In a desperate attempt to stay awake, we decided to play a game called “Twenty Questions”, where one player thinks of a person, place, or thing, and the other gets to ask twenty yes-or-no questions in order to come up with the correct answer.
“Does this person have more than fifteen tattoos?” Sheila asked in a sleepy voice.
Before I could say “yes”, because my latest People Magazine had reported Angelina Jolie as having seventeen of them, Sheila’s body slid down the wall like a glob of hot wax. When I couldn’t wake her, no matter how hard I tried, I began to weep.
“I’m so sorry, my friend. If I haven’t told you lately, I love you,” I said with a sniffle. I prayed her unconscious mind could hear my words of deep sincerity. “And, by the way, I did not select the cheapest phone service provider this time.”
I’d barely finished my remark when I felt myself slipping into oblivion. I felt bizarrely happy, because I would not have been able to deal well with survivor’s guilt if my stubborn relentlessness ended up taking my best friend’s life and spared my own.
Thirty-Five
“Lexie? Wake up. Come on, baby. Wake up.”
I’d heard Stone’s voice call to me just before opening my eyes. It seemed as though his voice had come from a long way off. My throat felt dry and scratchy, as if I’d just awoken in a recovery room following a tonsillectomy. As I looked into the worried eyes of my husband, I wondered how much time had passed. The last thing I remembered was sobbing about the fact I might have gotten my dearest friend in the world killed.
With an enormous sense of relief, I soon heard Randy talking to Sheila and questioning Lily, who stood outside the cooler in the hallway. I thought I heard Wyatt’s voice, as well.
“Is Sheila all right?” I asked Stone. “Where are we?”
“We found you two here in the floral shop’s cooler. I think you’ll be fine, but Lily’s called for an ambulance to transport you both to the hospital to be checked out.”
“Oh, no. Do we have to go? Each visit to the emergency ward gets more and more humiliating.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so, darling. Lily said you might have taken in too much of a dangerous gas called ether-something.”
“Ethylene.” Lily leaned into the cooler and provided the name for him, which at the time I thought an odd thing to do for someone who’d just tried to use it to murder two women. But then I realized, if the jig was up, she’d need to feign concern to make it appear as though the event was merely an accident.
In a pretentious manner, Lily went on to explain how ethylene oxide occurs. “It’s a toxic gas flowers put off naturally as they age. Prolonged exposure to the gas can cause fatigue, dizziness, confusion, and occasionally even death. Some of the more expensive coolers have a filter to filter out the gas. Sorry, but this cooler has no filter because the cost of the fancier model is out of my league.”
Strangely enough, Lily did sound sorry. Not sorry about what had happened to Sheila and me, mind you, but sorry we were still alive and kicking. I was pushing hard against my temples in an effort to alleviate the throbbing. “That must be why my head feels like a helium balloon about to explode. To make matters worse, I can’t feel my toes on either foot.”
“What in the world were you two doing?” Stone asked. Lily tilted her head, clearly as interested in my response as Stone. “You had to know it wasn’t safe to lock yourselves in a cooler.”
“Of course we know it’s not safe to be locked in here. But…well…we…just…” I began, struggling to explain our presence in the floral cooler. I was barely whispering as I explained. “We had to. We’d found evidence of what likely happened to Bubba and we needed to confirm it before taking it to the police department. His condition was not an accident, Stone. We’re convinced it was due to foul play.”
From Stone’s expression, you’d have thought I’d told him Sheila and I had read hippos killed more humans every year than any other animal, so we’d gone swimming in a small lake with a pod of them to find out if the statement was true.
“What does locking yourselves in a floral cooler have to do with confirming evidence of foul play?”
“We didn’t lock ourselves in here, Stone.”
“No?” he asked impatiently. He was clearly not buying any of what I had to say. “Go on.”
“We just stepped in here for a few seconds, not expecting that someone would lock the door behind us.” As I whispered, I cast an accusatory glance Lily’s way. “It took a number of hours for the gas to build up enough in our systems to affect us.”
“You two have been in here for over seven hours. It’s a wonder we didn’t find two dead bodies when we opened the door.” Stone sounded almost angry they hadn’t found two dead bodies. It was as if he thought we deserved to have succumbed to our own stupidity. That this thought even crossed my mind made it clear to me the effects of the gas had not completely abated yet. I could barely work up enough energy to take a full breath, so I didn’t try to respond. I figured it was best to let him vent his frustrations. I knew once he got it off his chest, he’d be as malleable as a flat bicycle tire.
“It’s after midnight,” Stone said. “We’ve been worried sick about you. We weren’t sure if the two of you had been abducted, or involved in an accident on some rarely traveled back road. It would never have occurred to Randy and me to look in a floral shop cooler, for goodness sakes! You’re lucky we found you in time, considering you told no one about your plans to come here.”
Stone’s last remark prompted me to rally up the oomph to respond. “I did so tell someone. I told you! Don’t you remember speaking with me? I explained to you about how all three groomsmen’s boutonnieres had been confiscated from the pantry refrigerator. We found out they contained not one, but two toxic flowers! I really need to speak to Wyatt privately about our suspicions. Lily Franks needs to be interrogated by the police.” I whispered, as Lily stood just outside the cooler door. Fortunately, she was having an exchange with Wyatt and paying no attention to my conversation with Stone. “In fact, someone needs to step outside the cooler to keep an eye on her before she locks the entire lot of us in here.”
Stone stared at me oddly, as if trying to judge my sanity. Apparently, he came to the conclusion I was completely bonkers. He made no response other than a look that spoke volumes all by itself.
“Stone, she locked Sheila and me in here to do away with us because she knew we were on to her. There’s nothing to stop her from locking that door again, leaving us all to die while she flees the country.”
“Oh, jeez. You are in worse condition than I realized. Wyatt is outside in the hallway with Lily. I think he can take care of the situation if Lily tries to lock us in here.” Stone’s response was heavily laced with sarcasm, which I didn’t appreciate. He turned away from me and asked the detective if the ambulance was en route to the floral shop.
“They should be arriving any second,” Wyatt replied. “In fact, I think I hear sirens in the distance.”
I pulled Stone’s head down toward my mouth. “This is not the ethylene talking, Stone. We think either Raven or Lily, or possibly both, targeted Bubba on purpose, if not all of the groomsmen. We know for a fact it was Lily who locked us in here, which makes her our number-one suspect. She has nothing to lose at this point, and that makes her very dangerous.”
“Honey, lay your head on my lap. Try not to talk. You’re not making any sense, and talking is not going to help your headache subside any time soon. As I said, Wyatt is outside with Lily right now. I don’t think there’s much chance she’s going to overpower Randy or me, much less Detective Johnston. Besides, after I contacted Lily to ask her if she’d seen you two, she rushed back here to her shop. She told me when she saw your car parked behind the building, she had a bad feeling you two had gotten locked in this floral cooler. She had it open before we arrived. She was nearly hysterical when we arrived, having just discovered both you and Sheila lying unconscious in here.”
“She ‘
had a bad feeling’? Yeah, right. She knew we were in here and was likely faking her concern,” I said in defense of my theory. “If she was distraught, it could have been because she’d been caught before the gas had eliminated us for good.”
With an expression of pity, Stone tenderly stroked my forehead. It was clear he thought the toxic gas had made me cuckoo for cocoa puffs. With my lips pressed up against the denim of his blue jeans, I mumbled, “I’m glad you guys thought to look for us here.”
“We didn’t,” he replied. “It was Rapella who suggested we search the floral shop. She and Rip stepped into the Inn around nine-thirty to ask about Bubba and say goodnight. Randy and I told them you two were missing. We had already called Wyatt, who put out an all-points bulletin on you girls. With Ladybug parked behind a dumpster in the rear of the building, it went undetected by the police officers who were patrolling the streets and responding to the APB. Why did you park your car there, anyway?”
“There were no available parking spots when we arrived.” Actually, I hadn’t even looked for a spot on the street, as we’d been trying to be less conspicuous at the time. We were afraid Lily would make a sprint for her SUV the moment she laid eyes on us. After all, she’d made a quick getaway the last time we confronted her.
“Well, whatever.” Stone sounded unconvinced.
As absurd as this may sound, I was a little ticked off that he didn’t believe my response, even though it wasn’t exactly truthful. I wisely kept my aggravation to myself. “How did Rapella know where we were?”
“She told us she’d overheard you talking on the phone, discussing the groomsmen’s boutonnieres. She said, ‘If I were in Lexie’s shoes, I’d go to the floral shop to confront the owner.’ Why didn’t you tell me someone had taken the boutonnieres out of the fridge?”
I did! In fact, Rapella overheard me talking on the phone to you, you numbskull! I laid my head on Stone’s lap and sighed. It seemed pointless to remind him I had told him about the missing boutonnieres on the phone earlier, and in return his response had been that Sheila and I should do whatever it took. It truly was my fault. I’d known he was preoccupied at the time and barely taking in a word I was saying to him. I had actually thought his distracted state of mind might be to our advantage. I certainly couldn’t blame Stone for being worried about us when we hadn’t shown up at the inn by well past suppertime. I felt fortunate to have a man who always put my welfare ahead of his own. Thank goodness Rapella was paying attention to our conversation, or things might have turned out much differently.
As Sheila and I lay side-by-side in the back of an ambulance a few minutes later, I reached over and clasped her hand. “Sorry, pal.”
“No need to apologize, Lexie,” Sheila said. “We were in this together, weren’t we?”
“Yes. And I appreciate you being my sidekick on what turned out to be an ill-advised mission. We might be dead right now, you know, and it would have been all my fault.”
“Don’t fret about it,” Sheila said. In an effort to lift my spirits, she added, “I wouldn’t have held it against you. Because, after all, I’d have been dead.”
We both laughed and then simultaneously put our hands on our temples and groaned. “Please, Sheila, don’t make me laugh!”
“Okay, I won’t. Oh, hey. Did Wyatt tell you that Lily didn’t lock us in the cooler?”
“No.” That should have been welcome news. For some reason, it wasn’t. For one thing, it blew my theory that Lily was the perpetrator out of the water, and for two, I sensed my friend was about to tell me getting locked in there was our own stupid fault. Which is exactly what she did. “If she didn’t, who did?”
“No one. When she hung up the phone, after the conversation we overheard, she―”
“You mean eavesdropped on?” I said with a chuckle that only made the jackhammer inside my head pound harder. “Oh, God, that hurts!”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. You need to not make me laugh, either. My head feels like a titanium piñata someone’s been banging on for an hour. One more whack, and it’s―”
“So who locked us in the cooler?” I interrupted. I didn’t have the patience to listen to a lengthy description of Sheila’s headache. Considering how excruciating my own head felt, I already had a pretty good idea about hers.
“No one,” she repeated. “In her explanation to Wyatt, she said that after she ended her phone call, she had grabbed her purse, locked up the office, and headed home. She looked around and, when she didn’t see us, she assumed we had decided not to wait for her to finish the phone call and left. She hadn’t even walked back to the cooler because she knew it had an automated system installed on it. To make sure she never left the door open overnight, risking all of her stock stored inside it, she had a system installed that automatically closes the door and locks it after two minutes of it being opened. As we’d thought, the code box inside is for safety purposes. In the event she or any of her employees got locked inside, they just had to enter the pass code to override the system. The pass code, incidentally, is 0925. Her niece was born last September twenty-fifth.”
“Well, crap. How would we have ever figured that one out, not knowing Lily’s birthday, much less her niece’s? Do you know if Wyatt happened to ask Lily why the cooler has a locking mechanism on it, to begin with?”
“Actually, he did. She told Wyatt her shop was burglarized a few years ago, and although only cash from the register was taken, the thieves trashed the place―destroying all of her fresh flowers, vases, specialty arrangements, and other supplies―before they left. That incident convinced Lily to have the security system installed on the cooler to protect her stock, which amounts to thousands of dollars.”
“Makes sense, I guess.” I groaned as I put pressure on my temples with my hands again, trying to alleviate the throbbing.
When I lowered my arms to my sides a few moments later, Sheila reached over, picked up my left hand, and gave it a squeeze. “I think we should rest now. I’m feeling light-headed again, and my headache is getting worse by the second.”
“Yeah, mine too.”
After our conversation concluded, we remained silent until we reached the circular drive behind Wheatfield Memorial Hospital, which led to the emergency room—the place I now plan to claim as a second home on our income taxes.
Thirty-Six
“Hey there, Ms. Starr,” the emergency room physician said in greeting after entering the curtained-off cubicle. “We were beginning to think you’d moved away, having not seen you in here for several months.”
“Yes, well. Very funny.” I could feel my face flush. “I’m still living in Rockdale. Visiting the ER is a bad habit I’m trying to break, Dr. Jifi.”
“That’s good to hear,” he responded while he scanned my chart. “Says here you’ve been exposed to ethylene gas and a high level of carbon dioxide. Your blood work showed trace amounts of each, but both tend to dissipate from your system quickly once you’ve return to breathing clean air. Another hour in those frosty conditions and we’d likely be talking about amputation right now. All of your toes and a few fingers on Mrs. Davidson’s right hand were beginning to show signs of frostbite. You two ladies are very lucky to have been rescued when you were.”
“Yes, thank God for our friend, Rapella Ripple. When will we be released?”
“You should be good to go in no time.”
“That’s good. Is Sheila doing all right?”
“Yes, she’s fine. It was wise to come in to be evaluated, but neither of you appear to have sustained any lasting ill effects.”
“Just curious, Doc. We were locked inside a floral cooler, surrounded by flowers, a few of which are considered toxic. Would an over-exposure to, say, castor oil and lily-of-the-valley plants, show up on a tox screen?’
“There’s no indication we need to run a tox screen on either one of you ladies.”
“I realize that, Dr. Jifi. But there is a patient on the fifth floor of this hospital, named Bubba Slippkno
tt, who has been in a coma for several days. Sheila and I discovered both of the flowers I mentioned were present in a boutonniere pinned to his lapel when he lost consciousness, and I’m wondering if inhalation of either flower could have caused that to happen.”
Dr. Jifi was making notes on the chart in his hand. I wasn’t sure he’d even heard what I’d just said, but I didn’t want to interfere with what he was so intent on doing. Finally, he looked up, and replied, “Unless Mr. Slippknott decided to chow down on his boutonniere, it’s highly unlikely the presence of toxic flowers would cause him to fall into a coma. Most flowers are only considered to be potentially lethal if ingested, not merely inhaled, so the odds of those flowers causing your friend to lose consciousness are extremely low. You can get dressed now and the nurse will be back in a few minutes with your discharge papers. Your friend has already received hers.”
Soon after, I was dressed and waiting impatiently for the nurse to return. Sheila poked her head in through the curtains and I motioned her to come in and have a seat on the bed next to me.
“Randy’s getting the car,” Sheila told Stone, who had also entered my cubicle.
“I’ll go check on Bubba’s condition before we head home,” Stone replied. “You can keep your partner in crime company in the meantime.”
“I think he meant to say ‘partner in crime-solving’,” I said after Stone was out of earshot. I then reiterated what Dr. Jifi had just told me about the poisonous flowers in the groomsmen’s boutonnieres. “The doctor agrees merely inhaling those floral toxins would not cause someone to slip into a coma, except maybe in very rare cases.”
“That explains why none of the other groomsmen were affected by them. The retired cop in Randy made him question Lily while we were waiting for the ambulance. She told him that Raven ran out of baby’s breath with two boutonnieres to go, and they didn’t have time to get any more, so Lily instructed Raven to substitute with lily-of-the-valley sprigs in all of the groomsmen’s boutonnieres so they would be consistent and look as if they were planned that way.”
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