“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.
CHAPTER 49
“Just hold off on the sledgehammer until we shoot video,” Lucy said, thinking ahead.
“I’m not razing it. Besides, I’ve got over a hundred stills.”
“This isn’t public television-I need video. I can’t just zoom in and zoom out on the same damn pictures for twenty- seven minutes.”
Characteristically, Lucy had become obsessed with the Yoly project and had all but moved in with me. In no time she’d written a script, shot a ton of additional footage, and interviewed everyone remotely connected to Yoly, including, with Felix acting as translator, Celinda Rivera, who was still in the United States, visiting cousins in New York.
Jon Chappell’s help was invaluable. Lucy had dangled a coexecutive producer credit as the carrot to keep him engaged, but he needed little incentive-being in the same room with Lucy seemed to be payment enough for him.
“If there were Kennedys involved, even distant ones, I could be looking at a Peabody Award,” she’d said early on.
“Well, don’t start writing your speech now,” I’d said. “Not only aren’t there Kennedys, we may not even have a Fifield.” I replayed my visit with Dina.
“Something going on in Washington?” Lucy said. “In the summer… in the early seventies? She ever hear of Watergate? It must be dark, living your whole life with your head up your butt.”
Evidently, the summer Yoly disappeared, both Mr. Fifields were out of state, otherwise engaged, and could prove it. Which left the amazingly well- preserved- some would say pickled-Mrs. Fifield with only her lusty Mediterranean gardener for company. She made do.
“That rascal,” Lucy said. “I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day. But if Guido Chiaramonte was boffing the very rich, very worldly Dina Fifield, would he waste his time with poor, simple Yoly Rivera?”
“In a heartbeat,” I said. “Dina might have made him feel like a Roman god in the sack, but once they were vertical she probably fell right back into character and reminded him that she was slumming with him. With Yoly, he’d be the worldly, upper- class partner.”
By the time I had a realistic estimate and a signed contract with Dina, Felix and Hugo had assembled a workforce and we were ready to start as soon as the ink was dry. Not surprisingly, our first task was dismantling the fountain.
The marble pool and some of the statues would remain intact. The trumpeting angels would lead Dina to her gazebo; the cherubs would frolic in her serenity garden; the massive Roman god would preside over her waterfront pavilion. The rest I’d figure out along the way.
The smaller statues weighed close to three hundred pounds each and required three men to lift them off the brass rods anchoring them to the fountain’s base. We hired a piano mover to raise Neptune and deposit him on his new perch facing the water on a quickly built platform of gravel and Pennsylvania bluestone. That alone took half a day, and anyone watching might well have wondered why I was more interested in a hole in the ground than a thousand- pound marble statue hanging precariously by a cable. Once Neptune was enthroned, I sent the men home.
Lucy was there to record the event, if, in fact, there was one; and Felix and the newly sprung Hugo provided the muscle.
In the center of the now empty marble pool was a concrete ring housing the fountain’s pump and tubing. Four cinder blocks surrounded the pump.
We moved the cinder blocks and external pump. Underneath the pump was a thick square of black slate. It took Felix and Hugo and two heavy crowbars to flip over the slate. Black landscape fabric was wrapped around a lumpy, unidentifiable object, but poking through the weed mat was something that looked eerily familiar. A bone. A bone I was convinced belonged to Yoly Rivera.
CHAPTER 50
“There’s such a fine line between cheesy and clever.” Babe Chinnery held up that morning’s edition of the Springfield Bulletin. “GARDENER DIGS UP TRUTH IN 30-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY.” I curtsied and slid onto a stool at the counter to a smattering of applause from my fellow diners at the Paradise.
“Breakfast is on the house,” Babe said, pouring me some coffee. “If I had a liquor license I’d buy you a drink.”
The previous week had been a blur. The bones found underneath Dina Fifield’s fountain were conclusively identified as Yoly’s remains by matching a sample of her DNA with Celinda Rivera’s. Guido Chiaramonte had apparently stashed her body under Neptune and, over the years, in the course of checking on Dina Fifield’s plumbing, kept an eye on Yoly.
Jon Chappell’s editor had unleashed his inner Rupert and given him carte blanche on Yoly’s story. To Jon’s credit he kept the tone reasonably respectful.
Guido’s killer was still at large, but as long as Hugo was in the clear, I was leaving that problem to the professionals. The closemouthed day laborer community wasn’t providing many answers, and Mike O’Malley feared the killer had already left the country and would never be found. Like Yoly, Guido would wind up on a yellowing flyer on someone’s bulletin board.