Evidence in the Echinacea

by Dale Mayer

The entire backyard had a perimeter garden, and it was about four feet away from the fence that completely closed it in. Doreen walked along to a couple spots, found a place where nothing was growing, and asked, “Do you remember what was in here?”

  “I think the dahlia bulbs didn’t do well here.”

  Doreen stabbed her shovel into the ground and smiled. “Well, it is soft,” she said. “I could certainly move a bunch of this over and maybe buy six or seven bags for the top.”

  “If you could do that, that would be much better.”

  “I can only do it,” she said, “if you have a wheelbarrow.”

  Penny disappeared into the garage and came back with a wheelbarrow.

  Doreen smiled. “Okay, tomorrow I’ll move some dirt from here to that front bed. I’ll be here first thing in the morning, or as soon as I can. I know my packers are coming back in the morning.” She frowned. “Maybe I’ll leave them to their own devices while I do this.” But she hated to do that.

  “I’ll head inside now. I’m exhausted,” Penny said, wiping her face. “I’ll see you in the morning then.” And she walked away, leaving Doreen standing in the back garden with her shovel still in the dirt.

  Chapter 13

  Monday Evening …

  Even though tired, with the animals flaked out all around her, Doreen hadn’t left Penny’s backyard yet. Her animals had done as much running around and dancing, then snoozing, as they could, so they would be more than ready to head home whenever Doreen was ready. She currently inspected the bed of echinacea in the backyard, where Doreen saw a leaf that didn’t belong.

  She bent down with her cell phone out and took a picture of it. She wasn’t sure what it was. Regardless, she could take some echinacea from here and put a little in the front bed. She needed more than one plant in order to make a color splash, but, if she left each transplant fairly small, they would all grow and multiply quickly, and the bed would be full in no time. But still, often new owners came in and ripped out whatever landscaping was here, so it didn’t make sense to put too much time or effort or money into this one curb-appeal project, especially with the short time limit involved.

  Plus she’d just accepted the price offered, but she hadn’t expected all the rocks in the soil, nor having to haul the dirt from the backyard garden to the front bed. Still, it was her fault for not defining exactly what she would do for the money.

  She’d done enough today. Slowly she walked back out to the front garden, stopped to survey the work she’d done, taking a couple photographs, although the lighting was wrong. What did she expect with dusk approaching?

  And then, with the animals in tow, she strolled back to the creek. As soon as she got there, she stepped into the deeper water, bent down, washed her hands, and then washed her face. The creek water wasn’t necessarily clean, but it was cool, refreshing, and helped with the sweaty feeling. When she was done, she stepped back out to see Goliath sitting on a large rock and Mugs sitting in the middle of the creek, just looking at her.

  “Come on, Mugs.”

  Thaddeus, who walked along with them, had hopped from rock to rock to rock. Even now he sat beside Goliath, waiting for her. She and Mugs, both bedraggled and wet, resumed walking. “Let’s go home.”

  By the time she got home, she felt an overwhelming fatigue and relief. “I didn’t bring anywhere near enough food,” she muttered to the animals as she headed up to the house. She stepped inside and turned off the alarm, took a look at the time, decided it was too late for coffee, and put on the teakettle. “If I still have any energy by the time I come out of the shower,” she said, “I might have a cup of tea.” She probably needed food; otherwise she likely wouldn’t sleep through the night. But first she needed that shower.

  She headed to her stairs but stopped at the living room, shaking her head, knowing her bedroom would be way worse. When she got up there, because the massive bed frame was still there, it didn’t look all that much different. The vanity and the dresser were gone, leaving large empty places where they’d stood, but she knew everything else had been rearranged to get to those pieces. She walked into the bathroom, stripped down, and stepped under the hot water. It took three shampoos to get her hair clean, and she hadn’t done anything about cleaning and drying Mugs.

  This was when she wished she had the servants around. If she’d come home tired and the dog wet, two servants would take care of the dog, so he didn’t track water and mud across the house. And, of course, her job had been to step into a shower and to make herself perfect looking for whatever was going on that evening. As she stepped out of her en suite bath, a towel wrapped around her, she leaned against the door for a long moment, just resting. “Those were the old days,” she muttered. “The good news is, you don’t have to be perfect tonight because nobody is here but us.”

  She put on her pajamas and walked back downstairs. Although technically spring, it had been a hot summerlike day, and she could almost feel the humidity from the shower cloaking her skin by the time she made it to the kitchen, but she was too damn tired to care. She made herself a couple pieces of toast—well, really one piece for her and one piece for Mugs—topped each with peanut butter. Then, along with her tea, took it all with her and sat outside on the deck, enjoying the cooler evening air. Even if she had had the food to make more for dinner, she didn’t have the energy to prepare it or to eat it. Mugs matched her almost bite for bite on her hot toast. How was it that he loved peanut butter as much as she did? She quickly consumed her food and then went inside to get a piece of cheese and an apple. By the time she was done with that, she was too tired to keep her eyes open.

  She pulled out her phone, checking for messages, and saw Mack had called her. She listened to the message and frowned. She was too tired to deal with him. She flicked through the images she’d taken, looking for the one of the strange leaf among Penny’s echinacea. But her phone wasn’t the best way to study these. Doreen took her tea back into the kitchen, transferred the images to her email, and opened them up on her laptop.

  As she went through them, she stopped at the image of the backyard garden. Something was shining in the corner, near the echinacea. That made no sense because she’d been there and hadn’t seen anything. But it had also been at that weird dusk hour, so it might have been hard to see. So why had her cell phone photo picked it up? Maybe because of the flash. She’d also taken several photos of Penny’s garage to remind herself that a garage could look like that. Doreen had so much work ahead of her in Nan’s garage that it was exhausting even to think about it.

  Then she looked at the close-up picture of the echinacea bed with the odd leaf, and she blew it up even larger so she could take a look at the leaves on the inside. She could bring a piece home and check it out a little closer when she started digging in that bed, but it almost looked like foxglove. It was often mistaken for a weed—before it flowered, that is. Honestly hydrangeas, a common flowering shrub, could be some of the most dangerous plants, and Penny had several of those. But then so did Nan.

  As Doreen took a look out the window at her back garden, even in the moonlight, she saw dozens of plants in her own backyard which were likely dangerous. But she never once considered Nan was a murderer. So why was Doreen so suspicious of Penny? Doreen opened her browser, brought up Penny Jordan’s address, and then went back several years on the city satellite map images to see what Penny’s yard had looked like before. Doreen found very few changes had been made in the last ten years.

  About fifteen years ago or so ago, that front garden bed had been created per a Google Earth picture date stamped from back then, revealing a big gaping hole in the ground. She frowned as she saw it was much deeper than the hole they made earlier today. Why was that so deep back then? There was no need to go very deep, but obviously the rocks were still there, which meant that, for some reason, George had put all those rocks back in the hole again.

  She hadn’t done any research on George, outside of how that info pertained to Johnny or P
enny. Doreen should look up birth records and marriage licenses.

  Just then her phone rang. It was Mack, and she smiled. It would be nice to hear his voice. “Hey, Mack,” she said, but there was no way to hide the exhaustion in her tone.

  “Sounds like you did too much today,” he said. “Did you go to Penny’s?”

  “I sure did.” She explained the problems they came across.

  “You were using a pickax?” he asked in astonishment. “You have any idea how sore you’ll be tomorrow?”

  “You mean, on Wednesday,” she said, “because tomorrow I have to go back and do more. Wednesday the photographer’s coming.”

  “I understand Penny needs to get top dollar for her place, but she could have hired somebody else.”

  “And yet, you know I need the money, so …”

  “I sure hope you get a decent price for those antiques, so you don’t have to do jobs like this again.”

  “You and me both,” she said, “but you know what? For a while I’ll probably keep accepting them because, in my head, I feel like I need them.”

  “So the packers are coming back in the morning?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know that they’ll get to the dining room,” she said. “But they’ll be coming and packing up the bed.”

  “It’s pretty exciting for you, on many fronts. Just make sure you’re not looking to continue the excitement of the cold cases by dreaming up something that doesn’t exist.”

  She winced. Was she doing that? “I won’t.”

  With that call done, she flipped through the pages of the search she’d started. She always found that supposedly the most relevant stuff on a search came on the first screen load, but some interesting things could be found when you went deeper through the search-related links. Somewhere in the back she found a notice that Penny and George had gotten married. She smiled, and then she saw Penny’s last name: Foster. “Penny Foster,” she said. “Interesting.”

  She did a search for Penny Foster and came up with multiple sites, one of them involving a dead brother and his father. She hoped that wasn’t the same Penny, but it would explain why the big teddy bear everybody had called George had appealed to her. Doreen found mentions that the father, Randy Foster, had abused the son, Anthony Foster, and he’d eventually died from his injuries. Doreen found that pretty horrible too, and now she couldn’t possibly bring it up with Penny. But it did make her much less suspicious in Doreen’s mind. With that last thought, she headed up to bed and crashed.

  Chapter 14

  Tuesday Morning …

  Doreen woke up feeling like crap but went downstairs, making herself a cheese omelet, just like Mack had taught her. She needed enough protein to work on Penny’s project. While she sat here in the kitchen eating, the doorbell rang. She checked her watch to find it was nine a.m. already. Holding her coffee cup, calling out over Mugs’s din of barking, she walked to the front door to find Scott.

  He beamed at her. “So do you want to sell the dining room table too?”

  She eyed him over the brim of her coffee cup and then nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  He nodded happily, rubbing his hands together. “Good,” he said. “I couldn’t get any research on the fabric covering the chairs, so I’ll take some better photographs, and I’d much rather do that back at the office, where I have access to more information. But, even with the possibility of it being reupholstered, it’s still a really nice piece.”

  “Take it then,” she said, “but that means you probably won’t get it all done today, will you?”

  “We’ll try,” he said. “I have two other men with me today.”

  She looked up at six men behind Scott. She motioned them all in and said, “Go for it,” and then remembered she was supposed to empty the hutch. She groaned and said, “If I give you boxes, will you empty everything for me?”

  “If you want to sell the hutch, yes,” he said. “I’m not sure about the second piece.”

  “That sideboard did have empty drawers,” she said, “so maybe we can transfer everything from the hutch over to it. If not, I’ll give you a few boxes. Unfortunately I have to be at a friend’s house.”

  Scott nodded. “Not to worry,” he said. “We’ll be fine. We’ll get the table and the chairs all out of the dining room first, and that will give us space to empty out the hutch.” And, with that, he started barking orders, and the moving men dispersed through her place.

  Mugs, more confused than ever, sat at her feet and whimpered. She crouched down and said, “It’s okay. This is the last day of craziness.”

  “Unless you find more pieces,” Scott said cheerfully.

  “I better ask Nan about that.”

  He poked his head around the corner and looked at her in astonishment. “You haven’t yet?”

  She shook her head. “No, but I need to. She’d know which pieces are the most valuable.”

  “I would think so,” he said. “Call her while I’m here. Who knows what you might find out?”

  Trouble was, Doreen was out of time. She looked at her menagerie, and she couldn’t leave them with the moving men in the house, which meant she’d take them to the garden center with her. But that would eat into her time. Better that she head out now and get the gardening work done first. Avoiding it wouldn’t help. “I’ll call her while I’m walking up to my friend’s house,” she said.

  “We’ll be here when you get back.”

  She stopped and asked, “No chance of hidden drawers in this thing, right?”

  He shook his head. “Not likely. I was just looking at it. I won’t see any hidden letters like last time or any more treats.”

  “If you take it apart and find something …”

  “Absolutely we’ll save it for you. Don’t you worry. We know this is part of your heritage.”

  Even him saying that made her feel guilty all over again. She grabbed several apples and figured she’d buy some food while she was out getting the potting soil. She also grabbed a bottle of water and filled her travel mug with coffee. And then calling the animals, she headed out the back door and walked toward Penny’s house. As she did, she called her grandmother. “Nan, did you know that dining room table is valuable?”

  “Of course it is,” Nan said brightly.

  “What else should I tell the appraiser about?”

  “All of it, silly.”

  Doreen shook her head, about to object to Nan’s lack of specificity, when Nan spoke again.

  “How are you? You sound terrible.”

  Doreen rolled her eyes at that. “Thanks, Nan. That makes me feel so much better.”

  “Didn’t you sleep last night?”

  “I slept like a log,” Doreen said, rotating her stiff shoulders as she walked. “The trouble was, I’d done a lot of heavy physical work at Penny’s first. Found a ton of rocks in that bed. I’m on my way up there now. She’s paying me to put together a nice front garden bed for the Realtor’s photos tomorrow.”

  “And what are you doing for her?”

  Doreen explained, and Nan said, “So it’ll just be a green bed for the photos then?”

  “Yes,” she said, “because nothing is in bloom, unless I can get her to buy a couple annuals.”

  “You can also put some dianthus or something around the bottom just to show a spot of color.”

  “The problem is, Penny doesn’t want to spend any more money than she has to,” Doreen explained. “And I certainly understand that. She’s looking for a small memorial to improve that bed, which was an eyesore.”

  “Right. That eyesore has been there for a long time though.”

  “Yes, I looked on Google Earth, and, about fifteen years ago, it was a great big hole originally. Maybe from sewer work. I don’t know for sure.”

  “So somebody turned it into a rock garden? That’s a better answer.”

  “I could certainly put in sedums and some hens and chicks,” Doreen said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think Penny has any of those in her garde
n in the backyard. She didn’t want to buy any either. And that front bed is a big-enough space that she’d spend a fair bit of money to fill it.”

  “Like you said, she’s selling the house. So just snag what you can from the back garden—without making it look like you stole from it—and do what you can,” Nan said cheerfully.

  “Did you know Penny before?” Doreen asked.

  “What do you mean by before?”

  “Before she married George.”

  “Yes and no,” Nan said.

  “Meaning?” She and her animals were already at the place in the creek where they crossed. Thaddeus sat on her shoulder, so Doreen picked up Goliath under the belly, listening to him howl as she carefully stepped across the rocks. Mugs had no intention of staying dry and dove into the middle of the creek, working his way over. When he popped out on the other side, she joined him.

  “Just that she was a young woman, originally from the lower mainland, and, of course, she had some family problems we knew about but didn’t really know the extent of,” Nan said.

  “Apparently her father was abusive.”

  “Yes, I believe he killed her younger brother. We always said that was why George was perfect for her. George was a very gentle soul.”

  “Right,” Doreen said. “What happened to her father?”

  “No idea. I think he went to jail for a bit, and then he just disappeared. Maybe he’s dead.”

  “Well, that’s probably a relief for Penny at least. Particularly if she was afraid of him. Afraid he’d come back into her life.”

  “She was afraid of him,” Nan said. “But that was a long time ago.”

  “True, but some things stay with you.”

  “I think that’s why she was close to Johnny, because she had lost her own brother so young.”

  “How old was he, do you know?”

  “It was one of those sad cases where he’d been abused a lot, so he was small for his age, but I don’t really know all the details, dear. You could ask Penny though.”