Death and Daisies

by Amanda Flower

  First lady of the school? That was a title I had never heard of. I didn’t think it was a British title either.

  “Craig!” one of the crime scene techs called from the edge of the ruins. “We are all done here. Didn’t take very long.”

  Craig nodded and turned to Emer and Malcolm. “I’ll let you know if anything of significance comes from what we found here today.”

  Emer nodded, and Malcolm frowned. Carver was walking around the ruins as if he had lost interest in the conversation.

  Together, except for Carver, we returned to the community garden. Malcolm and Emer went back inside the church, and I stood at the edge of the daisy field, feeling torn over all I’d heard. The only outcome I was sure of from my visit to the church was that I had found the place where the minister had been killed. That was more than Craig and the police had discovered, but something still felt off. There was something about the chapel ruins that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I was forgetting something.

  Craig walked over to me. “Are you all right?”

  I looked up at him. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

  He smiled. “Because you are biting your lower lip.”

  I realized he was right. I hadn’t even known I had been doing that.

  “Fiona, go home,” Craig said. “Or go back to your shop. You’re not needed here.”

  I bristled at his comment. I always wanted to help and be useful.

  Craig seemed to sense my sudden shift in mood. “You did the right thing by calling me. I’m sorry if I was short with you when I first arrived. I just don’t want anything to happen to you. You’re a special woman, and it would be a great loss if anything bad happened to you. It would be a great loss to me.”

  “To you?” I whispered.

  He nodded and reached toward me. Craig adjusted the daisy over my ear and brushed the side of my face with his hand as he did it. “There. We don’t want your flower to fall out, do we?”

  “No, we don’t,” I said, barely above a whisper.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As I walked through the cemetery and back to the street, my ear tingled from the chief inspector’s touch. I wished I could have said that his presence didn’t have such a visceral effect on me, but if I had, I’d have been lying.

  I walked through the cemetery gate and spotted Emer and her husband standing in front of the village school. It was the middle of July and school was out for the year, but I guessed the head teacher had to go to the school often even when there were no children there.

  Emer waved to me, and I relaxed. I was happy to see she remained friendly despite what had been discovered in the community garden.

  Emer smiled warmly as I approached. “I hope I didn’t come on too strong back there. Douglas is always telling me that I need to think before I speak. Isn’t that right, honey?”

  Her husband was studying the tops of his shoes. “Yes, dear,” the man muttered.

  I frowned. I had seen Douglas only a couple of times, and he had never once looked me in the eye.

  I waved away her concern. “The minister’s death has been a shock to everyone, and I know you worked with him closely. I’m very sorry for your loss and for the loss of the church.”

  “The church will survive. The presbytery is sending out the general presbyter in the next week. He will fill the pulpit until we can find a more permanent interim. I don’t think anyone in the congregation will be in a great hurry to replace the minister until some time has passed. Emotions are just too high right now.”

  I nodded.

  “I am sorry that I wasn’t able to stay longer at your flower shop opening, Fiona,” Emer said. “How’s business been?”

  I bit the inside of my lip. “We’ve only been open for a couple of days.”

  She nodded. “It’s hard to start any new business, and the old flower shop that was in the same location wasn’t able to make a go of it because Bellewick is so small. If you need any financial advice, I’m happy to help any way that I can. Like Malcolm said, I’m quite good with numbers.”

  “Thank you for the offer,” I said with as much grace as I could muster.

  “When things settle down,” she went on to say, “I want you to know that I will talk to the church elders about purchasing our altar flowers from you. I can put you in touch with the other churches in Aberdeenshire as well. I believe that is a great place for you to start and expand your business. From there it could lead to weddings.” She paused. “And funerals.”

  I swallowed at the mention of funerals. “That’s so very kind of you.”

  She smiled. “And you are always welcome on Sunday mornings. We would love for you to join our congregation. I know you might have been hesitant before, but …” She trailed off.

  But I didn’t have to worry about that anymore, I thought.

  “Emer, I need to go back into the school to talk to the custodian,” Douglas said, speaking for the first time. His voice was scratchy, like he didn’t use it frequently.

  Emer’s eyes widened slightly. “I thought you wanted me to talk to him.”

  He stared at his wife. “I never said that.”

  Emer forced a laugh. “Then we will both go, love.” She turned back to me. “I’ll be in touch, Fiona, about the flowers.”

  I thanked her and watched as she and her husband walked up the school steps. Emer opened the door for her husband, and before they went inside, the head teacher looked back at me. The man’s eyes were puffy and bloodshot, like he had been crying. It took me a long while to get the image of Douglas’s sad eyes out of my head.

  Before I returned to the flower shop, I decided to go to the laundromat to deal with my dirty coat. I wasn’t too worried about how much it would cost to clean the coat. Raj charged me way less than he did most of his customers because he and Uncle Ian had been such good friends.

  And I had ulterior motives. After the encounter that morning at the Twisted Fox, I knew that Claudia Kenner worked at the laundromat.

  The walk back to the main part of the village gave me time to think. It was time for me to catalog the suspects I had for this murder.

  I started with Seth MacGregor. The dropout medical student/staunch environmentalist had a couple of motives going for him. There was the grudge he held against Minister MacCullen for ruining his chances of getting into St. Andrews when he was young that had ultimately, according to Hamish, resulted in his grandfather’s death. It seemed odd to commit murder now, since so much time had passed. And there was his gambling problem, which was the more likely of the two motives. Even so, it was a bit farfetched even to me, and I had a big imagination. I knew I would need much more than that to convince the chief inspector that’s what had happened.

  My next suspect was sexton Malcolm Wilson. He was at the church all the time, so he certainly had had the opportunity, but I couldn’t think of his motive. He didn’t seem to be broken up by the minister’s death, and he had seen Minister MacCullen every day. To me, he seemed like a man who took pleasure in his work and ignored everyone else around him, including the outspoken minister.

  Another suspect with opportunity and no real motive was Carver Finley. As he’d told me at the chapel ruins, he’d had no reason to kill the minister. In fact, the minister’s death made it more difficult for him to do his assessment of the chapel ruins because so many in the congregation were against the project to begin with.

  The most likely suspect was Remy Kenner. Everyone in the village agreed that the man had a temper and would be the type to commit a murder if he was angry enough. He had been seen at the docks with the minister the day the minister died, and it had appeared that the two men were in the middle of an argument. Whatever that argument had been about could be Remy’s motive. I wished I had thought to ask Chief Inspector Craig about how the questioning of Remy had gone when I was still at St. Thomas’s. But I knew that if Craig had been mad at me for wandering off while waiting for him to arrive to see the rain barrel, he would
be furious if he knew I was making inquiries about Remy, who he’d already told me was a dangerous man.

  The laundromat was on the shopping district side of the troll bridge near the creek. It was also on the street with the village’s one and only grocery store, a small Tesco that would have been considered a convenience store back in the United States. Superstores like those in the U.S. were becoming more common in the cities in the United Kingdom, but not in the small villages like Bellewick.

  When I pushed the laundromat door open, I spotted Claudia’s young son, Byron, on the floor playing with a collection of plastic dinosaurs and blocks. He held the T-rex out to me and roared. I made a face of mock horror, and the little boy laughed.

  The chemical scent of soap solvent hit me as soon as I stepped into the building, but it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant. Claudia sat at the counter that divided the dry-cleaning portion of the business from the main room where washers and dryers tumbled. Half of the machines were in use. I had learned that there weren’t many people in the village who had their own washing machines, and other than the Twisted Fox, Raj’s Laundry was the best place to gather village gossip. But whoever had put their laundry in the machines had come and gone.

  Claudia’s eyes were bloodshot from crying. She stood when I walked up to the counter. Without a hello or any type of friendly greeting, she said, “Take you coat off. I will put it in to soak. I think, with the wool fabric, it would be best if we dry-cleaned it.”

  I removed my dirty coat, taking the time to make sure there wasn’t anything in my pockets, and then I handed it to her. “That’s what I was thinking too. If you can’t get the mud out, I understand.”

  “I can get it out. Raj taught me all his tricks for stain removal, and he can remove any stain you can think of. I’m not worried about a little dirt.”

  I nodded and was happy to see that she could chitchat with me. Maybe she didn’t hate me.

  She looked down at my mud-covered jeans as well. “I should clean those too.”

  “I would love you to. They are my favorite jeans and ones I would never be able to find in the U.K.”

  She made the gimme sign with her hand.

  “But I don’t have any other clothes. I will have to bring them another day.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” she said. “The longer a stain stays on a fabric, the harder it is to remove.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “Rrr!” the boy called from the front of the store as he flailed the T-rex back and forth.

  Claudia looked at her son and smiled. Tears rushed to her eyes, and she fell back into her seat. “What am I going to do? Can you tell me what I should do?”

  I was surprised by her sudden shift in mood. I’d thought I would come into the laundromat and she would throw me out because she blamed me for her husband being questioned by the police. I’d never thought she would ask for my help.

  Her tears came in a rush, and I couldn’t understand her garbled speech between the tears.

  The little boy continued to play while his mother cried, like nothing out of the ordinary was happening. That’s what broke my heart the most—the little boy was used to his mother’s tears. He probably saw them as normal. I guessed that in the Kenner home, they were.

  “Claudia,” I said. “I want to help you, but you have to tell me what happened. Why don’t we sit down?” I pointed at a folding table and chairs near the front window.

  She wiped at her eyes. “All right.” She came around the counter and took a seat.

  I took the one across from her and waited. It would do me no good to press her. No amount of prying was going to get it out of her.

  She took a shuddering breath. “I love Remy. I have always loved him, even when we were children. We both grew up in the village. He was so handsome and thrilling.”

  I nodded.

  She folded her hands on the tabletop. “He has a temper. He always has. He had one as a child, and it’s only gotten worse as he’s gotten older.”

  I didn’t like the direction this was going.

  “He’s not always kind to me. He’s never hurt our son,” she added quickly.

  I wondered if she added that last part a little too quickly. I waited.

  “I knew what he was like when I married him. I never thought we would have children, so I thought that would be okay. Then I got pregnant. I was happy and terrified all at the same time. It was all right to start, but our son is starting to notice things now. I went to Minister MacCullen about it for guidance. I needed to know what the best thing to do was, not for me but for Byron.”

  I raised my eyebrows. It made sense, if she was a member of the church, that she would go to the minister for guidance.

  “What did the minister say?” I asked.

  “He advised me to leave Remy.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I have tried many times to leave my husband before and always failed. The minister knew this, and he said this time I had to make the decision and stick with it. I wasn’t sure that I could. I wasn’t sure that I was strong enough, but I agreed to do it. Like he had many times before, he said that my son and I could stay in the church until we got our bearings.”

  “Were you at the church the night of the storm?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Remy found us there. He was furious with the minister. He said that he would make him pay for stealing his family. Minister MacCullen told him to leave and never come back. Finally, after what seemed like hours, Remy left. The minister said he locked the church up tight so that my son and I were safe. There was no way Remy could reach us. We slept on cots in one of the Sunday school room and shivered all night through that frightful storm.”

  “Did Minister MacCullen stay with you?”

  She shook her head.

  “So Remy could have gotten to Minister MacCullen.”

  She wouldn’t look at me. “I don’t know what happened between Remy and the minister when Minister MacCullen left the church. I wish—I wish—Minister MacCullen had never left. Maybe if he had stayed inside the church, he would still be alive.”

  “You think Remy killed him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re with Remy now,” I said.

  She stared at her hands. “When I heard the minister died, I went back to him. Minister MacCullen was my safety net for leaving my husband. With him no longer there, I had no power to stay away. And …”

  “And what?” I leaned forward.

  She swallowed. “And I thought if he could kill the minister, what would he do to my son and me? Maybe it was better to go back to deal with his day-to-day anger than face that kind of fury.”

  Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes, and my heart broke for the mistreated woman across from me.

  “I’m just torn up inside. On the one hand, I can’t believe that Remy would do such an awful thing; on the other, I can. Remy has been tangled up in many dangerous things since he was a teenager.”

  “Like what?”

  She shook his head. “He made bad choices. Thought there were easier ways to make money than through hard work. I only hope he didn’t make the worst choice and murder the minister, because if he did, it would be my fault that the minister is dead. I couldn’t live with that guilt.” Tears rolled down her pale cheeks. “Minister MacCullen was always so kind to Byron and me.”

  I was beginning to wonder at the paradox of the minister. He’d been the hard man who wrote scathing letters that stopped Seth’s chances from being accepted to St. Andrews and the man who’d left unwelcome notes on the door to my flower shop, but he’d also been the man who cared deeply for the history of his parish and wanted to save the old chapel ruins and the man who had counseled a young wife and mother to leave her abusive husband. I did not know whether he fit best in the category of good or bad. Perhaps he was like everyone else and a mixture of the two. It was the decent folks who pushed the bad back to let the good out. Whoever had killed Minister Quaid MacCullen had let the bad win. />
  “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

  She looked up to me for the first time. “I don’t know.”

  I was about to suggest she go to Raj about her predicament. He and Presha were both kind and compassionate. They would know what to do to help Claudia and her son.

  But before I could say any of that, the front door slammed against the wall and Remy Kenner stormed inside.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Byron, come here,” Claudia shouted to her boy.

  The child clutched his dinosaur to his chest and ran to his mother. She jumped from her seat and scooped him up into her arms.

  “Claudia, we need to go home.” Remy glared at his wife with so much malice I couldn’t understand how he could claim to love her.

  Claudia inched behind me with Byron in her arms. I took that as my cue to speak up. “Claudia can’t go with you right now.”

  “Who are you?” Remy demanded.

  “I’m a friend.”

  “It’s Fiona Knox, Remy,” Claudia said, barely above a whisper, but it was loud enough for him to hear. “She inherited the land from Ian MacCallister.”

  I inwardly groaned. Thanks for throwing me under the bus, Claudia.

  Remy curled his lip, showing off his crooked teeth. “You’re who sent the police after me. The old trolls at the docks told me they told you about the spat I’d had with the minister.”

  I swallowed but held my ground. “It sounded like a lot more than just a spat,” I said. “Especially considering the minister was dead a few hours later.”

  “I didn’t kill him, and Neil Craig knows that. If he thought differently, I would be in jail right now, wouldn’t I?”

  I realized he had a point. Craig would never have let him go if he thought Remy was the killer, especially knowing what a dangerous man he could be.

  “What’s your alibi?” I asked.

  “Alibi? Alibi? Does this little girl here fancy herself as some kind of detective?”