Warped Tales: The Gardener – Part 6

Warped Tales – be warned. As a child I read piles of books filled with short stories – the complete works of Poe, stories from the Twilight Zone, collections from Hitchcock, etc. As an adult, thrillers rule. This is that kind of story, in six parts.

The medics arrived first and, following Anne’s instructions to avoid unnecessary contamination of the scene, determined that she was indeed right. John Davenport was dead. They’d barely returned to the kitchen when the police arrived.

Officer Hendricks reminded Anne of her son when he left for boot camp – head shaved nearly bald, posture erect, proud yet nervous. Detective Grant, on the other hand, was more like her husband. He was gruff, numbed to the horrors of the job even in this small mountain community.

When they moved to the bedroom, she followed, but positioned herself in the hallway so she would not have to see John’s face again.

“Did you recognize the gun, Ma’am?” Officer Hendricks asked from the doorway.

“Yes. It’s his. He kept it loaded, on the bedside table,” she said.

“A Colt?” questioned Grant.

“He got it when we moved here. Liked the way it looks. His Glock is in a drawer in the kitchen. He was a detective with Schenectady PD. He’s had a hard time adjusting to retirement.”

“The gun is in his hand,” Hendricks said softly.

“Until the coroner gives us his findings, we can’t make assumptions,” said Grant.

“Hendricks, go call in and let them know we need a lab team out here. We may want to work with DPS.”

Hendricks passed Anne, then turned and asked, “Were you in the gun safety class?”

“John insisted I should know how to shoot.”

“I remember,” said Hendricks. He looked at Grant as he explained, “It was too much gun for her. Nearly tore her arm off. She quit after her first shot.”

“I hate guns,” Anne said. “I told him not to bother getting a smaller one for me.” Grant ushered Anne out of the house behind Hendricks.

“Any sign of forced entry?” he asked. He didn’t believe it was a suicide.

“No. But the side door wasn’t locked. I must have forgotten. I was running late when I left. He’d already laid down for a nap.”

“A nap?”

“He’d gotten into the habit of doing that after a big meal. We ate about five and I left at five-forty-five.” She inhaled deeply and pulled up her shoulders and allowed her eyes to glisten. “If it was murder, it’s probably my fault he’s dead.” She let her chin quiver slightly.

Grant paused a few moments, then said, “You shouldn’t blame yourself for leaving that door unlocked. Most folks here don’t bother with that unless they’re leaving the place empty.”

They sat on the front deck. Hendricks closed the police car door and came over.

“There’s a team on the way,” he said.

Grant nodded, then asked Anne, “Was there a particular reason you would have locked up, if you’d remembered?”

“After thirty-five years as a cop, twenty of them in homicide, my husband insisted on keeping the doors locked, even when we were both home, even when I was working in the yard.”

“You do the yard work?”

“John loved the fact there was no lawn to mow. He liked the tall pines.”

“Are those tomato plants in that raised bed?”

Anne was surprised. Grant didn’t seem like the kind of man who would care about anything other than his work, and dead tomato plants were not readily recognizable from a distance. “They were. I haven’t got the knack of gardening here yet. It’s so different.”

“You’re from New York?”

“Yes. Schenectady. I always had a wonderful garden. I don’t know how anyone can grow anything here.”

“So your husband was asleep when you left?” Grant asked.

“Yes.” She needed to stay focused. This wasn’t the time to complain about anything.

“Where did you go?”

“The assisted living center. I play cards every Wednesday with some of the residents, six until seven. That’s as long as most of them can last.”

Detective Grant wrote that on his pad. “Do you have a friend we could call for you?”

“No. No one I’d want to bother at a time like this. We’ve only been here a year, almost a year, actually; not long enough to make that kind of friend.”

“We can drive you to a motel,” he offered.

“Thank you. I’d like that.”

“We have to wait for the lab people to check your hands and clothing for residue, though.”

“Of course,” she said.

“It’s standard procedure,” Hendricks assured her. Then he got her talking about John while they waited for the specialists and watched the sun slide down to the horizon.

Grant listened. It wasn’t a suicide. The Colt would have kicked the man’s hand back, or flown right out of it. Most murders were personal. The victim hadn’t known anyone here. It was unlikely some low-life had tracked him down this far for revenge, which left the woman. The spouse was the most likely candidate in any homicide.

When the lab specialist got there, Grant watched as Anne pulled clean clothes out of the dryer, then he left her alone to remove the clothing that would have to be tested.

“Don’t run any water, though,” he warned.

“I won’t, but I’m sure I washed my hands after playing cards.”

Grant knew they wouldn’t find anything on her, but procedure demanded she be checked. He’d also make sure they did a toxicology screen on her husband. Women traditionally used poison. She could conceivably have shot her husband while he was comatose from something he ate. But, being a homicide detective’s wife, she’d know that would be suspected, so the tests would probably be a waste of money.

When the lab people were done with her, Hendricks drove Anne to a motel in the Mustang while Grant followed – and watched as the car ahead of him passed under the street lights on Main.

At the motel, Hendricks walked the woman into the office, then slid into the passenger seat. “She’ll probably end up selling the place, if anyone will have it, and moving back to New York.”

“She said that?” Grant asked.

“I asked again if she had a friend we could call to come be with her.”

On the way back to the crime scene, Grant pulled around behind Safeway and parked with the headlights on the dumpster. He pulled on a pair of disposable gloves as Hendricks watched, puzzled.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Grant ignored the question. He got out and lifted the heavy lid. There was a neatly tied black yard bag tucked under some cardboard that should have gone into the recycle bin, but on top of the other trash. He yanked the bag out and opened it as Hendricks joined him.

Grant pulled out the plastic rain gear with duct tape still sticking plastic bags to the cuffs. There was a shower cap with a clear veil of plastic taped to it as well.

“What made you check here?” Hendricks asked.

“She looked toward Safeway when you drove by, while she was rubbing her shoulder. I expect it’ll be her DNA on the inside of this and we’ll probably find his on the outside.”

When they went back to the motel to pick her up, Anne saw the bag and nodded.

“He killed me first,” she said. “I was a gardener. He killed me.”

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Warped Tales: The Gardener – Part 5

At first, Anne tried to adjust to the idea of staying married. They had enough money they could take a modest trip each winter, if they were cautious with other spending. So when the window air conditioner broke and John decided not to replace it, she did not argue. There were ceiling fans and her friends told her the monsoons – daily thunderstorms – would cool things off most days. It helped that John started going out every day again – usually fishing, sometimes hunting, always alone. He seemed less depressed than he’d been all winter.

Then she realized the roses and berries she’d planted in the fall had died, because she didn’t understand she needed to start watering in the first months of the year. Back home, the only thing her garden needed in the winter was some pruning – she hadn’t even checked on the roses and berries for months. She didn’t want to ask John for money to replace them, so she suggested she could work part time for her garden money.

“No. My mother never had to work and my wife doesn’t either,” was his knee-jerk response. “If you have to have your damn garden, here, use this.”

He handed her a twenty, which might be enough for seeds and a few starts, but not for new roses and berries. She started skimming money from the grocery allowance he gave her each week, but it wasn’t enough. She didn’t dare take money out of the bank – he might take her name back off the accounts.

She gave up on having anything along the fence, at least for now.

She planted tomato starts and seeds for other vegetables in the raised beds she’d insisted on when they first arrived last fall. John would never have agreed to that expense now.

The monsoons were nothing but a promise – everyone commented on how late they were. There were blistering hot days with no wind when John stayed in the stifling house while Anne volunteered in air-conditioned luxury. When the AC on her truck went out, John reluctantly agreed to let her use the Mustang – if he wasn’t going to use it.

He did go out before dawn most days, but would come back to spend the heat of the day watching television. Sometimes he went back out, sometimes he didn’t. His depression seemed to have returned with the heat.

Anne began to express concern about her husband with her casual friends – a bit here, a tad there, a partially expressed thought followed by biting her lower lip. Just enough to let it be known she was worried that her husband was depressed. She told them she thought he might have jumped into retirement too early, and that he wasn’t as satisfied with hunting and fishing as he’d expected. When the librarian saw her researching depression, Anne assured the concerned woman that it was her husband about whom she was concerned, not herself. The librarian suggested he might be having an identity crisis, after having been a detective for so many years.

Anne considered the irony of that possibility – he’d been unconcerned about her losing her identity as a gardener, but he’d lost his own, while she still thought of herself as a gardener.

Then one June day she came home from her book club meeting to find a scorching wind had killed her tomato plants and shriveled the sprouting vegetables. She stood staring at them and burst into tears.

She cried for her lost identity as a gardener, for the hours spent in her lovely garden with her son, for the smell of his sun-warmed hair, for the years devoted to creating that beautiful place – years that garden allowed her to stay trapped in a loveless marriage. She cried for her absent mother who had lived the same kind of life. She cried for the girl who might have found a happier life.

When there were no more tears, she went inside the cabin where John was sitting like a zombie, staring at the television. She grabbed the remote and turned it off.

“I’m done,” she said. “I want a divorce.”

John stared at her silently.

“Did you hear me?” she screeched. “I want a divorce.”

He got up slowly and walked up to her until his nose almost touched hers. He spoke quietly, but in that tone he had that meant the matter was closed. “No.”

He slid the remote out of her hand, sat down, and turned the television back on.

“I want a divorce,” she repeated. “I’m serious. I’m sick of this place and I’m sick of you!”

If he’d argued, there might have been a chance at reconciliation. They might have agreed the move was not working well for either of them and made plans to try another place.

But he didn’t.

She tried one more time. “John, we’re both miserable.”

He shook his head and replied quietly. “Until death do us part – marriage vows don’t say anything about being happy. What’s for dinner?”

Stunned, Anne put away groceries and started cooking.

They ate at 5:00. At 5:20 John finished and went to their room for his after-dinner nap. By 5:30 Anne had cleaned up the kitchen and could hear him snoring. At 5:45 she put a yard-waste bag into the trunk of the Mustang and left for the senior center, making one stop on the way to toss the bag into a dumpster. She played cards with the residents for an hour. She and old Mr. Smith in his wheelchair were the weekly winners.

On the way home, she put the top down and sat tall so the breeze could catch her hair.

As soon as she parked the Mustang beside the cabin, the heat pressed down on her. It was so difficult to breathe when it was this hot. The sun wouldn’t set for another hour or more.

The house was quiet. She walked back to the bedroom where John was lying on the bed, his head on a pillow soaked with gelatinous blood. She pulled her cellphone out of her pocket and dialed 911 as she returned to the kitchen.

“My husband’s been shot,” she told the woman at the other end of the line.

Her carefully controlled voice conveyed hysteria threatening to erupt.

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Impressions: A Grizzly Dog Tale

It was the damned dogs that caused all the trouble.

If they hadn’t barked all the time, we wouldn’t have gotten evicted, which the wife said was the last straw. Well, it was the camping out to avoid being served with the formal eviction notice that got to her, to be specific. Things had already been tense, even before we had to move out of the house, what with the electric and water being shut off just because the checks kept getting lost in the mail.

As long as we weren’t served, we could leave everything at the house until we got a new place, including the dogs. She wanted to put all our stuff in her parents’ garage, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with the animals, so what was the point?

The dogs never bothered me.

Dogs are supposed to bark. I always knew when someone was walking down the street, as long as the dogs were in the backyard where they belonged. But the kids would let them in the house sometimes, as if they didn’t make enough noise by themselves. Those brats bickered and fussed and screamed at each other every waking moment if they were within two rooms of each other.

So the wife had a point about the tent being too small.

We took the dogs with us the first night, when we thought it would only be a few days, but the campground host was a prick and came by first thing in the morning to tell us the dogs had to go. He wouldn’t make an exception to his no-pets rule, just because the collie mix barked from dusk until dawn. He should have been glad. She probably kept someone from getting eaten by a grizzly bear or something. But he didn’t see it that way, so I snuck them back to the house and put them in the backyard. The fence would keep people out, and I could slip in after dark to feed and water them.

The dogs were well cared for, got food and water every day. If they spilled the bowl, that wasn’t my fault. It was a pain to have to go over there almost every night with a jug of water, except it gave me a chance for some peace and quiet.

The wife always whined that I took too long, that she only had a half hour between jobs. She thought I should be there every minute she was gone, babysitting those brats. She said they were all mine, but I never made that kind of racket.

Well, I was enjoying the peace and quiet at the house when the wife shows up with all the kids. She left them in the car and came in screaming that she was going to be late to work because I was using the damn dogs as an excuse to sit and do nothing. Then she started in about me not having a job, as if it was my fault I was stuck watching those damn kids all day, as if I could go back and get a job last spring or winter, when I was checking the paper every week or so.

Anyway, when she went off on me like that and told me not to come back to the tent, I lost it. We hadn’t had any real fights in a long time, probably because she was too busy working to start them, but this one made up for it. I finally punched her in the stomach to knock the wind out of her and shut her up.

She hit me back!

There wasn’t any thinking about it. The man of the house deserves more respect than that. I smacked her good. If she’d had decent reactions, she’d have had her hand out to break the fall, but she didn’t, and her head slammed into the corner of the concrete step between the kitchen and the garage. She made a mess with that blood gushing all over, but it stopped pretty fast, I guess when the pump stopped.

I had to get the kids into the garage one at a time then, so I told the younger ones to take the water bottle out back and put some into the dogs’ dish, and the oldest followed me to the garage to tell me which of his stuff could be tossed.

He was whining the whole way. I swung that baseball bat like a kid at T-ball. Crack—a home run and instant quiet. One by one I took care of them. The littlest one was harder to trick. She noticed it was too quiet. But she was little, after all, and she looked so much like her mother.

It took three days of starving before the dogs began to eat. I brought our stuff back from the campground and told the guy we were moving out of town. Then I hid in the house, figuring I’d have to get rid of the bones. When the owner came snooping around, I stayed in the garage. I knew he’d never open it with the dogs barking.

It was the smell that made him call the Humane Society, who called the cops. If the dogs hadn’t been so picky, you’d never have heard this story.

Damn dogs.

Impressions is a series of character studies – short sketches to wet your appetite. Think he’d make a good villain in a longer tale? Leave a comment.

Thanks.

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