Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

He stood there for a long time, leaning on his spade. His weariness of last night did not match the utter exhaustion he felt now. He wanted to lie down in that empty hole, to ask that the dirt be laid over him.

Slowly, only ever so slowly, the ebb of life, the stubborn, senseless desire of every man to go on living, flowed back into him. His simple brain began once again to grasp toward survival. He threw down the spade and marched back toward the house, emotion helping to numb his fatigue.

He found Harriet Kopping still in the dining room, awaiting him. Her smile was ugly, confident, superior. “Did you find Stella?” she asked him.

“No...”

“It was a waste of good digging, wasn’t it?”

“But I will find her... because I will make you tell me where she is.”

Mrs. Kopping’s still-black brows raised half an inch, making her narrow face look longer. “Do you dare to threaten me, Anton?”

“You may have been strong enough to move Stella, but I am stronger than you.”

“Of course you are.”

“Then I will make you tell me?”

“Before you touch me, Anton, let me assure you of one fact. You can kill me before I would tell you where Stella’s body is. And do you think you can kill me with the same freedom as you killed Stella? Do you think that Harriet Kopping’s death could pass unnoticed? Do you imagine that a person of my prominence and importance would not be instantly missed in this town? Yes, you could kill me, Anton, and then run away. A rich old woman dead and her gardener disappeared. How long do you think it would take the police to catch up with you?”

She spoke calmly and incisively, and he realized that what she said was true. He could not kill her as simply as he had killed Stella. He could not even hurt her or threaten to hurt her.

“I will search for Stella everywhere. You must have buried her somewhere else. I will dig...”

“One moment, Anton. I realize that since possession of Stella’s body means everything in our little game, you would naturally search for it. And to a certain extent I cannot prevent you from doing that. But I will allow you to search... to dig in my lawn... only under two conditions. First of all, you must do it on your own time. Six days a week, eight hours a day, you must continue to work for me, following my instructions. Secondly, when in your free time you do search, you must not damage or deface my property. I intend to preserve the beautiful lawn I have now, the beautiful lawn which is so important to me that I will tolerate the presence of a murderer here simply because he is an excellent gardener. Do you understand, Anton?”

He nodded dumbly.

“If you loaf on the job I hire you to do, if you mar the looks of my lovely lawn, trying to find Stella, then I shall call the police and tell them exactly where she is.”

The bitter pill of defeat was in his mouth now, its size choking him, its taste galling him. Yet he had to swallow it.

His surrender must have been visible on his face, because Harriet Kopping said: “Our second load of rose bushes must have arrived by now. You had better get to work, Anton, if you expect to finish by dark.”

He shuffled blindly, obediently, toward the exit. But she stopped him with her last admonition. “And don’t forget, Anton, to fill up that hole you just dug between the fourth and fifth bushes. I want my lawn to look like a lawn, not like a cemetery...”

...If his life before Stella’s death had been filled with backbreaking labor, now it was overflowing. Mrs. Kopping hired another housekeeper, whom she allowed to occupy a bedroom up on the second floor, while Anton kept his old quarters. And the new housekeeper was more efficient than Stella had been — which fact seemed to allow Mrs. Kopping to have more time than ever to plan projects for her nine acres of lawn.

The one hundred and sixty rose bushes got planted on schedule, of course, without time-out for corpse-hunting. And they were followed in unending succession by beds and banks and borders of rhododendrons, azaleas, lilies, bluebells, buttercups, ivies, geraniums, periwinkle, wisteria, nasturtiums, chrysanthemums, zinnias, marigold, delphiniums, asters, snapdragons, heliotropes, larkspur, nignonette, poppies, pansies, peonies, sweet william, foxgloves, forget-me-nots. Slowly but surely, with each inch paid for by Anton Vandrak’s sweat and Anton Vandrak’s agony, the immense green carpet of lawn was rolled back, engulfed, overwhelmed, by the oncoming, ceaseless tide of flowers. Rose Hill was being gradually transformed into a vast garden of stems and leaves and petals, an enormous sea of colors and fragrances.