Free The Garden Plot by Marty Wingate Page B

something that will help the investigation. You never know.”
    She thought back to the murder scene and her discovery of the wet soil beneath the mosaic. Murder she couldn’t fathom, but wet soil, that’s something she understood.
    “Jo,” she said, “could there be an underground stream or seepage or something at the bottom of the garden? Without anyone knowing about it?”
    Jo looked thoughtful. “Well, they covered over the Fleet,” she said.
    “You mean Fleet Street?” asked Pru.
    “The river Fleet,” said Jo. “It was a sewer, I mean really a sewer, flowing to the Thames. It was covered over ages ago.”
    “But this couldn’t be the Fleet, that’s over”—Pru waved her hand vaguely—“by Ludgate, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, but there could be others.” She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know, Pru, you’d be better off asking some historian.”
    “I might just look into it,” Pru said. “It will affect whatever I do with the garden.” She took a breath. “Jo, anything from the Clarkes?”
    Jo studied Pru’s face for a moment.
Gauging my tolerance level for bad news, no doubt,
Pru thought. “No,” Jo said. “There is no need to add something else to your list of worries—you just put them out of your mind.” She stood up, gathering her bag and phone to leave. “Pru, next weekend—come to the country with us. The Bennet-Smythes invite us all every year. The village has an autumn fête on Saturday, and there’s loads of room at the house. It’ll be good for you to get away … and we can go to Chedworth. You can become an expert in Roman villas.”
    Pru made her way home and spent the early evening filling out more applications for jobs, one for Stanborough Castle, a small private estate in Yorkshire, and one for a large ravine garden in Cornwall. She had hoped to hear by now from a small garden near Royal Tunbridge Wells, Primrose House; she had applied several weeks ago. It had sounded the perfect size, just four acres—somewhere she could design, dig, plant, tend, and avoidsmall-engine repair. The advert for Primrose House offered what most did for a full-time head-gardener post: regular hours, holidays, and—she loved the idea of this—a cottage of her own.
    Pru’s dreams of cottage living, born of her mother’s stories of growing up in England in the 1930s and ’40s, had a vintage look. In Pru’s vintage cottage vision, someone sat across the table from her, drinking tea. She could never quite make out his face, but she felt sure they drank out of her mother’s Spode china—the blue-and-pink Queen Mary pattern, the last few pieces of which had been packed away carefully and stored at Lydia’s.
    Memories of sitting and drinking tea with her mother in their kitchen in Dallas always comforted Pru. No matter what the temperature, their afternoons had been marked with this small ceremony. “There’s nothing cools you off better than a hot cup of tea,” her mother would say.
    Pru’s dad had taken a decidedly different view. “In America,” he would say with a twinkle in his eye, and a quick glance at his wife, “we drink our tea with ice.” His proclamation notwithstanding, Pru kept close to her heart the sight of her dad, every afternoon after his retirement, sitting down in the kitchen for a nice, hot cup of tea.
    Late in the evening and almost too tired to care, she remembered about the extra photos on her phone. She downloaded them to her computer and then put the entire set on a flash drive. As an afterthought, she did the same again and dropped both flash drives into her bag. She would take one to the police station and keep the other for Mrs. Wilson. But first she would take a look; she didn’t want to waste the inspector’s time.
    She’d fallen into the easy digital trap—of snapping way too many photos for her needs. She clicked through quickly—overgrown and forlorn back garden slowly evolving to less overgrown and nearly barren back garden—until she got to that