Floral Depravity

by Beverly Allen

  Foley turned back to Bixby. “Has the hospital determined cause of death?”

  “You know toxicology won’t come back for weeks.”

  “So”—now he was in Bixby’s face—“based on the guess of a nursing school washout, you’re going with poison?”

  “Miss Bloom was on the scene and did her best to aid the victim. And she’s proved . . . helpful . . . in a couple of previous investigations in Ramble.” Bixby’s hands went to his hips. “But I’m not going with anything. My job was to secure the scene. The scene is secured. Have a nice day.”

  He started to walk off.

  “Wait a minute,” Foley said. “Don’t go getting all uppity with me. I’ve been up for days dealing with that dad-blamed fire. If you say it’s a possible homicide, I’ll say let’s run with that.”

  Bixby turned around. “Let’s run? Oh, no. You’re not saying—”

  “Yup.” Foley grinned. “I’ll clear it with my good friend, your mayor, at whose pleasure you serve, but Kane Bixby, I hereby deputize you and put you in charge of this investigation.”

  Bixby said nothing, but clenched his jaw so hard he was in danger of snapping a molar.

  Foley just grinned and started his signature whistle. He’d taken two steps back toward the path to the road before he whipped around. “Oh, yeah. You know what? You’re going to need manpower, and I can’t spare any of my people.” He pointed to Lafferty. “How about this man?” Then he looked in my direction and smiled. Or perhaps he smirked. Hard to tell in the torchlight. “And since she’s been so helpful, as you say . . .” He pointed to me. “What’s your name again, sweetheart?”

  “Audrey Bloom.”

  “Well, Audrey Bloom, consider yourself deputized, too.” He turned to Kane Bixby. “See? I’m even giving you help.”

  * * *

  “Over there, son.”

  Bixby had commandeered Brad and his still camera to take crime scene shots. Maybe he was grateful he didn’t have to walk two miles in the dark to retrieve his own camera, but given their past skirmishes, “son” was probably overdoing it.

  Brad took a few more shots of the stew lying on the ground, the flash lighting the area in brief bursts. Bixby had already decided that the dust was too disturbed by people tramping all over it to get a decent footprint, but he had wanted to document the scene.

  “What should I be doing?” I asked.

  “Stay out of the way?” Bixby said. “Look, thanks for jumping in and trying to get the victim to the hospital. I only wish it had turned out better. But as far as the investigation goes, let the police handle this.”

  “If you haven’t noticed, I kinda am the police, too. I’ve been deputized. I should be helping.”

  Bixby turned to face me. Even the darkness couldn’t hide the sneer on his face. “You know he only did that to irritate me, right? The next time I have a conversation with his good friend the mayor, I plan to tell him how irresponsible it was to put you in possible danger. You’re not trained in evidence collection or experienced in police procedure. Or armed, for that matter.” He lowered his voice. “And if it is murder . . .” He flicked his head toward the crowd still behind the makeshift police barrier. No yellow tape here, just a string of colorful flags.

  “You did tell him I was helpful,” I said.

  “I could see he was leaning toward assuming some natural cause of death. Key evidence would be lost if—”

  “But you believed me.”

  “As the closest thing to a medical professional on the scene. You know, it’s still possible that the medical examiner will discover he died of natural causes.”

  I glared at him.

  “I just don’t want anyone further contaminating this crime scene.”

  I crossed my arms and waited. Grandma Mae always said that women had no greater weapon than well-timed silence.

  He threw up his hands. “Fine. Tell you what, Miss Poisons Expert. How about that as a job? It’s going to take quite a bit of time to get toxicology results back. Go and see if you can find the murder weapon.”

  * * *

  I paced up and down on the dirt floor of the “cottage” we shared with the girls. It turned out to be more of a low-ceilinged hut with a thatched roof. The one small room was jammed with sleeping mats on the floor, so only about three feet of pacing room was available. One tiny lone window faced the stocks in the courtyard, gleaming in the moonlight, empty but foreboding.

  “Will you try to get some sleep?” Amber Lee said. “Some of us older folks need our beauty rest.”

  “I can’t.” My brain was spinning. My father was here. And then the murder. My argument with Bixby. “Find the murder weapon.” I sighed.

  Opie hoisted herself up to sitting and crossed her legs. In the privacy of the cottage, she had changed into modern sweatpants. “Maybe you should do it.”

  “Find the murder weapon? You know he just said that to get rid of me.”

  “That might be true.” Amber Lee yawned and rolled over to face the rest of us. “But I have every confidence you can do what he said.”

  “How am I supposed to find a murder weapon when we don’t even know if a murder has been committed?”

  “Well, what do we know?” Melanie slapped a card onto the hand of solitaire she was playing in the light of her cell phone. Why she wasn’t just playing on her cell, I have no idea.

  I stopped pacing and ticked the one thing I knew off on my finger. “Barry Brooks is dead.”

  “What else?” Opie asked.

  “There is nothing else,” I said.

  “You got a good look at him before they carried him away,” she said. “What were the symptoms?”

  “Okay.” I sat down on the mat and raked my brain. “Chills. Vomiting. Racing, erratic heart rate. Probably a fever before the chills, because he was all sweaty. Convulsions.” I rubbed my forehead, as if that would fire up the old neurons. “Headache.” Maybe it worked.

  “You have a headache or he had a headache?” Amber Lee asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Carol tossed me a bottle of Tylenol.

  “Thanks.” I shook out two and washed them down with a bit of water before tossing the bottle back to her. “I would have thought you’d suggest blood-letting or something. After all, you’re a history major.”

  She drew up her knees to her chin. “Just not as hard-core as some of the folks here.”

  “She’s the best TA,” Opie said.

  “Which only means I let you get away with too much,” Carol said, but with a smile.

  I nodded, but my brain still cycled through the symptoms. “Maybe . . .” I pulled out my cell phone, then let out a disgusted sigh. “Low battery.”

  “We can fix that.” Opie dug around in a dusty backpack and pulled out a small device with a hand crank. “It’s a generator. It has a light, a weather radio—and a USB charging port. Not quite all the comforts of home, but not even a pound of extra weight to carry.”

  “Brilliant,” I said. “You come prepared.”

  “Well, it’s mostly because of my Candy Crush addiction,” she said. “But you’re welcome.”

  “Do I have to crank it?”

  “It should be fully charged. Just plug it in.”

  As my phone connected, the low-battery message disappeared, and soon I was sitting on a straw mat in a medieval village while surfing the Internet.

  “You have an idea?” Amber Lee said.

  “Just wondering if I could narrow down the type of poison by entering the symptoms.”

  The room hushed while I typed the various symptoms in, with the keyword “poison,” and then looked for a reputable source. Or maybe they kept talking and I just didn’t hear them because of my concentration. I had no idea how much time passed before I came across the National Institutes of Health report that best fit the bill.


  “You got it?” Opie asked.

  I looked up to see they’d all been staring at me.

  “Aconite poisoning. I think.”

  “So what now?” Melanie asked. “We search the camp for a bottle marked aconite?”

  “We?” Carol asked. “Are you all into this stuff?”

  Opie laughed. “We might have helped a little bit. Audrey here is a certified A-1 amateur sleuth.”

  When Carol looked confused, Melanie explained. “Not that anyone certifies amateur sleuths. But she’s solved a couple of murders already.”

  Carol’s head whipped back to me. I guess I didn’t look like the detecting kind.

  “Only this time she’s not an amateur,” Amber Lee added, “since she’s been duly deputized. Hey, does that make us deputy deputies?”

  “I’ll settle for minions,” Melanie said. “I always wanted to be a minion.”

  “Not if it’s going to put you in danger,” I said.

  “See,” Opie said, “she’s talking like Chief Bixby already.”

  I flipped on the LED light on the generator. It wasn’t a spotlight by any stretch of the imagination, but it produced a nice steady glow. Hopefully enough for what I needed it for. “May I use this?”

  “Sure,” Opie said. “Just crank it if it starts to get dim. Are you going somewhere?”

  I pulled on the surcoat Nick had loaned me. “Yes, looking for the murder weapon.”

  “The aconite?” Amber Lee said. “You know where to find it?”

  “I think I might.”

  “Then, wait. I’m coming with you,” Amber Lee said.

  “Me, too,” Opie added.

  “Ditto,” said Melanie.

  Carol looked rather stunned as she scanned our faces. She shrugged then pushed herself off the mat. “Count me in.”

  I looked at the small group, and for the first time got just a little glimpse into why Bixby was irritated with me poking my nose into one of his investigations. I didn’t want anything happening to Amber Lee or any of these young women. I resolved to try to be a bit nicer to the man. As I shoved the murder weapon in his face. Well, not actually in his face. With his allergies . . . “Should we try to find the boys?” I asked. “I’m sure Darnell must be back by now.” He’d gone with the group that took Brooks to the helicopter.

  Melanie shook her head. “Trust me. They’re useless. As soon as they strapped on swords, it was like their brains got sucked out.”

  “She’s right,” Opie said. “Hopeless. You’ll see. But you got us. What’s the plan?”

  “Aconite comes from plants,” I said, as the ladies gathered their wraps. “Specifically monkshood.”

  “And you think someone brought one of these plants in?” Amber Lee said. “Please tell me there wasn’t any in our flower arrangements.”

  I shook my head. “We just brought roses and bachelor’s buttons, so it didn’t come from us. And I don’t think the killer had to bring it with him, either. It was already here. I half remember spotting some growing wild in the woods on my way in.”

  “So basically, we’re looking for the plant,” Melanie said.

  I described the plant to them, with blue flowers shaped like the hood of a monk. And coincidentally not too much different from the hood on the back of the friar’s cloak, the one worn by my father. My father, who didn’t want me to reveal his identity and who warned me that dangerous things were happening here. After I delivered the murder weapon into Bixby’s hands, I needed to have a talk with that man.

  “Every part of the monkshood plant is poisonous,” I said, relating what I’d learned from the NIH article, “but to cause that much of a reaction, I’d think the victim had to ingest the root.”

  “So somebody dug it up,” Opie said.

  “Or pulled it up,” Amber Lee said.

  “We could have all been killed, then,” Melanie said. “Oh, Audrey! If we’d eaten the stew . . . Is that what someone tried to do? Kill everybody here?”

  “Any way it could have been an accident?” Carol said.

  I shrugged. “All good questions. Keep them coming. In the meantime, let’s look for answers. Don’t go out of sight of the camp.”

  “And we have our buddies and fresh tissues,” Opie teased.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to lose anybody in the dark. We want to find the flowers. Then look around the base, to see if some of the plants might have been dug up. Call if you find any monkshood. But don’t touch it.”

  “You want the glory?” Amber Lee teased.

  “No, just don’t want any of us getting a nasty rash—or worse—from touching the leaves or flowers. Every part of this plant is bad news.”

  We split up into two groups. I took Melanie and Opie and used the light from the mini-generator. Carol went with Amber Lee, using a contraband flashlight that one of the girls dug out of her sleeping bag. That way we could cover more ground.

  “You should have changed out of your mundanes,” Melanie told Opie, who was still dressed warmly in her sweats.

  Opie shook her head. “And freeze? No one’s going to see me in the dark anyway.”

  “Mundanes?” I asked as I shined the flashlight over the plants just outside the clearing. It was probably a snipe hunt in the dark, but I doubted sleep would come tonight, and I would enjoy dropping the murder weapon at Bixby’s feet.

  “Yeah, the modern clothes,” Melanie said. “Only the hardliners here look down their noses at you when they say it. Mundanes.” Melanie pursed her lips like she’d just bit off half of a lemon and pretended to shiver. Or maybe she really shivered. The air seemed to grow colder as we spoke. “They really didn’t want any of us wearing street clothes.”

  “So I’ve been told,” I said, shivering either at the cold of the night or the memory of the serving wench outfit.

  “What can they do to me?” Opie asked.

  “Send you home, that’s what,” Melanie said as she swatted at a mosquito on her arm. “And then you’d still have to write that paper.”

  “At least I’ll still have blood left,” Opie said.

  “Ah, is that what this is about?” I asked. “Either attend the re-creation or write a paper?” I had wondered why the event was so popular among the college students.

  “You bet,” Melanie said. “Thirty pages on some aspect of the Middle Ages.”

  “Here’s one,” I said, shining the light on the blue flowers of a tall monkshood plant, then redirecting the beam to the ground around it. The flashlight beam was alive with moths and other insects attracted to the light.

  “Any sign of digging?” Opie asked.

  The ground showed no signs of disturbance. “No, but now you know what we’re looking for.” I shined the light on the plant so the girls could get a closer look.

  “Those flowers are really pretty,” Melanie said. “I can see the little hood shapes. I can’t believe the plant is deadly.”

  “Very,” I said. “They called it monkshood for the shape, but it had other names, too. Wolfsbane. I’ve also heard it called devil’s helmet.”

  “Does it have meanings, too? In your language of flowers?” Opie asked.

  “I suppose so, but I’d have to look it up. It’s not one I’m all that familiar with. We obviously wouldn’t use it in a bouquet. Just touching it could make you very sick.”

  “I saw a movie once,” Melanie said, “where they used wolfsbane to protect a baby from vampires. Put it all around her neck. Scary to think of what might happen if someone tried that in real life.” She slapped at a mosquito on her neck. “But I might try it if I thought it would work against these little bloodsuckers.”

  “I think I’d rather take my chances with the vampires,” Opie said. “Here’s another one.”

  “A vampire?” Melanie asked.

  “No, a monkshood, y
ou . . .” Opie pointed to another tall plant, but the ground around it showed no disturbance, either.

  “Hey, over here!” Amber Lee called. “Quick!”

  We followed her into the woods. When she stopped, she shined her flashlight on Carol. The beam reflected the tear tracks on the young woman’s cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I got so excited I wasn’t thinking.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She touched it,” Amber Lee said.

  “It itches,” Carol said.

  “Come on back to camp,” I said. “They may not have running water, but we’re going to have to wash that somehow.”

  “Look!” Opie said. “She really did find it. Someone’s been digging here.” She pointed her flashlight down at the recently overturned dirt.

  Chapter 5

  “I am so stupid,” Carol whined as I poured more water over her hand. “You warned us not to touch it. And what do I go and do?”

  A few of the reenactors were giving me the stink-eye, probably because I was depleting their precious water supply at a fantastic rate. I’d probably get mad, too, if I had to carry all my water over a mile to the camp. But it couldn’t be helped.

  The rash on Carol’s hand looked ugly, but she didn’t know—because I didn’t want to alarm her—that I was secretly taking her pulse while I poured water over those hands. Her heart rate was mildly elevated, but not erratic. That and the rash and the self-loathing seemed to be the limits of her reaction.

  I also experienced a measure of self-loathing. This girl was barely past her teen years. And within hours of meeting me, she was running around in the dark trying to find a poisonous plant just because I’d asked her to.

  Opie put her hand on my shoulder. “You didn’t make any of us go.”

  “Did I say that out loud?”

  Opie smiled. “No, but I know you by now.”

  The advancing sun washed over the encampment with milky whiteness. A rooster crowed.

  Bixby and Amber Lee stepped back into the clearing. Bixby held a cluster of monkhood plants, with their turnip-like roots, in one gloved hand, while he tried to suppress a sneeze with the other. Amber Lee gave me a thumbs-up.