Pushing Up Daisies

CHAPTER 48

I walked back through the hemlocks, no smarter than I was before talking with Dina Fifield.

Halcyon’s official opening was a few weeks away, but I had a hard time staying focused. Hurtful, decades-old secrets were in danger of coming out; Anna was distraught, confined to her bed, lighting candles and praying; and, most important, Hugo was still in jail, now facing even more serious charges. And I’d done nothing but stir things up needlessly.

Thinking of Hugo reminded me of his last, curious words before O’Malley led him away. I headed for the espaliered trees blanketing Richard Stapley’s stone wall. I’d forgotten them in the days since Hugo’s arrest.

Espaliered trees were fashionable in small Italianate gardens in the twenties and thirties. I was grateful Hugo had taken an interest, since I had no experience with either fruit trees or espaliers. The pear trees had already blossomed, and wouldn’t need pruning until after the growing season, but Hugo said they needed some attention, so I went to check them out.

Over the course of many seasons, the trees had been pruned and trained to grow horizontally over the handsome stone wall using an intricate grid of wires and bamboo canes forced between the chinks in the stones. I resecured some of drooping branches, but nothing else seemed amiss, until I noticed a deep pile of mulch, sloppily shoved up against the bottom of the wall at the far end. I bent down to spread it around. As I did, I uncovered the top of a hand- hewn cornerstone. I dug farther, with only my gloved hands, and saw the date, as Hugo must have before shoving the mulch there to cover it: A.D. 1974, the same year Yoly Rivera vanished.

I pulled off my gloves and phoned Lucy and Felix, but I couldn’t reach them. I tried Gerald Fraser, but his line was busy. When the phone rang, I assumed it was one of them calling me back, but it was O’Malley.

“I thought you’d like to know, we released Hugo Jurado early this morning. We found our two witnesses, a Mr. and Mrs. Galicia. They confirmed Hugo’s whereabouts the morning Guido was killed. They shot plenty of video in the waiting room of the marriage bureau before tying the knot. You were right,” he added grudgingly.

In the background of the Galicias’ wedding pictures, only occasionally obscured by themselves, were Hugo and Anna, canoodling. And as if their testimony wasn’t enough, there was an exonerating time code in the lower-right- hand corner of the frame.

“The Galicias went home to Guatemala for their honeymoon,” Mike continued. “They didn’t know we were looking for anyone until they returned yesterday.”

I felt an adrenaline rush of success. “What about the fingerprints and the car?” I asked, pushing my luck.

“Felix’s lawyer friend grilled the woman who saw Hugo’s car, and she finally admitted she couldn’t be sure of the time. As far as the fingerprints, the lawyer’s investigator lifted them from a number of other items at Chiaramonte’s. Hugo did work there for a time, so the fact that his prints were on the weapon, too, was inconclusive. We had to let him go.”

At least for now. That was left unsaid and hanging in the air when O’Malley hung up. I reached Anna’s daughter and she told me that Felix and Anna were already downtown picking up Hugo. The phone rang again.

“Hey, it’s about time you called me back,” Gerald Fraser said. He’d left me a message I must have accidentally erased with all the snotty ones from Lucy.

“What was it?” I asked.

“Probably just another false lead,” he said. “I’ll let you know if anything pans out. What’s your big news?”

I told him about the witnesses and Hugo’s release.

“That’s terrific,” he said. “You’re a pretty good little detective once you get going.”

“I knew it wasn’t Hugo,” I said, pleased with myself. “ ‘Take a look at the espaliers’? Does that sound like a man being dragged off to the gallows?” I told him about the date on the wall and the fountain. “That’s the reason I called you, even before I heard from O’Malley.”

“What do you think it means, kiddo?”

“Dina’s fountain was installed the same year as the stone wall at Halcyon, 1974. That’s a lot of digging in a one- block radius that we know our missing person frequented. What if Guido killed Yoly and buried her body in the fountain? That was the one thing he personally attended to at the Fifield home, other than the lady of the house. He designed the fountain, oversaw its construction, and had plenty of access day and night, thanks to Mrs. Fifield.”

“It’s a good guess, and you may even be right, but there is one small problem. You’ve got zero proof.”

Gerald was right, of course. No one in his right mind was going to tear apart the family compound of a local politician on my gut feeling.

“I’ll just have to check out that fountain myself,” I said.

“How, pray tell?”

Dina’s own words told me how. “There are just so many times you can redecorate the houses,” I repeated.

The second time I rang the Fifields’ doorbell that day, I was armed with half a dozen garden books fringed with pink Post- its, my sketch pad, and a digital camera. Dina was still at her club, but I managed to talk my way past the house keeper and into the garden.

The blank slate of her garden cried out for paths and separate garden rooms. Within thirty minutes, I’d sketched out a raised dining (or more likely drinking) pavilion close to the water; a cozy serenity garden nestled in the trees; and a cheery gazebo garden, right near the house for newspapers and morning coffee. All would be connected by a circular path. And each area would feature statuary harvested from Guido’s marble monstrosity. I was shooting the fountain from every conceivable angle when Dina returned.

“I may have misjudged you,” she said. “I like a go-getter.”

I showed her my rough sketches, and she declared me a genius, a word I had a feeling came as easily to her as the word moron. She didn’t ask what it would cost, and I hadn’t a clue, but money would not be an issue for her.

“You won’t really destroy the fountain, will you? I have such fond memories attached to it.”

“Of course not, Mrs. Fifield. The plan is simply to remove some of the statues and repurpose them elsewhere in the garden.”

And to see what, if anything, was underneath.