The Gardener of Eden Read online

  THE

  GARDENER

  OF EDEN

  David Downie

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  In memory of my father,

  Charles E. Downie,

  the real gardener of Eden.

  PART ONE

  Homecoming

  “She was Eve after the fall, but before the bitterness of it was felt. She wore life as a rose in her bosom.”

  —O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings

  ONE

  Beverley could hear the surf over the wind. Rollers slammed into the totem pole–shaped pinnacles of stone edging the beach, sending up plumes of spray. Looking down from the bluff, she watched the man in the hooded black windbreaker crossing the expanse of wet black sand. Reaching the loose gravel where it showed gray against the blueness of the sky, he slowed, scrambled over broken shale, stooped to scoop up something shiny, then climbed the steep ravine toward the parking lot where Beverley stood, buffeted by intermittent gusts.

  The man’s stride, strangely sure-footed, was long and determined, his head was bent, and his noticeably large hands were clasped behind his back, as if he were a prisoner cuffed from behind.

  “A crow,” Beverley said to herself. “No, a monk, in a cowl, with something around his neck.” The thought of ecclesiastics took her back to the Convent of Jesus and Mary. It sent a shudder from her fleshy nape to her dimpled knees. As the man crested the bluff, his silhouette’s almost supernatural effect on her was spoiled by the close-up vision of bright green-and-yellow hiking boots laced together and dangling over his shoulders.

  “I’m so awfully sorry,” she said in a loud soprano voice, startling him as he neared the spot where his RV had been parked for the last ten days. “Another foot and it might have done some damage.” Beverley touched the pearls at her throat and smiled, pointing at his vehicle.

  Unzipping the windbreaker and pulling back his hood, the man Beverley had come to think of as the Mystery Man let his flowing gray hair and bushy beard tumble free.

  She took a step back. “I’d swear you were Jesus Christ,” she gasped. Then she let out a nervous laugh and added, “Or maybe Rasputin.”

  With deep-set ice-blue eyes sparkling under cascading eyebrows, the man surveyed her, the fallen tree, its tip curled across the roof of his RV, and the large rumbling patrol car parked at a dramatic angle a few feet away, as if it had skidded sideways to a halt. The engine of the four-wheel-drive sheriff’s department Interceptor SUV clacked and shook in time with the swirling lights on its roof. The man’s shaggy brows rose and fell as if synced with the engine. Beverley wondered if he would turn on his heels and run back to the beach.

  “It broke your fence good, Ms. Beverley,” a nasal voice bellowed over the wind. The wild-looking man pivoted as a young, muscular sheriff’s deputy came around the back of the RV and waved him into the lee of the wind. “Looks like you were both lucky,” the deputy shouted again, cupping his hands. He eyed the stranger with obvious distaste, seeming to smell overripe cheese. “Is this your vehicle?” he asked, letting his hands fall to his sides. The right one rested atop a bulging holster, the other found and felt a set of handcuffs.

  The bearded man shaded his eyes from the heatless morning sun, shifting his face out of the glare. He watched the deputy’s blunt fingers. “Yes, Officer.” His voice rang dry, like boots on gravel, a voice unused for days at a time. “Yes,” he repeated, louder, clearing his throat.

  “Seen anything unusual on the beach?” the sheriff’s deputy barked, glancing past the man at the breakers.

  “No, sir.”

  “No shipwrecks, sea monsters, or cadavers,” Beverley interjected, “or other objects and phenomena clearly related to a tree falling on a camper in a parking lot?”

  The deputy’s shoulders rose toward his earlobes, the nasal tone of his voice tightening. “If you see something unusual,” he snapped, “make sure you call us.”

  “Now that I think of it,” said the bearded stranger, his voice warming, “there is a wild pig on the beach right below, dead and outgassing.”

  “That’s what I smell.” The deputy grunted. “Just a hog?” he asked. “Nothing else?”

  The man thought for a beat. “Nothing,” he said, “except for the oil cans and plastic, and something I’d guess was a crushed shopping cart. But it was way out in the surf, so I couldn’t see it clearly.”

  “They must’ve been shopping for seafood,” Beverley said.

  Ignoring her, the deputy grunted again. “What about this vehicle? Any damage?”

  The bearded man climbed without apparent effort onto the RV’s stairs. Reaching with one long arm, he lifted the tree off a folding bicycle strapped to the roof. Again, apparently without effort, he walked the tree’s floppy tip to the ground at the deputy’s jackbooted feet. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s soft and fresh.” Crushing a fistful of pale green cypress leaves, the man smelled his fingertips. He opened his palm to the plump woman and the deputy. Both stepped back, the sheriff’s deputy instinctively unsnapping his holster. “Macrocarpa,” the stranger said in a pleasant baritone, making the word operatic while trying to hide his surprise at the deputy’s overreaction. “More like lime than lemon at this time of year,” he added. “What a shame it came down.”

  “Macro-carpa?” the deputy asked. “Sounds like some disease.”

  “It’s Latin,” said Beverley. “That’s deadly, if you don’t like the pope.”

  The deputy laughed convulsively, wiping at his mustachioed mouth with the back of one large hairy hand. “Will you ever let up, Ms. Beverley?” he said, shaking his head. “We have no problem with the pope. He doesn’t like us.”

  Stepping out of earshot back into the wind, the sheriff’s deputy cupped his hands, enunciating slowly into his helmet mike. His closely shaved, fully fleshed, noticeably featureless tanned cheeks telegraphed the gist of his report as Beverley and the stranger looked on. “Clean brand-name clothes and high-tech hiking boots,” he said. “Clean fingernails and toenails—he’s barefoot. Late-model Sockeye recreational vehicle. No rust, new tires, New York plates, no mud or dust on them. Caucasian, male, older, educated, unusually tall and wiry. He came through the checkpoint on Highway 12 a couple weeks ago. He must be in the data bank. An eccentric urban individual, not a vagrant, probably harmless, though he likes trees and talks funny. I might fine him or bring him in for questioning and make him move on.”

  Fitting a sanitized smile over his face, the deputy walked back to Beverley and the man. “Macro-carpa?” he asked again. “I thought it was a plain old cypress tree.”

  “That depends on what you mean by plain old,” the man answered, trying to sound affable.

  “Branches come down all the time.” Beverley sighed, tossing a strand of bright orange-red hair off her forehead. “But this is the first certified entire cypress tree I’ve lost in three years. I’m inclined to ask for my money back.” She let out a peal of girlish laughter. It did not match her age, girth, or dyed hair. The stranger could not help noticing her pink stretch top with a white, skirt-like frill at the bottom, and her mauve stretch pants. They were patterned with eights and nines of clubs and bloomed beneath her. Remarkably large, her head was joined seamlessly to her collarbone. Around the flesh that passed for a neck was the string of pearls she touched, moving them back and forth like worry beads.

  “You been around three years already?” the deputy asked, chuckling despite himself. “It’s good the motel’s up and running.”

  “It’s not a motel, Tom, it’s a resort,” she teased. “Now that I know they’re macrocarpa trees my occupancy rate is sure to rise.” Beverley laughed her nervous, high-pitched, girlish laugh again. “No need to fill out a rep
ort,” she told Tom. “They’ll never pay, my deductible is too high.”

  “That’s all right by me,” the beachcomber said.

  Tom smoothed his apricot mustache and licked his lips. They were thick and split by the wind and sun. The bearded man glanced over and read THOMAS SMITHSON off the name tag pinned to the deputy’s military-style khaki uniform. It wiggled when his bulging chest and arms flexed. “Thing is,” said Tom, “I’m supposed to file something, it’s the regulations. You are occupying two parking spaces when you’re only entitled to one. I ought to fine you and make you move.” He paused again, weighing whether it was worth the hassle. Beverley would let the whole town know he was bullying an old man again.

  “The lot sure is full to bursting,” Beverley chimed in. “I’ll bet the raccoons are awful mad this vehicle is hogging their space. They’ll be wondering what any of this has to do with my tree and his camper. For the life of me, I don’t know, but the ways of the law are many and mysterious, amen.”

  “He’s parked where emergency vehicles come in,” Tom objected.

  “I’ve seen a few too many of those lately,” she said.

  “Well,” Tom said, “if he can move over there”—he raised a paw toward the garbage cans—“I’ll let him off, but he’s got to leave soon.” He screwed up his lips. “Since the tree is yours, and the fence is yours,” he added, “and there’s no damage to this vehicle . . .” Scribbling on a narrow pad, he left the sentence to hang unfinished. Then he slipped the pad into a belt made heavy by the holster, Mace canister, truncheon, handcuffs, and radio transceiver. “You’ve been here about two weeks—”

  “Ten days,” the man interrupted. “The helpful woman at city hall said I can stay two weeks without a permit.”

  “Unless an officer of the peace asks you to move on.”

  “Why might he do that?”

  The deputy grinned again, his mustache catching the sunlight, giving him the look of a calico cat, his eyes hidden by wraparound sunglasses. “For instance, if you were causing a public nuisance, or were in danger.” Tom glanced at Beverley.

  “Oh, he’s no nuisance,” she said, “you barely know he’s here except to see him on the beach before dawn doing some yoga exercise routine, and then sometimes I smell a wood fire and pancakes and bacon.” Her smile widened. “Until he got onto the macrocarpa trees, I wondered if he was a short-order cook. My guests keep asking me where the restaurant is, and why we don’t have one. And he’s very neat. He wired up those garbage cans when the wind blew them over last week, after the teenagers set them alight and shot them full of holes. I’ve seen him picking up litter in the lot, too, running after paper like a scene from that movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “The Paper Chase,” Beverley said, then chortled, touching her pearls.

  Tom fought off a smile. “I wouldn’t mind some of that breakfast right now,” he muttered.

  “I could brew up some fresh coffee,” Beverley offered, “there’s a bag of leftover cinnamon rolls. The guests didn’t want them, not healthy, they said, not organic.”

  Tom shook his head. “Can’t do it.” He grunted. Then he lowered his sunglasses and winked. “Seems you’ve been watching your new neighbor pretty close?”

  “Just doing my patriotic duty,” she said. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”

  “Sure is,” said Tom.

  “Martial law,” Beverley quipped.

  “Don’t pay attention to Ms. Beverley’s jokes,” Tom said, turning to the stranger. “It’s a county-wide special ordinance. This is a free country.”

  “Well, you haven’t outlawed my sense of humor yet,” she said.

  “Not yet,” Tom echoed, “but we might.”

  The man turned away from the banter, glancing down the coast. Clearing his throat, he sang out, “No rain today?”

  “No rain,” Beverley confirmed. “It hardly ever rains, that’s why people like it. No rain and no heat. Lots of wind and fog, though, you’ve got to love them or you’re in trouble.”

  A gust kicked up, blowing sheets of dust across the lot. Pockets of morning fog still hung in the cypress trees and the scrub on the coastal hills. It lay in moist, aromatic tatters across the sloping grounds of the Eden Seaside Resort & Cottages, half hiding the signage. Only the glowing VACANCY sign stood out, its pink neon coils blinking.

  “Out of state,” the deputy remarked, indicating the license plate. “Like Ms. Beverley here?”

  The bearded man raised his brows in mute response.

  “On vacation?”

  “That’s it,” he agreed, “and what a beautiful spot.”

  Unsure whether the man was being ironic, the deputy tipped his helmet back, remembered the built-in camera, and pulled the helmet back down. “You got a gun in that vehicle?”

  “No, Officer,” the man blurted out. He was about to add something about not liking guns but didn’t have time.

  “He can have one of mine,” Beverley cut in, laughing her strange high-pitched laugh. “I’ve got a whole roomful of them.”

  Tom glared at the stranger. “You telling me you didn’t hear them shooting off semiautomatics the night before last?”

  “Woke the dead,” Beverley said, “I should know. I’ve been in a coma most of my life.”

  The older man stroked his beard. “Officer, I am a sound sleeper, besides, the surf has been pretty loud.”

  “It sounds like Armageddon,” Beverley put in. “Hellfire and semiautomatics, it’s real comforting.”

  Tom thrust out his chin but could not repress another convulsive guffaw that soiled his mustache. Wiping away the strands of spittle, he looked sideways past the stranger. “Your RV spring a leak?”

  “Two,” Beverley said, shuffling to the far side of the RV, then walking back with two corks in her pudgy pink hands.

  “Don’t touch the evidence,” Tom blurted.

  “What evidence?” Beverley asked. “He hasn’t committed a crime, as far as I know.” She paused and thrust the corks out.

  “This one’s from a Napa Valley Cab,” she remarked, studying the markings and sniffing the tip. “And this one’s from an exotic foreign locale, it’s Barolo, so that makes it Italian. Good thing you weren’t inside the sardine can when someone decided to perforate it,” she said to the stranger, “otherwise I could have added you to my antique colander collection.” She clucked as she stuck the corks back in. “That’s a kind of sieve, Tom, in case you didn’t know.”

  Tom frowned. “Where’d that happen?”

  “I have no idea, Officer, I only noticed yesterday.”

  “Lucky you like wine,” Beverley interposed, “and lucky you don’t spook easily. Those are the biggest-caliber semiautomatic holes I’ve seen. They look more like they came from anti-aircraft or anti-tank weapons. Military-style weapons.” She paused for effect, grinning at Tom. “Looks like someone’s trying to scare you away, doesn’t it? Did you tell Tom about your flat tire?”

  “No,” the stranger said. He hesitated, scratching his beard. “The air went out of the right front tire, about five days ago.”

  “Another mysterious leak.” Beverley laughed. “Purely coincidental. Because if it had been the result of malfeasance, Tom here or someone else down at the county sheriff’s department would’ve seen the perpetrators at work, right Tom? You are all-seeing and all-knowing.” Another sudden fit of laughter made Beverley’s upper arms and shoulders quake, revealing white folds usually hidden by sunburned rolls of flesh. “That’s why the camera’s up,” she added, fiddling with her pearls and raising her eyebrows at the streetlight across the Old Coast Highway. Mounted on top, a camera protected by a thick glass shield glinted, reflecting the sun.

  “Ms. Beverley feels safer now, don’t you?” Tom asked, not expecting an answer. “It’s bulletproof.”

  “Why not take a shot at it,” Beverley goaded, waving at the camera, “test the guarantee.”

  Tom flushed. “We saw the tree come down on your
vehicle,” he said testily to the stranger. “We called the motel. Ms. Beverley said you were on the beach. You might’ve been in there, and you might’ve been hurt. That’s another potential danger. This is storm season. When you don’t see surfers out, you know we’re overdue for some weather.”

  “Long overdue,” Beverley put in. “The Universal Deluge also known as the Flood is right around the corner. With my luck it’ll coincide with that tsunami everyone’s waiting for. I’ve already lost half an acre. No wonder we got the property so cheap.”

  The deputy’s radio crackled in his SUV, the speaker-mike clipped to his short-sleeved shirt echoing the dispatcher’s voice. Tom Smithson cocked his head, a calico cat, listening to a call and sizing up the odd-bird of a stranger. “Today’s Thursday,” he said, calculating, a twang slipping in, “so, if no one has harmed you till now, I’m guessing you’ll be okay for a couple more days. They know we’re watching.”

  “They?” asked the man. “Who are they?”

  “If we knew,” Tom said, “they’d be behind bars.”

  “Or Dundee,” Beverley quipped, “like that hog on the beach.”

  Tom studied his outsized wristwatch. “You know how to use that old chainsaw, Ms. Beverley?”

  She crossed her meaty arms, rocking her head. “Heck no, I can wait for Taz to show up. Now that this mysterious gentleman has seen there’s no damage to his camper, I think it’ll be all right. I just hope the deer don’t get through and eat my roses.”

  “Forget the deer,” Tom said, swiveling toward his car, “you don’t want those feral hogs getting in. They’ll eat you and your guests before you can call 911.” He brayed out a laugh, pleased with himself. “Does that boy use a saw?” he asked. “I would hardly believe it.”

  Beverley shook her head. “Taz has an incapacitating allergy to dangerous equipment. I might just get him to drag out one of those old cages and set it up by the breach, catch myself a wild pig, and invite you folks to a barbecue tomorrow.”