First Impressions

  “Country in the city.”

  “More or less. In Williamsburg, the houses had half-acre lots, and it is amazing that they could fit so many plantings into that small space. Every inch of their lots was used. And nothing was barren. They didn’t have the luxury of space.”

  Jared looked as though he wanted her to go on.

  “Take herbs, for instance. Today, if an American wants to plant herbs, they put in an herb garden. They tend to separate everything. Herbs are here, fruit trees are there, vegetables are there, and flowers are over there. All separate. But the colonials mixed things up—which, today, we’re rediscovering is a better idea.”

  “A cottage garden,” Jared said, looking pleased with himself.

  “No. A cottage garden prides itself on having twenty-five different species in one bed, and everything is free-form. The colonials couldn’t have stood that. They wanted order and symmetry, so they’d make a design, architectural really, and each shape would be bordered by a hedge of one plant, such as boxwood, or lavender. Then, inside, they’d put their flowers or vegetables. And they would put plants together that helped each other.”

  “How do plants help each other?”

  Eden opened a new book put out by her publishing house on companion gardening. “Certain plants like each other, and there’s a theory that if you have problems with bugs on your crop, then you should plant something else nearby that the bugs like more than your crop. In the Middle Ages, no one would plant strawberries without planting borage next to it. Lovage goes near the tomatoes, and hyssop has to be with grapes. They’re best friends. You grow catnip and use the branches as a mulch to repel the odious Japanese beetles—which, thankfully, the colonials didn’t have. Valerian draws worms to the surface to aerate the soil, and it adds minerals to the compost pile. And marigolds should be everywhere. Bugs hate the smell of marigolds.”

  Jared blinked at her. “And you say you’ve forgotten what you knew.”

  Eden smiled at his praise. “I think I can remember most of it with some study, and of course there’s so much more that’s been published since I was gardening. Back then, people didn’t even believe in mulch, and only a few people had any idea what a compost heap was.”

  “Imagine that.”

  Eden laughed. “It’s a matter of what’s old is new again. We’re finally learning that nature and our ancestors knew what they were doing. They were organic gardeners out of necessity, and now a lot of people are looking into how they did it.” She looked down at her paper. “Designing these gardens for other people is my problem. How do I do that? The colonials could get four gardens out of a half-acre lot.”

  “How big are the lots at Queen Anne?”

  She looked at him. “Unfortunately, I don’t know, but I assume the ones not on the water are from one to three acres.”

  “What would you do with three acres?”

  “In colonial times it would have been pastureland, with sheep, cows, and horses, but now it could be a croquet lawn or a putting green. Just so it’s not two and a half acres of lawn that has to be mowed.” When she looked down at her pad and began to write, Jared leaned across the table and looked at the paper. “Must have,” she’d written at the top of the page.

  must be enclosed

  must have outdoor structure(s)

  must have walkways

  must re-create the past

  “So show me a hypothetical design,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, glad for his interest, because she needed someone to run her ideas past. “It’s like this. Here’s the house.” She drew a rectangle near one end of the paper. “I’d bring in at least one old building and have it restored—and thank you for that idea. I’ll be sure and give you credit.” She drew a small square to the left of the page. “Now we connect the buildings with a walkway. Colonials didn’t have a huge lawn where people could walk anywhere they pleased.”

  “And these were the guys fighting for freedom?”

  “Before power mowers, having an acre of lawn to mow wasn’t freedom.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Here, near the house, we enclose a place for a pleasure garden that would be used for picnics and just sitting outside on warm evenings.” She drew a rectangle near the house, then surrounded it with what looked like rounded shrubs. “Trees at each corner, and over here a little gazebo, but you have to be careful of gazebos so you don’t make it look Victorian.”

  “Then what?” Jared asked.

  “The kitchen garden. Not too far from the house, but not too close either. A colonial kitchen garden was a thing of beauty and didn’t need to be hidden.” She drew six narrow rectangles, then a square with a diamond in the center. As Jared watched, she drew paths off the diamond.

  “I see. You could put a fountain there in the middle. An authentic-looking fountain, of course.”

  She smiled at him. “Now, curving pathways to connect all the spaces, and they’d all be tree-lined, of course. This was before air-conditioning, so shade was important. And, depending on the size of the property…” She turned the pages in the book to the plan for the Governor’s Palace and described the various “rooms.” There was a “ballroom garden” filled with topiaries, a maze made from hedges of American holly, a canal stocked with fish, and a bowling green. It was a garden that nearly bankrupted the government, but Eden thought it was worth every cent.

  Jared looked up from the book. “So where do the ATVs race?”

  “On the highway, with the eighteen-wheelers,” she said instantly, and he laughed.

  “I’ll take you on one for a spin one day, and you’ll love it.”

  “I doubt it,” she said, then looked at her watch. “I have to go meet Brad.” Her eyes pleaded with him to not go with her.

  “Sorry,” he said, “but it’s my duty to keep you safe. Tell Mr.—”

  She gave him a look to cut it out.

  “Granville,” Jared said. “Tell him that I’m going to help you with the designing.”

  She started to protest but stopped herself. What good would it do? “You wouldn’t happen to have a camera, would you?”

  “Digital, five million pixels, with a one gigabyte card.”

  She raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Okay, you can take pictures of everything for me.”

  “Meant to do that anyway,” he said softly. “I want you to get us into that house where Tess lived, okay?”

  Eden nodded. She wasn’t sure how she was going to ask Brad, but she’d figure out something. She smiled at McBride, and he smiled back. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

  “So what’s for lunch?” he asked, and she groaned.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHEN Eden saw Brad, she again marveled at how comfortable she felt with him. She wondered if it was because he was part of the Arundel family that Mrs. Farrington had been part of. For all that Brad was, more or less, a stranger, she felt as though she’d known him forever. Mrs. Farrington said that when you met the man, THE man, you started planning your wedding dress. So far in her life, every time Eden had dated a man for more than three months, she started planning how she was going to let him down easily. Never in her life had she been dropped by a man, but she’d had to tell several of them that it was over between them.

  But Brad was different, and she knew it—and so did he. When he saw her, his face lit up. Like a child at Christmas. Like she was a gift that he’d wanted all his life. We’ve had similar bad experiences, she thought, and we’ve never come close to finding that Great Love.

  Brad hurried forward, took both her hands in his, and kissed her cheeks. He looked like he wanted to do more, but instead he just stood there, holding her hands and looking into her eyes.

  “I hate to break this up,” Jared said from behind them, “but the architect is waggling at you.”

  “Waggling?” Brad said, smiling at the old-fashioned word. Still holding Eden’s hands, he turned to Drake Haughton, who looked exaggeratedly at his watch. “Sorry,”
Brad said to Eden, “but I’m on a strict timetable today. We have some buyers flying in from New York later this afternoon, and I have to be back here to meet with them. Shall we go?”

  Eden followed Brad to his car, and after a look at Jared, he seemed resigned to his presence. As Brad held the door open for her, he said quietly, “I see Mother Superior is well.” Eden giggled.

  Eden thought she was to meet with clients, but Brad told her that the meetings would start tomorrow. “Today I’m going to show you everything. You can’t go into a meeting without having seen the place.”

  “Of course not,” she said, glad to be with him. If McBride weren’t in the backseat, everything would have been perfect. Well, actually, perfect would mean that she wasn’t being investigated by the FBI, and people weren’t breaking into her house and filling it with poisonous snakes, and—

  “Are you okay?” Brad asked, glancing away from the road to look at her.

  “Fine. Just a little nervous about suddenly becoming a landscape designer. I spent the morning going over my gardening books and making a lot of notes. I hope people like the idea of these gardens. They’re not what most people want.”

  “Something I’ve found out in this business is that people love restrictions. Covenants put on property make them feel safe. The guy next door can’t park a boat in front of his house. They like that kind of thing. And I think they’ll like the idea of everyone having to make gardens that aren’t like the rest of the U.S.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You look nice. What did you do to make yourself look even better than you did yesterday?”

  “She took a bath and put big yellow curlers in her hair,” Jared said from the backseat, reminding them of his presence. “Eden wanted to ask you about a house you own.”

  Eden wanted to pinch McBride. She would have come to the house in time. Why did he have to rush things? And why did he have to remind Brad that they were living in the same house?

  Brad looked at her questioningly.

  “The overseer’s house down the road. I, uh…”

  “Her daughter is thinking of moving here to Arundel, so Eden thought she might like that house. I called a Realtor, and imagine our surprise to find out that you own it.”

  Twisting in her seat, Eden glanced at McBride in disgust. What was inside of him that he could lie so easily?

  “You’ll have to fight Minnie for the place,” Brad said. “She wants it very much, but I won’t let her have it.”

  “Why not?” Eden asked.

  “Maybe I should tell you now so you don’t learn it from gossip, but I am utterly selfish. I won’t let Minnie move into that house because I hate living alone. It’s that simple. She hates my big old house and wants out of it, but if she and her daughter moved…” Trailing off, he shrugged at Eden. “I guess I should let her have the place, but Drake, my assistant, also wants it. I owe Drake’s father and…” He trailed off.

  Brad’s eyes met Eden’s, and she wondered if he was saying that he now hoped he was going to have a different person to live with. She had to look away from him so he wouldn’t see what was in her eyes. She too hated living alone. The year that Melissa had been in New York and Eden had lived by herself had been the worst year of her life. Even now, although she’d never tell him so, she was glad McBride was in the house with her.

  “How long has the house been empty?” Jared asked.

  “Six weeks, I guess it is now,” Brad said as he stopped the car.

  Eden had been so intent on Brad that she hadn’t looked outside the car. Now she saw that they were on a pretty, tree-lined street. Again, she saw that old-growth trees had been saved. Peeping through the trees and around the gently curving street, she could see houses that were all eighteenth century in design. Well-proportioned, simple rectangles, with beautiful, paned windows, she thought. No fancy, curved porches, no gingerbread trim, no witches’ hat roofs. Nothing Victorian, and nothing modern anywhere.

  “My goodness,” she said. “They could all have been modeled after my house.” And for the first time, Eden fully realized that Farrington Manor was her house.

  “We were trying for perfection,” Brad said, smiling at her as he got out of the car, then went around to open the door for her. “The owners of this house haven’t moved in yet, so I thought we’d look around at the outside and you could see what you have to work with. Most of the lots are the same size.”

  “That’s exactly what I need,” she said, then turned to Jared. “How about if you take photos of everything?”

  “I’ll do my job if you do yours,” Jared said pointedly.

  Eden knew what he meant, and she nodded. In the next minute he walked around the back of the house and left her alone with Brad. Alone with Brad, she thought as she turned to look at him. Alone. From the look in his eyes, he was thinking the same thing.

  “Too bad we don’t have a key to the house.”

  His statement was so like a teenager’s that she laughed.

  He took her arm and walked her across the street. “Come on, I know a place where he can’t find us.”

  “I doubt that,” she said as they went across the street, through the side yard of another house, then through a gate to the back. It was a typical American backyard, with a couple of skinny new trees and about an acre of grass. Come summer, no one would step outdoors because they’d sizzle in the heat.

  “Eden,” Brad said, then started to pull her into his arms.

  But she pulled away from him. She had no doubt in the world that at least one and maybe two FBI binoculars were on them now. She didn’t relish having photos of her and Brad shown to McBride—or to anyone else, for that matter. “I…” she began. She couldn’t think of a reason for not letting him kiss her.

  “Right,” he said, smiling. “Too public.” He let go of her hand and gestured to the huge expanse of grass. “Think you can do something with this?”

  That he was so understanding made her like him more. “Oh, yes. By the way, I wanted to ask you if there was a good nursery near here. I’m going to need a lot of plants.”

  “Raleigh. We have trucks you can use.”

  For a moment she looked about her and tried to think how to bring up the subject of the house.

  “Is your daughter really thinking of moving to Arundel?”

  “It’s more that I’m wanting her to move here. You and I have something in common in that we bear little love for our sons-in-law.”

  “Don’t get me started. Did Minnie tell you—”

  She didn’t want him to go in that direction. “You don’t have a renter for the overseer’s house? Or are you going to let Minnie or Drake have it?”

  He looked at her for a moment. “No, I don’t have a renter, and I own three other houses, any of which Minnie would like.” He started walking toward the back fence, Eden beside him. “Did Minnie tell you what happened to the last tenant?”

  “No, she didn’t mention it.”

  “I can’t believe she left out any gossip,” he said as he opened the gate for her and they stepped out onto a service road. Right away, Eden liked the layout of the place. Instead of having the garages opening at the front of the house—and let’s face it, a huge, blank garage door was ugly—the garages faced the back, and residents entered through small service roads that ran behind the houses. “I like this,” she said, waving her hand. “So what gossip did Minnie leave out?”

  “I rented the house to a woman who was a retired schoolteacher. She showed me some watercolors that I think she painted, but she was too shy to say so. They were nice but not great. She said she was interested in the old houses in this area. She was especially interested in Farrington Manor.”

  “You sound sad. What happened?”

  “She was killed in a hit-and-run. It was a shock to the whole town. Her relatives came to claim the body, and…” He shrugged, not knowing what else to say.

  “What happened to the woman’s effects?”

  Brad looked at
her sharply.

  Eden had to think fast. “Okay, so you caught me. I love watercolors and I thought that maybe she’d done a portrait of my house.”

  “Tyrrell Farrington’s portraits aren’t enough for you?”

  “Puh-lease.”

  Brad smiled. “I could call and ask her family. I have the address and phone number her uncle gave me somewhere. When he came to get her body, he told me that if I heard anything about what happened to her, he’d like to know about it.”

  “A hit-and-run. That’s so…cowardly. No one saw anything?”

  “Nothing. The police think she was hit at about two in the morning. I can’t imagine what she was doing walking on the roads at that time of night. Didn’t she read the papers? Watch the news?”

  “Where did it happen?”

  Brad sighed, and she could tell that he was reluctant to answer her. “In front of your house. The police figured that someone was coming over the bridge, turned the curve too sharply, probably on the wrong side of the road, and there she was. You don’t expect someone to be walking along the side of the road at two o’clock in the morning, so you get a bit lax.”

  “Not to mention drunk.”

  “Probably,” Brad said. “It was all such a waste. Her uncle was pretty upset about her death. He looked like he wanted to hurt someone.”

  Eden wanted to stop asking questions, but she thought of what was becoming her secret life with the FBI and she continued. “Would you mind giving me the name and number that man gave you? I think I’ll call him and see if she did a watercolor of my house.”

  For a moment, Brad just blinked at her.

  “Is that too ghoulish of me?”

  “No, actually, I think that’s kind of you, and I think they might like that, but I just remembered something. I think Hank Smiley at the frame shop—you know, that room off the hardware store on Prince Street? I think he might have some of her watercolors. I forgot all about that. I was in there one day not long after she was found, buying some frames for photos of my grandson, and—”