How Does Your Garden Grow

by April Hill

  "You're not coming back," he said.

  Beth felt her chest tighten. "Is that necessary?"

  "I don't know, but I'm not ready to chance you staying here. "Now, hobble upstairs and pack, or I'll go up and do it for you. I warn you, though. If you let me do the packing, you'll regret it. I'm a flimsy lingerie kind of guy, and it can get pretty cold at the beach."

  "You live at the beach? On a cop's salary?"

  "I'm independently wealthy. Get moving."

  "Really?"

  "Really, what?"

  "Are you really rich?"

  "No. It used to be my sister's vacation place. She lets me use it."

  "Is she rich?"

  "Loaded, but I'm not in the will, so don't get any ideas."

  * * * * *

  "All right," she said, climbing up on the king-sized bed the second night at Adam's place. "Let's add up what we know for sure. Fact one, Felix Kruger is a slimy creep who makes women disappear."

  She propped her injured foot on a pillow, got comfortable, and nudged Adam to get his attention.

  Adam put down the paper he was reading and sighed. He had hoped for a different sort of evening. He yawned. "Assumption, not fact. Actually, wild guess is more like it. You look terrific in my shirt, by the way."

  "Thank you, but it’s not long enough," she said, tugging at the tail of the white dress shirt she'd borrowed from his closet.

  He grinned. "I was just thinking that a couple of inches shorter would be even better." He slipped one hand under the shirt.

  Beth slapped at his hand. "You’re not being a lot of help, you know. We need to go over this."

  "Some of us put in a full day of detective work, already. You know, though, one logical conclusion from what we do know is that maybe Felix is a simple, run-of-the-mill peeping Tom. Maybe that's what he was doing in your yard that night."

  "A peeping Tom?"

  "Just a thought, but now that I think about it…"

  "Am I about to be insulted?" she asked sweetly.

  "Not by me," Adam said, pulling her closer to toy with the buttons of his/her shirt. "Anyway, we've spent enough time talking about Kruger. Let's talk business. You didn't think you were going to live here rent-free, did you? With you and all those cats eating me out of house and home and you helping yourself to my clothes. I see you finished off the Oreos while I was at work."

  "What kind of arrangement did you have in mind?" she asked, demurely. "I'm a poor girl, you know, with few assets—other than a fine education and a lot of cats."

  He slipped the other hand inside the shirt and kissed her. "We'll work something out."

  Beth returned the kiss, but then pulled away and stood up. "Maybe later. Would it be okay if I got dressed and borrowed the car for a little while? I won’t be long."

  "It would not be okay, and you're not going anywhere."

  "Why not?"

  He yawned. "Because I said so, and don't bother arguing. It’s still the only answer you’re going to get. I've already figured out that reason and logic don't work with you."

  "But I'm worried about the other cats," she lied.

  "No, you're not. You’re the one that said they could wing it alone for a couple of days. One more lie and I'll go looking for that heart-shaped bath brush in the guest bathroom."

  "It's not fair to leave them alone when the others are here, sharing this big bed with us."

  "What's not fair is that I'm sharing a bed with a woman who stays up half the night watching old movies and eating pretzels in bed—and with four mangy cats who've already shredded the living room drapes, six rolls of toilet paper, and bitten me twice under the covers. I don't need any more bedmates, especially not the devil cat from hell."

  "I won't be there long, I promise."

  "You won’t be there at all. If you're not going to come to bed and be nice to the landlord, quit wheedling and go to sleep."

  "I could just wait until you go to sleep, you know," she said smugly.

  He chuckled. "Try it and see what happens. I'm like the old Indian scout of story and song. I sleep with one eye open."

  "We'll see," she said, coolly. "Anyway, I wouldn't have agreed to come here if I'd known how mean you can be."

  He stretched out and closed his eyes. "I get even meaner when I'm tired," he said, yawning again. "And take my word for it, you don’t want to know how mean I get when I get roused out of a sound sleep."

  She leaned down and nuzzled up against him, murmuring is his ear as she kissed a spot below his chin. "What about this? It'll take maybe an hour, door to door. What if I just jump in the car, dash over there and back, and…"

  Without bothering to sit up, Adam pulled her down across him, shoved the white shirt up far enough to expose a wide wedge of naked skin and laid three stinging smacks across her bare rump.

  "OW!"

  With nothing else on her late-night agenda, Beth decided to go ahead and make up with the landlord. Tomorrow was another day, after all.

  * * * * *

  At Adam's insistence, Beth had arranged for several days of unpaid personal leave from the women's center, which left her alone in the small condo, and bored. After two days of watching his limited collection of classic movies and eating everything she could find that contained no nutritive value, her boredom level reached critical mass. She went exploring.

  In the closet of the second bedroom, she found a children's toy box, crammed with Hot Wheels vehicles with missing wheels, game pieces from long-abandoned games, and an assortment of half-naked and dismembered Barbies. Adam's nieces and nephews, she assumed, poking idly through the box. Amidst the jumble of crippled toys there were a number of broken crayons and colored sidewalk chalk, and as bored as she was, the chalk gave her an idea.

  McCann had gone to work that morning in a foul mood. After days of checking out every lead he could find, he was no closer to finding something useful about Felix Kruger—something incriminating. There had been plenty of tantalizing leads, but little else, and he knew that Beth was scared. She would never admit to being scared, of course, only curious, and that curiosity combined with stubborn determination to do things her way was a formula for trouble. And if there was one thing he already knew about Beth Walker, it was that all the warnings and good advice—and all the spankings in the world—weren't going to discourage her from playing detective. Until he discovered something to clear up the mystery one way or the other, she was still in danger.

  * * * * *

  "Well, here’s a name you don't come across too often," Ed Forrester remarked, later that morning. He tossed the file he'd been working across the desk he shared with Adam. "Sure as hell not on a hooker. Makes you wonder what her mother was on when the kid was born. How'd you like to go through life named Marigold? Marigold Frumkin, yet?"

  Adam didn't look up. "What's she wanted for?"

  Forrester shook his head. "Nothing. This is the updated list of missing women they just sent over from Norwood. A few have turned up okay, but these are the ones still unaccounted for. A long list for a small county, wouldn't you say?"

  From across the room, Markowitz chimed in. "Marigold's nothin'. I got a Daffodil last week. Her real name's Darlene Smithers, from some Podunk town in Nebraska. Her brother claims she disappeared after getting a job dancing in a topless bar downtown. Goes by her stage name—Daffodil Darling. Can you believe that?"

  Adam stopped what he was doing and picked up the file. Of the fourteen women reported still missing, eight of them had the names of flowers. "What are the odds?" McCann asked. "Eight names like that, out of fourteen?"

  Ed shrugged. "A lot of women have flower names. Older women, especially. In my own family alone, there's a Rose and a Heather. And my mother's middle name is Iris."

  "There's a woman went missing Sunday," another detective said. "Over in Millberg. Not a hooker, though. She and her husband run a nursery—the garden kind, not for kids. It caught my eye because I thought it was a funny name for someone in that business
. The woman's name is Tulip Bramley."

  By that afternoon, they had compiled a list of thirty-two missing women with flower names, from a six-state area.

  Adam copied the list, folded it and stuck it in his pocket.

  * * * * *

  On the way back to the condo, McCann stopped at 285 Hazelwood, to gather up the remaining cats—and to have another, closer look at the basement windows. He checked the outside and came to the same conclusion. The rear windows were either dummies or covered up from the inside. Nothing new and nothing startling. Beth's explanation was probably right, but something still didn't seem right. What was needed was a thorough search of the basement. In the next couple of days, he'd get Ed over here, with a heavy-duty extension cord and a set of work lights.

  While he was searching carefully under the bed for the holdout cat—the vicious one—he glanced up and noticed a small, framed photo on Beth's dresser. Beth was standing in the back yard, against the house, with a middle-aged woman. From the disapproving look on the older woman's face, and the strained expression on Beth's, he assumed the photo was of mother and daughter. Beth looked embarrassed, and she was holding a lopsided cake with candles and a hand-printed sign that read, "Happy Birthday, 2008." Who was taking the picture, and whose birthday was being celebrated weren't clear, but the basement windows showed clearly. Two perfectly normal windows, through which Adam could make out the dim but easily identifiable outline of a white water heater and what looked like an old bicycle. Working windows, not dummies.

  The picture had been taken a full year after Beth bought the house.

  * * * * *

  When McCann arrived home late that afternoon, he stepped inside the front door and immediately called out to Beth. The condo wasn't large, and from the hallway he could see into the living room, the kitchen, and the small second bedroom. The door to the larger bedroom was open just a crack, and when Beth didn't answer his second call, a warning signal went off in McCann's head. He reached back to unsnap the black holster at the back of his belt and moved quickly across the living room, with his hand lightly touching the butt of the .41 caliber revolver.

  The master bedroom and bath was empty and so were the small bedroom and the hall bathroom. McCann shouted again and headed for the sliding door to check the beach. He'd told her not to go out on the beach while he was gone, but he already knew Beth well enough to know the chances of his warning being heeded. Consequently, he wasn't really worried yet, just edgy. Edgy and damned mad. If she was on the beach, he told himself as he reached for the sliding door to the deck, the lady was going to pay for it with a damned good spanking. Just inside the door, he found Beth's air cast, and that made him angrier. She had been ordered by her doctor to keep it on unless she was in the shower, an order she had begun to routinely ignore. The spanking had just moved up a full notch—from damned good to full-blown, world-class whopper.

  Beth was lying facedown on the deck—with the position of her body and limbs marked by a clumsily chalked outline. An unconvincing crime scene, even before the bikini-clad corpse giggled.

  "You think that's funny?" he demanded, snapping the holster closed.

  The question seemed rhetorical, but in light of the stern tone in which it was asked, Beth made an intuitive decision to not make her situation any worse by saying something flippant, which was always her first inclination, especially when she'd done something really dumb. From the look on Adam's face, there wasn't much doubt that she was about to pay for her tasteless joke with a pretty memorable spanking. Unfortunately, she wasn't quite intuitive enough to understand that the only thing standing between her and a spanking of truly epic proportions was an immediate (and preferably genuine) show of remorse.

  Instead, she opted for the injured feelings approach. What Adam called one of her Scarlett O'Hara moments. "How else was I supposed to get your attention?" she asked, sullenly. "I've been stuck here for almost three days, being ignored."

  Adam took her by the wrist and in one smooth, swift movement, pulled her up from the deck and across his hip. With her trapped snugly under his arm, swearing and kicking, he yanked her bikini bottoms halfway down her thighs. Before she could get the first complete sentence of protest of her mouth, he had delivered a lightning-fast half-dozen smacks.

  "OW!" she shrieked. "Don't! OW! Adam, please! O-O-OW-W!! Oh shit!" Beth was pounding the back of his thighs with both fists and kicking as hard as she could, but in her rage, she provided him with an even more efficient implement than his own strong, very efficient bare hand. On her fifth kick, both of the flimsy leather sandals she was wearing flew off. The first sandal sailed over the railing and out onto the beach—safely out of range. The second sandal, unfortunately, came to rest on the deck chair next to him. There was a moment's pause while he retrieved the sandal and got a secure grip on it, and while Beth, who had not observed the sandal's brief flight, assumed incorrectly that the worst of the spanking was over. But then as the thwacks began again, she realized what had happened. McCann was still mad, and now he was in possession of an implement capable of inflicting serious discomfort. Beth groaned, gritted her teeth and tried to stop struggling. She was no match for him, and she knew that squirming around would merely present him with new and even more tender targets.

  Beth had already learned enough about McCann's disciplinary likes and dislikes to know that he rarely lectured while he spanked, or even spoke, and she was secretly glad about that. It was hard enough to endure being spanked, without being made to feel guilty at the same time, or being reminded that the fire building in her rear end was probably her own fault. To his credit, Adam had never tried to claim that the spanking in progress was hurting him more than it hurt her. Such a whipping, from McCann's point of view, would have been a senseless waste of everyone's time—and his energy.

  This time was different. "If you ever," he said grimly, between smacks, "do something like this again, I'll blister your ass so hard you'll be standing up to eat for a week, and feeling it for two." More rhetoric, of course. Beth had concluded that maybe overstatement was a male thing. The threat of being "blistered" was a frequent one with Adam and had never really happened, but the word itself, perhaps because it was so unappealing—and so visual—did have a cautionary effect. Adam was a good guy, but pushed hard enough? Who knew? And this time, even Beth recognized that she just might have crossed some sort of line.

  Holding the flat, hard sole in his right hand, he began by concentrating the first dozen whacks on the sensitive backs of her thighs, and then spanked his way slowly, relentlessly upward.

  Wherever it landed, the rigid leather sole left a perfect deep pink imprint of itself, and a burn that Beth could never have imagined being caused by such inexpensive and unsubstantial footwear. And even as she sniffled and pleaded, she was grateful for the steady sound of the incoming surf, which she hoped would drown out her yelps and groans—and the occasional shriek—whenever the hard leather found an especially tender nook or cranny.

  Experience had brought a certain degree of sophistication to McCann's disciplinary technique, and he had already taken note of Beth's instant response when he spanked the area between her thighs and buttocks. Which was why he now repositioned her across his thigh, pushed her bikini bottoms down a bit further, and delivered a swift, sharp volley of swats to that exact location. Her howls were immediate, and to Adam, extremely gratifying.

  When it was over, there were no blisters, but a lot of rubbing and sniffling—none of which appeared to have any effect on Adam, who spent a half-hour on his knees cleaning the chalk outline off the deck and another half-hour suggesting that he hadn't done a good enough job—on her, not the deck.

  "I'm sorry," she said, when he came back inside. "I thought it would lighten the mood around here a little."

  "Does it feel any lighter to you?" he asked, dumping the bucket of dirty water into the kitchen sink.

  "No, but I did think you’d find it a just a little bit funnier than you did," she said, misera
bly.

  "I don’t like coming home to the same sort of thing I leave at work. It was a nightmare there today, Beth—a real life one—with real people in real pain. So you'll have to forgive me if I have trouble getting a laugh out of that kind of adolescent humor."

  She laid her head against his chest. "I'm sorry, Adam," she said softly. "I didn't mean to…"

  Adam kissed the top of her head and wrapped her in his arms. "It's all right. I'm not sorry about the walloping, but I shouldn't have dumped my bad day on you. I usually just come home and yell at the TV. I guess you’re an easier target."

  "Maybe my being here is a mistake," she suggested, morosely. "I could go to a hotel or something."

  He chuckled then pulled her tight against him and kissed her. "Try leaving and you'll find yourself handcuffed to the bed. It took me too long to get you here to let you walk out. I'm afraid you'll just have to get used to my being a grouch."

  "Handcuffed to the bed, huh?"

  "Just a figure of speech—unless that kind of thing is starting to appeal to you. In which case, I'm always open to indulging in a fantasy or two. I don't do costumes, though. Batman, Zorro, that kind of thing."

  "What about a tough, hard-boiled police detective, like Humphrey Bogart?"

  "Does the hard-boiled detective get to have his way with the heroine?"

  "Absolutely. But it always happens off-screen."

  "Do you feel up to going out for a late dinner?" he asked, nodding discreetly toward her rear end. "Under the circumstances?"

  Beth sighed. "When you know me better, Lieutenant, you'll learn that there are very few circumstances under which I'm not up for dinner. Besides, if we order enough, we can bring home leftovers for the cats." She had already started limping toward the bedroom to get dressed when she paused. "Oh, by the way, I noticed you putting some papers in your office. Something new about the case, maybe?"

  Adam swore under his breath. The small walk-in closet in the entranceway that he laughingly called his "office" usually served as little more than a safe place to lock away his holstered revolver when his daughter or his sister's kids were around. But sometimes he used it for official police documents he brought home—like the list of missing women he'd put there earlier. He wasn't going to have a moment's peace until he explained about the list—and what was on it.