Louise suddenly thought that the man at the bar was too handsome to have ever bothered making a lewd remark about her. He was tall and lanky with dark hair, just gorgeous. Even a shy person like Louise could feel the heat he cast. She must have misunderstood. Who did she think she was anyway? She felt transparent and foolish. She turned and rushed out of there. No wonder she’d never come to the Jack Straw before. It was a dump. She was breathing hard when she got behind the wheel of her mother’s old Jeep. There were thousands of blackflies in the air, so many that you’d probably choke if you tried jogging out there. Dusk was the hour they loved best of all. Louise’s heart was pounding stupidly. That handsome man was staring out the window, watching her, but she sped away. If he wanted to give her a ticket, he’d have to find her first.
IT TOOK QUITE a while before Louise realized what was happening in the garden. Whatever she planted was turning red. When she phoned about the lilacs, which she knew were supposed to be a pale purple—she still had the receipts and they were called Twilight Mist—the fellow at Harvest Hill said some of the new pink varieties glazed reddish in the sun. It was getting to the point that she couldn’t believe a word anyone at Harvest Hill said.
By then the roses had opened to reveal crimson-colored flowers. Louise knew for a fact that the tag had said Sunburst, which were meant to have yellow blooms with deep coppery centers. She’d asked for butter lettuce, but it looked to be coming in ruby tinged. And then early one evening, when she was harvesting the first of the reddish string beans, something odd happened. It was a pretty summer evening, very quiet and blue. Louise looked more carefully at the garden, the one her mother and aunt always said to avoid. The vegetables had grown fast. The garden was doing quite well considering she was a novice. The peepers over at the creek had begun their mournful calling at night and the mosquitoes were out in full force. But now Louise noticed there was some other natural force to be worried about: the soil itself looked crimson. She reached for a handful and rubbed it between her fingers. When she let the soil fall, her hands were stained bloodred. There was a small bone sitting in her palm.
Louise left the garden and closed the gate. She went inside her house and phoned the police station.
“There’s blood in my yard,” she said to the operator who answered. After that got around, people in town thought she was pretty close to losing it and that anyone who had put his money down on a full-fledged crack-up by August would win the betting pool.
Frank Mott, who was the chief of police, sent his son Johnny to take a look.
“Remember,” he said. “She’s related to Hallie Brady. Be nice.”
Johnny grinned and drove over to the Brady house. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. He ambled around toward the yard. He was going over all of the things he might say, stupid lines like Funny meeting you here or Where have you been all my life? as he came upon her in the yard. When he did, he stared and didn’t say a thing.
“Are you kidding me?” Louise said when she saw him. The handsome man from the bar she’d told to go to hell. “Is this a joke?”
“Are you going to hold my hitting you on the head in kindergarten against me forever?” Johnny asked.
“I think you said ‘knock-knock’ when you did it,” Louise said.
“I was just trying to get your attention.”
Louise had been pacing off the garden when Johnny stumbled upon her. It was a surprisingly large space. She now stood by the fence she had recently painted white. It looked iridescent in the fading light. “Have there been any murders in town?” she asked.
Johnny came to stand next to her. The garden, he noticed, was quite beautiful. He’d never seen anything like it.
“You’re a gardener?” he asked.
“Anyone missing, kidnapped, decapitated?” Louise wanted to know. “This could be a mass grave, a killer’s depository.”
“You’re very single-minded,” Johnny Mott said. When Louise turned to him, she had a hurt look in her eyes. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he was quick to amend. “Believe me—I’m single-minded, too.”
“Then check all the records and get back to me. Check Lenox, too. There might have been someone killed there, with the body later brought out to Blackwell.”
“There’ve been no murders, kidnappings, or decapitations. Trust me on this one.”
“Then why did I find this?” Louise held up the tiny bit of bone.
“A dog came through?” Johnny guessed. “Tim Kelly’s basset hound killed a rabbit? I could have him arrested. The basset hound, I mean. Not Tim.”
Louise backed away, shamed. She started at him. “You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not.”
Johnny noticed she was wearing some sort of mosquito netting tossed over her and a big pair of boots, the kind people used to go eeling in the river.
“Well, maybe a little,” he said.
“You think I don’t know there’s some kind of betting pool about whether or not I’ll go crazy? I heard people talking at the gas station. And your friends were saying something about me at the bar.”
Louise’s face was getting pink. In no time it would be red. That had happened in kindergarten after Johnny had hit her. He’d felt especially bad when he saw how blotchy she was. Afterward he used to watch her take the bus to the Mills School. She got picked up right outside her house.
“Actually, the pool isn’t whether you will. It’s when.”
“What’s your bet?”
They had come round to the front door. It was the original one, the very first door in town. In the winter, snow came through the cracks. In summer, hornets nested in the wood.
“I don’t make bets,” Johnny Mott said.
“Go to hell,” Louise said to him again, and again he was stunned. Louise couldn’t care less. She felt insulted and something more. She hurried inside and locked the door, not once but twice, even though everyone in town knew that the door to the Brady house was so unstable every time there was a storm it got knocked down.
SOON AFTER, LOUISE went to the Blackwell Museum, which was right across the street from the bookstore. The museum was in an old house, and one energetic elderly woman sold tickets, ran the gift shop, and gave guided tours twice a day. Louise remembered going there as a child, examining the few items still left from the Brady expedition, their spoons and forks, some pots and pans, a tilted wooden wagon wheel. There was also an exhibit of taxidermy, a glass case of local wildlife trapped a hundred years earlier: beavers, red squirrels, foxes, a wolf that was so poorly sewn together you could see the black crisscross of thread down his back, some old moth-eaten bats.
In a corner there was a case of fossils. One of the bits of bone looked very much like the one Louise had found.
“Were there dinosaurs around Blackwell?” Louise asked the ticket taker, who was having a tuna salad sandwich at her desk. She had the same thing for lunch at 10:30 a.m. each day.
“You bet,” the old woman said. She was Arlene Kelly, whose son, Tim, and three grandsons ran the Kelly Gas Station. Someone from the Kelly family had always owned the station, and Arlene had bought it from her cousin Carla when Carla retired early on disability to Delray Beach. “Louise Partridge, right? How’re you feeling, hon?” Arlene had put her money on September 7, which happened to be her birthday. She herself always went a little crazy right around then, and she figured Louise might flip out on that day.
“I’m fine. Thank you. What kind of dinosaurs?”
“Eubrontes. They were carnivores. We’ve found tracks. It’s all over there in the prehistory case.”
After she took a look, Louise got back in her mother’s Jeep and drove home. Lately she had been getting the kind of phone calls where someone hung up as soon as you answered. At first she thought it was someone calling from The Blackwell Herald, trying to sell her a subscription. But more recently she had come to believe it was Johnny Mott. Why a good-looking man who thought she was about to go crazy would be
calling and hanging up, and acting crazy himself, she had no idea. But she could feel something through the phone, a kind of yearning. When she realized she was the one doing the yearning, she stopped answering and let it go on ringing.
Louise sent a formal letter to the dean’s office at Harvard. She wrote that she was an alumna, more or less. She didn’t mention dropping out or being so miserable in Cambridge. Before long she was connected to the paleontology experts at the Peabody Museum to whom she explained her situation. Three days later a graduate student named Brian Alter arrived in a Volvo station wagon filled with equipment. There were just a few stray flies around then and the days were getting hot.
“Beautiful area,” Brian said, after shaking Louise’s hand when she came out to the driveway to meet him. “Great house,” he enthused.
“Yes, except for the bones in my garden.” Louise led him around to the back.
“In my line of work, that’s great, too.”
They went up the stone steps, past the gardens Louise’s mother and aunt had planted in summers gone by, predictable plots of land where nothing unusual ever happened. The old garden, however, was a riot of red. Everything was blooming so fast and so hard that the white picket fence had nearly disappeared into a tangle of bean runners.
“Wow,” Brian asked. “What kind of vegetables are those?” He pointed to the blood-colored runners.
“Green beans,” Louise said.
When she showed him the soil and the piece of bone, Brian pursed his lips. He did not make jokes about basset hounds. See! Louise wanted to shout, had Johnny Mott been anywhere near. He doesn’t think it’s ridiculous. She wondered if perhaps her garden had become red for a reason, the way maps turn up in your glove compartment right before you get lost. She wondered if the reason was Brian, and if the garden had brought him to her, magicking him along the Mass Pike right up to her door. In many ways he was a perfect fit: nice looking, Harvard educated, a scientist, clearly a gentleman. Maybe fate had sent her one true love.
“Unfortunately this means we’re going to have to dig up the garden,” Brian said.
Louise felt like crying at the idea of the garden being deconstructed, but she had no other choice if she wanted to get to the bottom of things. She fixed a bedroom for Brian, put fresh linens on the bed, stored away her father’s collection of eelskin memorabilia, went to pick up some groceries at the AtoZ Market, English muffins and coffee beans, since Brian would probably expect breakfast.
Although he was only a first-year graduate student, Brian was exceedingly professional. Soon enough the rear garden looked like a proper archaeological dig. It was roped off and divided into sections. The little white fence Louise had painted so carefully had been pulled down. She looked out her window and saw the roses and runner beans flipped over into a pile. Louise thought of all the money she’d spent on fertilizer as the mounds of dug earth began to collect. She counted all the hours she’d put in.
“Louise!” she heard Brian shout one day when she was sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea and reading a guidebook about Vancouver. In her plans to leave town she had begun to think the colder, the better. She had become interested in Canada and Scandinavia.
She ran outside in her pajamas and fishing boots when she heard Brian. He was covered with dirt, having been digging since 5:00 a.m. Actually, people in the neighborhood were beginning to be annoyed at the chink clink of his shovel so early in the day. He was standing in a hole six feet deep. Louise stepped over the dead roses and pepper plants and peered down. At the very bottom of the hole was a pile of bones, including several huge ribs.
“Hallelujah,” Brian said.
THEY WENT OUT to celebrate at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. This time, Louise had on a sundress and flip-flops and had run a brush through her hair.
“What an authentic place,” Brian said, glancing around at the knotty pine, the fireplace that was always roaring in winter, the dartboard, which could look picturesque if you didn’t know Tim Kelly was blind in one eye because of a fight with his brother Simon over whose dart had come closer to the bull’s-eye.
Brian went to the bar and pounded his fist joyfully. “Jack Daniel’s!”
“ID,” the bartender demanded. Brian looked like a punk to him and was definitely an out of towner. “Hey.” He nodded to Louise while Brian was thumbing through his wallet for his driver’s license.
“Hey,” she said back. “I’ll have the chardonnay.”
Louise gazed around. There were a few locals at the far end of the bar. Somebody was fooling around with the jukebox. If they punched in “When Doves Cry,” she’d take it as a sign that she should never come back.
“He’s not here,” the bartender said when he noticed her looking.
“Who?” Louise gulped some chardonnay. Lately she hadn’t been getting those hang-up phone calls.
Brian presented his ID and turned to Louise. “At this point, whatever’s in your garden could be just about anything,” he said, interrupting. He gulped down the first shot of whisky as soon as he was served. “We’ll have to collect the bones, clean them, then send them to Cambridge and have them carbon dated. I’ll have to call Professor Seymour in on this.” He laughed, delighted. “I’m in way over my head.”
When Brian turned away for a moment, the bartender leaned in. “He’s in the hospital,” he told Louise. “His appendix burst.”
“People don’t even need their appendixes,” Brian assured Louise when he noticed she looked stricken. He was already pouring another shot. He planned on getting drunk. “I’m going to be famous. Your house is going to be famous.”
“It already is,” Louise said.
THERE WAS NO chinking of the shovel the next day at 5:00 a.m. While Brian was sleeping off his hangover, Louise went out to the garden. She peered down at the pile of bones. She had a shivery feeling, as if they’d perhaps discovered something that was meant to be left alone. She gathered an armful of flowers from the piles that had been torn out, then set off in her mother’s Jeep. It wasn’t yet visiting hour at the hospital, but the floor nurse recognized her from all those weeks she’d spent at her mother’s bedside and let her in.
Louise had told herself she’d never walk into another hospital, but here she was. Johnny Mott was sharing a room with Mr. Hirsch, who was the principal of the high school. Mr. Hirsch had had a seizure the doctors thought might have been a stroke and was there for observation. Johnny looked aggravated over being trapped in a hospital bed, especially in a room with Mr. Hirsch, who had suspended him from high school three times for ridiculous infractions. Johnny had had his share of trouble as a kid and was headed in the wrong direction, then had straightened himself out. He still had scars and tattoos that seemed to belong to somebody else.
When he saw Louise Partridge with her half-dead flowers, he thought he was hallucinating. They’d been giving him Percocet for the pain.
“I hate hospitals,” she said.
“Agreed.” Johnny sat up in bed. He assumed he looked like an idiot—he was wearing a hospital gown—but actually Louise felt mutely and stupidly drawn to him. He was half naked and staring at her. She sat down on the edge of Mr. Hirsch’s bed. She thought she might have a hangover herself.
“Go ahead,” Mr. Hirsch said bitterly. “Don’t mind me. Make yourself comfortable.”
He’d spent forty years being sarcastic, but as Louise had gone to private school she took him at his word and said, “Thanks.”
“Allegra told me you’re living with someone. She said he drives a Volvo.” Johnny sneered. “Those cars are so overrated.”
“Your sister isn’t as observant as she thinks she is. Is that why you stopped calling and hanging up, because of the Volvo?”
“Calling?” Johnny said, feeling shifty, even if he was a police officer.
Louise rose off Mr. Hirsch’s bed and came to stand beside Johnny. She had something in her hand. A smooth white arc. She couldn’t help but notice that they kept the temperature much too hot
in hospitals. They thought only of the dying, never of the living. But wasn’t that always the way?
Louise thought she might burn alive standing there.
“I don’t think a basset hound’s behind this,” she said, showing Johnny the bone she carried with her.
“You never know,” Johnny Mott said. People who knew him would have been shocked to hear just how thoughtful he sounded.
“Really?” Louise said. “Maybe that’s true for you, but I always do. I don’t have to think twice about things.”
AFTER A TIME, Brian had collected all of the bones and washed them in a bucket. They were then spread out on Louise’s porch, to dry in the sun. A spine, ribs, long femurs, knobby things that Louise assumed were some kind of elbows or knees. Everyone in town was talking about the dig. Brian had to chase groups of interested ten-year-old boys off the property. Skittish teenagers came creeping around at night, daring each other to walk past the bone house.
Then one Saturday morning the board of trustees from the museum unexpectedly came to call. The board consisted of Mrs. Gerri Partridge, who was a cousin of Louise’s, once removed; Hillary Jacob, who ran the faltering bookstore; and Allegra Mott, who seemed too young and snippy to be on the board of anything.
“Hello,” Louise said when she opened the door.
Thankfully she was dressed in an A-line skirt and a blouse, both found in her mother’s closet. The outfit looked half decent if you didn’t notice the fraying seams. The women from the board had already turned their attention to the pile of bones. Brian was up in bed, sleeping it off. He had taken to visiting the Jack Straw Bar and Grill every night, not coming home till the wee hours.
“So you told your brother about the Volvo,” Louise remarked to Allegra.
“Sure,” Allegra said mildly. “Why not?”
“No reason,” Louise said. “None at all.”
The museum ladies informed Louise that due to the potential historical nature of the finding on her property, they would like to have the skeleton on permanent display in the Blackwell Museum.