He crouched down for a few more pictures and then straightened. He was tall. Not quite as tall as Dash but then there were other qualities. Like the dark hair curled up on the shirt collar. I’d grown rather fascinated with that curl of hair.
“Why did you leave medical school? You seem well suited. As you might have noticed with Officer Chinmoor, not many people are comfortable around a dead body.”
“It had to do with my acute sense of smell and the vaporous odors in anatomy lab. I kept passing out. The professors were sure I was just queasy. But it was the formaldehyde. No one else could detect it, but I was heady with it from the second I walked into the lab. It was for the best.”
He nodded. “Well, I think I’ve got all I need from you, Miss Pinkerton. You should get home before it’s too dark.” As he spoke, he leaned down and took a picture of a dark red spot on Beverly’s pink blouse.
“Is it blood?” I asked.
“Might be.”
I leaned down, closed my eyes and wiggled my nose. When I opened them, I had an audience. Detective Briggs was watching me. “What are you doing?”
“Smelling the spot.”
“From up there?”
“Yes, and you’ll be interested to know it’s not blood. It’s ketchup.” I took another whiff. “And something else, something that reminds me of pumpkin pie. Or maybe that’s because I’m standing in a pumpkin patch. And then there was my overindulgence on Elsie’s pumpkin bread.”
His eyes widened, and, for just a second, he let go of his unflappable demeanor. “Elsie’s making pumpkin bread?”
“With a sweet cream cheese ribbon running through the middle.”
“Briggs,” Officer Chinmoor called across the pumpkins, “I let the morgue know.”
Briggs was right back to his more stiff self. “Right. Now get the tape measure. And hurry up. Also let Maggie know she can head home. She looked shaken. I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”
Briggs returned his attention to the blouse stain. “Ketchup?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s true. The million dollar nose? The crow?” He motioned with his head toward the fence along the road, where Kingston sat like a stone sentry watching over me.
“I guess the mayor stopped by the police station,” I said.
“He did.”
“And is the crow a problem?”
“Not for me but you might ask the finely dressed scarecrow. He doesn’t look too pleased. Now, if you don’t mind, Miss Pinkerton, I need to get back to work.”
Chapter 12
The detective’s somewhat blatant dismissal of me fell on deaf ears. There were numerous unanswered questions, which tended to make me curious to the point of driving myself batty.
With his very reluctant and slightly pale work partner, Detective Briggs measured out the placement of the body and set markers so Beverly could finally be wrested from her prize pumpkin. And it was that prize pumpkin that once again caught my attention.
The massive squash was sitting firmly in the ground a good three feet from the source of its ropey vine. I followed the vine to the center of the base plant. The thin fibers from the plant stuck to my skin as I parted several hand sized leaves. The vine was severed from the plant and not by the hand of nature. It was a clean cut. The pumpkin was no longer attached to its life giving roots. It seemed strange to think that Beverly would have cut the pumpkin from the plant with the contest still two weeks away. The pumpkin had probably reached its maximum girth, but if the contest was based at all on weight it might still have absorbed more moisture and therefore pounds. Or, at the very least, ounces.
I circled around the patch for clues but found nothing until I reached the garden gate. My foot accidentally kicked the edge of a garden tool. I brushed away some of the debris covering it and discovered a well maintained garden hoe. The green painted handle of the implement was still smooth and shiny, so it was either quite new or Beverly was one of those fastidious gardeners who took care not to leave her tools out in the sun or rain. Which made it equally strange to think that, either way, she would have left it out in the garden to be buried by soil and dead leaves.
I tore free a pumpkin leaf and used it like an oven mitt to lift the entire hoe free from its hiding place. Instantly, I smelled the acrid, metallic odor of blood. I turned the hoe to look at the sharp metal end, the edge used to cut hard dirt and break up thick loam. The pungent smell of soil mingled with the easy to distinguish smell of blood. The sticky looking lump on the corner of the hoe was a mixture of both.
“Detective Briggs,” I called.
They had freed Beverly from the pumpkin. She was stretched out onto her back. “Miss Pinkerton, I thought you were going home.” There was a bit of aggravation in his tone but then he was helping to move a rather hefty dead woman.
“It’s just that I’ve found something that I think you’ll want to see. It’s not ketchup.”
The confusion in his brow lasted only a second and then it dawned on him. He said something to the medics and headed over to where I was standing with the hoe. I pointed to the sticky wad at the end of the tool. “Blood.”
“You’re certain?” He took a whiff. “I smell soil and fertilizer.”
“Yes, that too, but there’s blood mixed in.”
“Right.” Before he turned to get an evidence tag, he stopped to look at me, giving me and my nose the same once over that Mayor Price had done. Only Briggs did it with much more finesse and somehow I didn’t mind.
“It’s just a tiny button of a nose with a few freckles. How on earth could it be so powerful?”
I smiled. “The shape and, most assuredly, the freckles have nothing to do with its power.”
He turned to walk away. “Uh, Detective Briggs? The hoe?” I held it out to him.
He nodded in approval at my use of the leaf to avoid confusing possible fingerprints. He took hold of it, carefully placing his fingers between mine on the leaf.
“This changes everything, doesn’t it?” I asked, silently chiding myself for getting excited about the possibility of a murder mystery. A woman had died after all. But still a tremor of giddiness rushed through me.
“It might. We have to make sure the blood wasn’t from an animal. Mrs. Kent might have used it to club a gopher or rat to death.” His face popped up. “Unless you can tell the difference with that super nose of yours.”
“No, I can’t. It makes sense that it might belong to an animal. Although, there is that blood on the back of Beverly’s head.”
Detective Briggs smiled faintly. “Go home, Miss Pinkerton and leave the police business to the police.”
“Yes, I will.” Eventually, I thought wryly as I watched him return to the body. I walked to the gate. Sawdust had been strewn around the fence surrounding the garden. I walked out of the gate and crouched down. There was definitely something besides pine shavings lingering in the air. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I still couldn’t make it out, but it was something familiar and pungent. It would, of course, drive me crazy for the rest of the evening, so I pinched some of the sawdust between my fingers and took another whiff. Lantana. There were few ground covers as strong smelling as lantana.
The faint odor of lantana sparked something in my mind. There was a thick border of it stretched between Beverly’s farm and the neighbor’s.
I decided to head that direction. Kingston’s shadow coasted over me. I’d forgotten all about him. He landed on the fence and shook out his feathers.
“Kingston, go home.” I motioned toward Myrtle Place with my arm. He paced the edge of the fence a moment and then lifted his big wings and took off.
The ambulance rolled past with Beverly Kent inside. Briggs mentioned there would be an autopsy as early as tomorrow to find out how she died. It sure seemed as if he, too, was thinking along the lines of a possible murder.
My own intuition was running right along those lines as well.
And Mom thought I’d get bored in Port Danby.
The sun was just starting to drop lower in the sky, which meant I still had a bit of time to explore.
I reached the lantana border between the neighboring farms, not completely sure what I was looking for. Possibly a flattened footprint trail running through the plants. Someone, probably even Beverly herself, had recently tromped to the pumpkin patch with lantana flower smashed on their shoes. It was a thickly planted border that was quite overgrown but easy enough to cross with some high, careful steps. It had obviously been there for a long time.
Lantana grew with long, weedy stems, and the tiny blooms were fairly hardy. Usually it took a heavy frost to kill them off. And even then, they came back quite readily. The purple and white border was deep.
I was so preoccupied looking for possible footprints in the plants that I failed to notice I was being watched until the sound of a throat clearing carried my attention to the neighboring farmhouse. The woman was mostly hidden by the white columns supporting the portico jutting out over her front porch, but I could see the edges of her dress as they fluttered in the breeze.
There wasn’t much to stop me when I was in a curious mood. And I was definitely that. I hopped over the lantana border and headed across the yard and past the scarecrow clad in fireman’s gear. The giant pumpkin being guarded by frail fencing sat stoutly in the late afternoon sun soaking up the last remnants of photosynthesis for the day. Unless it too had been severed from its vine.
I made a quick note of the fact that this pumpkin was not nearly as big as the one next door. It was absurd to think a woman had been murdered because of a pumpkin but then human nature was often absurd. I was anxious to know if this pumpkin had been cut too, but as I glimpsed the woman standing in the shadows of her porch, I saw that she looked quite shaken. And familiar. It was Virginia, the woman I saw at the diner the day before carving her steak with fury.
Naturally, she would be shaken. The activity next store made it obvious something dreadful had happened to her neighbor. And yet, she hadn’t made the trip across the yard to find out. It was entirely possible she was too frightened to walk over. She looked properly horrified, as anyone might if their neighbor had just been carried off on a gurney.
I stopped for a moment to catch my breath and find my words. It seemed my insatiable curiosity had just landed me in the unfortunate position of bad news breaker. With any luck, she had already figured out the worst. It seemed so from the lack of color in her face and the way she braced her hand on the column for support.
I placed my foot on the first step and waited to see if she would ask me to leave or get off her property. Instead, her lips quivered a few seconds and she blurted out a question. “Is she dead? Is Beverly dead?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Her eyes closed and she swayed. I raced up the remaining steps and caught hold of her arm. “Let’s get you inside for a glass of water.”
She nodded weakly and allowed me to lead her into the house. A small, outdated but charmingly rustic kitchen sat off what would have been considered the parlor back in the day the house was built. Two orange striped cats were stretched out on a faded floral sofa. They hardly lifted their heads as we walked through. The house smelled of dust and animal dander. I wiggled my nose to keep from sneezing.
Virginia sat at the round kitchen table, and I opened a few cupboards to find a glass.
“I can’t believe it. Was it a heart attack?” Virginia had recovered a bit faster than I expected. Her words were far less shaky. “She told me she’d been taking some nitro—nitro—something or other for her heart.”
I filled the glass and placed it in front of her.
“Nitroglycerin pills? They are quite common, but I’m not sure how she died. Detective Briggs says there will be an autopsy.”
Her face had regained some color. One eye was slightly clouded by a cataract but her surprise was clear. “I thought I saw Detective Briggs there. Why would he be there? It couldn’t have been anything but a heart attack,” she insisted. “Bev was overweight and then there were those pills. And I don’t think those pills were such a good idea. That stuff explodes, you know?”
“Well, the pills don’t explode, but I’m sure, like you say, it was a heart attack.” She was getting worked up. I decided it was not my place to put ideas of murder and intrigue in her head. Although, if it was murder, Virginia had a motive, flimsy and shallow as it seemed. But people had been murdered for less.
A dog scratched at the door in the service porch off the side of the kitchen.
“That’s Spunker. He’ll want his dinner.” Virginia pressed her hands on the table to get up and let him in.
“No, let me.” I hopped up first and walked to the screen door. Spunker didn’t even give the stranger standing in the service porch a second glance as he pranced through with a good amount of mud on his paws.
“Oh, Spunker, have you been playing in the pig pen again?” Virginia’s tone was airy. Apparently, the shock had already worn off. “Taylor must have left the gate open.”
I glanced around the service porch as she continued her lighthearted scolding of her dog. There was a deep basin sink that was filled with several dirt covered root vegetables, two turnips and a big red beet. A clothesline ran from one end of the tiny room to the other. A wire basket was bolted to the wall behind the clothesline. It was filled with various seed packets. One packet that was pressed haphazardly against the wires of the basket caught my eye because, unlike the commercially prepared packets of tomatoes and beets behind it, the label had been printed and taped on. The words Pumpkin Giant Hybrid 17 were written in bold print across the label. The corner of the packet was torn off. It looked flat as if there were no plump pumpkin seeds inside.
I swung around. A rooster print garden apron hung on a hook. A pair of garden shears hung on the next hook. I took a closer look at the piece of greenery jammed between its blades. One quick whiff confirmed what I already knew. It was the vine and leaf of a pumpkin plant. The odor was still quite fresh. Virginia was recently pruning vines and leaves in a pumpkin patch. Someone wanting to grow a massive pumpkin might very well prune back various vines to send all the plant’s energy to one squash, but it was a little late in the growing season for that. Virginia’s patch did reach her front porch. It was possible she had to cut some rogue vines from the steps to keep from tripping on them. Pumpkin vines did tend to get out of control when given unlimited space.
Virginia had busied herself filling Spunker’s food bowl. I decided to take the opportunity to lift up her garden clogs and give them a once over with the million dollar nose. I’d always joked with my coworkers that I needed to buy some designer handkerchiefs because a regular tissue just didn’t seem appropriate.
It was always harder to find one particular scent in a scrambled mix of odors, and Virginia’s shoes were a veritable salad of farm smells. Manure, grass, crushed leaves and even pine from sawdust clung to her shoes in a big gluey mess.
I closed my eyes and twitched my nose a few times. There it was. It was faint and mostly drowned out by the pungent smell of manure, but Virginia’s garden clogs had recently walked through lantana.
“Excuse me, dear, but why are you holding my garden shoes?”
I had been concentrating on the smells and hadn’t heard Virginia approach. “Oh, I was just admiring them.” That was, of course, a lie. “I’m planning to start a flower garden in my backyard. It will help cut down on overhead costs for the store.” That part was not a lie. Thankfully I had a slice of real life to add to the lie to make it sound more plausible.
She seemed to buy it. “Yes, those are very comfortable. I can give you the company name if you’d like.”
Virginia reached for a recipe box on the shelf where her laundry soap was stored. Her fingers were still slightly shaky but that might just have been from advanced age. She fished through the recipe box and pulled out a small scrap of paper. “Garden Gnomes and Clogs.” She held the paper out. Ten minut
es earlier she’d looked close to collapsing from shock about her neighbor’s death. Now she was going about her day, chastising her dog and handing out information about garden shoes. It was odd.
I waved off the paper. “Perfect. I’ll remember that name. Since you’re feeling better, I’ll head home. It’s been quite an afternoon.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I’m sure it’s no easy task opening up a shop for business.”
“Actually, I meant the dreadful discovery of your neighbor, but yes it isn’t easy opening a shop.”
Her face grew slightly gray upon mention of her neighbor. “Yes. I can’t believe she’s gone. We’ve been neighbors for decades. Our husbands were friends.” She made no mention of her friendship with Beverly. Perhaps she thought it was implied.
She walked me to the front door. As she opened it, we were both slightly stunned to see a tall figure standing on the other side.
“Miss Pinkerton,” Detective Briggs said with a slight edge of impatience. “I thought you went home.”
“Yes, well, I’m still here.”
“So I see.”
Chapter 14
Detective Briggs stayed out on the porch. It took him a second to pull his gaze from me as he spoke to Virginia. “Mrs. Hopkins, I wonder if I could talk to you for a moment.” He made no move to walk inside, so Virginia stepped outside.
My mind was still buzzing with so many details and questions, I decided to make one more sweep of that service porch. I patted the pockets of my jeans. “Oh my, I think I might have dropped my house key in your kitchen or service porch. I’ll be right back.”
Detective Briggs had the most nicely shaped and expressive eyebrows. At that moment, his brows were questioning my motives. I winked at him and slipped back inside to the kitchen.
The detective’s deep voice rumbled out on the porch, but I couldn’t make out the words. The somber tone led me to believe he was talking to her about Beverly’s death.
Marigolds and Murder (Port Danby Cozy Mystery Book 1) Page 6