“How did you find roses up there in the first place?”
Frankie stammered. “Well, I, um, you see, we, it was no one you know, she was just, I mean she wanted, we went up, well, we—”
“Never mind. I can hear you blushing over the phone. Just stay there, I’m coming to get you.”
“Out here, on your bike, at this hour? With a murderer running ’round?”
“It doesn’t get dark until almost ten. But I get your point.”
“I have my car, I’ll drive to the garda station.”
“To make it easy for them to arrest you?”
“Arrest me for what? I argued with Jacobi, I didn’t kill him.”
“You own the murder weapon and you have an unconfirmable alibi. Trust me when I say don’t trust the gardaí to take your word for it that you’re innocent.”
“Call Niall. He’s at the station looking for a link between the cold case and Jacobi’s murder. A) He’ll be delighted to hear you’re safe and well, b) he’ll be an ally. He can keep Inspector Sutton from feeding you to the wolves.”
“Fine, I’ll call him before I do anything. But please don’t come out here. I know you don’t like men fussing over you and telling you what to do—”
“No, I don’t. But I’ll listen to you this once.” She said her goodbyes and ended the call. “Because I have something else I need to do.”
“Flower shop?” Eamon asked.
“Flower shop.”
Eight
Gethsemane and Eamon arrived at Buds of May just before closing.
“You didn’t have to come with me,” Gethsemane said as she leaned her bicycle against the flower shop’s wall.
“If we’re investigating then we ought to interview witnesses together.”
“You said the florist can’t see or hear you.”
“She can’t. But I can see and hear her. You talk, I’ll take notes. Go on in, before she locks up.”
A quick glance around the square confirmed the absence of gardaí. She pushed open the shop door and stepped inside.
Alexandra looked up from sweeping. “Dr. Brown. Your handsome friend’s not with you?”
“Told you she couldn’t see me,” Eamon said. “If she could, she’d know your handsome friend stood right beside you.”
Gethsemane ignored him. “Inspector O’Reilly’s busy with something right now. He didn’t come by to see you earlier this evening? Or call?”
“No.” Alexandra frowned. “Any reason he should have?”
She must not have heard about Jacobi’s murder. Or at least not the details. “We found another bouquet.” Gethsemane pulled up the photo she’d taken on her phone. “Daisies and pansies.”
Alexandra enlarged the picture on the screen. “I remember this one. A young girl came in for it a couple of hours after you left.”
“Young, meaning…?”
“About ten, eleven years old.”
Just like the boy who picked up the killer’s flowers. “Wasn’t it strange, an eleven-year-old buying flowers?”
“She didn’t buy them, she only picked them up. They were ordered online. And, no, the girl didn’t say who sent her to get them. She came in with the order number written on a slip of paper. They were pre-paid so I just handed the girl the flowers.”
“Did you know the girl?”
“I did.”
“Well, why the bloody hell don’t you tell her the girl’s name instead of making her drag it out of you?” Eamon asked, his aura bright blue.
Gethsemane dropped her gaze to the floor and covered a smile with her hand.
Alexandra went on, oblivious to the angry outburst. “‘Know’ might be too strong a word. Recognize is more like it. I don’t know her name but I see her around the square. Her ma works at the laundry down the way. The girl goes with her sometimes when she picks up and delivers laundry from the restaurants. The girl’s sweet. I gave her a peppermint from the stash I keep behind the counter. She thanked me pretty as you please.”
Gethsemane thanked her as well. “One more question.” She showed Alexandra the picture of the flowers again. “Do you know what these mean?”
Alexandra took a moment to answer. “Let’s see, ox-eyed daisies stand for perseverance, pansies mean think of me, purple columbine means resolve to win, and carnations are for boldness. Wait a minute.” She ducked behind the counter. When she came up, she held a small, tattered book. “I dug this out after your visit this morning. The Language of Flowers. Why don’t you loan it to your friend so he’ll be able to read his crush’s messages?”
“Thank you again.” Gethsemane spied a uniformed garda walking across the square. He wasn’t looking toward the flower shop but no point in taking chances. “We, er, I won’t keep you any longer. You’ve been a help.”
“Always willing to lend a hand in the service of romance. That’s why I’m in this business.”
Gethsemane huddled in the shop’s doorway until the garda went into the pizza parlor. Then she grabbed her bike and wheeled it around the corner into the alcove. “Can you think of a cover story,” she asked Eamon, “to give me a reason to track down and interrogate an eleven-year-old that doesn’t make me seem creepy?”
“Not off the top of my head, no. Do you think the same person’s behind both bouquets?”
“Two stalkers, each acting on their own?” Gethsemane shook her head.
“Why pick up the first bouquet in person but send a kid to get the second?”
“Because the stalker couldn’t go back to the Buds of May herself. Too risky. She knew she’d been noticed picking up the first bouquet by someone other than the florist.” Gethsemane jerked a thumb toward her chest. “Noticed by someone connected to the object of her obsession. She wouldn’t repeat her mistake. Besides, having a kid pick up the flowers follows the original crime more closely. If you’re going to be a copycat, you have to copy. Unless you think the similarities between the Flower Shop Killer and our stalker are coincidence?”
“No. As much as it pains me to say it, I think you’re right. Whoever left the bouquets for Frankie is a copycat. Except they didn’t kill Frankie, they killed his rival in the rose show.”
“Right after Frankie and Jacobi had a witnessed fight and during a time when Frankie has no alibi. Thanks, copycat. No better way to show a guy you love him than setting him up to take the fall for murder.”
“Now what do you want to do?”
“Call Niall.” Gethsemane dialed the inspector but the call went to voicemail. “Or Frankie.” Her call to the math teacher went unanswered as well. “Or worry. Rudolph Ash, one sixty, Bingo DeMoss, three oh-one, Dink Mothell, one fifty-two…”
“We can go to the station, see what’s happening. Or I can take the spectral express route while you wait here. I’m only half-ashamed to admit that I saw the inside of the Dunmullach garda station more than once while I was alive.”
“I appreciate your offer to pop—translocate—over to the station but I can’t just wait here. I’ve got to try to find the little girl. If—when—the gardaí realize the bouquet isn’t just a red herring, they’ll track the kid down. And if they get to her before I do, I’ll never be able to talk to her.”
“All right, I’ll go with you to the laundry. At least I can keep an eye on you. Since telling you to be careful never seems to do any good.”
“A spectral bodyguard. Just what I wanted for Christmas.”
“Hey, I’m pretty handy with a fireball.” A blue orb sizzled past her and exploded against the wall. A black smudge marked the place where it struck.
“Show off.” She looked around to see if anyone had noticed. “Stop it before you accidentally burn down a building or something. C’mon.”
Gethsemane stopped her bike a block away from the laundry. She knelt and scooped up a handful of dirt and grass.
&n
bsp; “What are you doing?” Eamon asked.
“Making a sacrifice to the cause of justice.” She smeared the dirt on the knee of her robin’s egg-blue linen pants. “You don’t have a pocket knife, do you?”
“Since I don’t actually have pockets, no, I don’t.”
“Never mind.” She rooted through her bag until she found nail clippers. She used the attached file to rip a hole in the center of the dirt stain. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not the full shilling for tearing up a pair of perfectly good pants?”
“No, because I think I know what you’re up to.”
She put the clippers away and headed for the laundry on foot.
“It’ll be more convincing if you limp,” Eamon called after her.
The laundry appeared deserted. She limped up to the counter. A faded card next to an old-fashioned hotel desk bell read, “Ring for service.” She tapped the bell’s plunger.
“Excuse me.” She craned her neck to peer past bags of clothes hanging from overhead racks. “Anyone here?”
Plastic rustled. The clerk, a frazzled woman with several dark hairs escaping from her untidy pony tail that framed her face like an exasperated halo and lines drawing down the corner of her eyes and mouth, appeared from behind the clothes. “Help you?” she asked in a tone that suggested she wanted to do anything but.
“I hope so.” Gethsemane balanced on one leg and tried to hold her knee high enough for the woman to see the dirt and the tear. “I had a bike accident. Landed in the dirt.”
The woman leaned forward to examine the tear. “No blood.”
“I didn’t damage anything but my pants, luckily, but they’re my favorite pants and I don’t know what to use to get the dirt stain out.”
“Any decent laundry detergent. Borax might work. Or Oxy. White vinegar. Rubbing alcohol. You’ll have to rub it in to the stain before the stain sets.”
“Do you have anything here you could sell me?”
The woman turned and disappeared behind the clothes. Gethsemane tried to see where she went, then looked around for any sign of a little girl. She spotted Eamon gesturing through the window toward the washing machines at the rear of the store.
She poked her head out the door. “Why don’t you come in?”
“I can’t. Laundry’s only been here a few years. Don’t remember what was here while I was alive. Never mind all that, the girl’s at a table in the corner. Hurry up.”
She pulled her head in. Before she could make it to the back of the store, the clerk reappeared at the counter. She held a small bottle in her hand. “Got this.”
Gethsemane examined the bottle. A long, chemical name assured her grass stains were no match for the contents. She pulled out her wallet. “May I put some on here? I’ve got a ways to go before I get home. I want to treat it before it sets, like you suggested.”
The woman shrugged and disappeared behind the clothes again. Gethsemane took the bottle and headed for the washing machines. She peered around a bank of the heavy-duty cleaners and saw a thin, preteen girl sitting at a table, reading.
She sat in the chair opposite. “Hello.”
The girl didn’t look up from her book. “Hello.”
“My name’s Gethsemane.” She pressed on when the girl didn’t reply. “Do you mind if I sit here while I treat my pants?”
“No,” the girl said, still not looking up.
Gethsemane squirted clear liquid on the stain. Silence filled the laundry as she dabbed at the stain with her fingers.
“That would be easier with a cloth,” the girl said. “You can use one from that basket in the corner.”
“Thanks.” Gethsemane retrieved a white rag and returned to the table. “What are you reading?”
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
“That’s one of my favorites. Why is a raven like a writing desk?”
“Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front.” The girl put the book down and smiled.
“I like the garden of live flowers, especially the rose and tiger-lily.”
“I wish real flowers could talk.”
“They can.” Gethsemane pulled out the Language of Flowers. “You can use flowers to send secret messages.”
The girl slid the book over and turned pages.
“Pretty cool, huh?”
The girl nodded.
“Has anyone ever sent you flowers?”
The girl made a face. “I’m only eleven, who’d send me flowers?”
“Have you ever sent flowers to anyone? I sent my mother flowers for Mother’s Day when I was about your age.”
“I gave flowers to someone. Sort of. A lady gave me five euros to get some flowers for her. I didn’t pick them out, though. If I had, I would have picked these.” Her finger rested on a picture of a gardenia. “It’s pretty.”
“It’s beautiful. And the smell’s divine.”
“You’ve seen them for real?”
Gethsemane smiled. “My grandma had a garden full of gardenias, back in Virginia. What kind of flowers did the lady have you get?”
The girl turned a few pages in the book. “Some were like this.” She pointed to a pansy.
“Did the woman tell you her name?”
The girl shook her head.
“What did the woman look like?”
The girl shrugged. “She had on a funny hat. I couldn’t see her face.”
“How tall was she?”
“Taller than you.”
“What did she sound like? Like she was from around here?”
“Yeah. She sounded regular. Not funny, like you.”
The clerk appeared around the corner. “Oona, finish the chapter you’re reading then help me close up. It’s getting late.”
“Sure, Ma.” The girl gave the flower book back to Gethsemane and went back to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“We’re closing,” the clerk said to Gethsemane.
Gethsemane stood. “Thanks for the stain treatment. I think it’s working. I’ll apply some more when I get home. You may have saved my pants.”
The woman nodded and headed back to the front of the store.
Gethsemane turned to say goodbye to Oona. The girl stared out the window.
“Who’s that man?” she asked.
“What man?” Gethsemane faced the window. Eamon stared back at them.
“That man. With the curly hair.” Oona waved.
Eamon turned a surprised brown and waved back.
“You see a man with curly hair and green eyes standing by the window?” Gethsemane asked.
Oona looked at Gethsemane as if she was thick. “Is he your husband?”
“Um, no. He’s a friend. My roommate.”
“Why didn’t he come in with you?”
“He’s, uh, allergic to laundry detergent.”
“Oona,” the clerk called from the front of the store.
“Coming, Ma.”
Gethsemane followed the girl to the front of the store but walked out before Oona could tell her mother about the curly haired man with the detergent allergy.
As soon as they’d moved out of sight of the laundry, Gethsemane asked Eamon, “Why could Oona see you?”
“Why can you see me?”
“Good luck and clean living? I don’t know.”
“Nor do I. Some can see me, some can hear me, and some haven’t got a clue.”
“And then there are the fortunate ones like me who get the multi-sensory Eamon McCarthy spectral experience.” Touched or gifted—or cursed—her grandma would have called someone with the ability to see the “haints” who frequented the stories she used to tell Gethsemane when Gethsemane was a little girl sitting on her rickety porch at her rickety house in the
middle of nowhere on sultry Virginia summer evenings. Stories Gethsemane’s citified mother forbade her grandma to repeat when she found out. Stories Gethsemane rejected as superstition—until she moved to Ireland and into Carraigfaire Cottage and met Eamon.
Eamon’s umber aura mirrored his hurt look. “Are you being sarcastic or do you really wish you were shed of me? Sometimes it’s hard to tell with you.”
“I’m sorry. That was sarcastic. I’m worried and angry and had to let it out somewhere and you happened to be in the line of fire. You know I don’t want you to go away again. You went away and I was miserable until you came back.” Eamon had been banished to limbo for a while. She’d been lost and lonely without him. “I’ll try to keep the snark in check.”
“Apology accepted. And as a fellow devotee of snark, I don’t mind when you deploy it. Just aim it in a different direction. Like toward the gardaí. They deserve it.”
“Some of them, anyway. I’d feel more confident about letting the ones that deserve it have it if I had something to back it up with. Like the identity of Frankie’s admirer.” She picked up her bike.
“Where to now?” Eamon asked.
“Home.” She looked toward the garda station. “I guess. I want to read through The Language of Flowers again. Maybe I missed something. Some alternate floral message that will give us a clue.”
Eamon jerked his head in the opposite direction. “Home’s that way, darlin’.”
She kept her gaze fixed on the gothic structure where she’d spent more time in interrogation rooms in the past several months than she’d ever before spent in her life. “I know.”
“You’re wondering if Grennan took your advice and called O’Reilly.”
“Kind of.” She gripped the Pashley’s handlebars and rolled the bike back and forth in front of her.
“You’re worried and you want to know if he’s in custody.”
“Sort of.” She climbed onto the bike.
“You want to ride over to the station to see what you can find out because not knowing is driving you mad.”
“Exactly.” Gethsemane pedaled toward the garda station. “Coming?” she called over her shoulder.
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