Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

with it. I headed back down the brick stairs toward the garden.
    Finding my way to the house was easy, partly because I’d been too mad to worry about getting lost, and partly because the great ungainly hulk of it dominated the landscape. Finding my way back to the goat pasture and from there to the barns proved slightly more difficult. The garden was an established one, older by several decades than the house. When Mrs. Winkleson hadbought the farm, she’d torn down a quaint little farm house to build her mansion, but she’d left most of the garden intact partly because the previous own er had designed it as a moon garden— a garden containing only white flowers that could be seen in the dark, and preferably those that also had a strong fragrance.
    But however enchanting the moon garden might be by night, right now it was a soggy, muddy morass filled with a great many trees tall enough to block my view of the barns. I got turned around several times and found myself heading back to the house.
    Then I stumbled out of a grove of trees into an open area and saw something that made my jaw drop.

Chapter 15
     
     
     
     
    I was in a small field, surrounded on three sides by woods and on the fourth by a fence that I hoped would turn out to be the goat pasture. In the middle of the field an area about half an acre in size was completely enclosed with a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Floodlights and speakers were mounted on all four corners and at intervals along the four sides of the enclosure. Other mechanical devices whose purpose I couldn’t even guess hung on the fence or were arranged around the perimeter of the fence. The whole thing looked like something you’d find on the grounds of a penitentiary rather than a farm.
    “You lost?”
    I started, and turned to see Mr. Darby standing behind me.
    “Very lost,” I said. “I’d appreciate a steer in the direction of the barns. But first, what’s that? The cell block where she keeps any brightly colored flora or fauna that invade her farm?”
    “You’re not far off,” he said. “That’s where she keeps all her rose beds.”
    “Is she that afraid people will steal her prize roses?”
    “It’s not really people she’s worried about,” Mr. Darby said. “It’s the deer and the goats. To goats and deer, roses are likechocolate, caviar, and champagne, all rolled up into one, remember? You should have seen the time she saw one of the goats out here eating all her Black Magic roses. I thought for a moment we’d be eating goat stew that night. She had the contractors out the next day to build all this.”
    From his tone, I gathered he shared my belief that the rose enclosure was a hideous eyesore.
    “I’m going to take a peek inside,” I said.
    “It’s locked,” he said.
    “I can look through the fence,” I said. “Unless that’s verboten .”
    “Careful, then.” He shrugged, as if disavowing any responsibility for the consequences of my nosiness. “She’s not dead keen on human intruders, either. And I don’t have a key. She doesn’t let anyone else inside, except maybe sometimes one of the garden staff, with her looking over their shoulders every second.”
    “Still, no harm in just looking in through the fence,” I said. I figured if Mrs. Winkleson saw me and objected, I could claim I thought I saw a glimpse of white fur among the plants.
    I stuck my face right up against the chain link, the better to see her roses. Even if you could forget about the surrounding fortifications, no one would ever call her rose garden pretty. For one thing, it was a little monotonous. Four long rows of precisely pruned bushes sported uniformly white flowers. I imagine if you got closer, you’d probably see enough subtle variations in size, shape, and texture of the white blossoms to make them interesting, but from where I stood they all blended into one. A rose factory.
    The most interesting part of the whole enclosure was in thefar corner, where there was a much smaller collection of roses. Many of them bore deep red or purple blooms, presumably Mrs. Winkleson’s potential entrants for the Winkleson prize. And also her breeding stock. Here and there I saw bushes sporting plastic bags over some branches, so I gathered Mrs. Winkle-son was trying to develop her own black roses. I knew from Dad’s efforts that you used the bags when you were cross-pollinating, to keep stray insects from contaminating the results with unwanted