It's a Crime by Jacqueline Carey Page A

electronic device. She used to give in without thinking. She didn’t much care either way, and for Frank, these were signifiers of the good life. There was no point in arguing that sometimes people liked a change. Frank didn’t. He’d got it in his head that stainless steel, shellfish, and remote control devices were classy. Just try to take such notions away.
    She was not about to redo the kitchen, but losing the remote for the entertainment center did make her heart do a small backflip—“What will Frank think?”—before she realized a minute later that he wasn’t going to be saying much about it in the near future. She also knew that Frank would have freaked out if he could see how she was letting his living room slowly fill with epiphytes and thrillers and
MAD
magazines from the sixties that she’d found on eBay. She even added a couple of occasional tables from a consignment store. Was she insulting him, letting him down, taking advantage of him, betraying him? Or was this efflorescence an unconscious attempt to muffle her loneliness? Maybe it didn’t matter, either way. Pat wasn’t obliged to follow his preferences while he was in jail; this was the twentieth century, after all. Well, actually, the twenty-first.
    When she’d first dropped Frank off at Allenwood, she’d come away with an awful feeling of emptiness. But that was not surprising. So much of their life together had been defined by Frank and his job. Pat had met some other mothers through Rose and Ruby, but she’d never had the time to see a whole lot of them. Frank entertained frequently; that was part of the fun of working for him. The High Risk boys, of course, were particularly coddled. When members of the Swat Team were in town, Frank would take them out for elaborate dinners at LinkAge’s expense. His favorites he would invite to the house.
    It was time for Pat to get back to landscaping. She’d started to design other people’s property not long after Ruby was born because she got tired of perpetually rearranging her own. What she needed now was to consider some bright, orderly colors, but she didn’t exactly have any ongoing jobs, so she decided to check out some of her old work, i.e., the artificial wetland at the LinkAge building in Meadowlands Center that she’d had installed a year and a half ago. The project was a particularly important one for her. Too many of her previous jobs had been for friends or friends of friends—the sort of people who might end up coming to one of the Foys’ parties. For these clients she was forced to lug around that missing canvas bag and waste endless extra hours negotiating plant lists. The profit margin was slim. Commercial projects, on the other hand, could be unsatisfactory in other ways. Landscaping ordinarily lies at the tail end of a development, when deadlines are near, budgets are tight, and tempers are short.
    How wonderful, then, to be handed commercial landscaping work unrelated to any building construction. The construction in this case was long completed. In fact, it was the problem. As LinkAge expanded, management decided that they needed more parking, and they created it by simply filling in a good piece of the tidal swamp adjacent to the existing lot. Unfortunately this was legally defined as wetland and thus protected. If anyone had warned LinkAge about the problem—and several LGT people claimed to have done so—the company hadn’t been listening. At first they ignored warnings from the EPA, unable to believe that anyone would want more of the reed-filled wasteland that already dominated the view from the turnpike. When the EPA persisted, LinkAge refused to re-create any of the trashy old terrain, but did promise to fashion at great expense an entirely new “bog” garden (to use the most modish term). Pat was charged with designing a half an acre of wetland with a panache that would symbolize LinkAge’s vision, growth, and imagination.
    Her employment was Frank’s idea,