To the Manor Dead by Sebastian Stuart Page B

cool stuff, isn’t it?” I said, grateful to have this simple transaction to ground me.
    “It is cool, and the price is fair,” she said.
    “We just bought a little weekend place up in Palenville,” her partner said.
    “We just love it up here.”
    “It’s magic.”
    Yeah—black magic maybe.

Zack lived in West Sawyerville, right under the eastern flank of the Catskills, in a little cabin next to a stream on a dead-end road. When I first met him I figured that any guy who would buy the place had to have some soul. I arrived to find him strolling around his vegetable garden shirtless, with a drink in his hand, picking the lettuce for dinner.
    “Hey, little darlin’,” he called. Zack was from Levittown and like a lot of guys who grew up in cities and suburbs but settled in the country, he loved to use twangy slangy language.
    He handed me his drink. I took a sip. It was one of his Zackwackers—basically whatever fresh fruit he had laying around, blendered-up with enough tequila to grow hair on a billiard ball. It was Zack’s drink of choice after “a hard day in the fields” (a.k.a. watering rich second-homers’ perennial beds), especially during “the high summer months” (which started in the middle of March). For years Zack had worked for a large landscape company, planting trees and building stone walls. Then two years ago he’d decided it was time to “be my own man, be Zack. ” He’d taken a six-week course in landscape design at Ulster Community College and reinvented himself by printing up business cards reading “Zack Goldman, Earth Art.” Well, it worked. He had more clients than he could handle, usually eco-earnest types from the city who bought second homes and dreamed of ponds, sweeps of grasses, masses of rare flowers—but who, after hearing the price tag, invariably settled for a couple of perennial beds and a dwarf evergreen or two, all of it tarted up come spring with impatiens, petunias, and geraniums.
    The drink went down easy—I needed it. “That’s potent stuff.”
    “I’m a man with potent appetites. And you’re one hell of a woman.” He leaned over and kissed me. Zack was pretty adorable when he was on his first drink—it was the second and third that were the problems, as he went from endearing to annoying to incoherent to comatose. At least he never got mean.
    “How was your day?” I asked, sitting on a stone bench. His property was small, but it was ringed with stone walls and filled with benches, paths, and nooks that Zack had built.
    “Darlin’, my day was … spectacular. The earth and I worked together to create beauty. It was hard work, earth work, muscles and sweat.” He looked up at the mountain, his eyes filled with tenderness and tequila. “It was spiritual work, a work of wonder.” I guess he caught my eye-roll because he said, “Janet, sometimes I think you don’t take me seriously.”
    “You don’t make it easy.”
    Zack was a hunk, no doubt—almost six feet of solid beefy muscle, thinning reddish hair, an open face covered with freckles, green eyes nestled in crow’s-feet. The package was a big part of the attraction for me. That and the fact that the Asshole had been a self-important, condescending pseudo-intellectual who turned every discussion into a game of one-upmanship. So much of what we do in life is a reaction to our previous mistakes—but Zack didn’t feel like an overcorrection. At least not yet.
    “My day was good. How was your day?”
    I told him about the town meeting, and my suspicion that maybe Vince Hammer was somehow connected to Daphne’s death.
    “My old company takes care of Hammer’s place. It’s outside Woodstock, up on Ohayo Mountain. Amazing place, views almost all the way down to the city, they say he spent like ten million building it.”
    Suddenly a battered red pickup plastered with bumper sticks—“Pray for Whirled Peas,” “Honk if You Love Silence,” “I’d Rather be Fartin’”—came to a