Garden of Scandal Read online

  “Nobody so sanctimonious as a reformed sinner,” Maisie mused with a twist of her wrinkled lips.

  “What?”

  The other woman looked self-conscious. “Well, what else would you call her?”

  “We are talking about Mother Bancroft?” Laurel asked in sudden doubt.

  “Don’t know about you, but I sure am.”

  “But she has always had such contempt for anybody who strayed from the straight and narrow, always talked about them as if they were the lowest form of life.”

  “Camouflage,” Maisie said with a snort. “I could tell you a few things that would make your hair stand on end.”

  Ordinarily, Laurel had little use for gossip. Being so private herself, she disliked prying into the lives of the people around her. Still, it was also true that she didn’t have a lot of interest in other people’s lives. Books, ideas, and preoccupations of that nature had always been more important. Now it was different. Now she was personally involved, whether she wanted to be or not.

  Her gaze level, she asked in answer to Maisie’s hint, “Such as?”

  “Well,” the older woman began as she reached up to pat her white curls, then smoothed her apron over her rotund stomach, “you might not think it to look at me, but I used to be a rounder, back in the fifties. That wasn’t so long after the war, you know, and all us girls were crazy about anything in uniform. We used to get a bunch together and go down to Leesville. We’d meet up with soldiers from Fort Polk, then take off to find a honky-tonk with a band. Dance? You should’ve seen us! Real dancing, too, not this jumping and wiggling they call dancing today.”

  Smiling a little at the picture Maisie painted, Laurel asked, “Was Mother Bancroft one of the bunch?”

  “Not her, no way. She was married and had two little babies. She and her husband were having all sorts of troubles, fighting like cats and dogs. He was a secret drinker, they said, and she was high-tempered. He liked the ladies, and she was mean jealous. I remember one time they had the police over. Story was, they got into an argument over his drinking. He wouldn’t fight, just fell into bed in the middle of the argument. So she heated up the grease she had been using to fry potatoes for supper and poured it in his ear.”

  “Ouch,” Laurel said, wincing.

  “Yeah, she was something, all right,” Maisie replied, shaking her head. “But what I was thinking about was the other way she had of getting back at him. He used to do shift work, worked nights from time to time. Then we’d see her in the honky-tonks around Leesville with soldiers. Don’t know whether she was passing it out free or making extra money on the side, but she sure wasn’t at home tending to little Howard and Zelda.”

  Laurel put her elbow on the table and propped her chin on her palm, staring at Maisie. After a moment, she said, “I can’t believe it. I just—can’t believe it.”

  “I know, but that’s the way with a lot of people—not exactly how they look on the surface. Anyway, wasn’t too long after that her husband left her, just took off one night and never came back. Somebody said he wrote once, on Howard’s birthday, but, after that, nothing. After a while, Sadie settled down, moved out of the house here and bought a place in town, got religion and everything.”

  Laurel shook her head in silent amazement. Then a frown drew her brows together.

  “What?” Maisie asked, her gaze measuring.

  Laurel removed her elbow from the table and took a sip of her coffee that had grown lukewarm. With a grimace, she said, “I was only thinking. It seems a woman who would pour hot grease in a man’s ear might do most anything.”

  “Crossed my mind, too,” Maisie said.

  Laurel hesitated. “Even kill Sticks?”

  “She never liked the dog, did she?”

  That was true, yet Mother Bancroft had also been deathly afraid of Laurel’s pet. She had trouble picturing her mother-in-law walking up to him and handing him a poisoned hamburger patty, or whatever it was he had eaten. That didn’t mean, of course, that she hadn’t put it out while he was shut up in the house, leaving it for him to find later.

  A shiver ran over her, and she shook her head to banish the image. That was one more thing she didn’t want to think about. In a tight voice she asked, “What am I going to do?”

  “Guess you could start by getting your hands on one of those letters.”

  “I doubt anybody is going to hand one over to me.”

  “No,” Maisie agreed. “But they might let me take a look, have a photocopy made.”

  “Then what?” Laurel asked. “If it turns out to be Mother Bancroft, what can I do about it? Have her arrested for improper use of the mail, or whatever the charge might be? Maybe sue her for slander?”

  “She’d stop pretty quick, I’ll bet, if she thought everybody knew she was behind it.”

  Laurel rubbed her temples, feeling a little sick to her stomach with the pain. “So I go and talk to her, then? I suppose that’s a possibility.”

  “Better than nothing.”

  That was too true to be denied.

  Maisie drank the last of her coffee, then pushed back her chair and got up to carry her cup to the sink. Over her shoulder, she said, “I finally remembered that chain saw Alec wanted, though he didn’t ask about it this morning. Guess you can tell him to get it out of the trunk of my car before I leave.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “And you might ought to take something for that headache,” Maisie added in stringent tones.

  “I’ll do that,” Laurel said, recognizing the caring behind the abruptness. Still, it was some time before she could force herself to move.

  8

  Laurel couldn’t stand to watch.

  Alec was near the very top of the big pine. Perched at least fifty feet off the ground, he was anchored by nothing more than the climbing spikes on his boots and the wide belt that circled both his taut waist and the great tree trunk. His confidence in the equipment was sublime as he reached to maneuver the whirling chain-saw blade against the thick limb next to him. His shirt strained across his shoulders with the contractions of the muscles of his back. He looked powerful and magnificent. And in heart-stopping danger.

  Laurel had been routed out of bed this morning by the earsplitting rasp of the saw. When she came out to see what was happening, Alec had already sawed through one limb, letting it fall with a heavy crash, and was reaching for the next.

  He had explained the evening before that he would have to cut the limbs first, then top the tree and take down the trunk, section by section, from the top to be sure it didn’t fall on the house, garage, fence, or shrubs in the garden below it. She had known he would have to climb to the top of the huge pine to do it. She just hadn’t realized quite what that meant, or how tall the tree was in actuality.

  The impulse to yell up at him now, tell him to come down, hovered in her mind. However, he couldn’t hear her for the buzz of the chain saw, and she wasn’t sure he would pay any attention if he did.

  Brown bark and yellow sawdust spewed from the saw once more, showering down. The resinous scent of pine sap was strong in the air. The cut limb creaked and the noise of the chain saw changed. As Alec drew back the spinning blade, the limb fell in heavy, whistling descent. It struck the ground with a thunderous boom. Laurel felt the vibration all the way to where she stood at the bottom of the steps.

  If Alec fell, he would come down just that way. Or if he slipped, hit something besides the tree with the saw, that powerful cutting chain would rip through his warm flesh in milliseconds.

  No, she couldn’t bear to watch; her nerves wouldn’t take it. Swinging around, she stalked back into the house.

  That retreat lasted maybe five minutes, because she couldn’t stay inside, either, not knowing what was happening. Dragging a pair of black jeans from the closet, she slid into them, then pulled on a cream-and-black striped scoop-neck T-shirt. It was early yet. Maisie hadn’t made it to work, wouldn’t for another hour. Taking a peach from the fruit bowl in th
e kitchen, Laurel headed out to the pottery shed.

  She had started on another Green Man plaque the evening before, after Maisie and Alec left; it had seemed better than wandering around the house by herself. She worked fairly late on it, trying to tire herself out so she wouldn’t lie awake thinking about Sticks and listening to every creak and rattle in the night. It had been the big dog that made her feel safe in the rambling old place, it seemed, and now he was gone.

  This new plaque was much closer to the spirit of the Bocca della Verità, reflecting the face of an openmouthed old man. But she had taken away the fierceness of the original, substituting an expression of benign benediction. The man in her plaque assumed the truth would be told instead of threatening dire consequences for the telling of lies.

  There was not much left to be done to it—not really. In any case, she couldn’t concentrate for listening to the long silences between the buzzing of Alec’s saw and the hard thuds of falling limbs. She could switch on the kiln, however, and get it ready to fire the plaque.

  It was as she turned away from the big oven that she noticed her sea-ripple bowl was missing. Alec must have done something with it—whatever it was he had been so secretive about when he saw it. But where had he put it? Leaving the shed, she went in search of the bowl.

  She almost didn’t recognize it when she found it, for it had become a small pool. Or perhaps that was the wrong word, she mused, since it was really more like a water mirror.

  Alec had set the bowl on top of an old tree stump where ferns and moss grew and an ancient wisteria climbed an iron post to arch overhead. Filled to the very brim with water, from one angle it reflected the twisted and gnarled stems of the wisteria, while from another it gave back only the clear blue basin of the sky. With the bowl dead level and balanced on the stump, the surface of the water mirrored perfect stillness. Occasionally, a breeze might shiver across it or a cloud shadow pass over, but for now it radiated calm and infinite peace. Not even the shattering roar of the chain saw and raw smell of fresh-cut wood could detract from that impression.

  It was so simple—a bowl filled with water. Yet the placement and purpose turned it into something approaching a work of art. Slowly, Laurel turned, searching the top of the big pine that she could just see above the roofline of the house, looking for Alec.

  He was topping the tree now, bracing with one foot against the stump of a limb cut minutes before. His muscles were corded with strain as he leaned against his safety belt, bending away from the trunk to make the horizontal cut into the wedge he had already carved out. His arms shuddered with the whining force of the saw. Wood chips kicked out from the saw blade, spewing up as they hit his body to dust his hair, coat his chest and arms and the legs of his jeans, then falling like sharply aromatic confetti.

  She heard a harsh, rending sound. The top was swaying. It groaned as it slowly began to list. It was toppling, ready to fall. Alec snatched the saw free and it rumbled into silence. He leaned back and to the side, letting the safety belt take his full weight as he strained as far away from the trunk as possible to avoid the butt of the treetop beginning its downward turn.

  The top broke free. The butt twisted, kicking against the severed stump as it heaved over and hurtled downward. The huge trunk shuddered and rocked, flinging Alec back and forth like a rodeo rider on a wild bull.

  Suddenly the thick belt holding him sprang loose, became a curling brown snake against the blue sky. The saw that was chained to it dangled an instant, then plummeted, dragging the belt with it.

  Laurel caught a breath so hard and deep that she felt its rasp far down in her throat. Through burning eyes, she saw Alec twist in midair with a wrenching of hard muscles. He snatched the severed stump of a limb. Clinging one-handed, he whipped around to hug the trunk, trying to dig in with his spiked boots.

  The climbing spikes scaled bark, ripped free again. Alec’s grip broke. He fell, plunging feetfirst. He disappeared behind the roof of the house, following close behind the great treetop.

  Laurel screamed—a thin, shrill sound lost in the crash of the treetop hitting the ground. Then she broke into a run for the front of the house.

  Red horror burned in her mind. Her breath rasped in her aching throat. A stitch like a knife wound pierced her side, though she ignored it as she flung around the end of the house. Skimming between the garage and the house wall, she fought off terrible images of Alec lying broken and impaled on the picket fence, or crushed by the treetop if it had rolled, or maimed by the saw as he fell on it.

  Then she saw him. He was lying on a bed of dark green pine limbs. Scraped and skinned and half buried in loose pine straw, wood chips and bark, he was sprawled bonelessly with his arms outflung and his thick lashes deathly still upon his cheeks.

  A sob caught in her throat as she dropped to her knees. What should she do? Call 911? Phone the hospital for an ambulance? Or would it be faster to drag him to his bike and try to—No, she could never manage that. Shouldn’t move him. An ambulance, then, as fast as possible.

  Even as the thoughts streaked through her mind, she reached with shaking fingers to brush bark from his eyelids, his nose, the hollow of his cheek. Her gaze moved over his arms and legs. They seemed all right—nothing obviously broken. The pile of cut branches had cushioned his fall somewhat, but there was a limb under him that might have broken his back if he hadn’t fallen just right.

  Quickly, fingers desperately unsteady, she unbuttoned his bloodstained shirt and spread the edges wide. She pressed her hand to the scraped and raw surface of his chest, pushing her fingers through the soft matting of hair to center her palm over his heart.

  It was beating. Thank God, thank God.

  His chest was also quivering, vibrating under her hand with a movement suspiciously like laughter.

  His voice came low and not quite even, yet fretted with humor. “If you’d like to try a little mouth-to-mouth about now, I think I could bear up under it.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling tears rim her lashes. Then she snapped them open. Closing her hand into a fist, she slammed it down on his chest with a hard thud. “Damn you,” she said through set teeth. “Damn you to hell for scaring me half to death!”

  “Hey, I was scared, too.” He made a snatch for her wrist, grabbing it as she raised her fist to hit him again. “Go easy on the cuts and bruises, will you? Can I help it if I got a kick out of waking up to a hovering angel?”

  She stilled, her gaze wide as she skimmed it over him again. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  He gave her a look of mock wariness. “Are you going to wham me again if I’m not?”

  “I might.”

  “Then I’ve got a twisted knee, a wrenched shoulder, and a knot on the back of my head the size of a basketball. I need a strong drink and some TLC, not necessarily in that order. If you can’t manage either one, could you at least spare a little first aid?”

  Her face tight, she said, “Possibly, if you really need it.”

  “Good, because I think I do.” He grimaced as he raised himself on one elbow, then changed his grasp on her wrist to a fireman’s grip. “You can start by helping me up.”

  He was going to be sore. Alec knew that much without a doubt, as every bone in his body protested at being hauled upright. He didn’t remember the last time he had been so shaken up, unless maybe it was after his first street fight. That time, he’d been mauled by three guys twice his size, four years older and ten times as mean. The big pine was a close second.

  It had been a near thing. He’d had only a snatched glance to choose a landing spot. When he hit the ground, he’d been out of it for real for a few ticks of the clock. But, hell, he thought groggily, as Laurel stepped against his side and put a slim arm around his waist, it just might be worth it.

  “What happened up there?” she asked as he tested his knee before putting weight on it.

  “Belt broke.” It was the most he could manage through set teeth. The shoulder was all right, he thought,
but the knee was going to take a couple of days before it was up to par again.

  The look she slanted upward was sharp. “I thought you checked it?”

  “Did. A day or two ago.” He hadn’t this morning, though. Why should he? The thing had been fine before.

  She was quiet for a few minutes while they made slow progress through the gate and along the sidewalk toward the front steps. Then she said with irritation, “I shouldn’t have asked you to cut the stupid tree in the first place.”

  “Wasn’t your fault,” he said with appreciation for her concern in spite of his rather breathless negotiation of the steps. “I should have been more careful.”

  “Yes, you should,” she said in acerbic answer.

  He grinned, he just couldn’t help it. She sounded tough, but it was all an act. He had her number now.

  Her hand was spread on the bare skin under his open shirt as if it belonged there, while the soft curves of her breast brushed his ribs with every limping step he made. More than that, he had heard the panic in her voice as she knelt beside him back there, had seen her wet lashes. Yeah, she was a softie. His favorite kind of female.

  Man, yes, and look at this. He was finally going to get invited inside the house, even if he did have to get himself half killed to do it.

  She took him to the bathroom and set him on the best seat in the house, the toilet with the lid down. It was a big room, the way they used to make them—foursquare with a high opaque-glass window, claw-footed tub, pedestal basin, space heater, and even a rocking chair with a wicker magazine rack and fern stand beside it. Alec took in his surroundings with a comprehensive glance, then sat unmoving, watching Laurel as she ran hot water into the basin and took a few things from a shallow closet in one wall. She wet a bath cloth, rubbed soap on it and turned toward him.

  “It’s been a while since anybody washed me like a baby,” he said, enjoying the look of trepidation on her face.

  “It’ll be a while longer if you don’t keep quiet,” she informed him.