“Did she have a heart condition?” Allegra asked.
“Not that I know of,” Lucas said, “but she had a little asthma in the summer.”
“She was flushed,” I said. All eyes turned my way. “Did anyone else notice?”
“I did,” Julia said.
“Caroline sometimes looked like that in the heat,” Doyle said. “She had pale, sensitive skin. It’s why she wore gargantuan hats. Look, can we have some of that whiskey?” He’d let go of the plates and was pointing at an open bottle on the kitchen island.
“Not now,” Lucas said.
Officer Underhill returned quietly to the kitchen—I didn’t hear him until he was at the counter, eyeing the Sieglers’ Keurig coffee machine—and told Lucas that his wife was being interviewed and Julia was next. “You’ll be last, Mr. Siegler,” he said apologetically.
“That’s fine,” Lucas said. “Everyone else needs to get home, and I’m already home.”
“Lucas, do you mind if we have coffee?” I asked.
“No, feel free,” he said. “The K cups are right there, and mugs are in the cabinet overhead.”
Underhill smiled at me, grabbed himself a mug, and let his fingers prance through the K cups in the wire basket by the machine. Coffee was his fuel. He was, in fact, the only person who could down more coffee than me in any given twenty-four-hour period.
Stella, the Blue-Haired One, was right behind Underhill. “Anything that isn’t flavored?” she asked, digging through the K cups.
“Sorry, no,” Lucas said. “Valerie likes flavored. I would’ve thought you did too. You still work at Grove Coffee, don’t you?”
“That’s why I hate flavored,” she said, continuing her search. “It’s all sugar, syrups, and whipped cream at Grove. Coffee-flavored drinks, not real coffee.” She picked up a pod and let go of it, dissatisfied with her choice, and then leaned against the counter. “I crave a cup of plain black coffee.”
“How long have you worked at Grove?” I asked her.
“Twenty-one months,” she said, making a face.
Allegra wandered to the other side of the table and sat next to Doyle, and he pursed his lips in annoyance.
“You don’t like it?” I asked.
“It was supposed to be for a few weeks in the summer, until I could find a job in my field. I got a useless degree in horticulture from Colorado State.”
“That doesn’t sound useless,” I said.
“I graduated more than two years ago. There’s nothing out there, and it’s not like I’m looking for precisely the job I want, just something remotely related to horticulture.”
“Your turn, Mrs. Foster,” Underhill said as Valerie walked into the kitchen.
Julia rose, plumped her short, gray curls with her fingers, as she always did when Gilroy was about, and headed out of the kitchen. “If I was forty-three and not sixty-three, I’d pursue the man,” she had told me more than once. But she was sixty-three, so instead, she’d bugged me relentlessly to pursue him myself. He was good and kind, she’d said. True. He was brave, and he was only forty-eight in an age when rather plump forty-three-year-olds like me were lucky to date anyone under sixty. Sadly, true. But I’d beaten the odds.
“You ought to move, Stella,” Lucas said. “You’re twenty-five, aren’t you?”
“Twenty-seven,” Stella said.
Valerie settled into Julia’s chair, threw an arm over the back, and looked over to Stella.
“You’re still young, you’re not married, you have nothing tying you down,” Lucas continued. He pushed his round, clear-framed glasses up on his nose and blinked. Hard. “You can even leave the state. Try Wyoming or Utah.”
“I like Colorado,” Stella said, jamming her hands into her jeans pockets. “You know that.”
“You’ll get a job,” Allegra said. “It’ll happen. I have almost ten years on you and I’m still looking for the job of my dreams.”
“And we all know what that job is,” Doyle said. He covered his mouth with his hand, trying not to grin as he shot Lucas a look.
“What’s wrong with climbing the ladder and trying to better myself?” Allegra said.
“But how many people do you step on as you climb?” Lucas hissed.
Valerie stood abruptly. “Coffee, anyone?”
“We’ve already covered that,” Lucas said.
“Then I’ll have some,” Valerie said.
Except for the sound of the Keurig brewing, the kitchen was silent. Valerie retook her seat, coffee mug in hand, and blew over the rim of her cup. She did not meet her husband’s eyes—or Doyle’s or anyone else’s. The others behaved in much the same manner. Allegra stared out the patio door, and Lucas stared into space, sniffing now and then. Doyle examined his fingernails, and Stella, still leaning on the counter, stared down at her shoes. Even in the silence, the hostility in the group was palpable.
“You’re next, Rachel,” Underhill said.
“That was fast,” Doyle said.
So Stella wouldn’t take my chair, I pointed Julia to it before heading into the living room and down the hall. “We’ll go home as soon as I’m done,” I told her.
“Lucky you,” Doyle said.
The interview room—the Sieglers’ office—was the first door on the left. The moment I entered, Gilroy rose, shut the door, and pulled me into a hug. How very unprofessional of him.
I studied his face—that strong, straight nose, that dark hair with touches of gray, those icy blue eyes—and he told me to stop staring. So I closed my eyes and kissed him, and then I hugged him again, fiercely. Suddenly I was feeling adrift in an alien world. A world where people argued over trivialities minutes after the death of a supposed friend.
“Are you all right?” he asked, still holding me.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Then why are you squeezing the air out of my lungs?”
I chuckled and let go of him. “I don’t know my own strength. I suppose we should get down to business. I never got a chance to meet Caroline,” I said, taking the room’s comfy armchair as Gilroy returned to his seat. “What was her last name?”
“Burkhardt. She was married to Gavin Burkhardt for twelve years, and they have two young boys. She was only forty-six. Tell me what you saw and heard.”
It didn’t take long. I recounted Doyle’s snotty remarks about Caroline’s hat and Valerie’s reaction to them, how Valerie couldn’t find Lucas until both he and Caroline came out of the house, and about bees dive-bombing Caroline’s hat, at least according to Doyle. “I only saw her for a moment. She was screaming that a bee was after her, then she got angry and started after Doyle. Allegra Jones tried to calm her down, but she just . . . fell.”
“What happened just before she fell?”
“The coroner knows something, doesn’t he?” I scooted forward. “I thought she was flushed looking, though that might have been because she was screaming and running around. Doyle says she had sensitive skin, and Lucas says she had asthma. Anyway, she threw her hat off, and I guess that worked to get rid of the bee, but then she got furious at Doyle. She made this outrageous face, and I thought she was really going overboard. But James, I think back, and maybe she wasn’t angry. Maybe she was in pain.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“She was drugged, wasn’t she?”
“Did you see her eating or drinking anything?”
“A glass of something that looked like whiskey, and she had a fruit tart.”
“You saw her eating and drinking?”
“Well, not exactly. I saw her holding the glass in one hand and holding a fruit tart in the other as she was leaving the house.” As I talked, images of Caroline flashed through my mind. “I didn’t see her drink. She was screaming and waving one arm around—and I remember her hand was open as she was waving it, so maybe she’d eaten the tart already.”
Gilroy nodded, encouraging me to go on.
“Then she took off her hat. She needed a free hand to do that.
Just before she fell, she dropped her drink, but I didn’t see the tart. I didn’t see it on the ground, either. She must have eaten it while I was talking to Doyle. Either that or she dropped it near the patio before she started going crazy about the bee. What do you know?”
“The coroner suspects poison. Her pupils were dilated and her skin was unusually pink.”
“Valerie and I ate those fruit tarts, James. Maybe Julia, too.”
He sat forward. “How do you feel?”
“Fine.” I thought a second. Was I feeling a little too warm? No. Was my heart racing at all? Nope. “I’m absolutely fine.”
CHAPTER 3
If Caroline had been poisoned by something she ate or drank at the party, only she had been affected. Gilroy told me that he had asked Underhill to keep an eye on me and the other guests for any signs of discomfort or nausea, even though the coroner hadn’t yet zeroed in on poison as the cause of death and despite the fact that whatever killed Caroline Burkhardt had killed her in an instant.
After my interview, Julia and I left the Sieglers’ house and climbed into my Forester. She slammed her door shut, hooked up her seatbelt, and said, “She was poisoned.”
I started the car and pulled from the curb. “Did Gilroy say that?”
“He didn’t say a word. You know how he is. Did he say anything to you?”
The July sun had turned the car into a slow-bake oven, so I flicked on the air conditioning, angling half the vents my way and half Julia’s. “He said the coroner suspects poison. And you can stop with the I-told-you-so look. What made you think poison?”
“Her pupils were the size of dimes.”
“That’s what Gilroy said. I didn’t even notice. I think I was looking at everything but her eyes.” I turned right onto Sumac Way and headed north for my street, Finch Hill Road. “I thought she had a heart attack, and she may have, but it could have been induced with a toxic substance. You said Caroline was kind to you. How so?”
“She was helpful, and she didn’t expect me to pick up on everything right away, and she didn’t become impatient because I didn’t know every plant in every garden. Unlike Lucas. What a snob he is. He rolled his eyes or made a rude comment every time I asked the name of a plant in his garden. He kept looking at Doyle as if to say, Why is she a judge? Like knowing the name of what you can plainly see with your eyes makes any difference. They’re all ambitious to the core. They wouldn’t hesitate to stab each other in the back if that meant getting to the top.”
“The top of what?”
“The gardening world, Rachel.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Cutthroat gardeners? For me, gardening was a respite from the dog-eat-dog world.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Julia turn to face me. “That’s what I thought, but I learned that gardening can be big money. It isn’t usually, but it can be. It can mean full-length TV shows, books, huge landscaping jobs, and celebrity status.”
“I had no idea. Was Caroline ambitious?”
“Let me put it this way: the only reason she was kind to me is because I didn’t pose a threat to her ambitions. She went out of her way to make me an ally.”
I’d lived in Juniper Grove for a little over a year, and in that time, all of it spent living next door to Julia, I’d learned that she was unusually perceptive. She saw right through people. Far from being the ditzy almost-senior-citizen most people saw, she was sharper than people half her age. Though she did like to play on people’s biases about older women. Harmless, almost invisible seniors could see a lot and get away with a lot, she often told me.
I nosed the Forester into my unattached garage—a glorified shed—and shut off the engine. “Let’s assume Caroline was poisoned.”
“I already have.”
“Come inside?”
“I was planning to.”
We trudged through my backyard, around the shovels I’d left lying on the ground and the stacks of slate pavers I’d been meaning to install since mid-June—needless to say, I hadn’t entered my garden in the contest—and into my kitchen. Julia sat at the table and I poured us each a glass of my homemade lemonade before taking a seat.
“When we were at the Sieglers’ house,” I said, “you said I wouldn’t believe the stories you’d heard.”
“Blind ambition and backstabbing,” Julia said. “Every single judge in the contest. Except for myself, of course.”
“Start with Caroline.”
She took a gulp of lemonade and expressed her approval of my sugar-to-lemon ratio before getting down to business. “You know about Lucas and his Front Range Gardening spots on TV, don’t you?”
“I’ve watched.”
“Awful stuff. Anyway, Caroline was asked to take over for him, beginning in August.”
“Really? Lucas didn’t let on.”
Julia leaned forward. “That’s because Lucas doesn’t know.”
Well, that piece of news was going to cause friction when it got out.
“That’s not all,” Julia went on. “Doyle was up for that job at one time—he lost out to Lucas—and he wanted it back. He kept after the station to rehire him and let Lucas go. Allegra wanted the job too. She thinks Lucas and Doyle are too old-fashioned and she’s the future of gardening.”
“Do any of them know Caroline was given the job?”
“Not unless she told them today. Caroline only learned herself yesterday. We ran into each other at the bakery, and when I asked what had her in such a good mood, she told me. She made me promise not to tell anyone, so I didn’t say a word to the other judges.”
“But the station must have let Lucas know.”
Julia shook her head. “I don’t think he knew. If he had, he would have behaved like a miserable sod all day. He had hopes of expanding to a weekend gardening show, and now he doesn’t even have three minutes once a week. Then again, maybe he did know and he was putting up a front so he could get his revenge on Caroline.”
“Why did the station let him go?”
“Caroline said they were getting complaints from viewers about, you know, about what he does when he talks.”
“What he does with his face?”
“To put it politely, yes. I can’t watch him. I think uncharitable thoughts if I do. Really, if you’re going to be on TV, don’t do things like that. Those eyebrows, his nose—and the sniffing, honestly.”
“Viewers actually complained?”
“According to Caroline.”
“So Doyle and Allegra don’t know Caroline got the job, even though they applied for it?”
“Maybe they’ll find out on Monday.”
I leaned back and sipped my lemonade. “How did Allegra and Doyle know Lucas’s job was up for grabs? He’s had that spot for two or three years.”
“Knowing them, they were in constant touch with the producers. Doyle had already applied for the job, so they knew him, and I’ll bet Allegra put her resume in months ago—for anything on TV. She sees herself as the new . . . oh, pick a name. Name an older gardening personality, and she’s the new one.”
“What about Stella Patmore?”
“She’s the only judge who doesn’t care about TV. She’s interested in plant diseases, things like that. Though she told me she’d leave Juniper Grove if she could get a job at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Caroline didn’t want her to be a judge.”
“How do you know that?”
“Doyle told me.” Julia made her familiar lemon-eating face. “Sniveling, distasteful man. You don’t know how many times I had to bite my tongue when we were looking at people’s gardens. He said Caroline thought Stella was overqualified because of her degree but underqualified because she had no experience judging.”
“But you had no experience.”
“Doesn’t that tell you it had nothing to do with Stella’s qualifications? It was personal with Caroline. She didn’t like Stella.”
“So who wanted Stella to be a judge?”
“If I had to guess, Doyle.”
“Does he wield that much power?”
“He and Caroline both. They were the original judges, and they act like king and queen. So if Caroline didn’t want Stella and Doyle did, and Stella became a judge anyway, I’d say Doyle gave up something to get her. There was some quid pro quo.”
“Something to help Caroline along with her ambitions?”
I had just stood to take my glass to the sink when the phone rang. It was Gilroy, telling me the coroner’s preliminary report had come back. Before doing anything else, he had tested for poison, and going with his instincts, he had tested first for the presence of belladonna in Caroline’s blood. Bingo.
“Belladonna? The plant?” I said, looking back to Julia.
And then Gilroy told me something that made the hairs at the back of my neck stand straight. Caroline hadn’t died from an overdose of prescribed belladonna, or the ground-up leaves of the plant, aptly nicknamed deadly nightshade. No, she had eaten the belladonna’s berries. The deadly poisonous berries that looked like ripe, dark blueberries or small, blackish cherries. They had probably been on her fruit tart, he said. The coroner had found specks of chewed tart in Caroline’s mouth and on her teeth.
When I protested that belladonna wouldn’t kill that quickly, Gilroy told me that Caroline’s doctor had informed the coroner that Caroline had asthma and suffered from migraine headaches—and she was self-medicating with belladonna for the migraines. He’d never liked her using her herbal preparation, but they were low-dosage tablets and hadn’t caused her any harm. When she ate the berries, that low dose skyrocketed, pummeling her already-compromised lungs, nervous system, and heart.
“One more thing,” Gilroy said. “Belladonna can cause hallucinations. Lucas said he never saw the bee Mrs. Burkhardt was running from. It’s possible she was hallucinating before she died.”
I hung up and told Julia everything, and then I asked her if she’d seen belladonna growing in the Sieglers’ garden or any of the gardens she’d visited.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Does it look poisonous?”
“No, it’s pretty, and so are the flowers and berries. Hang on.”
I dashed upstairs for my laptop, brought it back down, and found a photo of belladonna on the internet. It was a lovely plant, with oval leaves and mauve-colored, bell-shaped flowers. In the photo, the flowers and berries were in various stages of growth and decay.
Garden of Death Page 2