Bone Deep

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Kat swallowed. “Is there any way to check those bones for DNA?”

  “I don’t know.” When he’d disappeared, the police had taken hair from Hugh’s comb, so they’d have it as a reference if needed. “The thing is, even if we can, it often takes months. I can’t demand a rush job. This is upsetting for you, but it’s not as if we have a serial killer operating here. On the scale of crimes, this is about a one.”

  Months? she thought, aghast. And then she took in his dismissive one. Her spine stiffened. “If those are Hugh’s bones, and somebody kept them, then the chances are he was murdered. That’s a one, in your opinion?”

  “Only in terms of urgency.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what.” Mad now, she slid from the stool and faced him with her chin thrust out. “I’m feeling a little urgent here. Whether those are Hugh’s bones or not, this feels a lot like a threat to me. I’m taking it seriously, even if you aren’t!”

  “Oh, I’m taking it seriously.” His eyes still glittered with what she suddenly realized was major tem per. “Can you sit down and make me those lists right away? In the meantime, I’m going to go talk to anyone who is working today, find out if they were back here and if they saw anyone else nearby. We’ll get lists of names from them, too.”

  With his anger both comforting her and ratcheting up her fear again, Kat nodded. “We’ll be at the cash registers.”

  He went out ahead of them, pausing to examine the door with its rusting, wrought-iron handles, then shook his head as if in frustration. Kat guessed he was thinking of fingerprints, and realizing the pock-marked handle was unlikely to provide a good surface for lifting a print. Besides…how many people had grabbed it? Even on a glossy surface, could one print be lifted from atop thousands?

  She and Joan walked to the main nursery building, heads ducked as if that would keep them from getting wet. The earlier mist had become a steady, cold rain, one that wasn’t more than five degrees Fahrenheit from turning into snow. Ah, spring, Kat thought wryly.

  The few customers had evaporated, and who could blame them?

  “Ugh,” Joan said, when they hurried inside. She, at least, wore a vest. Anticipating the near-tropical warmth in the greenhouse, Kat had left her jean jacket in her office earlier despite the bite to the air outside.

  They shook off the rain. Kat grabbed a notebook and they both sat on stools behind the counter. “Let’s start with today,” she said.

  “George Slagle.” Joan rolled her eyes.

  “He was here today and yesterday,” Kat said, explaining.

  She started two sheets, labeled the top of each Wednesday and Thursday, then wrote George’s name on both. “Annika. You said she was in today.”

  “Right.”

  “Yesterday, too,” Kat said, and wrote her down. “Uh…I waited on Becca Montgomery. Her teenage boy was with her.”

  “Billy. He’s a good kid.”

  Despite the hair dyed goth-black and the tattoos spreading like a skin fungus on his lower arms. Kat had seen the way he dragged after his mother, every line of his body resisting the necessity of being at a nursery with her. He was probably petrified that one of his buddies would see him. But he hadn’t argued when his mom asked him to heft five gallon pots, so maybe he was okay.

  “Jason said Mike Hedin came by yesterday,” she remembered.

  “He was here today, too.” Widening, Joan’s eyes met hers. “Just after you called. I was ready to sprint back to you, but he stopped me and asked for you. I lied and said you were gone for the day.”

  Mike Hedin was an odd duck, but he’d been nice to Kat. She detested this, having to suspect everyone. “Did you see what direction he came from?” she asked.

  Joan shook her head. “He just…appeared. You sounded so freaked, I wasn’t noticing anything else.”

  Carefully, Kat wrote Mike Hedin.

  “Lisa Llewellyn was here today, remember? She bought a bunch of annuals.”

  Their lists grew. Carol Scammell, a school board member, had bought a Japanese maple to replace a tree in her yard damaged by a February storm. Greg Buckmeier, one of the few male members of the garden club, trolling for the unusual perennials that were a specialty of the nursery. People neither knew.

  “I didn’t take the receipts to the bank yesterday,” Kat admitted. “Which is lucky. I’ll look at the checks and credit-card slips. I’ll bet I can add more names.”

  By the time they were done, they had over thirty people listed for Wednesday, eighteen…no, nineteen for today even though business had been slower. And those were only the people either she or Joan had personally waited on or noticed. Kat had had at least two other employees working both days.

  Worse yet, the nursery wasn’t fully fenced. Somebody on staff would probably spot a customer who parked in the lot and came in the front entrance, but Hazeltine Road ran north-south alongside the nursery, and who’d notice a car parked on the shoulder for a brief time? A dirt lane behind the nursery led to the Schultz farm, once a going concern and now more of a hobby for Will and Martha Schultz, who Kat happened to know were still in Arizona where they wintered.

  Oh, yes, it would be all too easy for someone to slip entirely unnoticed onto the nursery grounds, keeping the greenhouses between him and the main grounds of the nursery.

  Only…how would someone like that know that she was the one working in greenhouse four? Didn’t whoever left those bones almost have to have seen her go in there yesterday morning and then leave her work undone when the nursery got busier?

  Confused and frightened, she said, “I’ll leave this here for now. We can add to it if we remember anyone else.”

  Joan nodded. “Is that rain turning to snow, or am I imagining things?”

  Kat followed her gaze and grimaced. “Boy, that’s great for business.”

  Even worse, she thought, would be the story coming out of human bones being found here at the nursery. People would be reminded about Hugh’s disappearance. The whispers would start again, maybe even worse because everyone would see how well she’d done without him. No, the taint of murder would not be good for business.

  Which might be the whole point of this, except she couldn’t for the life of her imagine who would benefit from hurting her business. She didn’t have any real competitors, only a couple of specialty nurseries that benefited, if anything, from the success of hers. For goodness sake, she bought her rhododendrons from Mountain Rhodies and her bearded iris from A Rainbow of Iris, and happily gave both a plug in case a customer wanted more variety than she could offer. And she couldn’t imagine the garden manager at Lowe’s Home and Garden Center sabotaging her.

  No, dumb idea. Something else was behind this grisly plot. Someone playing a mean game, and Kat was pretty sure she was meant to lose.

  She sucked in a ragged breath. Right now, what she wanted most was to know whether those bones were Hugh’s.

  HE HAD NO OBJECTIVITY whatsoever where Kat Riley was concerned, which made him a dangerous man to be conducting this investigation. Trouble was, he didn’t trust anyone else to conduct it, either.

  Grant dug out the binder that held police reports and notes on Hugh’s disappearance, in case he’d forgotten anything. He hadn’t. But now, reading again the original missing persons report, he had to ask himself: Could she have made all that up?Sure she could have. They had only Kat’s word for it that Hugh was at the nursery at all the morning of his disappearance, that he’d intended to visit the rhododendron wholesaler, that he’d driven away. Only one other person had been scheduled to work that day—the nursery had been considerably smaller four years ago—and he hadn’t yet arrived at work. Only Kat had seen her husband off.

  Her story might all be so much fiction.

  Grant kept coming back to the problem of where the bones had been to stay so clean. If she had her husband’s body stashed…where? In an outbuilding the police had somehow missed? Then how did that bone end up in her wheelbarrow? And why?

  Just for size, he
tried on the concept that she had killed Hugh in a fit of rage, say, because she’d discovered his latest affair. Okay, then why were bones appearing now? Grant would swear she was genuinely rattled. Did someone else know she’d killed him? Was it possible she was resisting blackmail, and these bones were a form of pressure on her to pay? Someone might be saying, I know what you did. I know where the body is.

  He wanted to believe in her. He’d always wanted to, since the first time he met her and had been stunned speechless. Police Chief for less than three months, he was being introduced at a city council meeting when he saw Kat in the audience. He’d never thought, She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, because she wasn’t. Rachel, his wife, was conventionally prettier. But Kat had something. Some magic that had captured him from that moment.

  He’d felt sick when he found out she was married, not letting himself think about the fact that he was married, too. That he’d moved out to Washington State to please Rachel, whose family was in Seattle.

  What he had to face now was that he didn’t really know Kat. She was an intensely private woman who had held herself together better than he would have expected when her husband vanished. At the time, he’d told himself she knew or at least guessed that Hugh was running around on her, and, while perplexed and shocked, wasn’t exactly grieving.

  But he’d been wrong. She hadn’t let go of her cheating husband’s memory for one minute, not in the almost four years. She clung to it with a fervor that bordered on obsession. She must pore over the damn newspaper every single morning looking for snippets about human remains found down in the Auburn Valley or up toward Blaine. Dissatisfied with police performance, she’d hired a private detective to find her husband and spent God knows how much before the investigator confessed to having found exactly nothing.

  Had it all been more elaborate fiction, embroidery intended to convince police and townsfolk alike that she truly was the baffled, grieving wife? Or—damn it—was it possible she’d never known that Hugh screwed around on her? Maybe she’d genuinely loved the guy, and the flicker of attraction she’d felt for Grant had been one of those things, unimportant except as a source of shame for her.

  His pride alone made that an unwelcome thought. Grant was thirty-seven years old, and had never in his life felt anything like this for another woman, not even the one he’d married. It was bad enough that Kat clung to the belief she was still a married woman, but he hated like hell to think she didn’t feel anything special for him at all.

  But he knew it was possible. She might be uncomfortable with him only because he’d kissed her once, because she’d responded. Or, even more likely, because he’d had to consider her a suspect in Hugh’s disappearance.

  Just as he had to now.

  Brooding, he faced the fact that there was a limit to how much time he could give to this. No crime had actually been committed; it all might still turn out to be nothing but somebody’s nasty idea of a joke. It wasn’t impossible to acquire bones. He’d heard that there were still whispers about Kat and her missing husband, about how much more successful the nursery had become without him. She kept to herself, too, which meant she wasn’t universally liked. And she’d gotten a lot of attention with that award. Could it have triggered enough temper that someone had decided to give her a scare?

  Man, he wished that explanation would turn out to hold water. It was unpleasant as hell; finding out you were so disliked would be a shock—but not near as big a shock as some of the alternatives.

  He made another trip out to the nursery, knowing it would be useless. He was right. None of the staff admitted to having been out to the greenhouse in which Kat had been working. Presumably it was a customer who’d tried the door yesterday, maybe belatedly noticed the Employees Only sign. Or she was right, and the person who’d put the bones in the potting mix had stayed to see her reaction…or had come close to being caught in the act and had hidden beneath one of the long plank tables, waiting for a chance to slip unseen out of the greenhouse.

  Grant found Kat out front of the main building, rearranging a display of spring blooming shrubs designed to trap the unwary into buying something they hadn’t intended, like the sweet-smelling whatever-the-hell-it-was-called that was sitting in his driveway at home waiting to be planted. As he watched, she hefted the five- and ten-gallon pots with ease, despite her slender frame. She was filling holes, he realized, replacing plants that had sold.

  He stepped forward, and when she saw him apprehension immediately deepened the color of Kat’s blue eyes.

  “Are you leaving?”

  “Nothing else I can do out here. I could talk to the customers you know were at the nursery both days, but if I do it will start a storm of gossip.”

  Yesterday’s snow had been a mere skiff, but the temperature hadn’t risen since much above freezing. Today Kat wore faded jeans and a sacky sweatshirt as well as work gloves, not enough to maintain her body heat unless she kept moving. Even so, Grant was pretty sure her shudder was just that, not a shiver from the cold even though she also wrapped her arms around herself as she’d done yesterday when she was scared.

  “The fact that you’ve been out here three days in a row already has people giving me funny looks.”

  “Tell me what you want,” he said. “Do I push it now, and the hell with gossip? Or do we wait for the other shoe to drop?”

  “It will, won’t it?” She hugged herself tighter.

  “I’d say so. Unless someone just wanted to give you a little scare.”

  She gave him a look. “Little?”

  “It could get worse.”

  He felt guilty immediately, seeing the way she flinched. A part of him wanted to step closer and pull her into a comforting embrace. But he didn’t dare until he could be sure she didn’t have anything to do with her husband’s disappearance.

  His mouth twisted in something like amusement. Yeah, just imagine how she’d react if he tried to take her into his arms. The result would probably be something like trying to cuddle a feral cat. Teeth and claws would fly, and he’d bleed.

  “Yes,” she said, so quietly he scarcely heard her. “The way people looked at me back then, I knew what they were thinking.” Her eyes met his. “What you were thinking.”

  Grant shook his head. “I was doing my job, staying open-minded. No more, no less.” That was a lie, of course, but she wouldn’t welcome the truth.

  “And is that what you’re doing now, too?”

  His jaw tightened. “Yes.”

  “But you’ll let it go if I ask you to?”

  “Yes.” After a pause, he added, “For now.”

  After a moment Kat nodded. “Let’s wait and see what happens.”

  “Have you been working in any of the greenhouses?”

  “No.” He saw the helplessness on her face and how much she hated feeling it. “Every time I dip a trowel into potting mix or compost, I’m going to expect—” She didn’t have to tell him what she expected. Her eyes searched his. “You don’t think he could be alive, do you?”

  Surprised, Grant rocked back on his heels. “Do you mean, he’s the one doing this?”

  “I had a dream last night.” More softly, she corrected herself. “A nightmare. Hugh was reaching for me, only he was missing a finger.”

  “I didn’t know your husband well. You did. Was he capable of coming back and doing something like this just to get at you?” He’d spoken mildly, but he’d tensed at her question.

  “No.” Her voice became stronger, more definite. Some of the rigidity left her body. “No. Of course not. Hugh was a nice man. He’d be horrified to think an idea like that had ever crossed my mind. It was just a nightmare.” She sighed. “Not Hugh, but somebody wants to see me upset.”

  “Kat.”

  Along with the sound of her name, footsteps crunched on the gravel behind Grant, and he turned to see the editor of the weekly newspaper coming toward them. Mike Hedin was thin and intense. He’d been a reporter at the Seattle P-I be
fore getting caught in a round of layoffs that preceded the eventual demise of the city’s second major newspaper. The Fern Bluff weekly, Grant couldn’t help thinking, had to be one hell of a comedown. Hedin would never get a Pulitzer nomination from here.

  “Chief Haller.” His gaze darted between them. “I’m glad I caught you. I picked up the list of this week’s police calls, and the nursery isn’t on it.”

  Grant had made damn sure it wasn’t. Kat’s mystery was not going to appear in the newspaper, not if Grant could prevent it.

  “No, it isn’t,” he said. “You’re out here on a cold day.” And wasn’t it interesting that he, too, had visited the nursery three days in a row.

  Kat had gone very still, a small creature hoping to go unnoticed.

  Hedin flushed. He was prematurely balding, and the red swept up over his bare pate. “Yes, well, I was hoping to interview Kat about the award. Just a follow-up. What strategies she thinks have increased business, any changes she envisions making this year, that kind of thing.”

  Well, hell, Grant thought in stunned realization; Hedin had a thing for Kat. Face facts: he and Mike Hedin probably weren’t alone. No, she wasn’t beautiful, not exactly, but she was sexy, even on the days when she wore shapeless overalls or, like today, a man’s sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up four or five times. And, while she was very good at being friendly, she also had that touch-me-not air that could seem like a challenge.

  His eyes narrowed. The sweatshirt was Hugh’s. He’d be willing to bet on it. She still wore her husband’s clothes.

  Question was, why? Because they were there, and comfortable? Or as another way to hold on to his memory?

  He was suddenly, deeply offended by the sight of that faded blue sweatshirt long enough to hang halfway down her thighs. Hugh Riley hadn’t deserved her devotion. Although he had left behind a house in town and the nursery out here on the flood plain. Kat no longer had a cheating husband, but she hadn’t lost her home or her livelihood along with the husband.

  She had motivation to have killed him, no question. But, damn, Grant did not want to believe she had it in her.