young matron, either.
The kind of work he was doing didn’t take a great deal of concentration, and his mind had a tendency to wander. If he let himself, he could see Laurel Bancroft as some kind of enchanted princess under a spell; she had that fragile look about her. She was trapped in her castle of an old house, drugged and sleeping while life passed her by. And he was a knight-of-old come to hack his way through the thorns and briers to save her.
Jeez, he must be losing it.
Some knight. No armor, for one thing. A pair of hedge clippers in his hands instead of a sword. Hardly perfect, either. And he was definitely not pure.
A screen door slammed at the side of the house. Maisie rounded the corner and leaned over the railing.
“Lunchtime, boy,” she called. “Sandwiches up here on the veranda. You want water or tea?”
He stopped, wiping sweat from his eyes with his forearm before he frowned up at her. “‘Boy’?”
She gave him a grin that put a thousand wrinkles in her face and made him feel good inside. “You don’t like that? I could have called you dummy for being out in this sun without a hat. Water or tea?”
“Water.” He should have known better than to try intimidating a woman who claimed she had changed his diaper when he was a kid. “Where’s Mrs. Bancroft?”
The elderly housekeeper’s gaze slid away from his. “She don’t eat lunch. You want to wash up, there’s a bathroom off the kitchen.”
It looked as if Laurel Bancroft was avoiding him. He didn’t know whether that was good, because it was a sign that he disturbed her, or bad, because it meant she couldn’t stand him. Either way, he was going to have to do something about it.
At least Maisie didn’t desert him. She brought her chicken salad and tea out to the table on the shady front veranda. While he ate, he teased her about her diet fare and how much her old man was going to miss her curves when they were gone. After a while, he got around to what he really wanted to say.
“So what is it with the lady of the house? Is she a recluse or just stuck-up?” He leaned back in his chair, rubbing the condensation from the sides of his water glass with his thumb while he tried to look bored and a little disgusted.
Maisie gave him a narrow look. “She doesn’t have too much for people, is all.”
“How’s that?”
“Her husband died, you know that?”
He nodded as he massaged the biceps in his right arm that had begun to tighten on him.
“Did you know she killed him?” she asked.
Shock brought him upright. “You’re bullsh—I mean, there’s no way!”
“She did it, God’s truth,” Maisie said with a shake of her head. “Not that she meant to. He stepped behind her car as she was backing out of the garage. But there were folks who claimed it was on purpose. The mother-in-law, for one.”
“Nobody else believed it, though, right? I mean, just look at her. How could they?”
“Some people will believe anything. Anyway, seems Laurel and Howard had been having problems. Then there was a big life-insurance policy.”
“But nothing came of it?”
“Nothing official, no investigation. Sadie Bancroft, the husband’s mother, said it was on account of Sheriff Tanning being Laurel’s old boyfriend. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. Anyway, it blew over.”
“Except for the gossip?”
“Yeah, well, there’s always that part.”
He tilted his head. “So she’s hiding out. But why, if she really didn’t mean to do it?”
“You want to know that, you’ll have to ask her.”
Maisie was avoiding his gaze. Alec wondered why. “Think she’ll tell me?”
“Might.” The older woman stood and began stacking dishes. “Depends maybe on how you go about it and why you want to know.” She walked off with her load, leaving him to himself.
Alec sat on for a few minutes, drinking water as the ice melted in his glass, and gazing out over the garden at what he had done and what he still needed to do. From up here, he could see the outlines, barely, of what had been a typical front yard in the old days. It had been fenced with white pickets to keep out the cows that ranged freely back then, with a gate accessing the driveway, which passed in front of the house, then made a sharp right turn into the garage that was separate from the house. A straight brick sidewalk cut from the front gate to the steps, and curving walkways followed the oval ends of the house around toward the back.
Planting had apparently been haphazard, except for the great treelike camellias and Cape jasmine at the fence corners and the roses along the pickets and over the arbors above the gates. He had found evidence of bulbs of all kinds everywhere, from daffodils and iris to licoris. Originally, the soil between the plantings would have been swept clean of every blade of grass and raked in patterns. Sometime in the forties or fifties, probably, Saint Augustine grass had been planted in the open spots. There were still patches of the thick sod here and there, although the rest was choked with weeds and briers and enough saplings to stock a small forest.
And he had to get after it. He drained his glass, picked up his sweat-damp gloves and went back to work.
Maisie left in the middle of the afternoon, flipping him a quick wave as she drove off in her old boat of a car. He dug up the tough tubers of a mass of saw briers that were trying to climb a column while he allowed a little time to pass. When he thought it might not look too much like he had waited for the housekeeper to leave before storming the house, he pulled his discarded shirt back on, then went and gave the antique brass doorbell a quick twist.
The harsh, discordant sound rang through the house, and from around back, Laurel’s German shepherd, smart dog that he was, started barking immediately. Earlier, Alec had seen Sticks shut up on the porch. The two of them had eyed each other through the screen. Leaning against the doorjamb now, Alec wondered whether Laurel Bancroft was protecting him from the dog or the dog from him.
Laurel didn’t want to answer the door. She felt threatened, almost beleaguered inside her own house. She wished she had never mentioned the garden to Maisie, then this Alec Stanton would never have shown up. She could have gone on as she had been for nearly five years, in comfortable solitude with little contact with the outside world beyond her housekeeper, her grown children, and the man who drove the brown truck that brought her mail-order purchases.
Catalogs had become her lifelines to the world. It was a catalog of antique roses from a place in Texas that had started her thinking about the garden again after all this time. Now look where it had gotten her.
It was a strange blend of fear and irritation that made her snatch open the front door after the third ring. Her voice sounding distinctly tight and unwelcoming, she said, “Yes?”
“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” the dark-haired man who leaned on the doorjamb said, “but I needed to ask a couple of questions.”
