“No. This is Beatriz.”
Peter had invited her out for lunch and she didn’t want me along and was that all right? I listened to her chatter and watched a bee humming around the forsythia bush just below me. Much more interesting than any phone conversation. “Beatriz, just call Philippe. If it’s fine with him, it’s fine with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” The bee was gone now.
“I…Did I wake you up?”
“No.”
“And you will drive me to my appointment tomorrow?”
“Yes.” I made an effort. “I’ll be there at eight-fifteen tomorrow to pick you up. Enjoy your lunch.”
“And you don’t mind that I won’t be there to help with the flowers?”
I told her I didn’t mind. Eventually she went away. When I dialed Julia’s number, it rang and rang and rang. She had even turned her machine off.
To many Americans, dirt exists only to be eroded with four-wheel drive or mountain bike. The great outdoors with its fragile systems was created for the convenience of fools who tear into the heart of a wilderness area to gawk at the grizzlies, get indignant if one gets too close, and roar off in a cloud of noxious exhaust, trailing Rush Limbaugh at ninety decibels and leaving behind their sewage.
If only they looked, they would see a world in their own back garden.
Gardening, the English vice. Kneeling on the grass, I could see a microcosm in a yard of dirt. Ants, ranging from lone black soldier ants with mandibles the size of my little fingernail, to the pale streams of fire ants like tiny amber necklaces. A glistening pink roll and wriggle of earthworm; beetles like apple seeds. Ladybugs—which the English call ladybirds—sitting like spatters of wet enamel on the underside of leaves. Black wasps with their menacing dangle of legs. A daddy longlegs trundling like some strange Mars Rover over granular soil flecked with specks of mica, then waving front legs at a pecan shell turning soft as rotting cardboard.
Sometimes I used my fingers, digging down into the rich dirt, feeling it push under my nails. No doubt I’d regret it later, but it was good to feel so much life under my hands. I dug, tapped an impatiens or marigold free of its PVC pot, dropped it in the hole, brushed dirt back around the pale green stem, pressed firmly until the young plant stood on its own. I wondered if there was a group anywhere in the state that planted trees in deforested areas. I could volunteer for that as soon as Beatriz was on her plane and I’d prepared a report for Julia.
I straightened, took a look. Bright, welcoming colour filled about half the beds. The back garden now looked a place for people as well as wildlife. I wondered if Julia liked flowers.
It took a while to clean up enough to eat lunch. I tried Julia again. Ring, ring, ring. I went back to the garden.
Evening. I called Julia. Ring ring ring. What had she found out that she wanted to tell me on Saturday night?
I tried to settle to a book by some philosopher called Roszak who declared ecology and psychology were the same thing. According to his bio he wrote fiction; god knows what it was like.
I had no way of knowing if leaving the answering machine off was one of Julia’s normal habits. Maybe she had found something out and done something stupid.
Her house was in Virginia Highlands, a brick tudor with roses outside. She liked some flowers, then. I parked down the street. There were lights on, one upstairs, one down. Her car was in the drive, and I could hear music. Light jazz. I watched for a while. Eventually the light upstairs went out and another came on in what might be the dining room. I saw the swing of shadow hair against the blinds.
I drove away.
I was running around the corner in Inman Park, only this time she didn’t take the corner wide, we didn’t bump into each other, she went on to the house and had her flesh blown off her bones when it went up, nothing left but a standing skeleton surrounded by chunks of what looked like raw pork.
I got stuck in morning traffic a mile from the Nikko. I tried Julia’s home number. Ring ring ring. I called information, got her office number. Her voice told me to leave a message for Lyon Art.
“Julia? Aud. This morning I’ll be with my client, whom you met Saturday night. I drop her at the airport at midday but will be free after that. I have the information you want. Call me at home or on my cell phone.” I gave her the number.
Beatriz was full of beans when I picked her up. She chattered at me all the way back to the city, and walked into Perrin & Norrander full of confidence. Afterwards, she smiled all the way to the airport.
I parked in a no parking zone and helped her carry her bags to the first-class check-in. “I think they’ll offer me the job,” she said suddenly as the clerk stamped various things and put tags on her luggage.
“Congratulations.”
She looked down at her shoes, suddenly shy. “It means I’ll be back in a month or so. Will you…I mean, you’re probably busy…but…”
“Someone will have to advise me about what flowers to plant.” She gave me a tentative smile, and I found I was smiling back. “Call when you’ve booked your flight.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I think you are a very kind woman.”
I zipped east on I-20. Honeycutt may have given the order, but he was not the one who actually lit the match that was supposed to have burned Julia Lyons-Bennet to a carbon carcass. All of a sudden I wanted that name; a little tidbit for Denneny. Perhaps it was time to have a little chat with Michael Honeycutt.
I was following the hairpin bend of the Moreland exit by the time I got through to his secretary. “I’m Katy Willis, personal assistant to Charles Sweeting,” I told him in a brisk, impersonal voice. “Mr. Sweeting would like an appointment to see Mr. Honeycutt at his earliest convenience.”
“Mr. Honeycutt left very early this morning for a six-day trip to the Seychelles. If it’s urgent, perhaps I could help?”
“No, I believe it’s a personal matter. Perhaps we could go ahead and schedule an hour for, say, next Tuesday?”
“I could manage to squeeze him in for forty minutes on Wednesday at ten.”
“Thank you.” At five minutes past ten next Wednesday morning Michael Honeycutt would go grey under his Indian Ocean tan. By the time I was finished with him, he would want to cancel the rest of his appointments that week, but I would have that name.
When I got home I spent half an hour watering the flowers. The cheerful pinks and yellows and violet in the two front troughs reminded me of something: the window boxes lining the smart Mayfair mews where my mother had lived the last two years. She had never seen my house.
When making a rocking chair it is extremely important for the runners to curve in exact symmetry. I hummed as I checked one against the other; shaved; sanded. Perhaps when it was done, I would ship the chair to my mother. Perhaps I would go visit her for a week this summer.
Birds sang their evening chorus. The harsh screeching of a blue jay drowned them out for a while, then I heard again the trill of a cardinal, liquid as the sunset spreading like cranberry juice along the cloud line between the trees.
When I had the runners shaped to my satisfaction, I started on the armrests. I wanted them wide and comfortable, but not so wide that they overwhelmed the balance of the piece. I went over to the far wall, ran my fingers over a few pieces of pine, thinking. Eventually I selected one, brought it back to the table vise.
The doorbell chimed. I leaned the wood against the table, knocked my boots against the table leg so I wouldn’t trample sawdust through the house, and went to answer it. It was Julia, lips like sunset, hair like evening shadow.
“Will you let me in?”
I stood aside and gestured her in.