Free The Winds of Change by Martha Grimes

that.’ Jury thought for a moment. ‘You know how he is about a crime scene - doesn’t want anyone breathing on it?’
    ‘Oh, everyone knows how he is.’ Cody smiled.  
    So did Jury. ‘I’m worse.’
    This was by no means true, but it acted as sufficient reason for Jury’s wanting to go to the bottom of the garden alone and also made Platt feel relieved that he wouldn’t have to run a Macalvie-style endurance test.
    Cody had walked him from the front of the house around to the rear. He told Jury there’d been so many police about that it was hardly necessary to seek Declan Scott’s permission; he wouldn’t think anything of it if yet one more copper invaded his grounds. Then Cody left by way of a small door in the garden wall with black grillwork in the shape of an angel. Jury watched him disappear as if it were a magical effect; he couldn’t help but think again of Alice in Wonderland. The gardens, the little door, the sudden disappearance as if Cody had fallen through it. He had disappearance on the mind, he supposed, but he still wondered what fictive element there was in all this, what childhood story.
    The garden wall was a faded red brick like the house itself. It was lined by broad herbaceous borders. Two or three acres were undergoing restoration; that was clear from the parts torn up and from other sections freshly planted. It was nothing like Heligan, but still a big project. It had the look of a job being directed by a landscape designer or garden architect, laid out in squares and triangles and bisected by flagged paths and studded with the occasional piece of sculpture. In the middle of the garden was a fountain, a bronze rendering of two little boys with buckets, trying to douse each other with water. One was high above the other, so the one below would have gotten a thorough dousing. It made him smile; it seemed such a whimsical piece for gardens so formally landscaped. Yet it kept to a sort of unkempt wildness; there were masses of rhododendrons in pink and white, and several with large leaves and lemon-yellow flowers. It was very early March, but he imagined that the Cornwall climate could sustain early blooming. The rhododendrons enclosed a small area that Jury thought might be a garden within a garden, perhaps the secret garden Macalvie mentioned.
    Mounds of box grew around the perimeter and edged the paths. Much of the area was torn up; still, there were plantings of luminous colors-buttercup, a green-needled, red-flowered plant that Jury couldn’t identify, and a sheet of bluebells in the rhododendron garden. He thought of the little girl in Hester Street.
    Jury observed all of this from the terrace, which was really the first terrace in three sloping downward; they were balustraded terraces with central steps leading down to the pool and the bronze boys. Still it was not immense, and because it was walled it seemed almost intimate. He walked down the steps and across and past the bronze boys with buckets to the bottom of the garden.
    Yellow police tape served as a strange counterpoint to the tied-off plots that had been undergoing planting. And it was strange how the few steps down to the covered recess were so reminiscent of the grotto in the Lost Gardens. Jury crouched to go under the tape and went into the cold little room to see the stone bench on which the body had been found.
    He looked back along the path which, in its middle part, curved around the sculpture of the boys. This covered niche was perfectly visible from the back of the house, although across a two acre distance, but still not so far as to block a view. But since the shooting had happened after dark, whether it was visible in daylight hardly mattered.
    Why had this woman come for the second time? Mary Scott was dead, so who was she meeting? It must have been for that purpose, so the someone must have a connection to the house, whether living in it or not. A strange meeting spot, in any event.
    Jury walked back along the