The Murderous Trophy Wife
My wife, Betty, and I have been vegetable gardeners going back to our dating days. As a matter of fact, she ‘vetted’ me by asking me to dig over the plot of hilltop land behind her apartment in Lenox, Massachusetts. I agreed to do so. The rest is history.
In 2006, with far too much shade at our own home, we joined the Medfield Community Garden in order to have enough sunlight to grow things like tomatoes and corn. To say the garden was not well managed is an understatement. Plots were abandoned and grew up in weeds; a small clique had an empire of six plots while mere mortals had one.
We complained. And, in 2009, we found ourselves running the garden. Today, it comprises 75 plots on a full acre of rich farmland. We grow food for ourselves as well as for two area food pantries. We have given back.
As Garden Ogre, my job is to enforce the Gardening Guidelines. In doing so, I get to know my fellow gardeners and their habits quite well. There are gardeners who come at dawn; others who save their labors for twilight. Many friendships, some of them unlikely, form among them. To have a ‘gardening buddy’ is to have someone with whom you can share confidences as well as seeds.
And so, it seemed only natural that I would find a way to insert a murder into the Hardington Community Garden where Alice Beauchamp has been a fixture since The Garden Club Gang. I started the manuscript in 2020 as Covid reared its unwanted head. I got down 40,000 words but was dissatisfied with the direction of the story. Then, in the summer of 2024 I re-read what I had written and knew where I had veered off the path.
It’s always a pleasure to bring characters from other book series into a story. The Carltons – Matt and Anne Evans Carlton – are welcomed from How to Murder Your Contractor. Their dream retirement home is now nine months old. Because the story takes place in Hardington, Detective John Flynn is allowed to cross over from the Hardington mysteries (sorry, no Liz Philips).
Here are the opening chapters for your enjoyment. If you like what you read, you can get the full book from Amazon.com or at https://the-hardington-press.square.site/.
* * * * *
The Murderous Trophy Wife
Chapter One
Tuesday, 6 a.m.
Alice Beauchamp reconsidered, for the third time in as many minutes, adding the blush. He won’t even notice. He’ll notice but not think anything about it. He’ll notice and think it’s odd that a seventy-two-year-old woman is wearing makeup in a garden.
It was 6:04 a.m. on an already-warm, early August morning, and Alice’s planned arrival at the Hardington community garden a mile and a half away was just six minutes from now. She had already prepared a Thermos of piping hot English Breakfast tea, which she knew he liked and never got at home. There was a printout of a recent study on the use of plastic mulch in vegetable gardens – a subject he felt strongly about. Plus, she was dressed and otherwise ready to go.
She gave a last look in the mirror. Peering back at her was a woman with piercing blue eyes, but also with curly gray hair and wrinkles. Unable to make a decision, she left the blush, unopened, on her bathroom counter.
Alice’s plot in the community garden had adjoined that of Arthur Simmons for four seasons. In the first year, they established a nodding acquaintance and discussed the merits of Midnight Snack tomatoes and whether it was worthwhile to grow potatoes given the inevitability of a Colorado potato beetle infestation. Their first extended conversation, if fact, had been a half-serious-half humorous discussion over how a pest from the Rocky Mountains could annually find its way to Massachusetts. Arthur facetiously suggested United Air Lines was responsible; having concocted a highly profitable ‘breed-and-feed’ excursion fare between Denver and Boston in which larvae were dropped on unsuspecting gardens from incoming flights.
In the second year, they developed a true friendship. It was rooted in horticulture and Alice spent a great deal of time acquainting herself with the topics that interested Arthur. They were also the same age; born, as they discovered when they compared birth dates, just a few weeks apart.
Over the course of that second spring and summer, though, the tenor of their morning conversations evolved to things deeper. Tall, bald, and with an unusually lean build for a man of his age, he would take off his wire-rimmed glasses, mop his head with a rag, and then look off into the distance as he spoke. He opened up, speaking increasingly of regrets over ‘mistakes’ and ‘missed opportunities.’ Sometimes, Alice couldn’t be certain if Arthur was speaking to her or to himself.
Then, in July of their third season, her life had changed irrevocably. A chance luncheon among friends following a meeting of the Hardington Garden Club meeting led to the formation of the Garden Club Gang. Each of the four women in the group, they realized, was facing a different existential crisis. In August, Alice helped rob the Brookfield Fair. The robbery, born of their fears, was their cri de coeur.
Unless those working their plots a few days later noticed that a plainclothes detective in an unmarked car came to the garden to speak to Alice about how she came to faint in the middle of a crowded fairground walkway – drawing attention from the robbery taking place a few hundred feet away – no one, including Arthur Simmons, could have suspected this demure lady of being a master criminal.
Alice closed out her plot that autumn, still chatty and as horticulturally savvy as ever. That she had ripped out a dozen habanera and other high-Scovill-rated pepper plants to hide their use in the heist went unnoticed or at least unmentioned by her fellow gardeners. It was a given that little old ladies did strange and unpredictable things.
Five months after the robbery, the Gang helped uncover insurance fraud at a corrupt auto dealership chain while simultaneously investigating the death of an elderly friend in an upscale retirement community (a task which nearly cost Alice her life). A few months later, the group brought down a reverse mortgage underwriter that sought to push its loans to elderly homeowners into default. Just two months earlier, Alice had helped put behind bars four brothers running a romance scam that had bilked elderly women out of millions of dollars. It had been, all things considered, a remarkably busy year.
In the aftermath of the robbery of the Brookfield Fair (and thanks to its bounty), Alice moved from Hardington’s aging, subsidized senior housing complex to a pleasant ground-floor unit in a townhouse in the Olde Village Square complex. She soon discovered Arthur also lived in the small enclave. That had been in the autumn, just after the community garden closed. This April, Alice had been pleased to find Arthur was once again in the adjacent plot. Two years earlier, she learned he was usually at his garden just after dawn, and she began to keep a similar schedule.
One of Alice’s great strengths was as a patient listener. She could offer little by way of contribution on her own part; not because she was not intelligent but, rather, because she had lived such a circumspect life. Until a year ago, she had been defined by being first the wife, and then the widow, of Hardington’s postmaster. She had been a lowly bank clerk and part-time bookkeeper who, after her husband’s death, was slowly slipping into penury because her late husband invested in nothing but ultra-safe savings bonds and low-yielding certificates of deposit.
Alice also now had a job that made use of her heretofore lightly-used and all-but-dormant accounting skills. She had casually mentioned to Arthur that a friend had launched a web-based business selling imported Provençal printed linens and fabrics, and asked Alice to be the company’s manager of finance. She did not mention the company came into business specifically to get close to that reverse mortgage issuer, or that the enterprise’s success was sheer serendipity. Arthur came to the garden the next day with high praise for its website and offerings, and said he had ordered a set of napkins and placemats in a summery pattern unlike anything he had ever seen. Alice still beamed at the thought that he had listened, then gone home and found the website.
Four minutes later than her planned arrival time, Alice pulled in behind Arthur’s Lexus. As usual at this early hour, theirs were the lone cars parked along the road. Alice tucked the Thermos of tea under her arm and collected the printout of the study of plastic mulches.
There were sixty plots in the Hardington Community Garden, arranged in a grid with three-foot walkways around each one. Alice’s space was in the third row of plots, four in from the community garden’s northern edge. Many of the gardens she passed devoted part of their space to growing corn, with stalks now rising six feet; well above Alice’s five-foot-three-inch height.
She opened her gate, expecting to hear a customary booming ‘Good morning, Alice’ from the adjacent garden. There was no sound.
“I brought some tea,” Alice said, listening for a response, or at least sounds of movement. She heard nothing. Perhaps she had not seen him connecting a hose at one of the water spigots at the front of the garden.
When there was still silence after another minute, Alice left her own garden and walked the twenty feet to her neighbor’s plot. Arthur’s gate was open. At first glance, she saw nothing unusual. Then, focusing on the eight-by-ten square of corn, she saw him. Arthur had fallen face down into the corn, taking down at least a dozen stalks with him.
“Arthur!” she exclaimed as she knelt down. “Are you all right?”
Arthur did not move. His skin felt cool.
Then, Alice saw the spot of orange just beyond Arthur’s outstretched right hand. It was an Epi-pen, an injectable dose of epinephrine used for counteracting a severe allergic reaction. No needle was visible. It had not been used.
Instinctively, Alice reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone.
Alice did not remain in Arthur’s garden. Instead, she went to Farm Street to await the arrival of the EMTs whom she hoped would revive her friend. And, indeed, not five minutes elapsed before she saw and heard the truck. She motioned to them and ran back to his plot.
Three EMTs worked for fifteen minutes attempting to revive Arthur. They were unsuccessful. During their resuscitation effort, two police cars arrived.
Alice stood a respectful distance from the EMTs, who spoke in incomprehensible shorthand as they worked. She had hoped they might ask her questions, but none were forthcoming. Once the police were on scene, the EMTs began talking in low voices with the two officers, one of whom took notes as they spoke.
As the EMTs worked, Alice tied to imagine what must have happened. Arthur’s skin was cool; therefore, he must have been at the garden considerably earlier than his usual arrival time. He had been stung, but anaphylactic shock had set in before he could administer epinephrine. It all made sense.
Except she had heard Arthur let loose a deluge of cursing at least twice over the course of the summer after being stung by one vespid or another. When he was pricked on his hand, he shook it vigorously for several minutes, even as he apologized for his language. After a bee stung his nose, he pressed a bottle of water against his face. At no time did he mention possessing, much less reach for, an Epi-pen.
Arthur had been face-down when she first found him; now he lay on his back. He did not look as though he had suffered. She also saw his tee for the first time. Arthur always wore an un-buttoned, long-sleeved khaki shirt over a tee and, as always, the mulch-and-vegetation-stained shirt was open. Underneath the shirt would always be a tee. He rotated four: a Star Trek one with the faces of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, a red-and-blue ‘electric skull’ Grateful Dead one, a Kliban cartoon of ‘rock and roll cats’, and one with a drawing of a Karmann Ghia and the legend ‘Drive the Classic’. All were faded and many decades old.
The tee Arthur wore this morning was stark white.
Alice was still puzzling through the absence of the proper tee shirt when a Hardington policeman cleared his throat. She looked over at the officer. He was in his mid-twenties, so likely relatively new to law enforcement. She would also swear he looked bored.
“The state police just called to say they’re backed up this morning and can’t get out here,” the officer said. The nameplate below his badge said, ‘Kemp’. “They asked me to take your statement.”
Alice looked Officer Kemp over from head to toe. Everything about him said ‘rookie’; from his short, freshly cut hair to his gleaming, polished shoes. Even his uniform still had fold lines. He was too inexperienced to understand, much less to question, that something was wrong. To this product of Gen Z, an old, bald man had keeled over and died from a bee sting. End of story.
“My statement is that what happened out there doesn’t add up, Officer Kemp,” Alice said curtly. “My statement is that the state police ought to be out here examining the site for clues.”
She could almost see his eyes rolling. To this neophyte law enforcement officer, Alice was just a slight, white-haired lady with a hint of osteoporosis. His prejudiced point of view would assume Miss Marple wannabe sees murder everywhere…
“Then tell me what you would tell them,” Officer Kemp said evenly. “I promise it will get to them just the way you tell it to me.”
Like hell it will, Alice thought. But she dutifully recounted her arrival time and finding Arthur’s car, then finding his body in the corn. “His skin was already cool, yet he invariably arrives at the garden between six and six-fifteen,” Alice stressed. “He had apparently been here for some time.” She also explained his previous bee stings and noted Officer Kemp wrote as she spoke. When Alice got to the white tee shirt, the policeman’s pen stayed poised above the page.
“Please make note of it,” Alice said, “even if it is just to say the weird elderly lady swears up and down Arthur Simmons rotated four old tee shirts and just happened to break a years-long tradition on the same day he died.”
Officer Kemp wrote for almost a minute.
Alice noted the paramedics had placed Arthur’s body on a gurney and were threading their way through the garden paths toward an ambulance.
“Where are they taking the body?” she asked.
“A hospital, I would imagine,” Officer Kemp replied. “Doctors have to issue the death certificate.”
“Will there be any kind of post-mortem examination?” Alice asked, and then immediately regretted using plucked-from-police-procedurals language.
Officer Kemp shrugged. “Not my area of expertise. You could ask the EMTs.”
“And, will the statement you send to the state police include my belief that a full autopsy should be an immediate priority?” Alice asked.
Officer Kemp considered the question. “I will send them the report,” he replied after perhaps ten seconds of thought. “I don’t think they are particularly interested in the conclusions of rookie town policemen.”
* * * * *
An hour later, her shock, anger and frustration still at full boil, Alice navigated the back roads toward the city of Framingham and her place of work.
Work. Gainful employment.
She still marveled at those words and rolled them around in her mind. She had graduated high school and a two-year junior college with an understanding of accounting and bookkeeping. But marriage and children had sidetracked her into becoming a full-time mother of two. She had done ‘mothers hours’ stints at banks and small businesses. Her husband’s death – now seventeen years ago – had sapped their already-scant savings. But the best job a woman in her mid-fifties without a BA and a résumé could expect to get was as a bank teller, where her co-workers were more than thirty years her junior. By the time she was over sixty, even teller jobs were unavailable, especially when they had to stand on risers to be seen over the service counter.
In the prior decade, she found herself slowly sliding into poverty, saved from homelessness only by the existence of an aging, town-owned senior apartment complex where her rent and utilities were pegged at a quarter of her paltry social security check. Year by year, she shed the niceties of life; ending subscription to newspapers and cable television. It was just a year earlier, she recalled with a combination of bitterness and wonder, that someone had slid an application for the Hardington Food Cupboard under her door. She had volunteered at the organization for five years, and was now going to be one of its ‘clients’ as the food-insecure families were called.
The Garden Club Gang changed all that in a matter of months. And, four months earlier, she had started earning a steady paycheck. Provençal Home Décor of New England had grown from an imaginary business, designed to be physically close to a nefarious reverse mortgage company, in to a thriving, profitable enterprise in a matter of weeks. Alice was the one member of the gang with accounting experience. She was now the company’s ‘Finance and Accounting Manager’ with a staff.
Her mind also drifted back to a conversation with Arthur just a few weeks earlier. They were in the garden in the early morning. Alice was planting her fall crop of arugula and spinach, and he was raking over an area where two zucchinis had succumbed to borers.
Arthur was a moderately tall man, well-tanned and nearly bald, but also lean and physically fit from gardening and, likely, other exercise. “I’m still trying to figure you out,” Arthur had said that morning. “Last year, though you never said anything to support my theory, I suspected money was tight for you. It wasn’t the way you dressed – we all come here expecting to get dirty – it was your… frugality. No vegetable was too small to be used, or too far gone to be coaxed to grow. Everything in your plot was recycled from something else. I also knew – and I apologize for snooping – that you lived in that old income-restricted senior apartment complex on the other side of town.”
“Then, last August, something changed,” Arthur continued. “There was this ‘new you’ spirit; like a new lease on life. You fairly bounced into the garden every morning. You smiled. Not that you didn’t ever smile before but, by the end of September, you positively beamed.”
Arthur took a swig of water from a bottle and wiped his brow. “Then came the really interesting part: In November, you moved into Olde Village Square. That’s quite a change from senior housing. You were still driving that ratty old Corolla, but that’s New England thinking at work. You settled in. You bought some new furniture because I saw it delivered.”
“You were spying on me,” Alice said, arching an eyebrow at him. She was also intrigued Arthur had paid such careful attention to her comings and goings.
Arthur shook his head. “My office is our second-floor front bedroom. You’re four doors down and I have a good view of every townhouse on that side of the park, which is why I took notice when you disappeared in February for about two weeks. I figured you had gone to visit your son or daughter and just hadn’t told anyone.”
“Then, a funny thing happened,” he said, taking another drink of water while he chose his words. “One morning, a car parks out on the street and two men knock at your door. I knew you weren’t home but they obviously didn’t. They try to peek into the windows. Then, one starts one way around Dogwood Circle, the other goes in the opposite direction. They knock on every door. When they knocked on mine, I took my time answering it.”
“The guy – he looked and talked like an extra for a gangster movie – asked me if I knew how to get in touch with you. He said ‘management’ is worried there may be a water leak in your unit – and he used your name but pronounced it ‘Bow-champ’ – but they need your permission to go inside. I just gave him a blank look and said, ‘Is that her name? I’ve never met her.’ That sent him packing. I figured anyone who has never heard how your name is pronounced can’t really be working for the property manager.”
“Here comes the fascinating part,” Arthur said, leaning on his rake and peering directly into Alice’s eyes. “Two days later, you come home, and your lower arm is in a cast. And, that evening, the lead story on every local channel is about that mess at Cavendish Woods.”
Alice felt the muscles in her body tense up.
Arthur continued. “The state police went there to arrest that orderly but, at the same time, someone they didn’t know anything about attacked one of the residents before taking her own life. They specifically said several bones in the resident’s wrist and hand were broken. So, when you showed up back here on the same day in that cast, my curiosity was aroused. I called Cavendish Woods and asked for Alice Beauchamp’s room and was told by an exasperated switchboard attendant that you had ended your residency only a few hours earlier.”
Arthur cocked his head, waiting for a response. Alice said nothing.
“So, here is my mild-mannered gardening buddy, who moves to Olde Village Square from what could be charitably be called ‘basic accommodations’. Then, after three months, she checks into the swankiest retirement community in New England, stays two weeks, gets attacked by a homicidal monster but gets off with relative minor damage, and then comes back to Hardington without saying a single word about what has happened to her.”
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?” Arthur asked. He rested his chin on the rake handle.
Alice thought back to the plea from Cecelia Davis’s granddaughter to find out what had happened inside Cavendish Woods. How the Garden Club Gang had mobilized, and nearly been undone by Smilin’ Al Pokrovsky’s desire for revenge.
“I plead no contest,” Alice said with a shrug. “I was offered an opportunity to live at Cavendish Woods for a few weeks. After what happened, I asked for an early checkout. They didn’t charge me. Not even for their ridiculously overpriced brownies.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Arthur asked.
Alice shook her head. “If I said anything more, you’d think I was delusional.”
“The last thing you are, Ms. Beauchamp, is delusional,” Arthur replied. “And, what about the two thugs trying to find you?”
Alice shrugged. “They didn’t find me. They won’t be back.”
Arthur nodded, though with a look of disappointment on his face. “Then, let’s skip ahead to this spring. When we were planting our gardens, you never said a thing about Provençal linens. Not a word. Then, by mid-summer, you’re the CFO of a thriving business. Do you care to comment?”
Alice held her hands, palms up, in front of her. “My friend, Paula, came up with a novel idea. She asked me to help. The business has been spectacularly successful. Paula has truly done me some wonderful kindnesses over the years. I’m thrilled to help her out. It’s a small way of paying back someone who has been a dear friend. It’s really just a part-time job, though, and my title is considerably less exalted that ‘chief’ anything.”
Alice declined to mention she had a staff of three overseeing inventory management, international shipping, customs processing, and the ongoing management of the company’s relationship with three dozen mercurial French suppliers.
Arthur sighed and shook his head. “What did Winston Churchill call it? ‘A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ That’s you in a nutshell.”
“You’re comparing me to Russia?” Alice asked, trying to sound indignant. “That’s not what I would call nice.”
“Well, you’ve not been especially forthcoming with your friends,” Arthur said. “Something happened a year ago that put a spring in your step. Something else happened in February that had the Winter Hill Gang hot on your trail and put you in the same room with a suicidal murderer. I’ll bet good money there’s a good story behind that Provençal linens business. And I’m willing to give extremely long odds you’ve been up to other things as well.”
“You are, in short, Ms. Beauchamp, full of surprises. And I love surprises.”
Chapter Two
Tuesday, 9 a.m.
The news of what had happened that morning was accepted with undisguised shock and genuine sympathy, but also a careful listening to and analysis of the discrepancies Alice noted.
Provençal Home Décor of New England occupied part of the third floor of a modern, glass-faced office building in Framingham. It has been built for, but never occupied by, an internet applications company that suddenly found its target market had moved onto something newer and shinier. Now promoted as the ‘Women’s Empowerment Zone’, some twenty women-owned enterprises were tenants of the building.
Three women were gathered around a small table in Paula Winters’ office; which was festooned with brightly colored posters of Provençal artisans at work creating the napkins and placemats the business sold. At fifty-two, her medium height, slender build and expertly cut brown hair gave no clue that this woman was a cancer survivor; Paula was the youngest member of the Garden Club Gang by a decade. The French fabric business had been her idea; she had no inkling – much less a plan – that, four months later, it would gross half a million dollars a week in orders and employ twenty-five full- or part-time employees.
Paula, who had a nursing background, said, “People develop sensitivities where they had none before. You can get stung a dozen times and have nothing worse than a nasty welt. Then, one day, your body reacts in a completely different way. You go to your doctor, who prescribes an Epi-pen. It is possible Arthur couldn’t figure out how to use it and went into shock before he could get the epinephrine into his system.”
“On the other hand,” Paula continued, “if Arthur was a creature of habit with no reason to be at the garden earlier than six, why would his skin feel cool to the touch? Based on your description, Arthur had been laying there more than half an hour – and that assumes he was stung as soon as he got to the garden.”
“I just wish you had felt the hood of Arthur’s car to see whether it was warm,” Paula concluded. “That could have told us a lot.”
The second attendee was Eleanor Strong. A stout woman, she had lost her husband earlier in the year to advanced Alzheimer’s disease. At sixty-two, she was starting over with her life, The Garden Club Gang and her role as Operations Manager of Provençal Home Décor of New England provided the necessary anchor that allowed her to deal with the grief caused by the death of a beloved spouse.
Eleanor focused on the shirt. “Men are creatures of habit far more than women,” she said. “My husband had an armoire full of clothes but, after he retired, he wore the same two fraying pair of shorts seven months of the year. The idea of breaking out a fresh tee shirt is antithetical to the inner gyroscope that governs the male psyche. Someone dressed him that morning. I’d lay money on it.”
Jean Sullivan, the fourth Garden Club Gang member, would have likely chimed in as well, but she was still in Aix en Provence, getting to understand the quirky commune that produced the glorious fabrics that Provençal Home Décor of New England sold across the country via the internet. She was accompanied on that trip by Larry Sinclair, whom she had nursed back to health from a stab wound he received while defending Paula’s home from two brothers intent upon revenge for having been brought down by the Garden Club Gang.
“You know, we can get along without you for a while,” Paula told Alice a short time later when they were alone in Paula’s office. “You need time to process a good friend’s death.”
“I think I’m better off among living friends and keeping busy,” Alice replied. “But you could do me an enormous favor.”
“You need only ask.” Paula said, giving Alice her full attention.
“Can Martin find out if the state police have any intention of following up on a death by bee sting of an elderly man in out-of-the-way Hardington?”
‘Martin’ was Martin Hoffman. As town detective for Brookfield, Massachusetts, he had investigated the now-infamous and daring Brookfield Fair robbery a year earlier. The state police had ‘solved’ the robbery by arresting a group of men who more than deserved to be in prison, though not for the theft of the fair’s daily admission proceeds which, in any event, had been recovered.
Martin had eventually deduced it was four woman who had committed the robbery but, by then, he was in love with Paula and she with him. In the intervening year, Martin had ingratiated himself with the Massachusetts State Police by handing them a series of high-profile, ready-to-arrest cases that led the news cycles for multiple days. Those cases, in turn, both helped restore some vestige of the reputation the state police had lost due to its own internal malfeasance, and gave Martin a sizeable handful of chits to cash in when he needed information.
“I can ask him,” Paula said. “He’ll probably be relieved to know it isn’t because we’re up to something.”
“My fear is Arthur’s body will be released without anything more than a cursory examination,” Alice said. “Right now, some emergency room physician may well be seeing a corpse, asking the EMTs what happened, hearing about a third of the story, and signing a death certificate; all without giving the matter a second thought.”
Paula thought for a moment. “I know the town police are required to contact the Chief Medical Examiner’s office. One of the things they ask for is a whether the cause of death ties to any underlying medical condition. And, they get that from the next of kin which, in Arthur’s case, would be his wife. Did she show up at the garden while you were there?”
Alice shook her head. “Arthur told me yesterday she was on her way out to the Berkshires for a couple of days at one of those swanky ‘health and wellness’ places. I told the police officer everything I could remember – which, of course, didn’t include the name of the inn or spa. Who knows how long it will take to track her down.”
* * * * *
Alice returned to her office and tried to work. Her desk had invoices that required her attention. There were a dozen messages in her email inbox. But she could not focus on anything but Arthur’s death.
His wife…
In that first year of gardening together, Arthur had said almost nothing about his personal life beyond having a wife and two grown children. Then, in the second year, he sketched a broad outline. It was a second marriage for him; the first for Jennifer. The children – Alice could not recall their names – were by his first wife, Marilyn, who now lived somewhere on Cape Cod. He barely mentioned the children except to say a boy and a girl. Even in their second year, Arthur spoke little of his family.
Last year, Arthur had truly opened his life story, and it was not an especially pleasant one. The divorce from Marilyn was amicable on its surface, but Arthur realized and fully accepted he was at fault. Marilyn had said he was married to his job, and Arthur could not disagree. The things they once had in common had gone stale. Their financial assets were divided down the middle and Marilyn set off on a round-the-world cruise; something they had, once upon a time, planned to do together.
The children, both recently graduated from college at the time of the divorce, blamed Arthur. The older one – the daughter – pointedly refused to come to Arthur’s wedding. She would now be in her mid-to-late forties. According to Arthur, she was ‘forever a demanding child’, always pushing for more attention. And, she was ‘entitled’, to use his word. In her sophomore year of college, he bought her a car to encourage her to come home on breaks. It was a new, silver convertible. The daughter – and now Alice remembered the name, Karen – promptly left the car out, with the top down, in a weekend-long rainstorm.
Arthur said he was crushed by his daughter’s deliberate neglect. Marilyn told him the problem was Karen was upset because she had no say in choosing the car. Mother and daughter chose the next vehicle together. The silver convertible, despite ten thousand dollars of restoration expense, sold for less than half its original cost. Even with the car of her choosing, Karen still chose to spend semester and holiday breaks with friends in other cities.
Where did Karen live now? Arthur must have said something but, try as she might, Alice could not remember any conversation on the subject.
The son, Stephen, was two years younger than his sister. He, at least, was not estranged from his father. Stephen (and it was always ‘Stephen’ and never ‘Steve’) lived twenty miles away in Belmont. He had followed his father into the life sciences and was, in Arthur’s words, ‘making a name for himself’ wherever it was he worked. Stephen was married with two teenaged children.
This year, Arthur had begun to speak with something close to bitterness about his wife, Jennifer. She was nineteen years his junior, which would make her fifty-three. About her life before their marriage, Arthur said only that Jennifer had an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School and had been one of the ‘bright lights’ in the world of biotechnology consulting. When he first spoke of her, he said Jennifer had been his most stalwart champion and vocal supporter when he went out on his own after being ousted from his company.
But her support, Arthur realized as time went by, had been predicated on either a quick and successful product launch or the bringing in of one or more financial partners. When one year became two, Jennifer began proposing specific names of venture capitalists who could both bankroll the development laboratory Arthur had established and pay for the ten employees who worked there. At five years, Arthur discovered Jennifer had privately shopped the technology he had developed. Jennifer had done so, she told him, because Arthur failed to see the ‘big picture’ of how the biotechnology industry now functioned. With its sale, the two of them could enjoy a more than comfortable twenty years together. When Arthur sold their Weston estate to finance the lab’s eleventh year, Jennifer was in open revolt.
“She could never comprehend how important it was to me,” Arthur had said a few months earlier. “I couldn’t allow some bean counters to nickel and dime my idea to death. And, I wasn’t going to sell in desperation. I was onto something – an idea that needed to be championed.”
When they moved to Hardington, Jennifer was furious. “We live in a brand-new, one-point-three-million-dollar townhouse,” Arthur said. “Jennifer pronounced it a dump and said it was ‘cruel to pretend otherwise’. She bought a dog and started taking ‘spa weekends.’”
Though she had never introduced herself, Alice had seen Jennifer at least a dozen times since moving to Olde Village Square nine months earlier. For someone who was approaching her mid-fifties, Jennifer had the physique of someone at least a decade younger. She walked a dog that looked to be a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle. The two would walk Dogwood Circle, which connected the two dozen structures that comprised Old Village Square, and the central ‘green’ onto which most of the homes faced. She was frequently on the phone as she walked, and she seldom smiled. If Jennifer knew Arthur’s gardening partner lived four doors down from her own home, she never acknowledged it with as much as a glance toward Alice’s unit.
It was this season – sometime around when the corn began to develop tassels – Arthur first broached he had made a series of what he termed ‘horrific mistakes’. Alice recalled specific sentences that sometimes came out of nowhere. “I was so caught up in being this important ‘entrepreneur scientist’ I completely lost sight of my family.” “My kids never really knew me, nor I them.” “Marilyn gave me every opportunity to change, but I ignored her.” “I was so caught up in work, I was actually glad when she said she was leaving because now I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about pulling eighteen-hour days.”
The regrets extended to Jennifer. “I made long-term promises to her I never intended to keep. I promised I was going to slow down. We were going to take a month every summer, go away, and leave behind our phones and computers. We did that for three years. When my Board turned on me, I was going to take a year to develop a business plan. Instead, I had a lab up and running in three months.”
He was especially sad for his children. “They deserved to have a father. I managed to miss almost every major milestone in their lives. If they hate me, it is with good reason.”
Alice thought about all these things Arthur had said, but one enigmatic statement just a week earlier stood out: “I can’t change yesterday,” he said, looking out across the community garden. “All I can do is make today and tomorrow better for those who are most important to me.” With that, he returned to hoeing weeds.
Alice went to the desk of one of her two assistants. Both were women with strong computer skills who could, because of commitments at home, work only four to five hours a day. Both needed healthcare benefits despite being below the accepted threshold number of hours per week. Provençal Home Décor of New England willingly provided that benefit, and so earned the loyalty of two women who would otherwise have had to choose between health security and those home commitments.
“I need some time to grieve,” Alice told her assistant. She gathered her purse and departed the building.