“You know what I mean,” Allegra said. “Quit being a jerk.”
“It’s true Caroline was the single dissenting vote,” Julia said. “I voted for their garden because I genuinely thought it was the best, but now I wonder what everyone really thought. It’s almost as if the winning garden was chosen ahead of time.”
Allegra snapped to attention. “That’s just wrong, Julia. Nobody told me how to vote, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say no one pressured any of the judges. Not even Doyle.”
Score one for Allegra. I jumped in before Doyle could react. “Do either of you know if Lucas is still hosting Front Range Gardening?”
“I hope not,” Allegra said. “It’s such a shame. Caroline would have been perfect for TV.”
“Lucas seems to think he still has the job,” I said.
“The station won’t switch hosts in midstream,” Doyle said. “I think he has his job, but I’m of the same opinion as my wise and literate friend here. It’s too bad.”
“He’s so arrogant,” Allegra said, checking her watch for the second time. “Always trying to make a fool of people, trap them, mock them.”
My phone sounded a text message tone, but I ignored it. “Who’s arrogant?” I asked. “Lucas?”
Allegra grinned. “Gosh, who else could I possibly mean? I don’t know how he’s kept his job. Doyle? Do you know?”
“Inertia,” Doyle said. “It’s the only explanation. Or a contract with the devil. The man turns three minutes on TV into thirty at the dentist.”
“He’s not that bad,” Royce said.
Leave it to Royce to put in a good word for the beleaguered Lucas, I thought. He was unfailingly kind. Though he was dead wrong about Lucas. He actually was that bad.
Allegra stood and smoothed the front of her skirt. “I’m ravenous, Doyle. I’ll see if I can find us a table.”
Doyle rose but remained by our table while Allegra walked off in search of an empty spot. He shook his head. “What’s the point of sarcasm if she doesn’t get it?”
“From my vantage point, you got as good as you gave,” Royce said.
To my surprise, Doyle laughed. “Fair enough. You’re probably right.”
I had one last shot at asking him about Lucas’s TV show. “Are you or Allegra still hoping to host Front Range Gardening?”
He looked down his nose at me. “Rachel Stowe, you have a way of cutting to the heart of the matter.”
The text message alert went off again. This time I looked at my phone. Gilroy.
“I’ll let you take care of that,” Doyle said, as though he was doing me a favor rather than escaping my question. “I’m sure we’ll all run into each other again.”
Doyle made his break, and as he trotted off after Allegra, I checked my last message. “Are you with Julia?” it read. “Call me now.”
CHAPTER 10
After I showed Julia and Royce the text message, we paid the bill and hurried to the police station, a two-minute walk from Wyatt’s. Officer Travis Turner, manning the front desk, seemed both surprised and relieved to see us. He was especially glad to see Julia, and he asked us to have a seat while he called Gilroy.
“Where is he?” I asked. “He just texted me.”
“You haven’t heard?” Turner replied. “There’s been another murder. Stella Patmore.”
“Oh, no!” Julia cried. “How? Why?” Taking Turner’s advice, she sank into one of the lobby’s plastic chairs.
“Hang on a minute, Mrs. Foster.” Turner dialed Gilroy from the station’s land line, telling him that the three of us were safe and together, and yes, he would tell us what happened. And he’d tell us why Julia shouldn’t be left alone. I had a terrible feeling I knew the answer to that.
Royce sat next to Julia, putting a protective arm around her, but I didn’t feel like sitting. The moment Turner hung up, I asked, “Belladonna poisoning or something else?”
“A sharp hand pruner,” Turner said. “A narrow pair of shears. She was stabbed in the neck with one, inside her greenhouse.”
“Oh, Lord,” Julia said.
“The pruner was engraved with the initials LS,” Turner said.
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean Lucas Siegler killed Stella,” I said.
“It may or may not. You wouldn’t think a murderer would implicate himself like that, but I’ve seen it before. It’s reverse psychology.” Turner held up his hands in a gesture of innocence. “‘Why would I be stupid enough to use a weapon with my initials on it?’ That kind of thing.”
“Gilroy and Underhill are at the scene?” I asked.
“That’s right. So the chief wanted to make sure Julia was with you or Royce.”
There was an uncomfortable moment of silence. Then, knowing the subject had to be broached, I said, “Because someone is killing the Garden Design Show judges.” I stole a glance at Julia.
“The chief thinks it’s possible,” Turner said. “Better safe than sorry, Mrs. Foster.”
“I wish I’d never agreed to be a judge,” Julia said.
I could tell be the expression on Royce’s face that he was finding the whole thing preposterous. “Why would someone kill garden judges?” he said. “In the scheme of things, a Juniper Grove garden award isn’t important, and besides, the competition is over. What’s to be gained?”
“Murders don’t make sense to normal people,” Turner said. “Rachel could tell you that.”
Latte at Grove Coffee aside, I needed more caffeine. This was going to be a long day, and probably a long night. I poured myself a cup of station coffee and took a long sip, scowling at the bitter taste. What good did a new coffeemaker do if Gilroy wasn’t going to brew fresh coffee? Honestly, the man was so stubborn. I’d gone to the trouble of buying the station a decent brewer last month and this sludge was the result?
I set the Styrofoam cup on the table, and in my best firm and no-nonsense voice, I said, “Julia won’t be alone until this is solved. Royce or I will be with her during the day, and at night I’m staying at her house. Right now, I need to talk to Gilroy. I have some information for him. And this stuff . . .” I pulled the old filter from the machine and dropped it into a trash can. “Where’s the good coffee? These grounds look like a mud pie.”
“We’re always pinching pennies,” Turner said.
That’s what I thought. “Penny wise and pound foolish,” I retorted. “You can’t drink this liquid tar, and neither can visitors to the station. It’ll cause ulcers, you’ll be sued, and a jury will find you guilty. I’ll try to bring something from home later. Royce, can you stay with Julia?”
“Just try to keep me away,” he said.
“And I think the gang should meet later,” I said.
“Name a time,” Royce said.
“Six o’clock,” I said. “We need Holly there too. I’ll ask her.” Then I swung back to the desk. “I need Stella Patmore’s address.”
i found stella’s house, a two-story Tudor-style home on a green and pleasant street, and parked my Forester behind Gilroy’s SUV. Allegra had been right about Stella having money. The Tudor lot was double-sized—plenty of room for a greenhouse in the back by the looks of it—and primly manicured, probably by a crew of landscapers. How did a twenty-seven-year-old acquire that kind of money?
Underhill appeared from around the southwest corner of the house and cut across the front lawn, holding what looked like an evidence bag. He stowed the bag in the back of the SUV, strolled back to my car, and bent down to look at me as I lowered the window. “You just missed the coroner, Rachel.”
“That’s fine with me. Turner said she was stabbed in the neck with a hand pruner.”
“Sure looks like the cause of death, though they’ll probably test for belladonna too.”
“When did she die? I saw her at Grove Coffee about an hour ago.”
“She died about an hour ago, maybe a little more. The coroner said her being in a hot greenhouse makes the timing difficult, but the blood was still
damp, though partly because of the raised humidity. Sorry to be explicit. A neighbor who was allowed to cut flowers in the greenhouse found her.”
“Last I saw her, she was leaving work. She must have gone straight home. Is Gilroy back there? I need to tell him something about her.”
“Go on back. Just watch for the crime tape. Fingerprints were just taken, but don’t touch anything.”
Rounding the corner of the house, I could see Gilroy in the backyard, standing in Stella’s glass greenhouse and turning slowly in place. Figuring that he was searching for something, I slowed and waited for him to see me and signal me that it was all right to approach.
“Is Julia with you?” he asked.
“She’s with Royce,” I said, hovering at the greenhouse door. “We won’t leave her alone until this has been settled.”
“If I had to guess, she’s not in danger.”
“But why take the chance?”
“Exactly. The forensics team has already been here. Come inside, look around, and tell me what you notice.”
He stepped to the back of the greenhouse and I walked to the middle. It was smaller than I’d imagined. Nice but not the luxurious monster I’d imagined. It was no more than fourteen feet long by maybe ten feet wide. Two raised beds, one on each side, ran the length of the greenhouse. Beneath them were open shelves storing empty clay pots, and behind Gilroy there was more shelving for tools and even more pots.
“It’s steaming in here,” I said. “No wonder forensics moved fast. Okay if I vent it?”
“Those louvers?” he said. He reached over one of the raised beds and began to push open the glass shutters that made up two of the panels, and I did the same on the other side of the greenhouse. Immediately a breeze shot through, cooling us. Gilroy moved to the door, and I continued to scan the greenhouse, looking for something out of place or not right—whatever had caught his attention.
The wooden beds on both side were stuffed, really stuffed, with flowering plants. Not a single vegetable or herb plant caught my eye. Of course I looked for belladonna, but I didn’t see any. There were hibiscus, tall lilies, summer irises, freesias, and a whole host of flowers whose identities were a mystery to me. I examined the base of a few plants and noticed healed cuts on some of the stems. “It looks like Stella was using the greenhouse to grow cut flowers. She didn’t grow them in pots like you’d do if you were going to bring the pots inside or place them around your garden, and look here,” I said, directing his attention to several of the cut stems.
I continued slowly to the back of the greenhouse, slipping my hand between the larger plants, looking for smaller plants stuck among them or holes in the soil. At the very back, I noticed soil sprinkled on top of the wood frame where it butted against the concrete blocks that formed the first three feet of the greenhouse wall. Nothing out of the ordinary in a soil-filled raised bed, but the rest of the frame was clean and clear of soil and debris. Even the gravel path down the middle was clean—except for two small pools of blood close to where the gravel met the concrete.
“Was her head between the two pools of blood?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“When I heard she was stabbed in the neck, I imagined more . . . of a mess.”
“The blood didn’t spatter,” Gilroy said.
“Then the shears were still in her neck?” I cringed as I asked the question.
“Yes. She was stabbed just once.”
“Wait a second.” In this bed crammed with plants, with not two inches between each one, I now found a void, and it was right next to the disturbed soil. “There was something here,” I said. “Stella used every millimeter of these beds. Did you find a leaf or petal on the soil?”
“Nothing.”
“You found this?”
“Just before you came. It’s the only bare spot in a greenhouse packed to the gills.”
“Can I dig into it?”
Gilroy edged forward. “Grab that trowel behind you, and don’t touch the soil with your hands. What are you thinking?”
Using a trowel from one of the shelves, I carefully scooped out the soil and pushed it beneath the other plants. “Whatever was here was yanked out, and that’s why there’s soil on the frame. Maybe there’s something left of it.” I was looking for part of a stem underneath, but I didn’t find it. What I did find was a small clump of roots several inches below the surface, still fresh and plump.
“Hang on,” Gilroy said as he took a plastic bag from his jeans pocket. He held it open and I dropped the roots inside.
“These aren’t old, dried-out roots,” I said, stepping away from the blood pools. “There must be a scientific way to tell if they’re from a belladonna plant.”
Gilroy squatted down near the blood, his elbows resting on his knees, and peered under the raised beds. A moment later he pulled out another evidence bag, turned it inside out, stuck his hand inside it, and dropped to his knees. He bent low and reached far under the shelving beneath the bed, grimacing with the effort. When he got to his feet again, he was holding a small, dark berry.
“If I’m not mistaken,” he said.
“That’s a belladonna berry. I know it.”
He turned the bag inside out over the berry and then pressed the bag shut. “This doesn’t tell who murdered Miss Patmore, but it may tell us why.”
I scanned the opposite raised bed, looking for suspect berries or another void among the plants. “Either Stella was growing the belladonna or someone else was and she didn’t know it. So when they came to take the plant, she saw them and confronted them.”
“Could be.”
“I don’t see anything unusual over here. Did you?”
“No.”
“Of course, one plant is all you need to do the job, and not even a full-grown plant.”
“Right.”
“Stella didn’t kill Caroline.”
“Hard to say.”
“If the killer wanted to plant belladonna where it wouldn’t be recognized, Stella’s greenhouse would be the place to do it. It would be hidden from her neighbors and lawn people, and Stella herself wouldn’t have known what it was. She probably thought it was a volunteer from past flower seeds. Maybe she even took flower cuttings for her house.”
That caught his attention. He stopped staring at the evidence bag and looked at me. “She wouldn’t recognize such a well-known poisonous plant? She had a degree in horticulture.”
“She didn’t, James. That’s what I came to tell you.” I recounted my conversation with Jacob Horning at Appleton’s and with Doyle and Allegra at Wyatt’s. “I think Doyle knew Stella was lying about her degree and didn’t care,” I said. “I wonder if Caroline knew, too, and that’s why she didn’t want Stella to judge the Garden Design Show.”
“That’s a motive to murder Mrs. Burkhardt,” Gilroy said.
I followed him outside the greenhouse. Here, in Stella’s backyard, was wealth beyond the reach of most in Juniper Grove: an aged and beautifully trimmed hedge, a pond with a waterfall, huge stone planters, an alpine rock garden, a raised cedar deck. “What did Stella hope to achieve by lying about her degree? What more could she have wanted?”
“It doesn’t matter what people have,” he answered. “They always want more.”
As I looked at him, and he—I was sure of it—avoided looking at me, I couldn’t help wondering if he was talking about more than Stella.
CHAPTER 11
Gilroy and I had some things to clear up between us, but Stella’s murder scene wasn’t the place to do it. And so, craving a cream puff and needing to talk to Holly about our Mystery Gang meeting tonight, I headed downtown to Holly’s Sweets.
Peter Kavanagh, Holly’s husband, was scrubbing the counter when I entered the bakery. He said hello and waved me toward the back. “Should I box some cream puffs?” he asked as I slid behind the counter.
“Two, please,” I said. “No, make that four. I have guests this evening.”
There was usually a lul
l or two in customer traffic in the afternoon, and luckily I’d hit one of those lulls. I found Holly piping icing onto a tray of cinnamon rolls, looking a tad less harried than normal. After catching her up on the latest news—her bakery being Gossip Central in our town, she had already heard about Stella’s murder—she offered me a freshly baked almond croissant. Needless to say, I took it and began to nibble. If I’d been at home, it would have vanished in four large bites.
“If someone tries to hurt Julia, they’ll have to deal with us,” Holly said. “Peter too. He’d thrash them.”
“So would Royce,” I said. “Sixty-nine or not, he’d clock them.”
“He’s a good protector.”
“By the way, we’re having a meeting of the gang tonight at six o’clock, my house. Royce will be there too. Can you come or is that too early?”
“I wouldn’t miss it. Peter won’t mind cleaning up. We’ve had a slow day.”
“It’ll pick up tomorrow morning.”
“It always does. Slow days used to worry me, but not anymore. These days they’re so rare I consider them a gift. Be right back.” Holly hauled her tray of cinnamon rolls to the front of the bakery and I chowed down on the croissant, eating as much of it as I could before she returned, dropped onto a stool, and started to massage her right calf.
“Is Gilroy sure Julia’s a target?” she asked.
“No, and neither am I. Does your leg hurt?”
“Nope. I do this to prevent it from hurting. Peter told me I should get off my feet every once in a while and massage them—and my calves. Once my legs start hurting, it’s almost too late to get them to stop. Wish I could say I was, but I’m not getting any younger.”
“You and me both.”
“For your hands.” Holly grabbed a clean dishcloth from her stainless steel work table and tossed it to me. “We can’t take a chance with Julia’s life, however unlikely it is that she’s in danger. I’d never forgive myself.”
“Agreed. Stella’s murder was vicious, Holly. There’s a lunatic out there—a very angry lunatic—and if they could kill a twenty-seven-year-old, they could kill Julia.”
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