Death of a Political Plant (9 page)

Louise sank down on the grassy spot next to Nora. As usual, her perceptive poet neighbor had gotten right to the nub of things. “I’ve had a lifetime of experience with house-guests, Nora. It’s just something you have to put up with if you’re a foreign service officer’s wife.”

“Like bearing the stigmata, perhaps?” Again, those smile lines near Nora’s mouth had deepened.

“Kind of,” Louise agreed good-heartedly. “Now, London, that was positively the worst. Let me tell you about London.” Then she reeled off what she could remember of those two hectic years living on North Row in Mayfair in an apartment larger than the Eldridges required. The youthful friends of friends of theirs, dirty, tired, and hungry, with backpacks strapped on their bodies, ringing the doorbell at midnight after having made their way from the continent or
Scotland. American politicians. Friends and former friends and relatives who hadn’t been heard from in years.

“You mean you let them all in?” Nora’s dark eyebrows went up in astonishment. “Didn’t they even phone to warn you they were coming? Why didn’t you just tell them to go elsewhere?”

Louise airily waved a hand. “Oh, you don’t do that in the foreign service. In the first place, you’re getting free lodging. Anyway, that was our arrangement. Since the American taxpayer is footing your housing costs, you can’t turn away any American from the door. Of course, we had foreigners, too.”

“I can believe anything.”

Louise remembered well some of the European figures, contacts of Bill in his undercover activities, some undoubtedly ex-criminals and enemies of one state or another, dropping in and holing up for a few days in the back bedroom. Like jay was doing right now. “These were old friends or associates of Bill’s, some of them people making a change to London, who didn’t want to move into one of those little efficiency apartments they give to singles.”

Nora was smiling now. “And I suppose you cooked for them all. Where did you shop, the food halls of Harrods?”

“That was hard,” Louise admitted, her arms aching even as she remembered the bulging plastic carryalls she would manage in either hand after visiting Selfridge’s or Marks & Spencer. “No American woman has the right arm and hand muscles to survive it,” she added wryly. “Actually, only British women, and they train for years to do it. I finally broke down and hailed taxis.”

“It must have been nice to live in London.”

“Quite wonderful, really, but dangerous, because of the IRA bombs.” She decided not to tell Nora that Bill had nearly
been killed by a bomb planted under a car on his route to work. It was too unpleasant and personal a memory. “We had an enforced busy social life, of course, but the girls flourished. They went to British schools. I took a history class, and volunteered with the other wives to help needy children.”

“And entertained houseguests.”

“Yes.” They lapsed into silence.

Finally, Nora said, “You’ve come so far with your career. You could take another big step: Complete your emancipation from your old life by learning how to say ‘no’ to prospective houseguests.”

Louise laughed. “I don’t know, Nora. That old life isn’t even over, you know. But as for turning away unwanted visitors, I agree. I have to be more firm.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for your Jay McCormick, but of course I can’t see much because of the woods. Is he a friend of yours, or friend of Bill’s?”

“An old college chum of mine.” A chum who had disappointed her, for after that first couple of sentiment-soaked hours in Joe’s Raw Bar, they had exchanged no more private reminiscences, and at this rate, with him hopelessly distracted with writing and daughter Melissa, they never would. “He doesn’t need attention. He very much wants to be left alone. I just didn’t want you to think anyone had broken into Mary’s house.”

Nora stood up, voluptuous even in her grimy overalls. Her face had become solemn, almost drawn. “I hope you will be surrounded with people. Do be careful, won’t you?”

There was something unsettling in the woman’s eyes. “Nora, you’re not having one of your premonitions of danger?”

Nora slowly nodded her head. “I’m afraid I am. What its
focus is, I’m not sure. I only beg you to tell me that you’ll take care.”

Louise promised she would, and bid her good-bye. Her neighbor, with her mysterious powers of extrasensory perception, had warned her once before, and she had ignored that warning.

She wouldn’t do that this time, she told herself.

She hurried back across the street; she had little time to finish some last-minute work in the garden. Popping in a few mature nicotiana plants was her very last project before the perennial people arrived. Later, she would have the unpleasant task of gently shoving Jay McCormick out of her house into his new quarters across the street. At the moment, however, he and his car were gone, and she had a little reprieve.

First, she needed to put out the trash containers for the weekly pickup this afternoon. Bill’s job, normally. The holly-shrouded garbage area concealed two big cans residing on a rolling cart. She took the cart by the handle and gave it a good tug, and then screamed at what she uncovered.

Crouching behind the cans was a man.

“Oh, God!” she cried, and jumped back.

He rose slowly from a crouch, but kept his knees bent and held his hands out to either side, like a karate expert moving into position for an attack.

“What are you doing in my yard?” she snapped. “Are you snooping in our trash?”

Stocky, with black hair and olive skin, the man wore dark glasses, a dark turtleneck, and a sports jacket. Trendy for New York, maybe, but out of place in Sylvan Valley. And what she noticed next made her mouth fall agape: the large bulge in one side of his jacket. Had it not seemed ridiculous in the bright light of a day in the northern Virginia suburbs, she would have
sworn he was carrying a pistol. In fact, she realized he was, and her nerves clanged to attention. Adrenaline rushed through her body, and she tightened her grip on the trash cart.

“Lady,” he said in an oily tone, “you won’t believe this, but I’m in real estate.”

There was more than a touch of hysteria in her frightened laugh. “You’re right, it’s hard to believe you,” she said, and eased the trash cart back a little, to familiarize herself with its weight, perhaps to use it as a shield in case he pulled the gun.

As if her worst fears were being realized, his right hand had moved over toward the bulge in the jacket. Not in her wildest dreams could she imagine anyone wanting to kill her, at least not lately. “Why don’t you just get out of here,” she demanded shakily.

He was inching toward her, smiling, still with his hand in a ready position. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “Why don’t we call it a draw?”

“Why don’t we not!” she shouted, and rammed the cart right at him, and with one motion upended it. The tops flew off the two cans; a stream of papers, plastic peanuts, catalogues, and plump garbage bags cascaded over him. She didn’t wait to see more, but heard him cry out in shock as she raced around the addition and into the house. With clumsy fingers she turned the lock and stood inside the door, trembling. All was quiet in the world outside.

It only took her a moment to realize she had blown it. She should have left him alone. But instead she had to use force. Now, she was too embarrassed to call 911. What if he was what he said he was: a realtor, who was snooping around where he didn’t belong?

She had to find out. Quickly she reopened the door and went outside. Hearing an engine being started, she ran down
the front path in time to see a low black car turning out of the cul-de-sac. He was gone as mysteriously as he had arrived.

Then she recalled the big gray foreign car wheeling around Dogwood Court on the day before. It had not seemed remarkable at the time, since it came and left so quickly. What the cars had in common, she now remembered, was that both had tinted windows so the driver could barely be seen. Jay McCormick had to be the reason: Someone was bent on tracking him down, and at least had found the house where he lived.

Perhaps it was just as well he was moving across the street.

Out of curiosity, she followed the path next to the addition that the stranger must have used to flee her yard. She stood there, arms akimbo, staring at the ruin. He had plowed through her finest woods garden, bruising prized hostas and knocking over tall golden spires of ligularia, thalictrum, and white anemone. Worse yet, his path took him straight through her front garden, where he had trampled her toad lilies, which were just coming into magnificent spotted bloom!

Her cousin’s child, Sally, had been equally bumbling, but not nearly as big.

Then she turned and went into the house, swallowed her pride, and called 911. She would feel foolish if the police discovered the man was a realtor. But as far as she knew, realtors didn’t carry weapons. After all, that was no way to sell a house.

T
ESSIE
S
TRAHAN
W
OULDN’T TAKE
no for an answer. When she phoned, Louise did not come right out and say, “I’m afraid you can’t stay at my house” an action Nora would have applauded. Instead, she merely pointed out to this past president of the Perennial Plant Society that it would be more convenient for her and her two colleagues to stay at the Hilton in Washington, where their convention was being held.

“But Louise, we’re writing that big article about you,” said Tessie, in a voice that sounded like a nail gun. “That’s going to take sitting down together. Besides, it will be restful to get away from those two hundred growers and designers at the convention for a couple of nights. We won’t be any trouble. You don’t know us. We’re the kind who pitch in and help a body. And we all want to see your garden. We bet it’s wonderful.”

Garden: Louise quaked inwardly. These rising expectations scared her. The gardens had been dandied up, true, but were still like patched-up patients who had been in very bad car accidents. Oh, little Sally, she thought, how you have marked the world. And now the clumsy stranger had diminished yet another one of her prize beds; it was yet to be seen whether the flower stalks were broken or merely bent.

“Then if you’re sure,” said Louise resignedly, “I’ll expect you later this afternoon—and in time for dinner, of course.”

“With setting our exhibits up in the convention hall, we may not get there until right around six,” said Tessie. “Don’t worry about dinner.”

“Oh, but I already have it planned.”

“Barbara McNeil and Donna Moore are the others, you remember, and Barbara is a gourmet cook: She’s bringing some special fixings for the meal. You’ll no doubt have a few basics. She has morel mushrooms, special herbs, pasta from Pennsylvania, things like that.”

Louise thought of her carefully prepared fast-fix meal. “Oh, well, that will be fun,” she said, wandering if it would be at all. “See you later. It will be wonderful to get better acquainted.”

She had the vegetables prepped by the time she heard the puttering of the motor of Jay’s old car, as it gave a last little
flutter of rebellion after the motor was turned off. When he walked in the kitchen, she could see the man was in worse shape than when he had arrived a week ago: his color poor, his clothes scruffier, and lines of worry carving his face. He smiled nonetheless, that familiar, crooked smile that used to get right inside her.

“So you’re really kicking me out.”

“Those women are definitely coming. I’ll help you move your things across the street.”

“No way, Louise. I don’t want to cause you more trouble. I don’t have that much to move.”

She busied herself putting the extra vegetables back into their plastic bags. “I’m sorry we haven’t had more chance to talk since you’ve been here, Jay.”

He watched her work with a stare like a sleepwalker, and she could tell that even now his mind wasn’t here—it was far away. “You have to forgive me for being rude. It’s just that I’ve been so nervous about Melissa and whether she’ll still be there when it’s time for me to pick her up.”

“This is the eve of departure for the two of you, then.”

“Friday’s the big day.” He leaned back, crossed his arms on his chest, and looked as if he might actually relax and share some of his thoughts with her. “Three days is all I’ll need to finish my work. I have it all scheduled with Lannie, who of course doesn’t know I’m already here; she thinks I’m flying in from California. I pick up a new car Friday morning, then swing over and get Melissa and her things, and we start our road trip across the country back to Sacramento.” He swayed a little, as if overwhelmed with fatigue.

In two strides she had reached him and steadied him from falling. “Good heavens, Jay, you’re dead tired, I can tell. Why don’t you sit down; I’ll fix you some dinner.”

“No, no” He pulled away from her and walked slowly into the dining room and took hold of the back of a Hitchcock chair for support. “All right, that’s a good idea: I’ll eat something, but not dinner. Just coffee and a roll, if you have one.” He lowered himself shakily into the chair. “You’re right, Louise, I’m worn out. I feel like I’m about a hundred years old, but I’ll go to your friend’s house and hit the sack tonight and feel great tomorrow.”