay on the border between their woodsy yards. Her husband jokingly called the two of them “Mutt and Jeff” when the tall Louise and the shorter Sam toiled together in the soil. Over the years, they had bought gardening equipment together and shared its use. An electric golf cart dubbed the “cartita” and a rototiller were the latest purchases.

Sam’s life changed three months ago when Greg moved in with him. Archer was a slim, attractive man with high cheekbones and stylish blond hair, quite a contrast to Sam. This newcomer in Sam’s life was not interested in gardens, but preferred collecting antique glass. In a quick flash of compatibility with Louise when they first met, he’d given her an erudite lecture on his collection and she’d shown him the small assemblage that she and Bill had in a wall cabinet in their dining room. But once he’d discovered she and Sam were a devoted gardening duo, Greg had kept his distance from Louise.

Instead of immediately joining the party circuit, the newcomers hovered near the front door, as if they couldn’t quite decide whether or not they would stay. They were quietly arguing. “Oh boy,” said Bill, observing the pair, “another disgruntled couple. This party has so many that I fear the situation’s reaching criticality.” He turned to Louise. “I hope you didn’t make trouble between Sam and Greg.”

“Of course not,” she said. Then she reflected that she and Sam had spent the past two Saturdays together gardening. “I didn’t mean to make trouble.”

He took her arm and gave her a tug. “Let’s go back to the bar. I need another drink if they’re not serving dinner yet.” As they approached the bar, however, they ran into two more neighbors with gloomy expressions. “Uh-oh,” Bill told Louise, “more couples on the rocks. What the heck’s going on around here?”

Mort and Sarah Swanson were another Mutt and Jeff pair. He was probably six-foot-six, wide-shouldered and slim, with horn-rimmed glasses and a completely bald head, features that made him look like a wise investment banker or perhaps a college professor. His wife was short and ample, but obviously muscular from years of throwing pots on a wheel. She had gray hair that fell in wisps of curls about her face and was caught in a fat braid down her back. At the moment, her gray eyes seemed to be holding back tears. Mort, mouth turned down at the corners, was pouring himself a glass of orange juice. This was strange behavior for Mort, thought Louise. He normally did not settle for less than a good belt of straight whiskey.

What was going on around here? Louise wondered. The mood of these close friends seemed to reflect the brooding, restless nature of the country at large. Instinctively, she reached out and gave her potter friend a hug, and a smile broke out on Sarah’s face. She pulled Louise away a step or two, seeming to read her mind. “Forgive us if Mort and I are party poopers,” Sarah said, “but we’re going through a hard time just now. We’ve just gotten Mort’s tests back. The liver, you know. It doesn’t look good.”

Liver. Pancreas. Louise shuddered to hear of those particular health problems. Torn rotator cuffs, which so many people seemed to suffer, were something one could handle, but liver problems sounded fatal. She felt irrationally obliged to convince Sarah that the worst would not come to be. “I’m so sorry, but I’m sure they will be able to do something. They must be able to do something. He’s basically a very strong man. Isn’t he accustomed to running three or four miles a day?”

Sarah laughed, desperately. “Yes, and I hope that improves his prospects. They’re doing more tests. We’re hoping for a magic reprieve, for someone to say, ‘It’s all a mistake and he’s fine.’ ”

“You’re so generous, taking on an apprentice at a time like this,” she said, nodding at Hilde. “Maybe it would it be easier if the young woman stayed at our house for a while.”

“Thank you, but no. Hilde is turning out to be wonderful. Even though she’s quite tall, Mort calls her his ‘little one.’ Isn’t that sweet? She’s one of the stalwart Swiss, you know: quite learned, and a young activist, something like your lovely daughter Martha. She took a bachelor’s degree in European cultural and political history, one of those young people interested in really understanding the Holocaust. And frankly, Louise, it’s better to have another person around. It takes my mind off Mort’s health.”

“It shows you how well-known your work has become, that you’re being sent apprentices from abroad.”

“I guess so,” said Sarah, glancing over to the couch on which Mike Cunningham and Hilde Brunner now sat side by side. “She’s a little naive, I fear. I hope the attentions of the dashing Mr. Cunningham are not too much for her to handle. She’s met him before, but he’s coming on mighty strong tonight. I suppose no one would take a man like him seriously.”

They noted the movement of black-uniformed servers laying food out in the dining room. Sarah said, “Ah, dinner at last. After we eat, I’ll whisk Hilde safely home with us. Do come and sit with us.”

Together with the Swansons, Louise and Bill edged toward the dining room, murmuring with pleasure when they saw the elegant repast that Nora, who was a real cook, had prepared. Guests were to serve themselves and sit on the patio.

Nora, looking as mysterious as the mythical goddess Circe, intercepted them. “There’s a slight delay in serving dinner.” She looked around self-consciously, then turned to them and pleaded, “And please, dear friends, this party needs your vital presence. Everyone is so somber. I’ll admit that Ron and I are not at our best tonight. But don’t leave early, Sarah, I implore you. I heard you saying that you would. I’ll be heartbroken if you do.” She squeezed Sarah’s arm and smiled. “I’m sure we’ll all feel more jolly once we’ve eaten.” Then she swirled away as a worried server beckoned to her. With an imperious tilt of her head, Nora relayed a message, which the server hurriedly passed on to her dutiful husband.

The delay apparently was due to a wine shortage. Ron hurried away to get more from their wine closet.

Over the expectant chatter of a crowd about to sit down to a good meal, they barely heard the front door chimes. Nora went to answer it again. Louise could define an intense baritone voice and an insistent high one. The owners of the voices appeared to be jostling themselves right past the amazed hostess.

Louise pulled in a rasping, noisy gasp of air and fell back a step. Standing in the living room archway was a tall, muscular man with graying blond hair, piercing eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses and a mirthless smile on his face. Next to him stood a woman with sharp features and a blond pageboy.

“Hello, folks. Remember me?” said Peter Hoffman. “I’m back.”

Louise staggered and almost fell against Bill as a wave of faintness overcame her. She gazed at the man in the doorway. He was a brutal murderer, a person she had never expected to meet again. Peter Hoffman might never have been caught had Louise not discovered his grisly crime. And now he was, free as a bird, back into her life like a very bad dream.

She could not stop trembling. Bill took a firm grasp on her elbow and whispered consolingly in her ear, as if soothing a mental patient. “Get a grip, honey. We knew the sonofabitch was leaving that hospital.”

“But to think he’d have the nerve to show up here,” she said. Hoffman, through the efforts of a pricey legal team headed by Mike Cunningham, had gotten off with an insanity plea four years ago. Instead of the harsh realities of the Lorton maximum-security prison near Washington, D.C., he vacationed at the taxpayers’ expense at a mental hospital in the Blue Ridge mountains in southern Virginia.

When the sentence was handed down, Louise had been in her own home, having avoided the agony of sitting out both the long trial and the verdict in the Alexandria courtroom. She’d cried out in disbelief when she heard that he’d been declared insane at the time of the murder. After the trial was done, she had decided that to live a sane life herself she would block thoughts of Peter Hoffman from her mind.

And she’d been fairly successful. Even the news of his imminent release from Western State Hospital had only floated vaguely in the back of her mind, like a dark storm cloud that wouldn’t come too near. She never believed she would actually see Peter Hoffman again, especially in her own backyard.

Louise and Bill, like the rest of the guests at the party, stood speechless, not knowing what to do. That is, until the feckless Mike Cunningham stepped forward. He sauntered up to Hoffman and gave him a big hug. “Peter! So good to see you.” Cunningham drew his male companion up to Peter and said, “And here’s your friend Lee Downing.”

Hoffman boomed, “So good to see you, Lee,” and gave him a businesslike handshake. Then the handsome Cunningham leaned down to embrace the blonde in the expensive cotton knit suit who stood quietly at Peter Hoffman’s side—Peter’s wife, Phyllis Hoffman. Louise hadn’t seen her since the trial, when Phyllis had sat in a front row and supported her husband. She’d gained either weight or muscle. Mike Cunningham greeted Phyllis with a “Hi, sweetie.”

Cunningham turned and stretched out his arms to the crowd, which was frozen in place like a tableau of wax figures. “Folks,” he said, “we all have to remember Peter has served his term, paid his debt and been declared ready to resume his place in society.”

“Oh, no,” grumbled Sarah Swanson, “we don’t need a killer in our midst.”

“Now, now, Sarah,” Cunningham said in a rebuking tone. As if he’d just been elevated to the job of party host, he took Peter’s arm and escorted him into the midst of the group. A few people including Sarah’s husband, Mort, and Roger Kendrick, gave Hoffman a restrained greeting. He responded with a big hug for Mort and an effusive handshake for the reporter. The others remained silent and still.

Louise’s thoughts reeled back to that moment when she’d found parts of the body of Kristina Weeren, the woman Hoffman had murdered, in the bags of leaves she’d gathered from neighbors to mulch her yard. Paid his debt? How could a man who’d massacred someone be free to enter normal society after only four years?

Then she heard Nora’s quiet voice. She stood in the living room archway, her face pale with shock. “Peter. Mike. Wait. You must go no further until you talk to Ron. Please honor my wishes.”

Hoffman paid Nora no attention, but Mike Cunningham paused, looking ambivalent, probably wondering whether this party-crashing was a good idea. After all, Mike now lived in this neighborhood, in the intimacy of the Dogwood Court cul-de-sac. Would he risk all cachet with his neighbors?

Mike’s lawyer’s dilemma didn’t appear to bother Peter Hoffman an iota, for his attention was elsewhere. His glance darted first to Louise and then to the white sofa.

As Hoffman passed by Louise and Bill, he stopped and stared straight at Louise. Bending his head, he murmured, “You’re dismayed to see me, my dear?”

She nodded agreement and looked up at him. “I can’t believe you have the nerve.”

“It’s been a long time, Louise. Maybe we could talk things over and come to a rapprochement. After all, I have done my penance. You might find me a changed person.” Then, in a carrying voice, he c. . .