Garden of Death

by Karin Kaufman

  “In a nutshell.”

  “So how do you think you became a judge? Caroline wielded a lot of power.”

  Without hesitation, she said, “Doyle put in a word for me. Funny, huh? I don’t think he likes me—I don’t think he likes anyone but himself—but that’s how it went down, according to Doyle himself.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “He and Caroline choose the judges, so yeah, I do. Doyle’s the one who suggested me, and without his support, Caroline would’ve had her way.”

  “Why do you think Caroline didn’t want you to be a judge?”

  Stella grinned and latched on to a strand of black hair striped with blue, twisting it around her finger. “She used the excuse that I have a degree but I don’t have experience. I know too little and too much all at the same time. I think it’s garbage. You know what it was? As soon as Doyle put me on the judge list, she didn’t want me. That’s all it took. Those two were like bad siblings, kinda close but hating each other.”

  Another thunderclap sounded, this one rattling the window. Seconds later it began to rain in earnest. I looked to the sidewalk. Gilroy and the woman were gone.

  “That was close,” Stella said. “I hope it pours.”

  “Me too.” I turned back to her. “Did you see anything suspicious at the party?”

  “I’ve thought about it, gone over it in my head. Everyone seemed a little on edge.”

  “All the judges?”

  “Except for Julia. She was fine. But everyone else, including Valerie and Lucas, seemed like . . .” She dropped her hair. “They seemed like they were waiting for something.”

  “Like what?”

  “A fight to break out? I’m not saying they were waiting for someone to die.” She took another drink of her iced coffee, stared down at the table, drummed her fingers on it. “Did you see Caroline right before she died, when she was screaming on the patio about a bee?”

  “Yes, I saw.”

  “Did you see Valerie and Lucas? They looked like they were watching paint dry.”

  “I noticed.” Stella was an observant young woman. “They weren’t concerned about her. Or that’s what it looked like.”

  Her eyes were glued to mine. “So were they waiting?”

  “I don’t know, Stella.” Finally, I took a sip of my iced latte. Our conversation had gone off the rails, considering how I had intended it to play out. Time to slap it back on track. “Do you know anyone who grows belladonna?”

  Her eyes popped wide. “Wow. Why would I know that?”

  Such a defensive tone. “Because you’re a horticulturalist and a garden judge.”

  “Poison plants aren’t my thing.”

  “They’re someone’s thing. Did you see belladonna in any of the gardens you judged?”

  Stella made a puffing sound and shifted in her chair. “Um . . . gosh. Wow, I don’t think so.”

  The world’s most famous poisonous plant and she wasn’t sure if she’d seen it? “You don’t think so?”

  “I was a garden design judge, Rachel. I didn’t inspect people’s gardens for dangerous plants, and I don’t think there were any. I looked at the design, the structure behind everything. These were gardens of beauty and life, not death.”

  “You have to see the individual plants, too.”

  “I did. Man.”

  “What about greenhouses? Could belladonna grow in a greenhouse?”

  “I guess. I don’t see why not.”

  “Did you count greenhouses as part of the design of gardens in the contest?”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t go inside them.”

  As I talked, Stella’s eyes narrowed. I pressed on. “What about the other judges? Have you seen their gardens and greenhouses?”

  “I saw Doyle’s garden. I really don’t think he was growing belladonna.”

  “You’ve been to his garden?”

  “He’s been teaching me a lot.”

  “So you would have noticed if you’d seen belladonna.”

  “Yeah, I would have. So?”

  “You have a greenhouse too.”

  Her eyes became slits. “You think I’m growing belladonna in my greenhouse?”

  I leaned in, and in a quiet but firm voice, I said, “Would you know if you were?”

  That did it. Stella grabbed her drink and stood. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. The Blue-Haired One removed her apron and marched off, and I took my gratis latte with me and walked back to my car in the rain. To the west, over the mountains, I could see hairline cracks of lightning. A bigger storm was moving in.

  I drove to Appleton Garden Center, parked, and hurried inside, hoping to find Jacob Horning. I didn’t find him inside the retail greenhouse, but an employee directed me outside, to the hoop greenhouse where I’d seen Stella talking to one of the employees the day before.

  Jacob was inside, appraising rows of plants in one-gallon pots.

  “Sorry to bother you again,” I called.

  “Rachel, how are you?” he said, pushing his choppy brown bangs from his forehead and heading my way. “You’re never a bother. I was just checking my Salvia divinorum. They’re almost ready to go.”

  “Do people plant much in July?” I asked.

  “They do in August and September, and those will be ready in August. Lots of perennials do well the following year when you plant in late summer or early fall. Some vegetables, too. Especially if you sow the seeds. Carrots, radishes. I wouldn’t recommend transplanting lettuce or spinach right now, though. They’d bolt in this heat. And I’d hold off on roses too. How are yours doing? Any aphids?”

  “I released a packet of ladybugs weeks ago, like you told me, and I haven’t had a problem all summer.” Soon after buying my faux Victorian house in Juniper Grove, I’d discovered an aphid infestation in my rose garden, much to my dismay. But Jacob had been a lifesaver, suggesting ladybugs as a quick and nontoxic solution. Ladybugs ate aphids. The man knew more about plants and plant problems than anyone I’d ever met. Which was why I was at Appleton’s again.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said. “It’s important, but if you don’t want to answer, I’ll understand.”

  “I’m intrigued. Is this question connected to Caroline Burkhardt’s murder?”

  I must have looked surprised, because next he was telling me that he’d always wanted to play a part in one of my “investigations,” though he couldn’t imagine how he could help.

  “It’s about Stella Patmore,” I said.

  He nodded. Yes, he knew her.

  “I understand she keeps applying for a job here.”

  “She’s relentless,” he said with a laugh. “Normally, I’d consider that a plus.”

  “But in her case?”

  “She knows squat about plants, and I don’t have the time to teach her.”

  “She says she has a degree in horticulture.”

  “That’s what she told me, and for a few minutes one day, she had me fooled.” He was shaking his head. “I don’t mind teaching people willing to learn, but I do mind liars.”

  “Are you saying she doesn’t have a degree?”

  “She may have taken a seminar once, but she doesn’t have a degree. And I was so convinced of that, I checked with Colorado State. She never went there.”

  I had expected as much. How did a horticulturalist not know what belladonna looked like? Not pay attention to and remember the plants she saw while judging gardens? Stella was a horticultural fake.

  CHAPTER 9

  Julia and Royce had already found themselves a table and were drinking coffees when I arrived at Wyatt’s. I joined them and ordered sparkling mineral water from a busy waitress while I perused the menu. That latte I’d had at Grove Coffee was kicking in, so for the time being, I’d had enough caffeine.

  “We caught up Chief Gilroy,” Julia said. “He was very appreciative. Though he did wonder where you were.”

  “How about the Post?”
I asked, taking my phone from my jeans pocket and setting it on the table. “Did you put a bug in the reporters’ ears about Lucas and Caroline?”

  “They were surprisingly interested,” Royce said. “I wasn’t sure they’d bite.”

  “The Post is essentially a gossip rag,” I said. “This is right up its alley.”

  “I wonder what tomorrow’s paper will bring,” Julia said.

  “I’ve got news too,” I said.

  The waitress returned, bringing me a small bottle of mineral water and a glass with ice and a lime wedge, then took our orders—chicken salad sandwiches all around, plus French fries for Royce.

  The sight of the lime wedge took me back to the party, when Valerie had dipped her fingers in her iced tea, plucked out a lemon wedge, and squeezed it into her glass. “I keep going over the garden party,” I said. “I see little snapshots instead of the whole event. Small moments, like when Caroline was screaming hysterically and no one seemed to care. Valerie being so proud of her hydrangeas. Doyle holding a plate full of half-eaten fruit tarts. Or you, Julia, talking to Stella and Allegra.”

  “I know what you mean,” Julia said. “I remember Stella’s blue hair and blue plate, Doyle dumping his tea in the sink, Lucas standing in his kitchen, telling me that Allegra was after his job. None of it gives us a real clue about our murderer.”

  “Because we missed the moment of poisoning. Everyone did. It was done so cleverly. And probably very simply.”

  “Oh, it gives me the willies!” Julia said, waving her small hands in front of her. “What if one of us had eaten a berry by accident? I wasn’t looking at the tarts, I was grabbing them, one after the other.”

  “So was I. So were Doyle and Valerie.”

  “Everyone was,” Julia said. “The only person I didn’t see either eating or holding a tart was Lucas.”

  “May I interrupt? Rachel, you said you had news. About the case, I take it.” Royce was on pins and needles and trying to be nice about it.

  “It’s a brand-new piece of the puzzle,” I said. “Stella Patmore is a phony. She doesn’t have a degree in horticulture, and according to Jacob Horning at Appleton’s, she doesn’t know much about plants.”

  Julia’s mouth dropped open.

  “The young lady must be a skilled liar,” Royce said.

  “She had all the judges fooled,” I said. “Now we know why she hasn’t found a job in more than two years. Employers are going to check with the university on her degree. Doesn’t she realize that?”

  “One would think,” Royce said.

  A short pause in the conversation was broken by the arrival of our waitress, who served us our sandwiches and French fries. We waited until she was out of earshot before continuing.

  “This is what I don’t understand,” Julia said. “Why did Stella want to be a garden judge so badly she lied? It’s a very strange thing to do.”

  “I would say so she could murder Caroline,” I said, “but there are simpler and better ways. Besides, she’s been bugging Appleton’s for work. It’s possible she thought becoming a Garden Design Show judge would look good on her resume. What if she really likes working with plants? That would explain why she built a greenhouse.”

  “But when we talked, it was never about the plants,” Julia said. She lifted the top piece of bread on her sandwich, inspected the chicken salad and tomato, and removed a limp bit of lettuce. “It was always about ‘structure,’ as she called it, or color or design or flow. I don’t remember her saying such-and-such a plant worked well in this or that garden.”

  “That’s the word she used with me,” I said. “‘Structure.’ I think she uses words like that to disguise her lack of real knowledge. We could all talk about color or flow in a garden.”

  “That means the judges never checked Stella’s credentials,” Julia said. “No wonder she lies. She gets away with it most of the time.”

  “Ladies, carry on,” Royce said, digging into his sandwich.

  I was starving, so I took that as a cue to eat my lunch—without examining what lay between my slices of pumpernickel. As I ate, I tried to make sense of recent revelations. Stella a phony, Caroline vetoing Stella as a judge and Doyle overruling that, Lucas finding out that Allegra too tried to take his job, Valerie suspecting Lucas of an affair.

  My thoughts drifted to murmured conversations from other tables, the clatter of plates and silverware. Littles bits of this and little bits of that. White noise, like the myriad images and motives tumbling in my mind. The sheer volume of them obscured the truth of what had happened at the Sieglers’ house. There were plenty of motives. Trouble was, not all of them pointed to why someone would kill Caroline. I put down my sandwich and wiped my hands on my napkin.

  “We know that Caroline didn’t want Stella to be a judge,” I said. “What if Caroline found out Stella was lying about her degree? That’s a good reason to reject her as a judge.”

  “But she ended up being a judge anyway,” Julia said.

  “Maybe Caroline didn’t tell anyone,” Royce said.

  I shook my head. “From what I’ve learned, she was as ambitious as the rest of them and liked to get her way. If she found out about Stella’s nonexistent degree, she would’ve used that to keep her out. Somehow Doyle overruled her. What did he have on Caroline, if anything? And why was he so game to have Stella as a judge?”

  Royce shoved back an errant strand of white hair and leaned back, considering what I’d said. “I didn’t see any records at Town Hall linking Doyle and Stella. I don’t think they’re father and daughter, business partners, co-investors, or anything of the kind.”

  “I’d ask Stella straight out, but I don’t think she’s fond of me right now,” I said.

  Julia cleared her throat. “Don’t turn. Allegra and Doyle just walked in the door.”

  I turned.

  “Rachel, I said don’t.” She grunted and mumbled under her breath, “Too late, here they come.”

  “Julia!” Allegra cried. She strode to Julia, seized her by the shoulders—a little too close to her neck—and dug her fingers in. I supposed she meant it to be a friendly greeting. “And Rachel, hi again.”

  The Polished One didn’t touch me, thank goodness. She was wearing green capris—I hadn’t seen capris in ages—and a magenta-colored short-sleeved top, but being young and thin, she gracefully carried off both fashion violations.

  “Royce Putnam,” Royce said, rising a few inches from his seat before dropping back down.

  “Good to meet you,” Allegra said.

  Doyle just grinned, content to let Allegra deal with the pleasantries. Dressed in comfortable clothing this time—a T-shirt and jeans, Colorado’s summer uniform—he looked downright awkward, as if he was trying hard to fit in and knew he was failing miserably at it.

  “Why don’t you join us?” Royce said. “We were just talking about Caroline.”

  Julia bit her lip, probably to keep herself from kicking Royce under the table, and I moved one seat closer to Royce to make room.

  “We were just doing the same,” Doyle said. He slid into the chair next to mine while Allegra sat next to Julia. “I’m astonished the police haven’t made any arrests.”

  “It’s been twenty-four hours,” I said.

  “My point exactly.”

  “Doyle, can I ask you something?” I said.

  He shifted around in his seat and looked me square in the eye. “Have at it, my dear.”

  “How did Stella Patmore become a judge in the garden show?”

  “She has excellent qualifications,” he said.

  I fixed my eyes on his. “Does she?”

  His eyebrows twitched.

  “Qualifications aside,” I said, “how did she become a judge?”

  “I think I ran into her at Appleton Garden Center. Yes, I think that was it, but it was months ago. Anyway, she seemed keen, very interested in gardens, and I think young people should be given a chance, don’t you? They have a different perspective, an energ
y, a new way of looking at what can be a tired, old subject. All of us older judges needed a breath of fresh air, like Allegra here. Inject some life into things, shake things up.”

  What a load of blather. “So you hired her months ago?”

  “The judges aren’t hired,” Doyle said in a condescending tone.

  Looking at him straight on like that, the mostly bald head, the tufts of white hair above his ears, I couldn’t help but notice the difference between him and Royce. Doyle was a mere five years older, but he looked three times Royce’s age. Maybe that was the price of gardening: the sun had fried his skin.

  “Why are you asking about Stella?” Allegra said.

  A battle was waging inside of me. Was Stella’s degree, or lack of it, fair game in trying to find a killer? The decision was taken from my hands when Julia spoke up.

  “Doyle, you know very well Stella doesn’t have a degree in horticulture,” she said.

  It was as if time stopped. Allegra froze. Doyle stared.

  “Now, the question is,” Julia went on, “why was she hired as a judge? Caroline was adamantly against her.”

  There was a brief silence. Allegra broke it.

  “Seriously, though, she doesn’t have a degree in agriculture?”

  “Horticulture,” Doyle said.

  “No, she doesn’t,” Julia said.

  Allegra smiled, her thin, red lips stretching wide, accentuating the uncommon length of her nose. “Oh my word. That cracks me up. She always played like she was on a passionate quest to design gardens, like she wanted to be the next Capability Brown. She sure fooled me. But why would she lie? It’s not like she needed to.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Stella is rich. She can be anything she wants. She could bankroll her own garden design company.”

  “Did Caroline know Stella was lying?” Julia asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Allegra said. “Otherwise she never would’ve allowed her to be a judge.” She raised her wrist to check her watch—a signal that our talk was coming to an end. “You know, Caroline was the only judge to vote against the Sieglers’ garden for best in show.”

  “Gold medal,” Doyle said flatly. “Best in show is for horses and dogs.”