Death of a Political Plant (26 page)
Read Death of a Political Plant Online
Authors: Ann Ripley
Tags: #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction
“Not much,” replied Lannie. “I’d advise you to quit snooping on Melissa. Melissa is well cared for. She doesn’t need you.” The woman’s amber eyes became crowded with tears, that soon were falling onto the breast of her expensive white suit. “She has her mother. Her mother loves her, can’t you understand?”
Quietly, Louise said, “I know you do. I’m sorry to be
snooping.” But Lannie turned without a further word, walking despondently back down the road to her house.
The officer, completely oblivious to the exchange, climbed officiously out of his patrol car and made his way back to her. He thrust the ticket at her. She winced when she saw the price of her transgressions.
“And what’s your name, Officer?” She gave him her sweetest smile. “Oh, never mind, I can see it there on your badge. Officer Strader.” She stuck her hand out so he was forced to shake it. “Officer Strader, you have a nice day.”
Kill the bastard with kindness.
Momentarily flustered, he stuttered, “Uh, uh, you, too, ma’am.” But in a moment he had regained his supreme indifference and swaggered back to the patrol car.
From underneath the sun visor where she had tucked it, Louise hurriedly grabbed her notepad with Melissa’s number; she tapped it in on her cell phone.
“Hello.”
“Melissa, your mother’s about to walk in your front door, and she’s upset because she saw me here. I am still parked down the street. A policeman stopped me and gave me a ticket.”
“You didn’t tell her I gave you Dad’s disk, did you?”
“No, of course not. She’s suspicious that I’m trying to make contact with you. What else would I be doing in this neighborhood? Will you be all right? Can you pull this off?”
“Yes, I’m a pretty good actress. I’ve been pretending for months when I snuck out to see Dad. I can pretend again.”
“If I were you, I would deny ever having met me. Remember, you don’t know much about me or what I look like. You can say your father mentioned me once or twice. I’m hoping
she’ll think I was just investigating the neighborhood out of curiosity about where you lived.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Eldridge. I can hear her coming in, so I’d better go. And remember, I’ll see you again. We have a reason to meet now.”
“A reason?”
“The key.”
A
NNUALS GIVE US WHAT FEW PE
rennials do: a whole season full of faultless color. They thread through our gardens like the colors in a patchwork quilt, with some quilts being bright with strong colors, and others graced with soft pastels. They fill in gaps and stabilize the garden picture with their constancy and freshness.
There is no end to the use of the annual, whose popularity swept over Europe when introduced there in the 1800s. Americans, always copiers of the British in horticultural matters, also took “bedding plants” to their hearts. This is still
the case, as we see millions of plants and annual seed packets offered for sale each year. Fortunately, we can reach beyond the traditional choices of marigold, moss rose, impatiens, red salvia, and petunia to bring new forms and colors to our gardens.
If you haven’t grown annual poppies, you should, for they add a true innocence to the garden, reminding us of The Wizard of Oz and of classical storybook pictures of children standing in fields. Poppies grow profusely in some climates, such as California, but will perform in almost any. One attraction is the gray leaves sported by many varieties. Maintain your innocence when the police come, but grow the handsome opium poppy; seed is available from English and European catalogs, or can be scraped off your morning bagel. It has blossoms as big as peonies, and imposing floppy leaves. Petite single-poppy varieties in jewel colors make the front of the garden border literally seem to dance: one choice is appropriately called “Ballerina.”
Annuals and perennials mix well. The feathery pink-and-gold annual squirrel-tail grass combines beautifully with pale pink perennial phlox or lavender catmint. And the shapely flowers of Diascia, rosy pink with yellow throats, are spectacular
when combined with the perennial bronze-tasseled fountain grass, Pennisetum setaceum “Rubrum.”
Perennial herbs like lavender, rosemary, horseradish, rue, or the splendid, shrubby
Calamintha
nepeta add a special refinement to annuals, and are like the arbiters between them and the other perennials.
When we experiment with annuals, we discover some that become our favorites, such as a salvia with special form and color.
Salvia greggii
is not hardy beyond zone seven, but is wonderful for a season, with a small shrubby shape and a cloud of coral or red blooms. It is striking when paired with another underused and striking annual that has coral, purple, or yellow blossoms resembling the alstroemeria; it is called painted tongue (
Salpiglossis sinuata
).
There can be fun as well as beauty in growing annuals. Children will be delighted if you plant sunflowers on the perimeter of a square or rectangular patch of ground. What will result is a sunflower playhouse with towering walls topped with saucer-sized yellow flowers. Kids can use it even as growth starts, and watch the sides ascend to twelve or more feet. To add a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk touch, grow pole beans outside the sunflower
house. The big flowers will support their upward progress, and the kids can have the job of keeping the mature beans picked and the giant away.
The annual castor bean plant makes another showy plant, with its large palmately lobed reddish leaves and flowers in drooping panicles. All of its parts are poisonous, however, but this is not the only toxic plant about which children should be warned: Children should not eat the garden. There is a smaller castor bean variety, “Carmencita”? that fits better in the border and profits from the nearby presence of a lacy gray artemisia. Another taller annual plant is Nicotiana sylvestris. It stands in the back of the border, with its fragrant and slightly droopy white blossoms, like a graceful maiden aunt at a wedding reception.
Treat most tulips as annuals and you will enjoy them more and not agonize over their disappearance next spring. Try different kinds—small species tulips, which are more reliable; compact middle-sized varieties; and the tall French tulips that soar so prettily above the iris and columbine. Since you will lose a portion of the bigger ones, especially, plant more bulbs of the same type in that patch. To save your garden from the sorry picture
of dying bulb foliage, always plant bulbs in the midst of ground cover.
Snapdragons are one of the clever annuals that seed themselves or overwinter, even in tough climates. Extraordinary colors emerge from some of these seeded offspring. They are delightful coupled with the gray-leaved, salmon- or white-flowered perennial,
Centranthus
—which gets the ultimate compliment that it blooms as long and robustly as an annual.
Some annuals have an intricate delicacy that invites close-up viewing. Love-in-a-mist (
Nigella damascena
) has delicate flowers in blue, pink, or white, held in feathery bracts. It self-seeds, is easy to grow, and improves the view of leggy perennials like lilies, which are up there in the air with their knobby knees showing. The handsome, horned seedpods alone make it worthwhile to grow. Clarkia is quite another matter, and you may find it only at a florist’s, for this beauty, with its four-clawed petals in shades of lavender-red, red, salmon, and white, flourishes mainly in the state of Washington, which some believe has a distinct advantage over most of the other growing areas in the U.S. One northwest gardener put a red variety at the top of an and stony bank covered with blue-gray woolly thyme and purple-shaded thyme.
A master combination of annuals that is simplicity itself includes blue-flowered borage, chartreuse dill, and airy fennel, mixed in with the arching stems of the cosmos in white or pale pink. The nice thing about it is that three out of the four—all except the cosmos—are good to eat. This includes the cobalt blue flowers of the borage. Candy them or eat them fresh.
I
T WAS PAST FIVE WHEN
L
OUISE
reached home. Her neighborhood had grown busier since she left it. A Channel Eight television truck, looking somehow sinister, was slowly rolling out of the cul-de-sac. Children from the Sylvan Valley neighborhood, released from day camp or tennis camp or other life-enriching activities, were on the loose, walking around and gawking at the Mougey house, and because they were small and thought of
themselves as invisible, were seriously considering sneaking under that yellow plastic police tape and taking a good peek at the pond where a man was found with his head bashed in.
As she got out of the car, she stared at that yellow tape and realized she herself was definitely going to breach it later on. For one thing, there was no patrolman around, and she had to feed those fish. Going into her home, she carefully put the disk that Melissa had given her into a disk container. If she was going to explore at the murder site, she had to do it now while it was still light, even though there was danger of being caught.
She thought of Melissa and hoped she hadn’t put her in jeopardy by getting caught by her mother. The girl now had expectations of Louise, high hopes that she would find whoever had murdered her father.
Louise smiled when she pictured Melissa in her mother’s sunglasses, fancying that they and a Hollywood walk would change her appearance. A change in appearance was what Louise needed right now. She opened her closet and found what she wanted, a running outfit in faded olive drab; it was heavy, but it was camouflage. It would match the woods nicely, she reflected, as she pulled on her oldest tennis shoes, the ones that were grayed with age. She shoved her long hair back and tied it with a light brown cotton scarf. Then she prepared the koi’s afternoon worm dinner, noticing she was hardened now to killing and mincing earthworms.
Feeling a little like a member of the Vietcong, she crouched down and zigzagged her way across the backyards of the Kendricks, the VandeVens, and the Radebaughs. She kept well into the tree cover to avoid anyone seeing her from the street, and
was on a constant lookout for child stragglers, little Christopher Robins and the like, looking for mushrooms and toads. Soon she was in the thicket of trees separating Nora and Ron Radebaugh’s house from Mary and Richard Mougey’s. She slid her way through the young trees and bushes, keeping a close eye out, for the worst thing that could happen to her was that a policeman had been stationed here and would catch her snooping around.
Holding low to the ground, she came in by way of the bronze prancing deer statue, carefully slipped across to the statue of the dancing child, and then crept the rest of the way on all fours down the ornamental-grass-lined path to the fishpond. The koi rushed to greet her and receive their afternoon repast. “Hi, guys,” she said, and tossed in the worms.
The state of the koi, she realized, was just as important to her right now as the state of the nation was to a president. She didn’t want to lose her precious friendship with Mary Mougey because she had flubbed it with the fish. Once they had consumed their dinner, they seemed to go into low gear, drifting lazily around the rectangular pool. They were dazzlingly bright, dappled, and beautiful. Were they lazy, sick, or just full? She was so unfamiliar with fish that she didn’t know what this level of activity represented. If she equated it to her exercise class, certainly low aerobics. A few days ago, when she made her first reconnaissance as fish caretaker, she was certain they had been swimming in a more sprightly fashion about the pool.
Something was wrong with the fish.
She looked up from her kneeling position, right into the chest of Oscar, the bronze whooping crane. She had forgotten him for an instant. There were noises from the street, and though she was at the back of the house and couldn’t see
people approaching, she could spy another news vehicle making the wide circle of Dogwood Court. She had better hurry. Intrepid TV reporters might decide to breach the yellow plastic strip barrier.