Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 02 - The Geranium Girls

by Alison Preston

  “Jesus,” Hermione said. “Jesus fucking Christ. That’s gotta be a horrifying picture to be carrying around inside your head. She formed a small pile of light brown hair and pushed it aside. “Bea was a customer of mine, you know,” she went on.

  “Really?” Beryl was stunned. She wouldn’t be able to tell Dhani this particular piece of information. Talk about connections! He’d freak!

  “Yeah. She was a sweet girl. Beautiful too. Imagine! God, I wish you hadn’t told me about the mushrooms.”

  “Sorry. I…”

  “No. No, it’s okay. It’s good you told me.” Hermione propped her chin on the end of her mop. “I’ll miss her. I hope they catch the guy and torture him.”

  “I wonder how she was killed,” Beryl said, her voice shaky.

  “I don’t know. Here, sit down, honey, have some coffee.” Hermione guided Beryl to a comfy chair in the waiting area and they sat awhile.

  There were no customers and Hermione turned around her sign and locked the door.

  “Herm?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you mind if I washed my hair?”

  “Of course not. I’ll even wash it for you. Come on.”

  “You don’t have to help. Honest. I just kind of have this thing about washing my hair lately. It never feels really clean.”

  “Sit.”

  Hermione fastened a little black towel around Beryl’s neck and ran very warm water through her hair till it was drenched. She squeezed shampoo into her hands and massaged it vigorously through Beryl’s hair. It smelled like jasmine. She rinsed and rinsed and rinsed again.

  The warm water felt good. Beryl wanted to talk about the mushrooms some more, but couldn’t. She wanted to talk them to death, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Hermione wrapped a bigger towel around Beryl’s head and kissed her on the cheek.

  “There. Spanking clean,” she said.

  The distinct perfume of coconut lay underneath the tobacco smoke that clung to everything in the little shop. It was the geraniums. How did they thrive so in such an atmosphere? Beryl wondered. And then she looked at her friend and knew how. Hermione whispered to the plants and fussed about with a water spritzer and a fork, loosening soil, spraying the lush growth, caressing the foliage, sometimes crumbling a leaf in her fingers to release its scent.

  This was the first summer she had put some of the plants outside. She had thought they would be too vulnerable out there, but Beryl had talked her into it. “They’ll brighten the place up,” she’d said.

  “I kissed a guy I shouldn’t have kissed,” Beryl said, as she fluffed her hair about with the towel.

  Hermione laughed. “What are you, in grade seven? I fucked ninety-two guys I shouldn’ta fucked. But there’s nothing either of us can do about it. Let’s have a real drink.”

  She retrieved a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a cupboard in her rolltop desk and poured them each a couple of inches.

  Beryl said, “I’m going to ask you what you’ll probably think is a stupid question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you think it’s significant that I found Beatrice Fontaine and that I also know you and that she was a customer of yours?”

  “That’s not a stupid question,” Hermione said and took a long pull from her drink.

  “Damn. I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “I don’t know if it’s significant in the grand scheme of things, but it’s significant to me,” Herm said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “This guy I mentioned,” Beryl said, “the one I kissed too soon? He’s very big on connections between things being full of all kinds of meaning.”

  “He sounds interesting,” Herm said. “Maybe I could fuck him next.”

  Beryl smiled. “Yeah, he is interesting in an irritating sort of way. I quite like him.”

  “Maybe it’s okay that you kissed him already,” Hermione said gently.

  “I don’t know…a passionate kiss sort of knocks down a barrier, doesn’t it? Maybe that barrier shouldn’t have been knocked down yet. Or ever, even. It changes everything. I can’t believe it isn’t the same for him. He seems so…sensitive, with all his talk of connections.”

  “I think you might be exaggerating the importance of kissing,” said Hermione.

  “No. I’m not.”

  “Well, maybe his whole world has changed too.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “No.”

  “A kiss shouldn’t take place only because it seems the thing to do at the time,” Beryl said. “It’s more important than that.”

  She came away from the shop feeling a little bit better and a little bit drunk. On the walk home she tried to organize her thoughts and couldn’t. Who cares? she thought, as she passed through Coronation Park. Who cares how organized I am if I feel better and my hair’s clean? Besides, Dhani sucked wasp poison out of my foot; it’s okay that I let myself go when we kissed.

  Chapter 14

  Dhani spoke like a Canadian; he’d been here that long. This was a disappointment for Beryl. She wanted an accent to go along with his exotic beauty.

  On her deck with Dhani she could forget the mushroom girl and a lot of other things besides. She could almost imagine she was someone else, living in a foreign land sipping strong coffee.

  It was a quiet morning a week after their night in the park. The occasional car washed by on the drive and the crows shouted in one of their many voices. But that was streets away. It was peaceful here. Beryl was reminded of mornings when she was a kid. When she’d had chicken pox, or mumps, or some other childhood disease. It had been good to miss school, but eerily lonesome on her own outside the school walls.

  “So, the girl you found in the park?”

  Dhani didn’t look at Beryl when he spoke. He talked to the grand old willow tree that shaded most of the deck.

  “Beatrice Fontaine, you mean.”

  He looked at her now but didn’t speak.

  “Dhani, what is it? You look horrible. Please tell me this isn’t about the terrible mistake I made in letting us lie down too close to where I found her.”

  He couldn’t possibly know about the Hermione connection, could he?

  “No, Beryl,” he said. “No. I’m afraid we’re connected to her in more ways than one or two.”

  “What do you mean, Dhani? What are you talking about?”

  “I know someone who actually knew the girl.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  They called her a girl but she was really a woman. Thirty-three years old on the day she died on the spot where Beryl found her.

  “You must have just found out,” Beryl said. “It was only in the paper yesterday, who she was and all.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is it that knew her? Someone close to you?”

  “Well, not really. I don’t actually know her. Shirley at work does. She went through pharmacy with this woman that knew the dead girl.”

  Beryl breathed an inward sigh of relief. This had nothing to do with her or Hermione. It struck her as very unreasonable that she had to hide the Hermione connection from Dhani but she knew she did, for her own sake. Dhani was definitely very odd in this particular area.

  “Wait,” she said. “Shirley at work went through pharmacy with a woman who knew Beatrice.”

  “Yes. This friend of hers, acquaintance really, remembers filling a prescription for her a year or two ago. She thought she recognized the name and looked it up in their computer and bingo.”

  “Bingo?”

  “Yes,” Dhani said. “Just as she suspected, the girl had been a customer at the pharmacy where she works.”

  “What’s this person, this pharmacist’s name?” Beryl asked. She reached in her pocket for a cigarette.

  “I don’t know,” Dhani said, “but I could find out.”

  “No,” Beryl said. “It’s not necessary. Dhani, don’t you see how ten
uous a connection this is? It doesn’t matter. Surely to God it doesn’t matter.”

  She lit her cigarette with a wooden match and inhaled deeply. It was the first time she had lit up in Dhani’s presence, although she had warned him that she was likely to do so from time to time.

  “Of course it matters,” Dhani said, talking to the willow tree again. “I wish you wouldn’t smoke, Beryl.”

  “I wish you weren’t insane,” Beryl muttered.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  They were quiet for a while with the wind in the trees.

  “Hi, Beryl!”

  It was the little boy from two doors down on the north side, calling in from the front sidewalk.

  “Hi, Russell! How’re things?”

  Beryl was glad to see him. Maybe he would come over and blow some of his spit bubbles for them and Dhani would see that there were better things to occupy his mind than his non-existent connections.

  “Who’s that man?” Russell asked.

  “This is my friend, Dhani,” Beryl said. “Would you like to come and meet him?”

  Dhani tried to smile but it wasn’t good enough for young Russ.

  “No, thanks,” he said and pedalled his trike on up the street.

  “Bye, Beryl!” he hollered over his shoulder.

  “So long, Russell!”

  “Your glumness has scared away my neighbour,” Beryl said.

  “Sorry.”

  Beryl concentrated on blowing her smoke in the opposite direction of Dhani. He took a good deal of the fun out of having a cigarette.

  “Even if all these feeble connections do mean something,” she said, “and it’s obvious they do mean something to you, what are we, or you, supposed to do about it?”

  Dhani sighed and sipped his coffee.

  “You like your coffee very strong,” he said.

  “Yes. You don’t, I guess.”

  “No.”

  “Is it a religious thing, this thing about connections? Is it part of a religion I could read about or you could explain to me?”

  “No, Beryl, it’s just me. It’s just a thing I have.”

  For such a smart guy Dhani could be a real bonehead at times. She almost said it out loud but stopped herself in time. She figured one sentence like that could be enough for someone as sensitive as Dhani. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to lose him, not yet anyway.

  “You have a picture of her,” he said. “At least, I assume it’s her.”

  Beryl’s scalp tingled.

  “How do you know that, Dhani?”

  She was suddenly not so sure she couldn’t stand to lose this person who had obviously been rifling through her desk drawers.

  “Where did you get it, Beryl?”

  “How do you know about it, Dhani?”

  “I’m worried about you, Beryl.”

  “I think you should go now, Dhani.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Hi, Beryl!”

  It was Russell again, this time on foot. He had come up silently, through the yard.

  “Russell, you scared the living daylights out of me,” Beryl said.

  The little boy leaned with his elbows on the deck and blew a big beautiful bubble made of spit.

  Beryl and Dhani both laughed and Russell laughed too.

  “My mum told me not to blow bubbles anymore,” he said and blew another one bigger than the last.

  “Well, you should probably listen to what your mother says.” Dhani crouched down near the boy and stuck out his hand. “I’m Dhani,” he said, “a friend of Beryl’s.”

  Russell smiled shyly and gave him his sticky little hand.

  “Hello, Dhani,” he said and skipped away down the sunny street.

  Beryl stood up. It was definitely time for Dhani to leave. She needed to think. She needed to ponder alone for awhile: was Dhani crazy? Was she falling for a crazy person?

  She waved half-heartedly from her kitchen window as she watched his silver Camry back into the Kruck-Boulbrias’ garbage cans. He knocked them right over. At least he had the decency to get out and place them back in position, even if he blocked the lane while doing so, causing a short line-up of people in their cars to wait patiently while he completed his task. No one honked, no one shouted — Beryl was pleased with her neighbours.

  Chapter 15

  Beryl’s ankles hurt on the walk home from the bus stop. Her plan was to rest for a bit with her feet up on cushions, have a bite to eat — maybe a bowl of Corn Pops — and then spend an hour or so deadheading her lobelia. It was one of her favourite activities. The weather had been hot and dry for a few days and the flowers were begging to be done. She had promised them and the bees as she left the house this morning.

  When Beryl entered the yard an uneasy feeling caught in her throat, slowed her in her tracks. Nothing happened, no one spoke; there was no noise at all. Just a feeling. I’ve been hanging around with Dhani too much, she thought. All his talk of vibes and karma, those sorts of things; it’s rubbing off.

  She found her key underneath the flower pot and looked over her shoulder as she unlocked the door.

  “This is stupid,” she said out loud. I may as well leave the doors open if I’m going to leave the key in such an obvious place.

  She resolved to give that some thought.

  Once her feet were out of their socks and shoes her ankles felt better. Beryl threw on a pair of overalls and decided to forgo putting her feet up and eating some Corn Pops. I’ll get right at the lobelia, she planned, as she tossed her postal uniform down the basement stairs. That’ll fix me up.

  She poured herself a Dr. Pepper over ice and headed back outside.

  The hanging plant closest to the door seemed the safest place to start. Close, and she could work her way out. The flowers were so abundant and beautiful they dazzled Beryl for a moment. She couldn’t see them as individuals, hundreds of them needing their tired dead blooms removed to make room for the new. As she focussed her eyes and blinked, and blinked again, she couldn’t find a single bloom that was past its best. This was impossible. She hadn’t tended her flowers in several days.

  The yard was too quiet. Beryl couldn’t even hear traffic noise from across the river. No trains ran and no birds sang.

  She feared she was losing her mind. She moved on to the next planter, this one lobelia mixed with petunias, and stared into the blue blooms. Not a one needed doing. Not a one was less than perfect.

  Slowly, she walked around her yard knowing what she was going to find. Someone had been here and someone had deadheaded her lobelia, all of them. There wasn’t a dead flower to be found.

  It must have taken whoever did it well over an hour unless he or she had help. A sidekick deadheader. Maybe one of the neighbours had seen something. That was her only hope.

  She wanted to think it was a friend who had done her a favour but she knew it wasn’t. Anyone who was her friend knew how she felt about this chore. She loved it! Someone had either intentionally ruined her fun or, worse, was terrorizing her in a way so subtle it made the hair on her arms stand up.

  Beryl walked around to the front of her house and sat down on the deck in the shade of the Russian willow. This was an impossible situation. She couldn’t phone the police: “Yes, I’d like to report some lobelia that have been deadheaded.”

  To wait a bit seemed a good idea, to let the situation settle. Maybe she herself had done it and forgotten. No. Maybe it hadn’t happened and her eyes were playing tricks on her. She got up and looked again at each planter in the yard, abundant with the healthy blue flowers. No.

  She doubted she could even tell a friend. It was too weird. If she tried to explain it to anyone they would think she was nuts. Tending flowers wasn’t what criminals did.

  Dhani! She could tell Dhani! She felt a sudden rush of love for her new friend, the one who caused her so much trouble and worry. It filled her up quite unexpectedly. He was just odd enough and in exactly the right way, to understand the impo
rtance of this situation.

  She phoned him at the pharmacy. He had booked off for the morning and still hadn’t made it in. They had just heard from him; he was on his way. The lovely feelings she had, ever so briefly, evaporated. Dhani was the culprit. Who else? She even remembered telling him about her love of deadheading. It struck her that it was precisely the type of thing he would do. But why? As punishment for not agreeing with him about everything? Had she disparaged him?

  Maybe he wasn’t her friend anymore. Definitely a possibility since the other day and their argument about… What had they argued about? The part that stayed with her was him opening a drawer in her kitchen desk to have a look inside. She wished so much that he hadn’t done that.

  She tried to look at it in a different light: if she was alone in Dhani’s kitchen would she open a drawer in his desk? Yes, she would. But only if he was nowhere in the vicinity, only if there was no chance in this lifetime that he would find out. So all that meant was that she was a more devious person than Dhani. At least he was honest about nosing around in her private stuff.

  But he had confronted her with what he’d found! Surely that was wrong. It was one thing to come clean about his despicable behaviour but quite another to gloss over it and start accusing Beryl. If he was going to admit to rifling through her drawers he could at least do so with cap in hand.

  Beryl realized she didn’t even know where Dhani lived. It was hard to picture his kitchen, his kitchen drawers and what he kept inside of them. She expected they’d be tidy. But really, she didn’t know very much about him at all.

  He was behind the prescription counter at the drugstore when she finally tracked him down later in the afternoon. She wanted to see if he could account for his whereabouts in the morning. And he could, unless he was lying. But she didn’t think he was; it wasn’t his style. She was both relieved and disappointed. In a way, she wanted it to be Dhani who had tended her flowers. It wouldn’t feel so dangerous if it was him.

  “I was at the toe doctor,” he said.

  “The toe doctor? You don’t have any toes.”