Story Excerpt
The Poisons Garden
by Janet Hutchings
A package out for delivery. That’s what she was. Deposited on the train by Aunt Lyla’s butler in Manhattan and collected by the Havimores’ man-of-all-work from the station at Rhinecliff. Anything to make sure she got out of New York, where she was spending too many hours, in her aunt’s opinion, in the company of Mr. Ellery Queen.
She consented largely due to Ellery’s absence, but that was beyond Lyla’s comprehension. Not that Ellery wasn’t around; he phoned regularly, pleading with her to come over and type some correspondence or other. But mentally he was orbiting in another galaxy, caught in the gravity of his last case. The whole matter would have had the aspect of a Gothic novel—complete with penniless heiress, sinister relations, a rumored hidden fortune, and (incredibly) a disappearing house—were it not for the very real evil that had lain in wait for Ellery.
Four months later, he still hadn’t entirely regained his equilibrium. His absorption, in the aftermath of the case, with the welfare of the no-longer-penniless Miss Mayhew rubbed Nikki the wrong way. And so she trundled up the Hudson, gaping at a river whose unfolding panoramas she hadn’t seen since childhood. At the station, the nodding heads of the few remaining daffodils were the only greeting she received, the Havimore retainer muttering nothing but “You the lady for Havimore House?” before hoisting her bag into the bed of a Roadster pickup.
Her reception at the house itself was even less ceremonious. Abandoned in the hall, she was nearly tripped over by a young man with a book in hand, who looked at her quizzically then passed silently by, ignoring Nikki’s “Excuse me—!”
It was the last straw. Pushing her bag into a corner, she ventured outside again to find the path to the greenhouses.
Aunt Lyla’s pretext for sending Nikki here was that her dear, dear friend Julia Havimore was having trouble meeting the spring demand for corsages. And how pleasant it would be for “Natalie” (her given name, rather than the nickname she preferred) to learn something about flower arrangement. How pleasant indeed, thought Nikki, sighing as she rolled up her sleeves. She might as well begin her servitude right away if no one had the grace to provide tea or show her to her room.
“Aunt” Julia was waving two girls in aprons toward a large greenhouse when she caught sight of Nikki. Nikki recognized her right away by the narrow jaw and thin nose, features that had detracted slightly from her beauty when she was younger. Now, paired with a graying chignon, they seemed to add an aura of dignity.
She saw immediately who Nikki was too.
“Oh, my. The little berry of a redheaded girl herself! Only not so little anymore. It was kind of Lyla to send you. I’d hug you, dear, but my hands are dirty. And I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to have to put you to work right away. We’ll talk as we work. First, why don’t you help bring some blooms from the greenhouses.” She made a shooing gesture in the direction of the aproned girls.
The greenhouse was divided into long raised beds bisected by a narrow path. Dazzling was the only word for the profusion of blooms, but even more arresting to Nikki, because it was unexpected, were the harvesters stretched on planks across them. Middle-aged women in skirts, cardigans, and brogues, their broad hips rose like whales breaching a pink and purple ocean as they balanced on their sides snagging bloom after bloom, handing them off to a boy who scuttled up and down the middle.
When he’d gathered enough to fill Julia’s order, he handed the mover to Nikki and her cohorts, who delivered them to the “composing shed,” where the florists waited at their sawhorse tables.
A space was cleared for Nikki next to Julia, and the older woman showed her how to make the angled cuts to the stems, how much greenery to back the blossoms with, and which combinations of flowers were to be used for the various styles of corsage—all the while reminiscing about the occasions when her great friend Lyla had brought Nikki up with her for events at Vassar (her alma mater) and had stopped for a visit at Havimore House.
In fact, although Nikki’d gone with Lyla to Vassar many times, she could recall only two occasions when they’d visited Havimore House. There had been, if her childhood memories were reliable, some circumstances that made Lyla reluctant to bring Nikki here. Well, whatever it had been, it was obviously not a concern to her aunt anymore. Or at least it was less worrisome to her than Ellery.
“Be careful not to let the petals touch the edge of the box when you lay it in, Natalie,” Julia said when Nikki reached the packaging stage. “It’ll cause them to brown, and we have a reputation to uphold. We Havimores have been florists since the eighties, you know, when my father had the good fortune to obtain a rare stock of double Parma violets from Europe. There was that big boom in violets just afterward, and that’s how he was able to buy this land.”
“I know, Aunt Julia. There wasn’t a girl around who didn’t yearn for a corsage of violets when I was in school.”
“Well, we’re lucky that my father foresaw the end of that fad. A lot of other growers didn’t. He always ran a business in pharmaceutical plants alongside the floral trade—for heart medicine and painkillers. It’s what gave us the money to transition to new crops—gardenias and peonies and roses, mostly. Now it’s the medicinal market that’s changing, of course. It’s all synthetic drugs now, and that requires complex scientific knowledge. Fortunately, my nephew’s quite a prodigy in that regard. . . .”
They labored for hours, with Julia clearly trying to inspire a sense of awe in Nikki by sharing with her further snippets of Havimore history. Their throats parched by talk and pollen, Julia finally sent someone to halt the harvesting and gave permission, when the last of the flowers were boxed, for everyone to go home.
“Hal-le-lujeh!” breathed Nikki. Time to get settled in her room, take a long bath, maybe even nap before dinner.