Bloom and Doom

by Beverly Allen

  Liv rolled her eyes. “Still, you didn’t need to break it to her that way.”

  “Like Bixby would be any gentler.”

  Liv sighed. “Okay, fine. What are you going to do now?”

  “Get some sleep,” I said. “Then, with a clear head, I’ll look up the pills online before I take them to Bixby in the morning. I want to make sure they’re what I think they are.”

  “You really should get Internet here. I know you’re trying to save money, but—wait, do you mean you’re not even sure they’re sleeping pills?” Liv said.

  My turn to roll my eyes. “Of course they’re sleeping pills. Jenny told me she took a sleeping pill and said she kept them in the stuffed penguin.”

  Liv lifted an eyebrow.

  “You’d have to know Jenny. It made sense to her. But I want to identify the specific brand before I hand them over. Jenny’s defense lawyer will need to be aware, and it might help if she hears about it sooner rather than through proper channels.”

  Liv sat in the driver’s seat, biting her lip while staring at my front stoop.

  “I’m still trying to help her,” I said. “Can’t you see that?”

  She grabbed my hand. “Of course you are. You’re a good friend. But this will be a hard thing for everyone to come to terms with. Ellen . . . and especially Jenny. Did you discuss your sleepwalking theory with her?”

  I shook my head. And then inhaled. Liv was right. Someone needed to. Someone who cared about her. And it looked like that person would have to be me. “I’ll see if I can visit with her tomorrow, tell her what I found. If you thought I was too direct with Ellen, can you perhaps recommend a better tactic?”

  “I . . . I was wrong,” Liv said. “You’re right. There’s no other way than to come out and say it.” She squeezed my hand. “Want me to come with you?”

  “I doubt the jail would allow it.” I sent her an encouraging smile. “But thanks for offering.”

  “You’d better get some sleep, then,” she said. “Tomorrow is going to be a humdinger of a day.”

  “Yeah, and Liv?” I opened the car door and swung weary legs to the pavement.

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for being my cousin . . . and my friend.”

  She leaned over and hugged me before I hoisted myself out of the seat. Once I’d unlocked my apartment door, Liv backed out and headed down the road.

  I bent down and prevented Chester from making a break for it.

  “No, you don’t, buster,” I said. “I’m not chasing you all over town tonight. I need to get some sleep.”

  But sleep proved elusive.

  Chester took turns between playing Tarzan with the cords from my already askew blinds and trying to snuggle under my covers and attack my toes. Sleep was not on his agenda.

  Not that my mind was all that conducive to the idea, either.

  I kept imagining Jenny popping a sleeping pill after breaking up with Derek, looking for relief from the stress and thinking that maybe things would be rosier in the morning. But instead, her sleeping body slipped out of bed, grabbed the florist’s knife—and maybe the flowers—in the apartment, descended the porch stairs, and hopped into Derek’s car.

  She would have still been in her pajamas, but I wondered if Derek even knew she’d been asleep.

  But why had Derek remained parked in front of her apartment? I couldn’t figure that out. Maybe he needed a few minutes to collect himself after the breakup. Or maybe he had to take or make a cell phone call. I doubted we’d ever know, but I wondered if Bixby had Derek’s cell phone records.

  I must have fallen asleep at one point, because I had a dream. I was working on Jenny’s wedding flowers. Except instead of the anemones, she had wanted red roses. Tons of red roses in the bouquets, corsages, centerpieces, altar flowers. Bridesmaids in red dresses and with red hair. Red rose petals dropped by a cute red-clad flower girl as she skipped down a white runner. Only they weren’t rose petals, they were drops of blood.

  Derek’s blood.

  I awoke with a start. What had Little Joe said about a spatter pattern? If Jenny had killed Derek in that awful way, even while asleep, she would have been covered with his blood. Could Jenny have showered and changed and cleaned up and destroyed evidence—all while asleep?

  Or could she have awakened covered in blood, panicked, and cleaned herself off—and been too shocked and afraid to admit what had happened? Jenny was the type to close herself off from a stressful situation, huddle under the covers, and wait for everything to pass. Perhaps the shock of the whole experience had left her in the stupor Mrs. June interpreted as drug withdrawal.

  I glanced at the alarm. Five a.m. Sleep wouldn’t come until this whole mess was sorted out. So I took a quick scalding shower, dressed, fed Chester, and walked in the dusky almost-sunrise to the shop.

  Ramble was still asleep, and a hazy mist floated near the ground. It would burn off when the sun rose fully, but the ghostly ebbs and rises sent a shiver down my spine, and every sound gave me the heebie-jeebies. A foraging cat sounded like a footfall. A bird pecking at an open garbage bag, like someone lurking in the shadows of the alley.

  I shook off the feeling. Soon everything would be sorted out and Ramble could go on its normal sleepy way.

  I microwaved a cup of instant coffee while the computer in the front of the shop booted. My eyes half-focused, I logged onto the pharmacological website and searched for the names of some of the leading sleep aids. I scrolled through dozens, but nothing looked like the pills in the plastic bag.

  Then I used the site’s pill identifier tab—handy tool—to enter the shape, color, and markings. And sure enough, found a match.

  Only someone must have made a terrible mistake. This wasn’t a sleep aid at all. It was an antipsychotic, and a powerful one.

  “Jenny,” I said to the empty shop walls, “what were you doing with that?” The idea that Jenny had been hiding a mental illness formed, then evaporated pretty quickly. Sure, Jenny and I hadn’t kept in touch as we once had, but a psychotic break would be hard to miss. Small towns pick up on that pretty quickly, and I hadn’t heard anyone say, “Did you hear about Jenny’s breakdown, bless her heart.” And if these pills were prescribed for her, why were they in a plastic bag? And why would she refer to them as sleeping pills?

  Then the back door shut with a soft thud.

  “Larry?” I remained perched on the stool, straining to hear any further sounds. “Is that you?” I swallowed hard. “Liv?” I really should have locked the door behind me.

  I walked to the back room. It was empty, and the door was shut, just as I left it. The sound of the back door must have been the product of a sleep-deprived, stressed-out imagination. I walked to the door and locked it behind me, also pulling shut the sticky, seldom-used dead bolt.

  I slammed an angry fist against the cold steel.

  One act had made the town so jumpy we were all hiding behind locked doors. I resented the loss, the intrusion of violence and the destruction of our security, as much as if a thief had broken in and stolen one of my prized possessions. I guess a sense of safety is right up there on the list of cherished valuables. Too bad nobody offered an insurance policy on that.

  I sighed and headed back toward the front of the shop. Might as well read up a little more on that pill. Even though it wasn’t a sleeping pill—which negated my whole brilliant theory—I wondered how Jenny had obtained them and what possible effects and side effects they might produce.

  Could it be the result of some catastrophic pharmacy mistake? Or might someone have slipped them to her, claiming they were sleep aids? And could they alter Jenny’s personality so much that she could become a coldhearted killer—with no one in town noticing? I rubbed my forehead. I couldn’t even put my mind around that idea.

  As I passed the walk-in, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. T
hose mice again? I pulled open the door. Sarah Anderson stood in the middle of the cooler.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  She pulled a florist knife from behind her back, the blade dully reflecting the fluorescent light.

  We stood still, frozen, probably both stunned for a moment. Then I ran out and slammed the cooler door behind me. I raced to the back door and tugged. Then tried to manage the stubborn dead bolt with trembling fingers. Why had I locked myself in? I tugged harder, as if by sheer force I could breach the heavy steel door. The dead bolt finally gave way.

  “Stop it,” Sarah said.

  I whirled around. She stood three feet away, brandishing the knife.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “I think you know.” She shook her head. “Get back from the door.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled me away from the door.

  I had to remind myself to breathe. “The pills . . . But how did you know I—?”

  “Shirley. She came into the health club last night. Moonlight aerobics.” Sarah shifted to stand between me and the door, between me and safety. “During cooldown, the topic of conversation switched to Jenny and the murder. Shirley told everyone that you found sleeping pills among Jenny’s things and that you were planning to take them to the police.”

  “But they’re not . . .”

  A corner of Sarah’s mouth quirked up into what might roughly be described as a smile. She took a step toward me, and I shuffled backward, toward the open cooler door.

  “I figured they’d trace the pills to me,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do next. I waited outside my apartment, expecting the police to show up looking for me. I decided that if they arrived knocking on my doorstep, I could sneak away and start over somewhere else.”

  She advanced closer. I took another step back.

  “When nobody came, I figured you hadn’t gone to the police yet. I still had a chance. See, I had to get those pills back, Audrey. They’d discover what they were, who they belonged to, and then it would all come out. I drove over to your place. Saw you leave and walk here. I decided to follow you.”

  So that wasn’t a cat. Maybe someone had been lurking in the alley.

  “But those aren’t sleeping pills,” I said.

  “Of course they are,” she said. “That’s all they’re good for. I should know. I’ve been taking them long enough. Until I got sick of being asleep.”

  “Listen, if you’re sick, we can get help—”

  “I am not sick!” She took one menacing step forward. “I’m not sick, so I don’t need pills. Why do people keep saying there’s something wrong with me? Something is wrong with them.”

  I stepped back and raised my hands. I was back in the cooler, with no escape, unless I could talk my way out. “Who says something is wrong with you?”

  “My parents, the so-called doctors, everybody. I thought I’d left them all behind when I moved here. I didn’t need the medicine anymore. I was fine. Derek thought I was fine. More than fine. At first.”

  Derek. But Sarah couldn’t be the elusive redhead. She had blond hair. Unless . . . and then I recalled Jenny’s Halloween photographs of Sarah dressed as Lucy Ricardo.

  “You . . . you’re Lucy. Lucy has red hair.” Maybe that was what my subconscious brain tried to tell me with the red roses dream.

  “Derek thought it was cute, the red wig. He called me Lucy when I wore it. We’d take long drives in that cute car of his, and he took me to this little club out of town. He’d buy me dinner—steak and lobster with butter sauce and all that fancy stuff. No one at the health club could see me eat all that cholesterol.” She chuckled. “And then we’d dance and gamble a little. He let me peek at his cards and blow on the dice, just like in some glamorous movie. He called me his good luck charm. Me. He didn’t love Jenny, you know.”

  I shook my head. “No, he didn’t love Jenny.”

  “Then why was he going to marry her? I’ll tell you why. His father put him up to it. Said what a good and wholesome influence Jenny would be. Marriage would settle Derek right down, he said. But why not marry me? Derek loved me. I’ll bet I’m every bit as wholesome as Jenny is.” She pointed the knife to her own chest for emphasis. “I was furious when Jenny showed me that rock of hers. Over two carats, she said. And Ellen smiling and pushing her all the way.”

  “Hardly seems fair.” I scanned the shop walls for something I could use to defend myself if talking it out with Sarah didn’t work.

  “Look, I know Derek may have seen a lot of girls, played the field, but he always came back to me. Always.”

  “You were seeing Derek even when he was dating Carolyn, weren’t you?”

  She straightened her shoulders. “I have been Derek’s lover since three days after I moved to this stinking town,” she said with unmistakable pride. “He was the first person who was nice to me at the health club. He bought me a smoothie and we talked. Then he parked his car behind the club and we made out. Most of those other girls were his parents’ idea. I was just never good enough for them, but Derek didn’t think so. I knew him, you see. I was the one he trusted with his secrets.”

  “You wrote him letters.”

  “Of course.” She gave a vacant nod. “He didn’t appreciate the effort.”

  “He kept them.”

  She scowled. “To hurt me. You know, I only pretended to take a shower when I got home that night. I listened to Jenny and Derek talking. I always listened to them. I heard them break up. They didn’t belong together. And then when Derek left . . .”

  “You gave her those pills. Told her they were sleeping pills.”

  “They are sleeping pills! Like I said, that’s all they’re good for. They make you groggy . . . knock you out for hours. Jenny had been taking them for weeks. Said they calmed her nerves.” Sarah laughed. “And they knocked her out completely. She had no idea that whenever Derek dropped her off I’d wait until she took a pill and fell asleep, then Derek and I went out. What a sap.”

  “Is that what you did the night they broke up? Went out with Derek?”

  “Jenny went to sleep. Now that they weren’t engaged anymore, I figured it was my chance to be with Derek. He could take me to dinner with his parents, put my picture in the paper. He could marry me, and then we’d be together forever. I didn’t even care if that ring was used. I knew it fit me. I tried it on lots of times when Jenny left it lying around.

  “So I put on my white dress, my white shoes, and those white gloves Carolyn made us buy. I saw the bouquet sitting in a glass of water on the table. It was beautiful, Audrey. Really pretty. All purply. I always wanted a bouquet like that when I got married, so I took it. Why should Jenny have that, too? So I was all ready.”

  “But Derek wasn’t.”

  She winced and sniffled. “He took one look at me, and instead of telling me how pretty I looked in my dress, he said I was demented. ‘A real psycho.’ He called me a psycho.”

  “I’m sorry.” She did have my sympathy.

  “He said he never wanted to see me again. Now that he was free of Jenny, he could move to Las Vegas and gamble full-time. And if I tried to contact him there, he’d take my letters to the police. Said they’d prove I was nuts.”

  And they would have.

  “I couldn’t face that again. Couldn’t go back there.”

  “Back there?”

  “All that poking and prodding and answering questions and taking pills I didn’t need and feeling foggy all the time. I would never go back there.”

  A mental hospital.

  “So I had to stop him,” she said. “I didn’t want to, you understand. I loved him. But he hated me for it, and I wasn’t going back there.” Her hands started to tremble.

  “Did you take a knife with you?” I asked, almost in a whisper. I hoped she’d find my tone calming. “
With the white dress and gloves and bouquet?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Who takes a knife with them when they’re getting married? That would be crazy.

  “I wasn’t sure what to do, you know, how I would go on without Derek. I sat in his car and cried for a good long time, not that he cared. Not that he took me in his arms and patted me on the back and told me everything was going to be all right. He just sat there, still as a rock. But then I looked down and saw the knife on the floor of the car. Don’t you see, Audrey? It was meant to be.”

  I swallowed hard. My voice came out husky. “How did you know where to . . . ? I mean, the carotid artery . . .”

  “Artery? Is that why it bled like that? Remember, I’m an exercise instructor. I just aimed for the place where you take the pulse. I felt bad right away. I tried to stop the blood. But there was so much. And then he died and left me—he left me alone—sitting in the car in a white dress covered with blood. Gloves covered with blood. Shoes covered with blood. Pretty purple flowers all covered in blood. Everything ruined.”

  “How did you clean up without anyone seeing you—without leaving any blood in the apartment?”

  “Ramble goes to sleep at nine thirty. I just waited until two a.m.”

  “In the car with Derek’s body?”

  “Nobody could see me in the dark in that car with the tinted windows. Then I took off my shoes and ran to the health club. I had my own set of keys and know the alarm codes, so I showered and changed there. I wrapped up the dress and gloves and tossed them into the Dumpster.” She laughed and shook her head. “I was in plain sight of the club’s security cameras almost the whole time. But unless there’s a break-in, they record over themselves in twenty-four hours, and garbage collection was due the next morning. I was home and in my own bed before anyone found Derek.”

  “But when the police arrested Jenny, you didn’t feel guilty at all? That she might be sent to prison for a long time, for something she didn’t—”

  “If it weren’t for Jenny, I might be Mrs. Derek Rawling right now, living in a beautiful house, with servants to bring me breakfast. Money makes a difference, you see. If you’re poor, they say you’re sick and a hazard to society. They lock you up in a hospital, pump you up with pills, and then put you back on the street. When you have money, you have power. Everyone would look up to me, and nobody would dare call me psycho ever again.”