Bloom and Doom

by Beverly Allen

  “I’m afraid not,” I said.

  “If you know of anybody, let me know.” The door shut in my face.

  I checked the time on my cell phone. Ellen wouldn’t be home yet, so I went back to the shop and filled in Liv and Amber Lee on my visit with Jenny and my shorter visit with Sarah.

  “That poor girl,” Amber Lee said.

  “Which one?” I asked. “Jenny or Sarah?”

  “Both, really,” Amber Lee said. “It would be terrible for Jenny if she found out she did kill Derek, even if she did it in her sleep. Can you imagine the guilt?”

  The thought caught in my throat. Hypothetically, I didn’t think people should be held responsible if they weren’t conscious. Although, if something similar happened to me, I’d hold myself responsible. A double standard, I’m sure.

  “I don’t know Sarah well,” Liv said.

  “I don’t think anybody does,” Amber Lee said. “She moved here when they opened the health club. I mean, she has friends, but no close ones. No boyfriend.”

  “But she’s a very pretty girl,” I said.

  “Pretty is as pretty does,” Liv reminded me, repeating one of Grandma Mae’s old axioms.

  “What does that even mean?” I asked.

  “It means personality does count,” Amber Lee said.

  “Fat lot of good it did Jenny,” I said.

  “Hey.” Liv came up behind me and put an arm around my shoulder. “That didn’t sound like it was about Jenny or Sarah. The pretty girls get picked for the cheerleading squad and get the hunkiest dates to the prom. That’s high school. But we’re adults now. Being in a relationship isn’t an achievement earned by being pretty—and if guys choose their mate that way, they get what they deserve. A miracle happens when two people suited to each other—maybe even made for each other—meet, let down their guards, and then commit to a relationship. And that can happen to the homeliest person alive and can elude even the most beautiful of women. It’s a mystery.”

  I did mention Liv was an idealist.

  Amber Lee seemed to take her side. “And Sarah is a pretty girl, but she’ll always be the bridesmaid and never the bride until she learns to be kind. Shoving Jenny out of the apartment isn’t kind. And good guys will see through that.”

  “Just as the right man will appreciate you for who you are,” Liv said.

  “I thought that was where I was getting with Brad,” I said.

  Liv stroked her chin thoughtfully. “Brad appreciated you, and I think you were well suited. But he obviously just wanted something different.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. “Who says it’s a who? I think he just wanted out of Ramble. Small-town life isn’t for everybody. I mean, lots of people grow up in small towns and just want to shake the dust off their feet and move to the big cities.”

  “And folk in the big cities,” Amber Lee added, “want to leave the rat race and become farmers and vintners. Mark my words. Brad will get his fill of the big city and be back.”

  “I won’t be waiting for him,” I added, wondering how we’d gotten so far afield of Jenny and Sarah. I glanced at the clock and put the finishing touches on a small vase arrangement before hanging up my apron and gathering my purse.

  “Mind if I head out a little early?” I asked. “Ellen should be home by now, and I want to see her before she . . .”

  “Starts drinking?” Liv suggested. “Good idea. Is that for her?”

  I looked at the small arrangement of purple anemones. “I knew she liked the flower from the bridal appointment, but I wanted the color to be different enough not to remind her of the bridal flowers.”

  “It’s perfect,” Liv said. “Want some company?”

  “I can close up,” Amber Lee said, obviously enjoying her new status in the shop.

  “Sure.” I smiled.

  • • •

  I can’t say I was still smiling when Ellen opened her door. She’d managed to start her drinking early. She swayed as she took in our appearance, gaze flitting from the flowers to my face to Liv’s without ever focusing on anything. But she pushed open the door and let us in without a word.

  “Hi, Ellen. How are you feeling today?” Liv said. “We brought you some flowers.”

  Ellen plopped down on the couch. Good thing. At least we wouldn’t have to catch her today. She wore lime green capris with a brown blouse and no shoes. Her nails were pink and her toes natural. In some way, her normal monochromatic look worked for her, at least better than her “untidy drunk” ensemble.

  She scowled at the flowers.

  I set them on a table near the sofa, and Liv and I slid onto a matching floral love seat without waiting for an invitation.

  “I went to see Jenny this morning,” I said.

  She stared into space for a few moments. “How is she? How’s my baby?”

  “Doing a little better. But she’s confused.”

  Ellen nodded. She whisked a tissue from a box on the end table, near a pile of used tissues.

  “She might appreciate a visit from her mother,” I added. “She’s worried about you.”

  “About me?” She searched my eyes. “Why would she be? Oh. You tell her?”

  “That you were drinking again? I didn’t have to. She figured that out on her own.”

  “Don’t give me that,” she said, the belligerent drunk oozing out in her voice. “Always sticking your nose in. How does knowing that help Jenny or me, huh, smarty-pants?”

  “It doesn’t,” Liv started.

  “Which is why I didn’t tell her,” I finished. “But would you rather she believed you’re just too busy to go see her?”

  She screwed up her face. “Always sticking your nose in.”

  “Which is why I’m here. She asked me to get something from her room. I went by her apartment, and Sarah said you’d been by to collect her things.”

  “I thought Princess Sarah had more class than that. Jenny sure can pick friends, can’t she?” Ellen rolled her eyes. “Not gone but a few days and she calls me up demanding that I get Jenny’s stuff out of there. As if I don’t have enough to do. Maybe if I hadn’t been doing that all morning, I could’ve visited Jenny myself.”

  “That’s right,” Liv said. “But you can always go tomorrow. Would you like me to go with you?”

  Ellen pushed herself up in her seat. “That’s right. I couldn’t go today because I was moving her junk and cramming it all in her old bedroom. I’ll set her straight on all this drinking stuff. Tell her it isn’t true. Maybe I had a little—a moment of weakness. But who doesn’t?”

  “I’m sure she would find it comforting to know that what happened hadn’t set you back,” Liv said. I’d give her an A in diplomacy.

  “She’s a good girl, Jenny is,” Ellen said with a hiccup. “Isn’t she?”

  “Of course.” I forced a cheerful smile. “She didn’t do this thing. I’d like to help her by finding out who did.”

  “She’s a good girl. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.” And she burst into tears again, bypassing the tissues by throwing herself down and crying directly into a satin throw pillow.

  Liv rushed over and rubbed her back. I watched as wracking sobs became slow, rhythmic breathing. Ellen cried herself to sleep, probably not for the first time in the last few days.

  I rose. “Ellen?”

  Liv hushed me. “Poor dear,” she whispered.

  “I’m going to check Jenny’s room. Want to join me?”

  “Is it all right to do that?” Liv asked, then lowered her voice. “What if Ellen wakes up and catches us?”

  “Jenny said I could look through her stuff. Her stuff is here.”

  “How about if I just tidy up for Ellen a little?”

  “Chicken.”

  Liv then made a squawking noise like no chicken I’d ever heard.
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  Ellen stirred, rolled over, and began snoring lightly.

  “Okay, then just consider me your backup on this mission.”

  I tiptoed to Jenny’s room. Cardboard boxes rose to chest level, leaving only a narrow walkway. Sarah must have laid claim to the furniture. I pulled one of the new shop knives from my purse, glad that Liv was in the other room so she wouldn’t see that I’d absconded with it, and slit open the first box.

  Clothes. I shuffled through it, making sure there was nothing else packed inside, and found a scarf I’d lent her, years ago. I wrapped it around my neck, then thought better of it. Although it belonged to me, I didn’t want to appear like the vultures descending on an estate sale. I hoped Jenny would be out of jail soon, running around town, even if she was wearing my scarf.

  I shoved it aside and opened the next box. More of the same. It wasn’t until the fourth box that I found some of Jenny’s more personal things, mainly knickknacks and photos. I leafed through a small photo album she must have started back when we used to pal around, because my own face graced some of the opening pictures. Then I suddenly disappeared, as did Jenny’s waistline. Carolyn and Jenny and Sarah at the health club, Jenny in a funny strongman pose. Then a photo of Jenny and Little Joe dancing. She might have warned me. Although, it looked like their dance was a little more controlled and refined than the jitterbug he treated me to.

  A bunch of pictures of Jenny and Sarah followed: paddling in a canoe, bundled in heavy ski suits, dressed as Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz for a Halloween party. I swallowed hard. Jenny’s smiling face made it obvious she counted Sarah as a friend. For a split second I thought of it as cosmic payback. Sarah had dumped Jenny just as Jenny had dumped me. But I stifled that thought. I had missed her, but at least I hadn’t lost my fiancé, been accused of murder, and gotten thrown into jail.

  I continued thumbing through the album. The next pictures focused on a budding relationship: a snapshot of Jenny and Derek double-dating with Carolyn and her fiancé (now new husband)—a dinner at the Ashbury. Jenny’s engagement picture. And another shot of Jenny and Derek smiling between Jonathan and Miranda Rawling. It was funny; though they were all smiling, none of them looked exceedingly happy. Or maybe recent events were making me see something not there. I closed the book and kept digging.

  At the bottom of the next box I found Pippa the Penguin, splashed with Jenny’s strawberry-scented conditioner, the open bottle haphazardly tossed into the box. I found the compartment hidden underneath and pulled out a small plastic bag of pills.

  The plastic bag gave me pause. It didn’t suggest prescription to me, unless something had happened to the original container. And I didn’t recognize the pills. Then again, it had been a long time since I’d taken pharmacology, and new drugs and generic versions of old ones came out all the time. I could look it up online at the shop to double-check.

  “Um, Audrey?” Liv’s voice startled me. “Someone just pulled in. I think it’s Pastor Seymour.”

  I shoved the plastic bag in my pocket. “Is Ellen awake?”

  “Stirring a little.”

  Right then the doorbell rang.

  “Why don’t you see about making coffee,” I said, “and I’ll answer the door.”

  By the time I returned to the living room, Ellen was trying to fight her way off of the sofa cushions, the imprint of an upholstery button engraved on her cheek.

  “Stay where you are. I’ll get it,” I chimed.

  “What are you doing here?” she muttered.

  I swung open the door and greeted Pastor Seymour and Shirley, his assistant, with a smile. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ellen jerk to attention and shove her liquor bottle under the couch cushion.

  “Audrey, my dear.” He grasped my hand with his cold, arthritic fingers. “An unexpected pleasure.”

  I pulled him into a hug, then shook Shirley’s hand. Amber Lee had explained that she’d become an invisible fixture with him whenever he made calls, ever since the previous year, when he drove through the local fast-food chicken restaurant—which unfortunately didn’t have a drive-through at the time.

  “Hey, Pastor,” Ellen said, sitting primly on the couch.

  “Don’t get up, my dear,” Pastor Seymour said as Shirley led him to the love seat and settled him with a pillow behind his back. Not that Ellen tried to stand, a wise decision on her part.

  “I came to express my condolences at the loss of your daughter’s fiancé,” he started, “and to see if I could do anything to help. Of course you all are in my prayers.”

  “Thank you, Pastor,” Ellen said. “Thanks for coming.”

  As I sank into a rocking chair in front of an electric fireplace, I let my hand slide across the lumps that the pills in the plastic bag caused in my pocket. A similar lump formed in my chest, and I wondered if Pastor Seymour’s presence might help soften the blow of the theory I was forming, that Jenny might have attacked Derek while asleep. At least if Ellen tried to kill me, I’d have witnesses.

  “I’m glad you’re here, too,” I found myself saying. “I discovered something, and I want to talk with both of you before I go to the chief about it.”

  “Something to help Jenny?” Ellen said.

  I cocked my head and bit my lip before continuing. “It’s something I learned from Jenny today, and it has to do with what I found in Jenny’s stuffed penguin.”

  “You were messing with Jenny’s stuff?” Ellen said.

  I swallowed hard. “Jenny asked me to retrieve something for her, and you were . . . asleep.”

  Before Ellen could process that, Liv walked in with a tray of coffee. I used the time she spent doling out cream and sugar to collect my thoughts. Best not to sugarcoat things.

  Ellen cast me a frightened look, taking her coffee from Liv with trembling hands. Porcelain clinked on porcelain and liquid jostled out of the cup and landed in the saucer. What was the old proverb about words being like water—once you pour them out, you can’t take them back?

  I wished I didn’t have to say them. I declined coffee. It would roil in my stomach. I cleared my throat instead. “I don’t know of any other way of saying this, but did Jenny mention to either of you that she’d been taking sleeping pills?”

  The pastor shook his head.

  As did Ellen, but then she paused. “She did say something a few weeks back about not being able to sleep. I figured it was just prewedding jitters.”

  “She seemed stressed during the prewedding counseling,” Pastor Seymour said. “More than most of my young ladies. Derek was . . .” He stopped and considered a cobweb in the corner. “A bit . . . dismissive of her concerns.”

  You’d have to know Pastor Seymour to know those were fighting words.

  “So Derek didn’t seem to care,” I translated.

  Pastor Seymour nodded.

  “That’s crazy,” Ellen said. “Of course he cared. Why else would he have proposed?”

  “I suspect Derek was under a lot of pressure from his parents to reform, and I’m sure they felt Jenny was a step in that direction.” I looked Ellen squarely in the eyes. “Jenny is a wonderful girl, and I’m sure she would never do anything to consciously hurt anyone.”

  Liv sank onto the couch next to Ellen Whitney. The movement was accompanied by a crunch of broken glass and the smell of alcohol wafting from the cushions. It must have been obvious to everyone, but we did what anybody in polite society would do—we ignored the pink elephant in the room.

  Liv took Ellen’s hand.

  I cleared my throat. Here goes, I thought. “Ellen, has Jenny ever sleepwalked?”

  I already knew the answer to this question. Once, she fell asleep on my couch after a late-night movie and gab session. In the middle of the night, I found her up, opening and closing my dresser drawers. I asked her why, and she said she couldn’t find her tights for school. But if I had to go t
o the bathroom, it was okay, she assured me, since she could use the cat’s litter box in a pinch.

  I’d herded her back to the couch, wondering if I should hide the litter box. In the morning, she had no recollection of the conversation.

  “Mostly when she was a girl.” A grimace of apprehension darkened Ellen’s face.

  I exhaled. “Certain sleep medications have been known to aggravate that.”

  “Are you saying . . . ?” Ellen started.

  “Yes, it’s possible that Jenny could have been sleepwalking and killed Derek—without even knowing it—and without being criminally responsible. It’s rare, but it happens.”

  “No . . .” Ellen’s face went ashen and she raked two clawed hands through her hair. “Take that back.”

  “I’m not saying I want to believe it. But it would explain everything—the knife with only Jenny’s prints on it, the flowers.”

  Ellen stood up. “My Jenny is not a killer. Not even in her sleep. Get out of my house.”

  “But I . . .”

  “I said leave,” Ellen insisted.

  “Maybe you’d better, Audrey,” Pastor Seymour said, a grim look on his elfish face. “I’ll stay with Ellen for a while.”

  “Ellen, I’m truly . . .”

  But Ellen whipped her head around to face the other direction.

  Liv grabbed my elbow. “He’s right,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 22

  “What were you thinking?” Liv jerked her car to a stop in front of my apartment building. “Telling Ellen that Jenny might have killed Derek after all!”

  “I said in her sleep. Unconsciously.”

  “And you don’t see how that could upset the woman? What’s gotten into you, anyway? Audrey, ever since they arrested Jenny, you’ve been defending her. And then you flip-flop, spouting some insane theory about Jenny killing Derek while sleepwalking.”

  I pulled out the bag of pills and dangled it in front of Liv’s face. “Not so insane. Look, I hate the idea, too. It would be a hard thing to live with—for both Jenny and Ellen. But it makes a lot of sense—just a tragic accident. Or would you rather believe some deranged killer is lurking in Ramble, stalking his next victim?”