Death and Daisies

by Amanda Flower

  The note. Whoever was trying to kill me had written the note, the note I should have told Chief Inspector Craig about, but it was too late now, far too late.

  Suddenly, there was a scream and the hands let go.

  I gasped and held my face out of the mud. As quick as I could, I crawled out of the pit. I wiped mud and rainwater from my eyes so I could see what was going on.

  Kipling lay in the mud, groaning. It must have taken all the strength he’d had to walk over to the ruins and pull my assailant off me. He had saved my life. A life that had been about to be taken by Emer Boyd.

  “Leave him alone!” I shouted at her.

  She turned her gun on me. “He’s not much of a threat anymore, so I will happily shoot you first.”

  I turned and ran deeper into the ruins.

  Emer had plenty of opportunity to shoot me in the back while I ran, but she must not have been a very good shot because she missed every time. Her hitting Kipling by the church doors must have been blind luck.

  I crouched behind a crumbling stone.

  “Come out, Fiona. Don’t you want to talk about the church flowers?”

  Nope, not really.

  “You seem genuinely surprised to see me. Who were you expecting? Remy Kenner? The drug dealer who ruined the new perfect life that I was trying to build for Douglas and me?”

  The new perfect life. That was all Emer seemed to care about, perfection or the appearance of perfection.

  “My husband went through all our savings spending money on drugs, mostly prescription pills, but since he met Remy, harder things. I knew he should never have given Remy the janitor job, but he did. It wasn’t long before Remy figured out Douglas’s weakness for pills. Douglas went through every penny we had. Finally, when the money was gone, I thought it would be over, but I was wrong. Douglas began stealing from the school to feed his habit. Do you know what would happen if the school board found out? He would be out of a job and my new life would be destroyed. So I did the only thing that made sense. I borrowed money from the church’s chapel restoration fund. I was the church treasurer, after all. I know how to hide what I did, and I paid back the school. The only wrinkle was Minister MacCullen wasn’t a trusting man and double-checked my accounting. He noticed a problem and confronted me. I went to him and told him about my husband’s issues. I told him that I would pay every penny back. I begged him to have mercy. He had mercy for Remy’s wife and child and let them stay at the church; why couldn’t he have mercy for me? No amount of pleading and begging did any good. He didn’t care. He planned to expose me and my husband to the congregation. That was his mistake. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

  So she had killed him.

  “So I killed him.” She laughed. “It was quite clever of you to tie my husband and Remy together. When the police came to talk to Douglas this afternoon, I knew you had been behind it.”

  The funny thing was that she was wrong. Seth had been the one to unravel the connection between Douglas and Remy, but I didn’t see any reason to correct, her since she appeared to be dead set on killing me at that moment.

  She came around the side of my hiding stone. “There you are.” She smiled.

  “What did you do to Malcolm?” I asked, praying that the old man wasn’t yet another one of her victims.

  “Malcolm?” she laughed. “He’s tucked away in his little cottage now, sipping tea. I was in the church when he called you. I told him to go home and I would take care of the flowers. I take care of everything, don’t you see? I do it best.” She raised her gun. “I’m tired of this conversation.”

  I leaped up and ran around the chapel’s one remaining wall and stopped just behind the four-by-four holding up the wall.

  Emer came around the side with the gun out in front of her, ready to shoot.

  I kicked the four-by-four with all my might. The wood shifted, but held. Before I could change my mind, I charged the four-by-four again. The pieced of wood gave.

  Emer screamed as the wall landed on top of her.

  Epilogue

  My godfather had been buried in St. Thomas’s cemetery, and his grave was still fresh. He had been gone only a few months, and it took time for nature to reclaim land that she had given up. Grass was starting to make its way over the grave, but it was still only timid shoots. In a year, the raised earth would fall inward toward his vault and casket and the grass would be green and lush at the foot of his stone. I didn’t know if the pain would be worse then, when he was settled into the earth, than it was now, when it was still fresh.

  A GOOD MAN was carved into the stone below his name, his rank in Her Majesty’s Army, and his birth and death dates.

  When I died, would A GOOD WOMAN be carved into the stone? I wasn’t sure it was a title I deserved. I didn’t know what my life would bring. I had a lot of opportunity for mistakes in the future, and my mistakes seemed to have been increasing since I’d moved to Scotland. It had been in self-defense, but Emer Boyd was in the hospital recovering from several broken bones from a wall falling on her. It was a wall I had made fall on her.

  At least Kipling would be all right. He had just been released from the hospital that morning for his gunshot wound, a wound Emer had given him. He was a hero for saving me like he had, and he loved the outpouring of praise and attention the village was giving him. As much as it was deserved, I suspected we would be hearing about his heroics for a long time to come.

  As for me, I would have to learn to live with what I’d done to Emer somehow. I wondered how my godfather had lived with all his baggage from war. It couldn’t have been easy.

  It couldn’t have been any easier for him to give up his daughter to another man. Or at least, I hoped that it had been difficult to give me up. I knew he had, but I didn’t understand why or why he and my parents had chosen to lie to me about it my entire life.

  Chief Inspector Craig stood next to me, holding my hand. “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded and moved away from my godfather’s stone. Craig, still holding my hand, came with me.

  There were many MacCallisters buried in the church cemetery, dating all the way back to Baird, the first MacCallister to have called this village home. I touched Baird’s stone, and the grime and moss stained my fingertips, but I didn’t care. Baird was the one who had started it all. In a way, his deal with the sea was what had put me in this very place right now. It reminded me how every decision a person makes has a lasting impression, not just on their own life but on the lives of those who come after them. Baird was the reason I was the Keeper.

  I knew I had to take that into account when making my own decisions. What I didn’t know yet was everything the garden could and was meant to do. Yes, my godfather—my birth father—had left me instructions, but I was realizing there was much he had left unsaid. Not just about my birth, but about the garden itself. Uncle Ian had said that the garden was used to help. Perhaps it could help more than I already knew. I suspected that the garden held many more gifts than just the ability to give me visions when I touched the stone. Those gifts and how to use them, I needed to learn, and I would in time—without the help of Carver Finley. It was true that he might be able to tell me quite a bit about the menhir, its history and purpose, but after the encounter in the parking lot, I didn’t trust him. I hoped that after the chapel project was complete, he would forget about our little village and move on. A small voice in my head told me that he wouldn’t.

  I had to protect the garden, because someday I would pass it over to another. The responsibility of that suddenly felt heavy, and Craig and I walked out of the cemetery without uttering a word.

  Finally, when we were a block away, I spoke. “This must be one of the oddest first dates that you have been on.”

  He smiled down at me. “It’s not often a woman asks me to go to the cemetery with her.” He touched my cheek. “But I’m happy you did.”

  I pressed my hand over his on my cheek for just a moment and then turned away. “I have
to call her.”

  “I know. Do you want me to give you some privacy? I can go to the pub while you talk it out with her.”

  I shook my head. “No.” Craig was the only one I had shared my suspicions with. I hadn’t even told my sister. He was the only one I trusted until I had my own emotions about my birth sorted out.

  As we walked back to the Climbing Rose, I removed my cell phone from my coat pocket and called a number I had memorized at the age of three. Somewhere on the outskirts of Nashville, the phone rang on my family farm. It rang and rang. I was patient. I knew my parents were out doing chores, and they set the phone for the highest number of rings before it turned over to voicemail to make sure they could reach it in time. They didn’t always make it, but most of the time they did.

  This call might be one of those rare times when they didn’t make it. I knew there was just one more ring before it turned over to voicemail. I was almost happy for that. I didn’t know that I was ready to have this conversation with my mother. Maybe I’d been wrong in my conclusion. A tiny part of me hoped that I had.

  “Hello?” My mother asked in her native Tennessee drawl. Usually, hearing my mother’s voice put me at ease, but not today.

  “Mom?” I asked, pausing in the middle of the sidewalk. Craig stood with me, still holding my hand.

  “Fiona, sugar, how are you? I hope Isla is being a good houseguest for you.”

  “Isla is fine.” I didn’t think this was the time to tell my mother that my sister had fallen in love with a medical school dropout and was pre-engaged with no plans to return to the States. Not that my mother could argue. It seemed to me that when she was studying abroad in Scotland, she had fallen in love with a local as well, possibly two locals: my father, who I had called Dad my entire life, and my godfather, who very well could be my biological father.

  “Mom …”

  Craig squeezed my hand.

  She sighed deeply. “Oh, honey. I was hoping this day would never come. I’ve been waiting for your call.”

  And that’s when I knew I was right.

  Also available by Amanda Flower

  Magic Garden Mysteries

  Flowers and Foul Play

  Living History Museum Mysteries

  The Final Vow

  The Final Tap

  The Final Reveille

  Amish Candy Shop Mysteries

  Lethal Licorice

  Assaulted Caramel

  Magical Bookshop Mysteries

  Prose and Cons

  Crime and Poetry

  Andi Boggs Mysteries

  Andi Unstoppable

  Andi Under Pressure

  Andi Unexpected

  Appleseed Creek Mysteries

  A Plain Malice

  A Plain Disappearance

  A Plain Scandal

  A Plain Death

  Author’s Biography

  Amanda Flower, a USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning mystery author, started her writing career in elementary school when she read a story she wrote to her sixth grade class and had the class in stitches with her description of being stuck on the top of a Ferris wheel. She knew at that moment she’d found her calling of making people laugh with her words. She also writes mysteries as USA Today bestselling author Isabella Alan. In addition to being an author, Amanda is a librarian in Northeast Ohio. This is her second Magic Garden mystery.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Amanda Flower

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-781-4

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-782-1

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-783-8

  Cover illustration by Ken Joudrey

  Book design by Jennifer Canzone

  Printed in the United States.

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: November 2018

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