Rosemary Harris - Pushing Up Daisies

Another blank look from O’Malley. Maybe he thought I’d hit her on the head with a weed whacker and tossed her onto the compost pile. I described the woman and our brief conversation. After that, O’Malley loosened up and so did I. We chatted politely while he took more notes and dozens of pictures with both a Polaroid and a digital camera. Stupidly, I thought it was casual conversation, then I realized he was getting background info on me, to see if I was the kind of psycho who might have buried a baby here.

“Who knew quiet little Springfield was such a hotbed of criminal activity?” I mumbled. “I assumed the worst crime ever committed here was some soccer mom running a red light.”

“Unfortunately, we have everything they have in the big city, just a bit less of it,” O’Malley replied. I couldn’t tell if he was sorry or proud. “If you remember anything else, give us a call,” he said, handing me one of his cards, “or stop by the substation on Haviland Road. If I’m not there, ask for Officer Guzman. She’ll be working with me.”

Renata’s white garden was cordoned off with yellow tape. Other people kept arriving. One of them, a cheery blonde about my age, had three cameras slung around her neck, and she rattled off a running commentary as she videotaped the entire area. She might have been at Disneyland.

I was pushed farther and farther to the edge of the property. I made a few feeble protests to no one in particular about needing to get back to work, and finally someone barked, “So do we, lady. Check back with Mom in a few days, okay? You’re sort of in the way here.”

“Mom?”

“Sergeant O’Malley. Nickname.”

Just as I was climbing back into my car, Richard Sta-pley arrived, gliding in on his bike.

“Good Lord, is it true?” he asked, swinging his left leg gracefully over the seat, dismounting, and resting his bike against an oak tree. Tall and patrician, he was just as ready to take command of this situation as he had of me a few hours earlier.

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Stapley.”

“Please, call me Richard. What did the police say?”

“Not much they can say at this point, except that I seem to have stumbled upon a very old corpse.”

“Good grief,” he said, bending down and fussing with his bicycle clips. “What was it?”

“A baby.”

He shook out his pant cuffs and recreased his pants with a quick thumb and forefinger on each leg. “I knew those girls were strange, but I never imagined anything like this.” He straightened up, resuming his military bearing. “Mike O’Malley called me; I’d better go talk to him.”

I was getting tired of being dismissed, so I decided to return the favor. “I have had a long day. All I want to do now is head home. The police will let me know when I can come back, but I’m sure it’ll be at least a few days. That’s okay. It’ll give me a chance to do some research.”

“That’s the spirit. Go home and try to relax. We’ll take care of everything here.”

On the way home, I slowed down as I drove by the police substation. The two- story strip mall was diagonally across the road from the Paradise Diner and was home to a handful of local businesses-Shep’s Wines and Liquors, Penny’s Nails-and sandwiched in between the Martial Arts Family Center and the Dunkin’ Donuts was the substation. I’d been kidding about the donuts. Now I wondered if O’Malley got the belly from the donut shop or the liquor store.

Suddenly I was anxious to get home. I picked up speed. The same manicured lawns and tidy flower beds I’d passed in the morning whizzed by, but instead of critiquing the plant selections, now I wondered what long-buried secrets they, too, might be hiding.

Eagle Road is a dead end. Turning into my driveway, I thought, Not many secrets here-single woman, thirties, no kids, no cats. Obsessive devotion to mini pine bark nuggets. The mailbox reads HOLLIDAY AND MAZ-ZARA, although that second name should have been razored off months ago.

My house was built about thirty- five years ago. The perky real estate agent I rented-then ultimately bought-it through said it had once been owned by a basketball player. Must have been a college player, because it was small, not the humongous estates even the benchwarmers have nowadays. It might have been true, though. When my ex and I first started spending summers up here, we saw a few of my beloved New York Knicks having breakfast at the Paradise. Perky real estate agent aside, that may have closed the sale.

Anyway, the player got cut by the team and the bank foreclosed, so I was able to pick the house up for a song-just about all I had.

I pulled into the garage and hopped out for a quick stroll around my garden before it got too dark. My own little controllable environment. That’s a laugh. All you can do is deal with the weather, the soil, the sun, the bugs, the bacteria, the fungi, and then resign yourself to the fact that the deer will eat most of it anyway. I didn’t kid myself that I controlled the garden. But at least there were no dead bodies here-or none that I knew of.

Outside the garden, control was no easier. Chris Mazzara had moved out months ago. The body had stuck around, but, to paraphrase B. B. King, the thrill had gone. Now the only thing left was the name on the mailbox, which I hadn’t had the heart to remove, since that made the departure more final.

I ended my short garden inspection, picking off a few dead leaves in the pro cess, then went inside.

“Anna?” I yelled. No answer.

Anna Peсa is my cleaning lady. The cushy days of double income no kids were gone and I couldn’t afford her anymore, but Anna didn’t seem to want to leave. And it was anyone’s guess when she’d show up. I suspected she came to watch English lessons on cable, which she didn’t get at home, but she never said. There was only the inconclusive evidence of the laundry being done and the TV being on channel 106. Far be it from me to discourage her.

Anna was a hardworking single mom and she’d decided that polishing her English and being my “assistant” would land her a job at the country’s biggest tequila distributor, based in neighboring Greenwich. So sometimes she came by to answer the phone and do a little filing to practice. “I don’t want to clean houses forever. I have ambition,” she’d told me.

To that same end, she’d recently embarked on a cutrate make over including the permanent tattooing of her eyebrows, eyelids, and lips; so it was also possible she was just lying low until all the swelling went down.

My voice echoed through the empty house. I dropped my backpack in the entrance and hauled myself up the open staircase. To night the climb felt longer than usual, but it was worth it. Upstairs was the living room, kitchen, bedroom, and a small deck. Downstairs was the entrance, office, and-for want of a better name-the TV room. It also housed all my workout equipment: rowing machine, free weights, Fat Boy punching bag, and any new gizmo guaranteed to flatten my stomach.

Eight hours before, I thought I’d be celebrating with a bit of bubbly, but I was going to need something stronger now. I made myself a very large, very dirty martini: lots of vodka, lots of olive juice, three olives, and “just say the word vermouth,” as an old friend once instructed. I opened the slider out to the deck, took my glass, and headed out to the old teak chaise I’d found at a yard sale.

I kicked off my shoes, put my feet up on the railing, and took a long pull on the drink. If the martini was a vacation in a glass, as that same friend once told me, my deck was a freaking sabbatical. No noise (usually), lots of sky, and a chance to contemplate my latest gardening project.