Pushing Up Daisies

CHAPTER 2

Until that moment my involvement with the local constabulary had been minimal. Three years of summers and eight months of full- time residence had netted only a few brushes with the law-once when my neighbor had an unusually rowdy party and another time when my flag was stolen. (What kind of lowlife steals a flag?)

Uniformed cops, Officers Guzman and Smythe, responded first. I told them I was alone but knew they wouldn’t just take my word for it. I stayed put until they’d made some calls and done a preliminary search. Then they returned to get a statement from me. More cars arrived while we spoke, including one bearing the state seal. People hopped out and sprang into action as if they did this sort of thing every day in our little town. I watched, fascinated.

I didn’t have much to tell, but I still had to repeat it all when Sergeant Michael O’Malley arrived about twenty minutes later from the local town center, where he’d been speaking and handing out bicycle safety helmets to kids.

O’Malley was five foot eight or nine and had black hair with the kind of pale skin that made him look like he always needed a shave. If there were two kinds of cops-the rock-hard not-an-ounce-of-fat-on-their-bodies kind and the other-he was one of the others. Not exactly fat but soft; this guy looked like he knew his way to the donut shop. With the whisper of an accent, O’Malley grilled me, repeating and expanding on the same questions asked by the uniformed cops.

“Paula Holliday, two ells. No, I didn’t go in; I didn’t need to. Besides, I don’t have the keys.”

“What made you start digging there?” he asked.

“Nothing in particular. Path of least resistance- maybe there were fewer roots and leaves there.”

He nodded gravely. I repeated my answers in an impatient, slightly singsong fashion, shifting my weight and hugging my arms tightly over my chest to keep warm.

“Is that your sweatshirt?” he asked, standing over the flower bed.

“Yes. It-it was rolling over.”

He picked up the sweatshirt, shook out the imaginary cooties, and draped it around my shoulders. I was taken aback by the intimate gesture.

“Why didn’t you just put it back in the box?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t seem right.”

He nodded again and scribbled more notes. “I see you, uh, mulched the rhododendrons,” he added, referring to the breakfast I’d left in the flower bed.

That shook me out of my stupor. “Haven’t taken that sensitivity training yet, have you, Sheriff Taylor?” I said, snottily suggesting that Springfield was Mayberry and he was out of his league.

“You’d do well to take this a little more seriously,” he said, straightening up and taking his own advice. “Did you see anyone else?”

“No. Oh, wait. There was another woman here. Well, briefly anyway. I almost forgot about her. The other guys didn’t ask.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I get the big bucks,” he said in an obvious attempt to reestablish some connection.

“I see. You can joke, but I can’t.”

“Point taken. Did you know her?”

“No. She said she used to live near here. We talked a bit, then she disappeared.”

He looked at me as if I’d said the dog ate my homework. “All right, she probably didn’t really disappear, but when I came back-I was looking for a pen and paper to get her phone number-she’d taken off. I figured I’d bump into her later somewhere around the grounds, but I didn’t.”

Another blank look from O’Malley. Maybe he thought I’d hit her on the head with a weed whacker and tossed her onto the compost pile. I described the woman and our brief conversation. After that, O’Malley loosened up and so did I. We chatted politely while he took more notes and dozens of pictures with both a Polaroid and a digital camera. Stupidly, I thought it was casual conversation, then I realized he was getting background info on me, to see if I was the kind of psycho who might have buried a baby here.

“Who knew quiet little Springfield was such a hotbed of criminal activity?” I mumbled. “I assumed the worst crime ever committed here was some soccer mom running a red light.”

“Unfortunately, we have everything they have in the big city, just a bit less of it,” O’Malley replied. I couldn’t tell if he was sorry or proud. “If you remember anything else, give us a call,” he said, handing me one of his cards, “or stop by the substation on Haviland Road. If I’m not there, ask for Officer Guzman. She’ll be working with me.”

Renata’s white garden was cordoned off with yellow tape. Other people kept arriving. One of them, a cheery blonde about my age, had three cameras slung around her neck, and she rattled off a running commentary as she videotaped the entire area. She might have been at Disneyland.

I was pushed farther and farther to the edge of the property. I made a few feeble protests to no one in particular about needing to get back to work, and finally someone barked, “So do we, lady. Check back with Mom in a few days, okay? You’re sort of in the way here.”

“Mom?”

“Sergeant O’Malley. Nickname.”

Just as I was climbing back into my car, Richard Sta-pley arrived, gliding in on his bike.

“Good Lord, is it true?” he asked, swinging his left leg gracefully over the seat, dismounting, and resting his bike against an oak tree. Tall and patrician, he was just as ready to take command of this situation as he had of me a few hours earlier.

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Stapley.”

“Please, call me Richard. What did the police say?”

“Not much they can say at this point, except that I seem to have stumbled upon a very old corpse.”

“Good grief,” he said, bending down and fussing with his bicycle clips. “What was it?”

“A baby.”

He shook out his pant cuffs and recreased his pants with a quick thumb and forefinger on each leg. “I knew those girls were strange, but I never imagined anything like this.” He straightened up, resuming his military bearing. “Mike O’Malley called me; I’d better go talk to him.”

I was getting tired of being dismissed, so I decided to return the favor. “I have had a long day. All I want to do now is head home. The police will let me know when I can come back, but I’m sure it’ll be at least a few days. That’s okay. It’ll give me a chance to do some research.”

“That’s the spirit. Go home and try to relax. We’ll take care of everything here.”

On the way home, I slowed down as I drove by the police substation. The two- story strip mall was diagonally across the road from the Paradise Diner and was home to a handful of local businesses-Shep’s Wines and Liquors, Penny’s Nails-and sandwiched in between the Martial Arts Family Center and the Dunkin’ Donuts was the substation. I’d been kidding about the donuts. Now I wondered if O’Malley got the belly from the donut shop or the liquor store.

Suddenly I was anxious to get home. I picked up speed. The same manicured lawns and tidy flower beds I’d passed in the morning whizzed by, but instead of critiquing the plant selections, now I wondered what long-buried secrets they, too, might be hiding.