Bloom and Doom

by Beverly Allen

  There were just too many loose pieces to this puzzle. It wasn’t like a bouquet with a missing flower. It was more like a vase with too many mismatched blooms just shoved together. Maybe the key wasn’t looking for more clues but trying to pull out the ones that didn’t fit.

  I slammed the magazine shut, pulled my knees to my chest, and moped for a good thirty seconds before Chester hopped up on the couch and climbed my knees, trying to force a lap for sitting. Instead, I lay back on the couch and he sprawled on my belly. I drifted into an exhausted but troubled sleep amid thoughts of marriage and murder, flowers and felonies, and cake and catastrophe.

  Chapter 21

  “No, I think poinsettia bracts are fine for a Christmas bridal bouquet,” I said to a clearly relieved bride. “Most people say the meaning has to do with celebration or Christmas cheer. What would you think of pairing that with a white rose? Or a white poinsettia with a red rose?”

  “Ooh,” she said, as I flipped to a page in my holiday bridal book. I explained the differences in meanings between pine (hope or pity) and ivy (friendship or fidelity) as possible greenery. And I told her no, I didn’t think pinecones had a negative meaning, and yes, we could wire a few into the bouquet.

  I tucked her deposit check into my order book and walked her to the door. I barely had a chance to wave good-bye when I heard my name.

  “Audrey.” Liv pressed her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “It’s Mrs. June for you. News about Jenny, I think.”

  “I’ll, uh . . .” I looked around the shop. “I’ll take it in the back room.”

  I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Audrey, when can you get free?”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Jenny’s up, at least for a little while. You can get in for a visit if you go before two.”

  “Why, what happens at two?”

  “Bixby will want to drive over and question her again when he finds out she’s speaking in coherent sentences. Can you make it?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I left by the front door, hopped in the CR-V, sent Nick a wave as I drove past the bakery, then used the GPS to find the county regional jail. I remembered the lively public debate on whether to allocate funds to build the place, but I can’t say I ever had reason to visit before. I guessed now I’d see my tax dollars at work.

  The facilities looked a lot newer and more secure than the Ramble Police Department. I was buzzed in twice, carded, signed in—and prayed when I saw the sign that elaborated about how visitors could be subjected to various searches.

  “You don’t have any weapons on you, do you?” a guard asked before I stepped into the scanner.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I . . .” Yeah, I did have one of the new floral knives in my purse, so I handed her my whole purse. She shoved it into an empty locker in the hallway.

  I expected to see a long, dingy white room with a glass divider separating orange-clad prisoners and weeping visitors, chairs set on either side, and phones to speak into. Except for the fact that the walls were painted a vibrant blue, I was not disappointed.

  I sat on a fixed round stool opposite Jenny, sent her a shaky smile, and picked up the telephone. It felt sticky and I tried not to cringe. Although I’m not normally a germaphobe, I longed for one of those little moistened towelettes from the barbecue place, but my purse was hanging in a locker.

  I looked at Jenny. Dark circles, reddened eyes, pale skin, matted hair, and a hunted look. She could be an extra for The Hunger Games.

  “Audrey, thanks for coming. And thanks for the underwear and stuff.”

  I wished I could have leaned in and given her a hug. “You’re welcome.” Even under the orange jumpsuit, I could see she wasn’t the plump healthy thing I remembered, but skeletal. And no, I wasn’t envious of her new shape, any more than you could be envious of the emaciated kids shown on those world aid commercials. I tried to recall if she’d lost much weight from the time—was it about a week ago when she arrived at the shop to order wedding flowers?

  “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  She nodded and pushed a strand of dirty brown hair behind her ear.

  “I don’t know that I can stay long.” I felt guilty that I couldn’t just spend the afternoon sitting with her, like you do when you go to a wake and words just don’t come, and wouldn’t make any difference if they could. “About Derek . . .”

  My words opened the fountain, and tears started streaming. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Shh . . .” I leaned toward the glass. “I didn’t say you did. I know you. I know you wouldn’t kill Derek.”

  “I still can’t believe he’s dead.” She rocked forward and raked her hair with her hand. “It’s like this terrible nightmare, and if I could only wake up, everything would be okay. Why can’t I wake up, Audrey? Help me wake up.”

  I let her cry into the phone for a few moments. I leaned my head back and stared at the dirty fluorescent panels in the cold white ceiling. I felt so powerless.

  “Jenny, listen to me. I know it’s bad. I wish I could make it all go away for you, but I can’t. I do want to help, though. Can you tell me what happened that night? Everything, from when I saw you pulling away with Derek.”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I . . . When I got into the car, Derek asked me where I wanted to go eat. I told him I was a little tired and asked him if he wouldn’t mind eating in. See, I wanted to break up, but I didn’t want to just blurt it out in the car or in a restaurant. I figured I owed him a little more than that.

  “I cooked him dinner—just pasta and a salad, but the good stuff, you know what I mean.”

  I did. Jenny had inherited her mother’s Italian cooking skills.

  “Then we went into the living room and sat on the couch. I almost chickened out. He has such lovely pale blue eyes, like some kind of gemstone.” She frowned and shook her head. “Had.”

  I hoped the compassion I felt was evident in my eyes. I wanted that fixed glass wall to melt away, so I could hug her and rock her and tell her everything would be okay.

  She stared at her hands. “Everything came out sounding a little stiff and formal, but I said, ‘Derek, I like you very much, and I hoped, in time, my feelings would develop into love. But I’m afraid they haven’t, and I don’t think I can marry you.’”

  “And what did he say?” I remembered Bixby’s theory that the breakup triggered a fight and that she killed him in self-defense.

  “He didn’t say anything. This odd look crossed his face. At the time I couldn’t identify it, but that look keeps coming back to me—it’s probably how I’ll always remember Derek.” She lifted her gaze to meet mine. “It was relief, I’m sure of it. I don’t think he wanted to marry me any more than I wanted to marry him.

  “He just squeezed my hand, then he gave me a hug.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Nothing. Sarah came home.” Jenny laughed hollowly. “I felt almost embarrassed to be hugging him on the couch. While she took a shower, Derek and I talked. I gave him back his ring. He hugged me again at the door. We parted as friends.”

  She bit her lip. “Nobody seems to believe that, though.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “And I’ll do my best to try to get you out of here.”

  “To what, Audrey? My roommate won’t talk to me. My own mother is too busy to come see me.”

  “Not too busy,” I said. “I know she’s taking it hard.”

  “Then why won’t she . . . ?”

  I must be easy to read, because one look into my eyes and Jenny knew. Or maybe she just knew her mother.

  “Audrey, you have to help her. If she’s drinking again . . . You’ve no idea how much it took to get her off that stuff in the first place.” She leaned back and pleaded to the god in the ceiling. “What have I done to
her?”

  “You didn’t do anything. But I want you to help me. Focus. What happened to the bag of tools I gave you? And the bouquet. Can you tell me?”

  But Jenny’s expression clouded over with grief. No wonder Bixby was so convinced she’d killed Derek. She was a poster child for guilt. “Tell me.”

  “We stopped for groceries,” she said. “The pasta and tomatoes and a bunch of other things I needed. I thought I grabbed everything out of the car. I put the bouquet in a bag, too,” she confessed. “I know it probably wasn’t the best way to keep it looking nice, but we both had our hands full. I don’t think I left it in the car, but I don’t remember seeing it the next morning. I can’t see why it’s so important.”

  I met her eyes. “Trust me.”

  She quirked her head, as if trying to see through the haze. “I half remember Derek running a glass of tap water and saying something about flowers, only I was so busy cooking. And so tired. And so worried about how he’d react. And it’s all one jumbled mess now. Maybe we did leave some of the bags in the car.”

  She furrowed her brows. “I half remember Bixby asking me about the flowers and tools, too. Audrey, why are they important?”

  “You don’t know?”

  She squinted at me, a pained look that suggested she needed to know but didn’t want to. I’m sure it was the same look I had on my face whenever I stepped on the scale. Why didn’t she have a lawyer here going over the case with her, telling her what to say and what not to say?

  I swallowed. “Derek was stabbed with a knife—a florist knife, possibly the one I sent home with you. The blade severed his carotid artery.”

  Jenny’s hand flew to her heart.

  Not her neck, her heart.

  “Jenny, do you know where the carotid artery is?”

  “The heart, right?”

  I couldn’t help a small smile. That one action confirmed my faith in Jenny’s innocence. Someone had sliced into Derek’s carotid artery with surgical precision. And while, yes, all arteries originate at the heart, Jenny’s reaction proved she had no idea where Derek had been struck.

  But how could I help get her out of prison—both the prison of her guilt and the literal bars? And why had she been so unresponsive when first arrested?

  “Jenny, something else. I want you to know I trust you and I care, but I must ask this. Have you been taking drugs?”

  Jenny’s jaw dropped, but it took several moments for any speech to follow. “Of course not! Audrey, you know what I think about that stuff.”

  “I know, but I’m not talking about just illegal drugs. Anything prescribed or even over-the-counter?”

  “No, I . . .”

  When she trailed off, I knew there was something.

  “With all the stress of the wedding, I’d been having trouble sleeping. I took a sleeping pill that night, after the breakup, and almost every night for a few weeks before that. I remember thinking that when the wedding plans were over, maybe I’d be able to get back to sleeping without it.”

  “What kind of sleeping pill?” My stomach did acrobatics. When I was still in nursing school, we’d read case studies of certain prescription sleep meds that had gained notoriety by causing a small number of patients to sleepwalk, strolling around, eating, sometimes even driving while asleep. The class had laughed uproariously over the account of one man who disrobed and went to work—as a roofer.

  Could Jenny have murdered Derek while asleep? I shuddered. People have been absolved of crimes committed when it could be proven they were asleep, but proving it would be difficult.

  “What pills, Jenny?”

  Jenny shrugged. “I don’t remember the name. I have more of them, though. In my room.” Her countenance brightened. “I was out like a light. Do you think that could clear me?”

  I didn’t answer her question. No need to give her more to worry about or make her wonder if she could have killed Derek in her sleep. Bixby had searched the room, though, and no medications were found, at least according to the inventory that Mrs. June had shared. But in the event he’d missed it . . . “Where in your room?”

  She blushed. “You know that stuffed Pippa the Penguin you bought me?”

  “You kept it?” I had bought it for her one Christmas after I learned of her passion for penguins. I swear that bird haunted me.

  “Of course,” she said. “It had a little pouch for the official Pippa the Penguin pedometer. I put the pills inside so they’d be handy if I woke up in the middle of the night.”

  Yeah, the perfect place to keep your meds. In a stuffed animal. It made Jenny-sense.

  “You can go get them. Just tell Sarah I gave you permission.”

  I spent the next few minutes trying to encourage her to eat, sleep, and not to worry.

  I only wished I could do the same.

  • • •

  “That report of the apartment search is here somewhere,” Mrs. June said, as I leaned on the corner of her desk keeping a lookout while she paged through files she had been recruited to make copies of.

  I had driven back to the Ramble Police Station right after my visit with Jenny.

  She licked her fingers and thumbed through a few more pages. “Here it is. No, there’s no record of a diamond engagement ring.”

  “You said there’s no record of any pills, either. Was there a stuffed penguin? Did Bixby place it in evidence?”

  “What is it with you and that penguin?” Mrs. June said.

  “You saw that photo, didn’t you?”

  “In all its flippertastic glory,” she said. “You’re not involved with that mortician fellow, are you?”

  “Little Joe? No, he’s just a friend.”

  “Good. I’d hate to see one of you girls taking up with such a morbid fellow. Your grandmother would have had a fit. Although he always seemed to have a soft spot for Jenny.”

  “Little Joe and Jenny? I never saw any interest there.” And I might have appreciated it at the time, when Little Joe was following me around like a puppy dog.

  “For a while, but not until after she lost the weight.”

  Right about the time she bade me farewell.

  “Not that she gave him the time of day,” Mrs. June added, “after Derek started coming to call.”

  Which gave my former dance partner a hint of a motive, if he’d been spurned by Jenny and supplanted by Derek. He had the strength. And as a mortician, he’d be well acquainted with the carotid artery. When we talked at Derek’s viewing, he was rather enthused by spatter patterns.

  But I couldn’t see Derek allowing Little Joe into that expensive car of his and risking getting formaldehyde stink in his leather seat cushions.

  Mrs. June had been scanning the report as she talked. She shook her head. “No record of any penguin in the report.” She flipped through a series of photographs. “But”—she slapped one photograph down on the desk and pointed to a spot on the bed—“I think that might be your little feathered friend right there.”

  I leaned over to take a closer look. There was Pippa, lounging on Jenny’s unmade bed.

  Our conversation broke up as Bixby walked in. He gave the flower arrangement I’d set on Mrs. June’s desk a wide berth, almost hugging the walls as he made his way to his office, then shut the door.

  Mrs. June winked at me. “Thanks for the flowers, Audrey.”

  “I might just stop by and bring you some more often. They brighten this place up.”

  • • •

  Mrs. June’s words echoed in my head as I drove over to Jenny’s apartment. If Grandma Mae would have had a fit if one of her granddaughters took up with a mortician, I wondered what she would think of me walking around Ramble pretending to be some kind of detective. I hoped she’d understand I was trying to help a friend. Grandma Mae was all about helping people.

  I eyed the flowerpo
t critters on Jenny’s front porch and wondered if Sarah had replaced the key. But I was not to find out, because she yanked open the door at my first knock.

  “Oh, Audrey.”

  “Hey, Sarah. I just visited Jenny.”

  Sarah stared at me from the crack in the door and shrugged.

  “And she wanted me to pick up something from her room.”

  Sarah just shook her head. “Even if I wanted to let you into my apartment, which I don’t, Jenny’s mom came and picked up all her stuff today.”

  “Today? That’s quick.” I was surprised Ellen had been sober enough. “I wonder why the hurry.”

  “I asked her to. If you must know, I’m looking for a new roommate. Jenny sure isn’t going to pay her share of the rent in jail with no job—not that I feel comfortable with her anymore. And her mother had no interest in paying, either. I mean, I’m not sure I could quite afford the rent for this place by myself, even with what I make at the health club and from my private clients.” She eyed me up and down. “You wouldn’t be interested in a personal trainer, would you? Or an apartment?”

  I let the offer of a private trainer pass without a thought. If I wanted someone to torture me, I’m sure I could find a wacko to do it without expecting to be paid. But I considered the apartment for a moment. A roommate would help me save money faster, and maybe some of Sarah’s healthier habits would rub off on me.

  But I couldn’t imagine taking Jenny’s apartment or living with someone so cold as to move her roommate out just because she’d spent a few days in jail.

  Then I caught myself. Lots of people wouldn’t be comfortable sharing an apartment with someone accused of such a violent crime.