Poison, Perennials, and a Poltergeist (The Petal Pushers Mystery Series)

by Hayes, Tina D. C.

  “I can’t hold my tongue any longer.”

  A collective gasp echoed through the house of worship, then all fell silent. Everyone turned to face the nervous woman who stood to interrupt the preacher man.

  “Preacher, you need to take a few steps back from that little Jezebel,” she said, moving into the aisle. Her hands shook as she swallowed hard, attempting to keep her composure. “I’m afraid you might get struck by a stray lightning bolt any second.”

  “What’s the meaning of this?” The reverend’s befuddled expression made it clear this sort of thing didn’t usually happen. “Why don’t you sit back down and-”

  A few people moved as if to approach her, but her next words stopped them in their tracks.

  “That slut is bonking my husband.” Her voice shook with indignation. “They’ve been going at it in the Dew Drop Motel on Highway 41-A for the past couple of months, maybe longer.”

  The bride took a step toward her fiancé. Her wide eyes threatened to take over her face, which grew paler with each passing second. “I don’t know what that crazy bitch is talking about.” Her expletive shocked a few older parishioners on the third pew.

  The bridesmaids exchanged worried glances with each other, whispering behind their calla lilies as Mrs. Blanford wailed. The groomsmen grinned like idiots.

  Darci hated to see the wedding fall to ruin, not just because she’d put so much work into it herself, but because she felt sorry for the young couple who stood at the altar. She felt bad for them, but she wouldn’t have traded her seat with anybody, since she had the best view of the woman causing all the trouble.

  “So now I’m crazy? It’s not bad enough you’ve been playing hide the salami with Morty, now you call me crazy!” Rage tinged her cheeks red as she reached into her handbag and withdrew an envelope of six-by-four-inch photographs. “This will show you and everybody else who isn’t crazy exactly who is a slut. That would be you.” She promptly took out the pictures and let the envelope flutter to the ground at her feet. Armed with extra copies which she passed out to the crowd, she saved two particularly interesting ones for Matthew Frye. It wasn’t exactly the wedding gift he’d hoped for.

  Judging by the disgust that twisted his face, he most likely held the twins to the photos Darci’d been passed. She was amazed the place hadn’t gone up in flames like the gym in Carrie, positive this sort of pornographic color glossies had never before polluted this conservative Baptist church.

  The first one showed a profile of the bride-to-be performing fellatio on a middle-aged man assumed to be Morty, the indignant lady’s husband. Seated in an office chair, ole Morty’s grotesquely jubilant expression suggested he was either enjoying the hell out of himself or in the throes of some type of seizure. Hard as it was to tear her eyes from that proverbial train wreck, she couldn’t wait to see what the next photo showed.

  It was even worse. The couple sprawled across a couch, both totally naked but for a pair of black socks on his feet. Morty groped Belinda’s ta-tas, which she looked to be enjoying. Their pastime of choice was obvious. On her back, one knee jutted up on either side of Morty’s ass, his cheeks the same shade of white as the calla lilies the bridesmaids held now.

  A scream came from the front row, and Darci guessed the mother of the bride had seen the photos.

  “Belinda Elizabeth Blanford, what in the name of God is wrong with you?” Mrs. Blanford shrieked as her husband held her up by her elbow. Silence gripped her momentarily as she searched for a way to rationalize the situation and-for the sake of saving face in a community where everybody knew everything that went on-found a way to place the blame on anyone except her daughter. “Did that man take advantage of you, baby?”

  “Ha, take advantage of her! I knew this was a bad idea the first time my son brought your trollop daughter through my front door.” Apparently, a set of the photographs had also fallen into the hands of Mrs. Frye, mother of the groom. “The whole town knows she acts like gutter trash, but good lord, I didn’t think she’d stoop to this, and with some old geezer. My poor, poor boy, falling for somebody who gets poked more than a pincushion.” She headed toward the altar to console her heartbroken son.

  “Don’t you dare talk that way about Belinda.” Mr. Blanford plopped his inconsolable wife down onto the pew and blocked Mrs. Frye’s way. “Any yahoo in the country could have very easily doctored those pictures in Photoshop.”

  Now Mr. Frye, father of the groom, stepped between his wife and his son’s would be father-in-law. “Don’t use that tone with my wife. You need to be giving your daughter a good talkin’ to, is what you need to do. If she’d been raised right, she wouldn’t be out lifting her skirt to every Tom, Dick, and Morty who crosses her path.”

  “Hold it right there,” said Mrs. Morty. She dipped her hand back into her purse to withdraw another envelope. “The private investigator I hired to follow Morty was kind enough to start tailing Matthew, after we found out what was going on between that whore Belinda and my husband, plus a few other guys he caught her out fornicating with. Since she didn’t care about breaking my heart by screwing up my marriage, I thought I should return the favor.”

  Whispers of speculation rippled through the crowded pews. One of the groomsmen pulled a small silver flask from his coat pocket, took a swig, then passed it around to the other young men standing beside him. Darci thought she might like a draw, herself. This was certainly the most exciting wedding she’d ever attended.

  “These pictures show Matthew isn’t such a high and mighty young man, himself. Oh, and I have the negatives, if anybody needs proof they weren’t tampered with. Anyway,” she said, pulling the pictures out one at a time before passing them through the crowd as she’d done with the first set. “These show Matthew going at it with some blonde floozy . . . . Funny, she seems to look sort of familiar.” Cocking her head, she shifted her gaze to the bridal party and pointed a finger at the woman standing to the bride’s left. “I guess Matthew has been schtupping the maid of honor.”

  “Kaylee, you whore!” Belinda pivoted around and slapped the blonde in question across the face, jumping at the chance to turn from being the accused to the accuser. Behind her, the best man elbowed Matthew, shooting him a quizzical look that made it apparent this was all news to him. Matthew said something into his ear that made the groomsmen laugh. The high five they exchanged thoroughly pissed off the bride’s father, who stormed up to the altar and began a heated argument with them.

  Kaylee decided the best thing to do in this unexpected situation was to get the hell out of Dodge. She threw down her calla lily, hefted up her long skirt, and ran bawling back down the aisle and through the front door. Darci had never seen anyone run like that in high heels, and wondered whether Kaylee got in her car or just kept right on running until she reached her house. The bridesmaid’s stiletto sprint ought to be an Olympic event, she thought, then turned her attention back to the chaos still unfolding.

  Mrs. Frye fainted after seeing the photo of her son Matthew tangled up in the backseat of the family Buick with Kaylee Peters. The irony of the girl’s last name didn’t seem to be lost on anyone, judging by the raunchy comments drifting through the crowd. The Frye’s ten-year-old daughter ran to fetch a cup of water from the fountain. On returning, she stood confused as to what she should do next. She opted for splashing the contents of the Dixie Cup into her mom’s face. Mrs. Frye sat up sputtering and gasping for air, choking on the water that sloshed up her nose.

  Just when it looked like things couldn’t possibly get any worse, they did. People seated on the front rows murmured and looked from the front of the beautifully decorated church to the bride and groom, then to the lady Darci now thought of as Mrs. Morty. From out of one of the Sunday school classrooms walked a man everyone knew from the pictures, though he would have been recognized even quicker if he’d taken off his pants and walked in butt first. He staggered in slurring declarations of love to Belinda. Darci assumed Morty’d been hitting the hootch.


  Slobbering all over himself, Morty fell to his knees in front of the blushing bride. He hugged her around the legs as he sobbed into the fluffy cloud of tulle-embellished skirt. “Come on, sugar. Don’t marry that dumb sombitch. He’s no good for you.” No one thought to turn off the microphone used during the ceremony so Morty’s drunken pleas echoed loudly through the church. “We can run away to Mexico or Tahiti or any other damn tropical place where nobody’ll find us. You know you’re my one and only, Sugar Feet. I love you so much! We can get married, and buy a dog, and-”

  Morty’s wife plucked a hymnal from its receptacle on the back of a pew, then whacked Morty a couple of good licks over his head with it. The preacher caught the book on its downward arc just in time to stop it from breaking Belinda’s nose.

  “Lord have mercy on us all,” the reverend exclaimed, restraining Mrs. Morty in a bear hug around her arms and body. She continued to lunge toward her husband, shouting profanity the likes of which had never been heard inside the little Baptist church.

  Matthew and Mr. Blanford shoved each other back and forth while the mothers of the bride and groom shouted in each other’s faces, defending their child while pointing out the lack of moral fiber in the other. Mr. Frye took his younger daughter outside to their car, which he drove to the front steps so his son could make a fast getaway. As he made his way back inside and toward his son, the minister spoke again, this time becoming a bit exasperated and losing his composure.

  “Come on people, get a hold of yourselves! This is the House of God, not Friday night mud wrestling over at Babes-a-rama.” He turned to address the larger group of people gaping at all the commotion. “Could some of y’all find it in your hearts to help me get these folks away from each other and out of here before somebody has to call the law?”

  As people moved forward to assist, Darci thought it was a good time to leave. She ebbed along among a wave of others with the same idea, all of whom kept glancing back over their shoulders until they were out of sight of all the action.

  The Blanford-Frye wedding fiasco was the talk of the town for weeks afterward.

  “Damn! You would know I’d leave before all the excitement started.” Charlotte couldn’t believe she missed the event of the century. At least she got a firsthand account of the chaos from Darci.

  Surprisingly enough, after people got the gossip out of the way, they raved about the floral arrangements. Darci booked two more weddings before the week was out, and Petal Pushers enjoyed an increased number of first time customers. Three-fourths of them pumped her for more information on the Morty affair, and everybody left with a plant, cut flowers, or an arrangement in hand.

  When Darci opened the store on Saint Patrick’s Day, she came prepared for nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn’t a big holiday in the florist business, but she hoped to sell a few things she’d advertised in that week’s fliers. Designed to ward off pinches due to lack of green attire on the seventeenth, a box full of St. Patrick’s Day buttons with little leprechauns dancing on a field of green sat on the counter. The flier featured a coupon for a dollar off Oxalis deppei, better known as shamrock plants. The green and purple houseplants filled the display table in the center of the room, their clover-like leaves festive beneath delicate pink blooms.

  “Well, would you look at this.” Darci picked up a potted spider plant from the stool by the porthole window, then held it out to Charlotte. “What do you think? Luck of the Irish, maybe?”

  The previous afternoon, a customer returned the plant because its leaves had started to dry up and fall off. It was pretty obvious to Darci and Charlotte that it hadn’t seen a drop of water in at least a week. Rather than point out the obvious, Darci took the plant back and talked Mrs. Jenkins into a jade plant instead, a hardy dark green succulent which could thrive in a drought. She didn’t mention that detail to the now happy Mrs. Jenkins, afraid that if she did, the lady would restrict herself to watering it once a month.

  The spider plant Charlotte gaped at this morning seemed to be the picture of health, ready for a photo shoot in Better Homes and Gardens.

  “Freaky. If we hadn’t walked in here at the same time, I would’ve sworn you were trying to get one over on the pregnant girl. This is the same plant, right?” Charlotte wore an expression of amused confusion.

  “Yep, definitely the same plant. Don’t think anybody would have broken in to switch out the stock and leave the till in the cash register.” Darci squinted at the pot, then stuck her finger in the dirt, testing the moisture as she examined the soil particles stuck to her index finger. “Did you fertilize it when you watered it?”

  “Nope, just H2O straight out of the tap.”

  “Hell if I know.” Darci shook her head. “Maybe we have some weird magical draft blowing through here or something. It’s worse there by the porthole and over by the counter. Wade came in last Saturday, when it was so windy, and went over the windows and door seals, but he couldn’t find where the air was coming in.”

  “Weird.”

  At the end of the month, Darci balanced the books, thrilled to find their profit margin growing steadily wider with each passing week. They still had a ways to go before she could declare the business a success, but at least now she was a little more confident she was doing something right.

  She always went over the financial stuff three times, just to make sure she caught all her mistakes. Darci sucked at math and she knew it. How she ever passed her college algebra class was beyond her. Maybe Professor Tannenbaum thought she was cute, or maybe he just passed everybody to make himself look like a wonderful teacher. He had won ‘Teacher of the Year’ that semester, if she remembered correctly. Oh well, she guessed it really didn’t matter now. She did know how to add and subtract-so long as her calculator batteries didn’t go flat-and could tell the difference between positive numbers, which gave her a rush like biting into a chocolate éclair, and negative numbers, which meant growing debt and made her feel stupid. For now, she was starting to use the black ink pen more than the red one.

  For the moment, at least, it looked as if she might actually be able to make her business a success. With a smile, she snapped the ledger closed, then turned to give Daisy a fresh sprig of millet. “So far, so good, my little feathered buddy.”

  Petal Pushers’ Plant of the Month for March is

  Shamrock Plant

  Oxalis deppei

  Perennial Bulb

  Common name: Good Luck Plant, Iron Cross, False Shamrock, and Lucky Clover.

  Brief description: This plant really is made up of four-leaf clovers, but unlike the ones you might find in your yard, the centers of these are purple. Pink blooms appear in summer, but the foliage makes this an attractive plant year round.

  Symbolism: good luck.

  Trivia: This native of Mexico became popular with plant collectors during the Victorian era.

  Growing instructions: These plants like moist soil and bright indirect light. They reach ten to twelve inches tall. Plant the bulbs two inches deep, and they’ll bloom in twelve weeks. When your shamrock plant starts to look puny, let it have a dormant period for a few months, then start watering it again and it should perk right up.

  Uses: These shamrock plants are good in containers indoors, but can be planted outside. They are perfect for window boxes.

  Tools & Tips: March is the time to start your seedlings, so they’ll be ready to set out after the last frost. You can buy seed starter kits with plastic lids, or just use paper cups or egg cartons that you fill with potting soil. Add your seeds of choice, water, and cover with plastic wrap. Place whichever you decide to use in a sunny window, keep the soil moist, and remove the plastic cover or wrap whenever the seedlings start to grow.

  In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, Greta Greeley has set up a beautiful display at the Webster County library, with shamrock plants and ceramic Leprechauns. Stop by and have a look sometime this month.

  Chapter 4. April

  I perhaps owe having become a p
ainter to flowers.

  ~ Claude Monet

  “Whatcha working on?” Darci walked behind the counter, curious to see what had her cousin so intrigued in the internet. Charlotte’s short blonde curls were as tidy as ever, though her roots were getting darker by the day. Unable to bleach it the ‘natural’ shade it’d been for the past ten years, her hairdresser had to use non-chemical colorants during the pregnancy.

  “Baby names. Jimbo and me can’t agree on anything, except that we both hate the names Gertrude and Peter.” Charlotte scrolled down a page full of the top five hundred names for babies, the meanings and country where the name originated listed to the right of each.

  “It would save fifty percent of the headache if you’d just let the doctor tell you whether it’s going to be a boy or a girl.” Darci bent closer to get a glimpse at the monitor, unable to stop herself from tousling the blonde hair beside her. “Your roots are showing.”

  “Thanks for pointing that out.” She coughed and said “bitch” at the same time, which caused them both to laugh. Charlotte took her hand off the mouse halfway through the ‘T’ names for girls. “How about Turquoise? That’s pretty, and you don’t hear it too much. And Twyla, that’s kinda cute. What do you think?”

  “Um, to be honest,” Darci said, the corners of her lips turned up in a sarcastic grin, “I think your mom is going to shit tulips if you name her grandbaby Turquoise Twyla. Sounds like a stripper from the eighteen-hundreds.”

  “You’re probably right. Still a cute name, though.” Charlotte tapped the mouse to bring up boy names that started with ‘F’. “Okay, let’s see what we have here. Farouk, Festus, and Filbert, like the nut. Well, I guess if it’s a boy, his first initial definitely won’t be ‘F’.”