It's a Crime by Jacqueline Carey Page B

of course; she hadn’t even had to submit a proposal. He told Neil Culp and the rest of senior management that she “loved swamps.” Pat laughed at first; Frank could be such a salesman. But the more she thought about his statement, the more she realized how true it was.
    There is nothing clean or crisp about a swamp. Its slow breath can be fetid and rank. Prehistoric plants slither from the muck. Insects thicken the air. Gothic vines glower from damp trees. All is doom, gloom, miasma, scum, froth, decay, and death. Also life. Gooey ooze is where life starts to percolate; sputters become animate; breeding begins. Fertility is spongy, viscous, spermy. A swamp may be waste. It has a hundred ideas when only one is needed. But that one will crawl out and start to walk.
    Not that LinkAge was ready for such a raw presentation. Pat tried, however, to move beyond the old-fashioned lily pond and hint at these paradoxes. To do so she opted for sheer lavishness. When the asphalt was broken up and carted away, she made sure a levee was left between the weedy, invasive reeds and the dear little pond dug with a backhoe. (What a madhouse that had been! Only the overseer spoke English, and he usually wasn’t there. She might as well have been playing charades.) Then she supervised construction of a cedar boardwalk and the planting of a grove of black willow, black cherry, and black tupelo. Dozens of summer sweet, swamp rose, and serviceberry bushes followed, their fragrance strong and spicy; there were no stagnant vapors here. The flowers, too, were abundant—seven-foot Turk’s-cap lilies, startlingly spherical globeflowers, and giant swamp mallows (of course).
    The boardwalk began at the outer limits of the original parking lot, where a stone bench sat amid thick stands of cardinal flowers and royal ferns. From this decorative spot, you could gaze on the star of the garden, Pat’s environmental coup, a plant so persnickety it was in danger of disappearing: the swamp pink. It needed ground that was saturated but not flooded, sunlight that was plentiful but not too hot, and soil that was rich but not overly so, since then other, stronger plants would crowd it out. Sometimes—only in years when conditions were right—it would produce a single flower, lasting for no longer than a week. This flower would sit at a slight tilt, ingratiatingly, but in truth it wasn’t much. It looked like a bottlebrush and was the creepily intimate pink of a cat’s tongue. It turned Pat’s bog garden into a living museum, though. She spent thousands of dollars on seedlings at a specialty nursery near New Hope, Pennsylvania, and the garden and its living treasure were featured prominently in the year’s (otherwise misleading) report to the stockholders.
    Although Pat shrank from returning to LinkAge property, she was eager to learn how her bog garden was faring. She still knew where she could find the pass she’d been issued during the landscaping. But when she arrived at Meadowlands Center, the guard at the gate told her the pass had expired.
    “Really,” said Pat, taking it back through the car window and then turning it over a couple of times. There was a photo of her looking like a psycho, also her name and title, Special Projects Director. “I don’t see any expiration date.”
    “That’s the old-style pass. We don’t use those anymore. Not since the bankruptcy.”
    “But you know me,” she said.
    “Well,” said the guard, an old man she’d greeted pleasantly one hundred and fifty times, “I might, and I might not. But I can’t let you in.”
    Pat thought of Ginny’s story “The Red Door.” She could have come up with innumerable ways to get past this guard if she hadn’t already tipped her hand. She glanced in the direction of her wetland. All you could see in any direction was reeds. Evidently her plantings were still too young to be visible from the road. It wasn’t possible to take a car around, but if necessary she might be