Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 6, June 1992

The Roots of Death by Margaret Maron

I was dawdling over a second cup of coffee, rereading Marcie’s letter and despairing anew at today’s mobility, which can put the width of a whole continent between a woman and her first grandchildren, when I noticed activity at the old Brockman house next door. I put down the letter.

The mock orange hedge that separates our two yards was too high for me to see the ground floor, but the shutters on a second floor window suddenly flew back, framing a young, very pretty girl with uptilted chin and sleek dark hair. Resting firm, capable hands on the windowsill to smile at someone below, she seemed so utterly, blissfully happy that I too smiled involuntarily. She saw me sitting in our sunny breakfast nook and threw a friendly disarming smile in my direction. I liked her at once.

People in the Brockman house again, and young people at that! I could hardly wait for Frank to come home that night to tell him the good news.

It had been a long, lonesome winter for me, with Marcie and her husband transferred to a branch office in Oregon and Frank, Jr., away at college. Brampton is a small Southern town in the outermost suburbs of Washington, D. C., and doesn’t offer too many diversions. Besides, I never was much for ladies’ clubs, for listening to a flock of elderly hens cackle about their grandchildren or preen themselves on growing old gracefully.

“We should have had a dozen children,” Frank often said that winter. “A natural-born mother like you misses having someone to cluck over.”

Well, I do like young folks, and the next morning I made up a fresh batch of oatmeal cookies and stepped through a gap in the mock orange to ring their back bell.

Anne Jordan opened the door instantly. “I was just going to come borrow a cup of something and invite you over,” she smiled, wiping dusty fingers on the seat of her blue stretch pants before taking the cookies. “Come on in and have some coffee.”

I saw that my first impression across the widths of our yards had been deceiving. Her slender figure, good bones, and open smile had given an appearance of extreme youth, but up close, tiny lines around her wide gray eyes revealed that she was past thirty.

“I’m thirty-two,” she told me that day, “and I feel like a nineteen-year-old bride. After twelve years of marriage, we finally have our first real home.”

“Her husband was in the army,” I told Frank at dinner, “and you know what that means: military housing, packing up and moving every time you’ve just got used to a place.”

My younger brother Don, who teaches botany at the college here and lives in a neat bachelor apartment on campus, was over for dinner that night, and he grinned at my enthusiasm. “Sounds as if you’ve adopted her.”

“Oh, you know Alicia,” Frank teased. “All strays and orphans.”

Although Anne was orphaned at an early age and shunted from one indifferent relative to another while growing up, she was by no means a stray. Her marriage to John Jordan was a rock upon which to anchor, and now that he had finally fulfilled the promise he’d made when they were first married — the promise of permanency, a proper home, civilian life — she had fallen in love with him all over again.

“He never minded army life, but I hated it,” Anne confided. “Most people got two- or three-year assignments to one spot, but our limit always seemed to be eighteen months. Once, in Germany, I planted rosebushes. I thought that even if I only saw them bloom one spring, it would be worth it. New orders came six months later for Japan. After that I just stuck to zinnias and petunias.”

Standing at her kitchen window that first day in early spring, she gestured happily to the deep back yard and its long-neglected garden where a few scattered crocuses poked up through the dead grass. “I noticed a little nursery on the edge of town the other day. Do you suppose I could find a Dorothy Perkins rosebush there? It’s an old fashioned rambler. My grandmother had one.”

All my frustrated maternal-ism went out to her, and after that I was over almost every day, lending a hand with painting cabinets, washing crystal from Germany, polishing brass trays from India, and helping Anne decide where all the accumulation of twelve years of travel could be positioned to best advantage through the Victorian-sized Brockman house.

I remember her satisfaction as she stood a massive pair of heavy iron candlesticks on either side of the wide center staircase in the entrance hall.

“I bought them in Spain,” she said. “I knew how perfect they would look someday in this exact position,” and they were the right touch: thickly twining tendrils and grape leaves of black iron formed a stubby five inch diameter and stretched up nearly four feet from a heavy block base, enhancing the formal red and black wallpaper of the entrance hall. Her decorative sense was superb, and the Brockman place bloomed and took on new beauty under her sure touch.

“Don’t forget I’ve had years to plan it,” she said once, and showed me a thick looseleaf notebook bulging with ideas and pictures she’d clipped from a long line of homemaking magazines. “It’s just as well John didn’t resign his commission any sooner. Look how my taste ran in those early days. Ultra-super-modern. Ugh!”

I had a sudden heart-wrenching picture of a trickling stream of bright women’s magazines following her around the world; of the days spent dreaming over, choosing and rejecting from, their shiny pages. It was as if she had held her life suspended, refusing to become attached to any place or unmovable thing or person until now, when she could let herself begin to live.

Throughout the long slow spring, I showed her the town, introduced her to Mr. Higgins at the greenhouse, and rummaged with her in the secondhand shops where we found several lovely chests to refinish. It was like having Marcie back, furnishing her first home, all over again.

We saw little of John at first. He was a stocky, capable man, not quite six feet tall, with an aura of restless energy. He helped move the heavier furniture, then absented himself, relieved to escape the endless discussions of the best color for the den, of whether the dining room should be papered or the badly-scratched paneling replaced.

He told Anne cheerfully, “Two things: stay inside our budget and no pink ruffles in the den.”

As he left for Washington one day, he said to me, “It’s wonderful of you to take her under your wing. She’s needed a friend for a long time, and I’m afraid I just can’t work up much interest in interior decorating.” He smiled at Anne, happily engrossed with fabric swatches. “I haven’t seen her so excited since we were married.”

“Darling,” Anne said, holding out two pieces of fabric, “do you think the federalist blue or—”

“Ask Alicia,” he protested and blew her a kiss. “I’m off to my office. I didn’t know civilians worked so hard!”

John had found an excellent job in Washington as personnel manager of a small but growing paper products firm. It had recently merged with a larger business, and John had been brought in as a neutral outsider to smooth over the merger and effect a friction-free working relationship between the two groups of employees. So far, he had managed to preserve his neutrality, but he was constantly being faced with complaints as old precedents and outmoded traditions were changed for progress’ sake.

“I only hope it continues to be hectic for a good long time,” Anne said. “At least until John gets used to the placidity of civilian life. He’s always enjoyed settling flaps. That’s why he made such a good administrator in the army.” For a moment there was a shadow of apprehension in her voice. “I just hope he doesn’t start missing it when the office settles down.”

During April and May, John’s office continued to demand long hours, and Anne began to join us for bridge on Friday nights when Don was over for dinner, a regular habit with him. Yet it was understood that even if she held seven no-trump, doubled, redoubled and vulnerable, the moment John’s car could be heard in the drive she would leave us, running across our back yard, cutting through the hedge to greet him.

Looking at the handful of face cards she had flung down one night, Don said wistfully, “It must be nice to have a wife who would leave a hand like that to welcome you home.”

Frank and I looked at him in surprise. It was the first time we had ever heard him regret his choice of bachelorhood, and Frank chuckled, “Better take warning, Don. Another remark like that and Alicia’ll have you marching down the aisle. Like tomorrow, possibly.”

Frank was so close to the truth that I could feel myself blushing as I pushed down the mental list of eligible females that I’d been checking off. “It’s no disgrace to want my brother happily married,” I argued. “He’s forty now. How’s he going to feel at fifty, with no family to cherish and to be cherished by?”

“Lucky!” Don answered. “Admit it, my dear. How many women do you know like Anne who are content to center their lives around making a home for their husbands?” And he cut the deck for three-handed rummy.

By June, the main improvements to the house were complete. There remained only the small additions and deletions of decor that would allow a dedicated homemaker a lifetime of happy puttering.

The yards and flower gardens were to have been John’s project, but as the office yet demanded long hours, Anne tackled it under Don’s supervision. Despite his lack of a garden of his own, Don has a bright green thumb and keeps our garden in a constant state of upheaval, shifting bulb beds and shrubs like a housewife rearranging furniture.

He often dropped in to help Anne repot the begonias into hanging baskets for the patio or to prune back an overgrown lilac, and he even found the exact rambling rosebush Anne had longed for. The exuberant hug she gave him in enthusiastic gratitude sent him stumbling through a border of sweet williams.

He and John devoted several Sundays to digging up young dogwood sprigs in the surrounding woods to transplant along their back fence. Anne had volunteered to help but was instantly voted down by everyone, for by this time, her condition was decreed too delicate to allow unwarranted strain.

All of us were delighted at the prospect of a baby. Frank and I had hardly got used to the idea of grandchildren before Marcie and her family had moved so far away, and Don had already decided that he would plant a Japanese walnut in the back corner that fall. “It should be just right for easy climbing in five or six years,” he declared.

John was happiest of all. He had wanted a child for years, but Anne had held back.

“How heavenly it sounds to say so confidently, ‘In five or six years our child will be climbing a tree planted this fall,’ ” she glowed. “To know that he isn’t going to be dragged all over the world, transferred from one school to another.”

“For heaven’s sake, Anne!” John exploded in exasperation. “You always make military life sound like existence in a concentration camp. What’s so terrible about raising a child in the service? Think how much more sophisticated all the kids were that we knew, how quickly they learned a bit of foreign languages.”

“A bit is right,” Anne said hotly. “Kitchen vocabularies learned from the maids they were constantly left with. No chance to form ties or build a feeling of belonging.”

“But they learned to belong anywhere, honey. And most of them were as well adjusted as any kids in Brampton.”

“And what of the ones who weren’t, John? You can’t have forgotten little Kevin Lentz, whose bedroom was over ours in Japan. The way he cried for hours every night.”

“He was an emotionally disturbed child, and you can’t know he wouldn’t have been the same if his father had been an accountant in Brampton. Besides, it was his first move and he was just upset at leaving his dog behind. He’s probably learned to adjust by now, just as our child—”

He laughed abruptly. “Look at us! Our first fight since we came to Brampton, and it has to be in front of Alicia and Frank.” The talk moved lightly on to other subjects, and I was the only one who even noticed what John had almost said, though Anne’s large gray eyes had been momentarily puzzled.

From that moment on, I began to distrust John vaguely, and once started, many small incidents seemed to take on uneasy significance. I noticed a restlessness about him, his lack of real interest in the house, and one day in July, I heard him remark that with all the improvements they’d made, the house had easily doubled in value.

By late fall, the office merger had settled down into a smooth routine, and as John became a normal nine-to-fiver, a bored impatience seemed to grow in him.

Anne put it down to the adjustment to civilian life and prospective fatherhood, but I was not so sure, and early one November day when he came over to return a pair of pliers, my concern for Anne’s happiness lost its discretion.

“John,” I said hesitantly, “I know it’s none of my business, but are you happy here in Brampton?”

He shrugged. “Oh, I suppose I’m as content here as I would be in any one place.”

“But you don’t like being in just one place forever?”

He sighed. “I wish Anne could see me as clearly as you do. She’s so intoxicated with this house, this town, with you. Oh yes, most definitely with you,” he repeated irritably, noting my look of surprise. “You’re the closest thing to a mother she’s ever known. She’ll miss you the most.”

“Miss me!” I exclaimed, aghast.

“Look, Alicia, I know I must seem like a heel, but I’ve tried to live like Anne wants and I just can’t. I said I would try civilian life and I have. That was our deal. But I see it just isn’t my bag.”

“But it’s only been a few months,” I protested.

“Months of knowing that I’ll be doing the same thing for the rest of my life, the same job, the same place, the same people. No offense to you or even to this town, but in the service you have the adventure of never knowing where your next assignment is going to be. How much excitement do you think I can get out of watching leaves fall off the same tree year after year after year?”

“But Anne—”

“I know, but she’s a good sport, and frankly I don’t think she actually hated the army as much as she says now. I never heard her do much complaining before.”

“Because she loved you,” I pleaded; “because she knew you’d keep your promise and give her a home.”

“But I have and I will. We can keep the house, rent it out during our overseas tours. We’re bound to be stationed in Washington once in awhile if I request it. And even if we don’t, she’ll get over it.”

“The way that child Kevin got over the loss of his dog?” I asked him caustically.

“Now, Alicia,” he said, grinning boyishly at me, but I was not about to be gotten around so easily.

“I think it was nasty of you to wait until she was pregnant at last.”

“I didn’t plan that, honest. But I won’t pretend I’m sorry. I’ve wanted a son for years, but Anne would never agree to it before.”

“When will you be leaving?” I asked bleakly, suddenly feeling older than my fifty-two years entitled me to feel.

“It’s too soon to say. I’ve started the paperwork, but I don’t know if they’ll let me reenter at my former rank. That’s why I haven’t told Anne yet.”

“You needn’t worry about my telling her,” I assured him. “I couldn’t bear it.”

Anne’s love and trust in John were painful to remember. In such a short time she had become a dearly-loved daughter to me and I cried as I thought of the baby I might never see, who would be born in some goodness-knows-where base hospital.

“It isn’t fair,” I raged that night to Frank as we lay in the darkness of our bedroom. “He talks of Anne’s not understanding him and thinks that because he wants a thing, she will come to want it, too. And he’s wrong-wrong-wrong!”

Frank put a comforting arm around me. “You’re getting too worked up, honey. You forget that she’s his wife and not your daughter. Why, you didn’t get this upset when Marcie moved to Oregon.”

“Marcie was different. She was excited about going. Anne won’t be.”

“Maybe when the baby is born—”

“It will be worse. Oh, Frank,” I sobbed, “I was so looking forward to that baby.”

In the next few days, I found many reasons to be out of the house. I didn’t want to see Anne’s face, so full of luminous content, knowing what I did, but as I was leaving one morning, Anne intercepted me. With a child’s anxious directness, she asked, “Have I done something, Alicia? You act as if you’re avoiding me.”

“Of course not, dear. I’ve been catching up on a lot of shopping. Thanksgiving sales, you know.” But I had missed our long talks, and when she wistfully invited me to come in for coffee, I couldn’t resist.

As we were entering the house, I saw Mr. McKeon, our mailman, trudging up my front walk. “You go ahead and pour,” I called to Anne. “I want to see if there’s a letter from Frank, Jr., or Marcie.”

“Just a postcard from Frank, Jr.,” Mr. McKeon greeted me. “He needs more money. Say, he sure does go through a lot.”

I agreed that he did indeed. We’re all so used to Mr. McKeon’s reading any unsealed mail that no one bothers to get angry about it any more.

“If you’re going back to Mrs. Jordan’s, you can take her these and save me a few steps. Just bills and circulars and a letter from the army marked ‘Official Business.’ ”

“They never stop.” Anne smiled as she left the mail on a small hall table for John. “You wouldn’t believe how endlessly the army tries to keep you involved. This one probably says, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay active by joining the reserve?’ ”

Yet the envelope filled me with apprehension. Its bulk was greater than that of a normal form letter, and I couldn’t help wondering if this might be the last time I would see Anne so serenely happy.

As I drew the living room drapes that evening, I saw John drive in. He gave me a cheery wave, but I stared back coldly. That he could be so callous! Moving jerkily around our kitchen, slamming silverware on the table, pounding the veal as I would have enjoyed pounding John, I could imagine Anne going through similar movements next door, graceful despite the eight-months’ burden she carried within her. I could almost see her dashing upstairs for a quick dab of lipstick as she heard John’s car, making herself pretty for an adored husband who was about to smash her ordered dreams.

Then Frank came home and I forced myself to push down the hatred I felt for John and the compassion for Anne, to make light conversation over our meal. Frank was fond of Anne, but old fashioned enough to hold that a wife’s place was by her husband wherever he wanted to go, and that, after all, it was really none of my business. I was too depressed to court a lecture from him.

We were just beginning our dessert when I heard running footsteps across our back yard and Anne burst into the kitchen without knocking. Her voice was ragged and she gasped from the exertion.

“Alicia — Frank — you’ve got to help me. It’s John. He... he slipped — he fell — on the stairs. I think he’s dead.”

She stumbled to a chair, crying wildly, as Frank sprang up and rushed out the door. Her gray eyes almost black, she clutched at my hand sobbing, “Please... please help me!”

Instantly my mind shot back twenty years to the day a crash from the den brought me on the run to find Frank’s most cherished possession — his great-grandfather’s gold watch, which hung inside a bell-shaped glass — lying smashed on the hearth and a shaken six-year-old Marcie terrified by the enormity of her guilt. She had looked at me with the same expression as was now in Anne’s eyes and whispered, “What will Daddy say? Mommy, please help me.”

I hugged Anne briefly, fiercely. “Go lie down on the couch,” I ordered. “You must think of the baby. I’ll take care of everything,” and I ran to follow Frank across the yard.

We found John at the foot of the wide staircase, his body twisted at a grotesque angle. His head lay against the foot of one of the heavy iron candlesticks and a small pool of blood had oozed out from the wound where he had struck.

Frank knelt briefly, listening for a pulse beat.

“Is he alive?” I whispered.

“Can’t tell,” he grunted, rising heavily. “If he is, it’s just barely. Where’s the phone? I’ll call a doctor.”

“In the den,” I gestured. As Frank moved past me, I went nearer to look down at John lying there so quietly, and hated him even more than before. If dead, I thought, especially if dead by Anne’s push, he would be an even more destructive force in her life than alive.

Then I saw the crumpled letter in his hand, half under his body. Frank’s voice called from the den, “The doctor says I’d better call Chief Norton, under the circumstances, but doc’s on his way.”

The sound of the dial clicking out the numbers of our local police station spurred me into what had to be done to protect Anne.

By the time Frank returned, I had finished and the official army letter, now smooth and flat, lay casually among the other opened bills and circulars on the hall table.

“I’ll stay here,” Frank said. “You’d better go to Anne. Poor kid! Damn shame this had to happen now.”

Anne sat in the same chair as I had left her, her eyes still dark with horror. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked numbly. “He was coming up the stairs behind me. He couldn’t understand why I was so furious. I didn’t know I could feel that much anger. That letter! The army — and he expected me to be pleased because it was Germany again. Germany! But I didn’t mean to — I didn’t want—”

“Hush!” I said sharply. “Shut up and think about the baby for a minute.”

Her voice cracked with tension. “You think I haven’t been thinking of my child while you were over there?” She was on the ragged edge of hysteria.

“He slipped,” I said deliberately. “He slipped and fell and struck his head on the candlestick. It was an accident. Do you understand, Anne? It was only an accident.”

I couldn’t be sure that she heard me. She had the withdrawn look of one listening for a faint, faraway sound. Suddenly, she clutched her abdomen and slumped across the table in pain.

I sat there beside her, stroking her hair and repeating slowly over and over, as to a retarded child, “It was an accident. He slipped and fell. You loved him. You were happy together. It was an accident.” At last I saw the lights of a car swing in next door, and I ran across to bring back the doctor.

He ordered an ambulance immediately, and little Todd was born that night. It was a near thing for Anne and him, and hours passed before we were sure both would live.

By the time Chief Norton could question her about that night, it was just a brief formality, and John’s death was put down as a regrettable accident. I think even Anne eventually convinced herself that John had fallen unaided.

When she was home, at last, with her young son, I asked, “You will stay on here, won’t you, Anne?”

Her clear gray eyes widened in surprise. “Why, of course. This was our first real home, our only home.” She blinked away the tears before they had a chance to form.

So Anne has stayed in Brampton and become a very dear part of our lives. Little Todd is beginning to talk now, and it’s adorable to hear him try to say Alicia; it comes out “Weesha.” He’s almost as precious to me as Marcie’s children, whom I see so seldom.

And Don! He spoils Todd dreadfully, always bringing him toys and sweets. He’s planning to adopt Todd when he and Anne are married next spring. It will be a fine marriage; they have so many common interests, not least of which is Don’s love of Brampton and complete lack of wanderlust.

Why, if I’d had any doubt but that their happiness would be the final outcome, I’d never have given the iron candlestick a low swinging putt into John’s head when he moaned lightly, lying at the foot of the staircase, while Frank phoned the police.