Rosemary Harris: Pushing Up Daisies

The first book in the Dirty Business Mystery series, 2008

Special thanks to Kathy Schneider, Betty Prashker, and Michele Tempesta for getting me off to a good start. To Deborah Schneider for making it happen. To Marcia Markland, Diana Szu, Martha Schwartz, Maggie Goodman, Jonathan Bennett, and the talented people at St. Martin’s for making it better. To Andy Martin for making it fun. And to Bruce Harris for keeping me relatively sane during the process.

My first guess was heirloom silver, or maybe the family jewels, buried and forgotten years ago by some light- fingered servant or paranoid ancestor. I was wrong.

The metal crate was heavy, about two feet wide and three feet long with a small handle at one end. Crouching down at the edge of the flower bed, I dragged it out of the hole and used my trowel to pry it open. I was hoping for a reward or at the very least an interesting story to tell. That time I was right.

Inside was another, smaller container, ornately carved and cushioned by paper, padding, and disintegrating excelsior. I opened the smaller box and took out a tattered bundle wrapped in many layers of thin material. Given the weight of the box, the bundle was lighter than I expected-as if the fabric surrounded nothing more than a handful of feathers. That’s when the butterflies first entered my stomach.

Picking at the rotting fabric with gloved fingers, I exposed a slim chain with a tiny medal. Above it, leathery and doll- like, was a shrunken head.

I fell back on my butt, flinging the bundle into the air, then I watched it land and roll over until it stopped facedown in the decomposing leaves behind a stone wall. I looked around, half hoping there was a witness but just as happy there was no one to see me act like such a chicken.

I got up and tiptoed over to where the bundle rested. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it but wanted to get the tiny face out of the dirt, so I nudged it with my toe. It didn’t move. I did it a second time, but pushed too hard and the bundle rolled again, this time picking up speed on the sloping lawn that would take it into Long Island Sound if I didn’t act fast. I wasn’t much of a football fan but instinctively knew what I had to do. I tackled it. I scooped up the body and ran up the hill, back to the garden, as if I were heading for the end zone. When I got there, I shook off my hoodie, made a circle on the ground with it, and nestled the tiny body inside, so it wouldn’t roll over again. Then, on unsteady feet, I walked a few steps and puked, over by the Album Elegans rhododendrons.

But I should start at the beginning. Six hours earlier, I’d been minding my own business, lingering over burned cinnamon toast at the Paradise Diner. The coffee was better at Dunkin’ Donuts, and the food was better almost anywhere, but the Paradise was my third place- that place you go to that isn’t work or home.

Chalky turquoise and hot pink, with Christmas lights on twelve months a year, the Paradise is a little bit of the Ca rib be an inexplicably transplanted to southeastern Connecticut, courtesy of the proprietor, Wanda “Babe” Chinnery.

Detractors claim Babe stays in business by dealing pot on the side, and there is a suspicious patch of ground in the back surrounded by a hodgepodge of lattice, but I don’t believe it’s anything more sinister than your garden- variety suburban debris, and probably a lot less toxic.

Though only the boldest of the soccer moms ventured in, the Paradise is a magnet for every male in town between the ages of twelve and eighty. That’s also due to Babe. Babe is every young boy’s fantasy bad girl and every older guy’s shoulda- woulda- coulda. They come in to see what color her hair is this week or what sexy, tattoo- revealing getup she’ll be wearing. And if none of them can really have her, at least they can dream, for the price of bad coffee and artery- clogging donuts.

Twenty years ago, Babe and the late Pete Chinnery bought the Paradise. She’d been a backup singer and he was a roadie for a fair- to- middling metal band that’d had one big hit and toured on it for years. They socked away the money they’d made hawking rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia, and when they decided to settle down, they moved back to Babe’s hometown and bought the Paradise. Less than a year later, Pete and another member of the Son Also Rises Christian Bikers Club were killed in a freak accident on Route 7 when some crazy antiquer hit the brakes for a tag sale and sent the two men flying. To hear Babe tell it, there was more leather at Pete’s funeral than at an S & M convention.

Now the Paradise staff was just Babe, a revolving part-time waitress-this one named Chloe-and the cook, affectionately referred to as Pete number two. Babe claims she hired him only because it would be easy to remember his name, and from some of the food I’d sampled there, she might have been telling the truth. Despite our glaring differences, Babe and I had hit it off immediately.

“Top you off, Paula?” she asked.

I threw caution to the winds and held out my cup for more.

“You seen the Bulletin this morning?”

“I didn’t know they bothered to publish that thing once March Madness was over.”

“ The New York Times isn’t the only newspaper in the country, wiseass.”

Springfield, Connecticut, is a bedroom community, one of New York City’s many moons, more famous for the planet it orbits than for anything in the town itself. Springfield has a healthy mix of low, middle, and upper-middle classes, and we’re within spitting distance of the blue bloods in Greenwich and Bedford.

The Springfield Bulletin is our local paper, and unless it was college basketball season, when the UConn Huskies ruled, it took all of five minutes to read. Example? Now that the Huskies hadn’t made it to the Sweet Sixteen, a recent feature was THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF WALNUTS.I was saving it for some really lonely night by the fire.

Babe slid the paper across the counter to me. The entire front page covered the death of someone named Dorothy Peacock, last member of one of the oldest, most prestigious families in Springfield. We had a Peacock Lane, a Peacock Road, a Peacock band shell, and undoubtedly lots more a relative newcomer like me hadn’t heard about.

“I didn’t know there were any actual Peacocks.”

“I guess there aren’t. Anymore. Not exactly the crowd I ran with,” Babe said, “but I always thought their house was cool”-pointing to the paper. “Weird, but cool. They even gave tours of Halcyon’s garden.”

“Their house had a name?”

“Sure, doesn’t yours?” she said, grinning.

“Yeah. Right now it’s Chez Citibank.” I pushed my cup and plate to the side and spread out the skimpy paper. “Ever meet her?”

“Dorothy? No. A pal of mine did. I saw her a few times though, from a distance. Looked like quite a character.”

“Oh, yeah, not like us,” I said, returning to the article.

In one deft move, she cleared the plates and wiped down the silver- and- gold Formica counter, then consolidated the ketchup bottles in that precarious upside-down way they must teach in diner school. She used a balled- up napkin to erase a few words from the blackboard behind the counter, changing the breakfast specials into the lunch specials.