by Dale Mayer
“Why arguing?” Doreen asked.
“Because George thought she should sell them, and Nan said she had another plan in mind.”
Doreen’s heart warmed when she thought about Nan’s other plan. “Yes, Nan was holding on to them for me,” Doreen said with a wistful smile. “My grandmother is pretty special.”
“Oh, she’s special all right,” Penny said, chuckling. “George used to come home from one of his visits, and, although he’d be brighter and full of laughter, he’d say that Nan was especially crazy.”
“A lot of people have told me that she fell somewhere in that realm,” Doreen said. “I am afraid she’s losing some of her memory now though.”
“She’s probably not taking all those supplements George told her to take. They worked like a charm for her.”
“What kind of supplements?”
Penny shrugged. “I’ll have to take a look,” she said. “I have the notes at home somewhere. George always had a fascination for natural remedies. Nan was having trouble even back then.”
“And they helped her?”
Penny nodded emphatically. “Oh, yes. George used to comment on it all the time.”
“Well, if you could get me that list, that would be awesome,” Doreen said. “I have absolutely no idea about supplements. And I really don’t like doctors.”
“No, once you deal with something like George’s heart condition,” Penny said, “you have to consider how much the medical profession actually knows. Obviously they’re helpful a lot of the time, but some of the time it makes you wonder if they aren’t just pushing drugs.”
“Exactly,” Doreen said. “But if you had supplements that worked instead, that would be huge.”
“I think it’s the same list he gave me, so I can certainly find out when I get a moment,” Penny said. “Do you think Nan would take them?”
Doreen nodded. “Particularly if I say it was the same stuff that George used to give her.”
“That might work too,” Penny said. “Those two really did get along like a house on fire. Nan was pretty upset at George’s funeral.”
“I’m sure she was,” Doreen said. “I think one of the hardest things about getting old is watching all your friends die before you.”
“Very true,” Penny said. As they walked up to Penny’s house a good half hour later, Penny motioned and said, “If you want to come in for a few minutes, I can look for that list.”
Doreen brightened. She’d been looking for an excuse as it was to go inside and see how Penny lived. So far she’d only been invited into a few houses, Nan’s, Julie’s and Doreen’s murderous neighbor, Ella. Doreen nodded and said, “Sure. Thank you very much.” Together, the five of them trooped into Penny’s home.
Inside Penny’s house, Doreen looked around. It was stuffed with pretty floral-patterned couches, large floral paintings, and, yes, … floral carpets. It was also pristine. “You haven’t started packing, have you?”
“Well, it’s not like I’ve sold my house yet,” Penny said in a dry tone.
As Doreen looked at Penny’s big living room, it wasn’t really cluttered, but it was overstuffed with mementos. “If you got a staging crew or a Realtor in here,” she said, “I’m pretty sure they’ll insist on all the pictures coming off the walls, all the stuff being moved off the countertops, hauling out the big hutches you’ve got. Realtors can be quite brutal.”
Penny’s jaw dropped. “You know what? I was thinking about bringing in a stager to see what they’d charge me. But it sounds like you know a lot about it.”
“Not necessarily,” she said, “but I’ve watched lots of shows on TV. And my husband did a lot of buying and selling.”
“Right,” Penny said.
Doreen could almost see that, in Penny’s mind, those disqualifiers just raised Doreen’s status several notches. Doreen didn’t understand how that worked because, of course, people should be doing their own investigation and research on this type of thing before deciding. Besides, in Doreen’s mind, she should be demoted not promoted for her husband’s activities. “Have you picked out a Realtor?”
“Absolutely. I was going to ask Simi Jeron,” she said. “I’ve known that family for thirty years or more.”
“Oh, good,” she said, “that should make it easier. Ask her about staging and decluttering when she’s here.”
“Well, she’s already been here once, but we haven’t signed any paperwork yet.”
“That’s when the boom will get lowered,” Doreen said, chuckling.
“I hope not,” Penny said, walking into her kitchen, approaching a large cupboard, opened it up. She took out a small notebook sitting on top of the box of vitamin bottles and brought it to the kitchen table and sat down, flipping through the pages. “Ah, here it is,” she said, “a page just for Nan.” She held it up and then read from it. “Vitamin D, ginkgo, B12, and I’m not sure what this other one says.”
“Do you mind if I take a look?” Doreen asked, holding out her hand. Penny handed it over. As Doreen looked at it, she said, “I’m not sure what that is either. May I get a copy of this?”
“We’ll photocopy both sides.”
Passing the book back, Penny made copies of both sides and then gave Doreen the two sheets.
“Thanks.”
Penny nodded with a smile, and both women returned to the kitchen, where Penny tucked the book back into the vitamin corner.
“Must’ve been nice that George was so interested in health,” she said.
“A lot of good it did him,” Penny said bitterly, and she winced. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I guess you’re angry he died, huh?”
“Isn’t that the stupidest thing?” Penny asked. “Even after a year, I still look around our house, and I get mad at him. We had all these plans for retirement, all these things we would do now that he wasn’t working anymore, and here he ups and dies on me.”
“Well, can’t you do those things on your own?”
“I could,” Penny said, “but I don’t really want to. They were things we would do together. They were our plans.”
“Versus your plans?”
Penny froze for a moment and slowly nodded. “Very insightful.” She glanced at her watch and said, “Oh, my goodness. I have to run. I have to meet someone.”
“Oh, absolutely no problem,” Doreen said. “We’ll go and let you get on then.” She and her animals were ushered to the front door. Goliath had taken up a seat in the middle of George’s big recliner. Doreen scooped him into her arms, with Thaddeus still on her shoulder, and Mugs trotted behind them. “It was a nice visit,” she said, “and I’m glad I had good news for you.”
As she stepped down the front steps, Penny said, “And once again, thank you,” she said sincerely. “I will definitely sleep better now.”
With a half wave, Doreen watched as Penny got into her vehicle and reversed out of her driveway and headed down the street. But Doreen had stopped on Penny’s driveway. Doreen really shouldn’t do what she was thinking of doing. But it was pretty damn hard to talk herself out of it. With a shrug, she decided it would worry away at her, so she might as well put her mind to rest.
She put Goliath down, Thaddeus taking the opportunity to get down as well, and quickly headed into Penny’s backyard, where Johnny had his favorite place to sit. Doreen didn’t even know why Penny’s echinacea bed was bugging her, but she thought she’d read somewhere how echinacea was used in all kinds of medicine. It certainly wasn’t—as far as she knew—a killer, but anything was a killer if you took too much of it.
Doreen made a quick trip through Penny’s backyard, mentally jotting down what was here: marigolds, lilies, calla lilies, black-eyed Susans. None were flowering yet. Daisies were about to explode with blooms. … This would be a lively garden when summer hit. She really appreciated the wide variety, even a few straggling tulips. She stopped and stared at them and shook her head. “What are you guys doing drooping over like th
at?”
She stopped to study stalks reaching for the sky. They wouldn’t bloom for another month or two, and this bed was far too crowded for them to do well. Then there was the belladonna and foxglove mingling in the patch too. Drat. So was their presence that bad? She couldn’t tell. But as the same poisonous plants lived in Nan’s garden… Possibly Nan and George had shared a love of poisonous plants as well as antiques?
Glancing around, Doreen noted how little shade the echinacea plants would probably get during the daylight hours, backed up against the fence as they were, which wouldn’t help their growth. As she dropped down in front of the massive green patch—at least three feet across, with dozens of plants in there—she frowned, realizing their roots would be completely twisted together. Echinacea plants loved company, particularly its own family, but, at one point in time, they would fight and hate each other—just like every other family.
Too-close confines caused too-much strife.
She checked the ground around the roots, unable to help herself, and realized that they were also very dry. The ground was poor here, with many rocks noticeable in the soil. Echinacea could survive in crappy soil. A lot of plants could survive. But the intention of a garden was not to have them survive; it was to have the flowers thrive. And again, as she glanced around the backyard, what had once been Penny’s pride and joy at this point in time was probably just a constant source of work and bad memories. As Doreen walked past the echinacea, she thought she saw something else burrowed in the center of one of the plants. But just then, a man asked from the park side of the fence, “Hey, what are you doing back there?”
She popped out of Penny’s backyard gate guiltily, leaving the gate open for her animals, and plastered a bright smile on her face. “I walked home with Penny,” she said, “but she had to take off. I just wanted to take a quick look at her garden. She has done so well here,” she said, injecting a bright warmth to her voice.
The man looked at her suspiciously.
She looked him over, from the top of his six-foot frame to his dirty sneakers and held out a hand. “I’m Doreen Montgomery, and who are you?”
Reluctantly he shook her hand. “I’m Dave.”
“Dave?”
His frown deepened. “Just Dave.”
She nodded and smiled and said, “Well, if you see Penny, and you want to tell her how I was in her backyard, that’s fine,” she said. “She knows that I’m a crazy gardener too. I was checking out her echinacea.”
“Echinacea?” he asked doubtfully, looking at the green splotch against the fence.
“Echinacea,” she said firmly. “We were talking about mine at my house earlier.”
At that, his face seemed to settle, and his shoulders sagged, as if with relief.
“Not to worry,” she said. “I’m not a thief. I’m the one who helped solved Johnny’s disappearance.”
At that, awareness came into Dave’s eyes. Of course Mugs’s slow approach, his head lowered and moving from side to side like a pissed-off bull drew more attention to Doreen. So did the orange streak that raced between Dave’s legs, and he grinned. “Now I know who you are.”
Thaddeus, not to be outdone, squawked, “No you don’t. No you don’t.”
“Yeah, sorry about them,” she said. She gave Dave a quick finger wave. “And now I’ll head home before my critters decide that they like Penny’s garden better than mine,” she said in a joking manner.
Dave watched as she and her animals ambled toward the creek. “Why are you walking along the creek?” he asked, calling behind her.
“Because I love it,” she said. “It’s my favorite place to walk.”
He shrugged and said, “Nothing but dirty water down there. It’s full of ducks and all kinds of waterfowl.”
“Hopefully I’ll see some today.”
“You won’t catch me walking through the water, that’s their toilet.” And with that, he headed off.
She walked a few more steps and turned to look back. He strode away, not having explained his presence at Penny’s property. Doreen frowned and thought about that, then sent Penny a quick text. Stopped to take a quick look at your echinacea plants. A stranger named Dave came up and didn’t seem terribly friendly. Wasn’t sure what he was doing in the park behind your place. Just a heads-up. And she left it at that.
“Come on, Goliath, Mugs …” Thaddeus squawked as he waddled toward her, but then Mugs came racing forward with Goliath on his heels, and, in a surprisingly quick move, Thaddeus jumped on Mugs, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Giddyup, Mugs. Giddyup, Mugs.”
By the time Doreen had crossed the bridge and headed up her backyard, Thaddeus had long giving up riding Mugs, subsequently walking. Now he was tucked into the crook of her neck, swaying with her every step. She crossed the bridge as her phone beeped with a return text. He’s a lovely neighbor, but he doesn’t like strangers. That echinacea is doing terrible. As are some of my more specialized plants. Suggestions?
Doreen grinned. Perfect entrance to find out more. Absolutely. Maybe we’ll have tea another day and check it out.
Perfect.
This concludes Book 4 of Lovely Lethal Gardens: Daggers in the Dahlias.
Read about Evidence in the Echinacea: Lovely Lethal Gardens, Book 5
Lovely Lethal Gardens:
Evidence in the Echinacea
(Book #5)
A new cozy mystery series from USA Today best-selling author Dale Mayer. Follow gardener and amateur sleuth Doreen Montgomery—and her amusing and mostly lovable cat, dog, and parrot—as they catch murderers and solve crimes in lovely Kelowna, British Columbia.
Riches to rags. … Controlling to chaos. … But murder … well maybe …
Doreen’s success at solving murders has hit the newswires across the country, but all Doreen wants is to be left alone. She has antiques to get to the auction house and a relationship with Corporal Mack Moreau to work out, not to mention a new friendship to nurture with Penny, Doreen’s first friend in Kelowna, and Doreen doesn’t want to ruin things.
But when a surprise accusation won’t leave Doreen alone—about Penny’s late husband George’s death and made by one of the men Doreen helped put away—she thinks that maybe it can’t hurt to just take a quick look into her new friend’s past.
Before Doreen knows it, she’s juggling a cold case, a closed case, and a possible mercy killing … along with cultivating her relationships with Penny, Mack, and Doreen’s pets: Mugs, the basset hound; Goliath, the Maine coon cat, and Thaddeus, the far-too-talkative African gray parrot. And while Mack should be used to Doreen’s antics by now, when she dives into yet another of his cases it’s becoming increasingly hard to take …
Book 5 is available now!
To find out more visit Dale Mayer’s website.
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Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Daggers in the Dahlias: Lovely Lethal Gardens, Book 4! If you enjoyed the book, please take a moment and leave a short review here.
Dear reader,
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Cheers,
Dale Mayer
About the Author
Dale Mayer is a USA Today bestselling author best known for her Psychic Visions and Family Blood Ties series. Her contemporary romances are raw and full of passion and emotion (Second Chances, SKIN), her thrillers
will keep you guessing (By Death series), and her romantic comedies will keep you giggling (It’s a Dog’s Life and Charmin Marvin Romantic Comedy series).
She honors the stories that come to her – and some of them are crazy and break all the rules and cross multiple genres!
To go with her fiction, she also writes nonfiction in many different fields with books available on resume writing, companion gardening and the US mortgage system. She has recently published her Career Essentials Series. All her books are available in print and ebook format.
Connect with Dale Mayer Online
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DAGGERS IN THE DAHLIAS: LOVELY LETHAL GARDENS, BOOK 4
Dale Mayer
Valley Publishing
Copyright © 2019
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-1-773361-44-4
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