Dirty Rotten Tendrils (37 page)

She steadied herself against the doorjamb. “The man who came with you before, do you love him?”

With all my heart,
I wanted to say. But all I could manage was a slight nod.

“Be sure to tell him.” She gazed wistfully at me and then she was gone.

I heard a door shut, a lock slide home. I rolled onto my side and stretched my hand toward my purse, lying by my feet. I had to get to my phone. I had to stop her.

Someone knocked on the front door—maybe it was Connor! “Help!” I tried to call, but my voice was a mere croak. “Help!” I tried again, attempting to move my unresponsive legs.

The doorbell rang and Connor called, “Hello? Anyone home?”

I wanted to bang my fist on the coffee table, but my arm wouldn’t obey. He knocked a few more times, then stopped. Would he peer in the front window and see me lying here? I tried to lift my head so I could see him, but he never appeared.

Concentrating as hard as I could, I managed to hook my fingers beneath the strap of my purse and tug it toward me. With slow, agonizing effort, I slid my hand inside and pinched my phone between my fingers and thumb, using them like a crab’s claw. I finally got the phone onto the sofa beside my face, then had to pry it open. I forced my fuzzy brain to focus on the numbers until I was able to press speed dial number two. But when Marco answered, all I could do was mumble, “Tansy.”

“Abby, what’s wrong? Where are you?”

“Tan-sy,” I said again, my head spinning from the effort. I felt like throwing up.

“Are you with Tansy?”

“Yeh.”

“Hang in there, baby. I’m on my way.”

I let my head loll back and the tears come.

 

 

I must have fallen into a deep sleep, because when I awoke, the house was full of cops, EMTs, the coroner, and Marco, who was sitting on the floor rubbing my hand. I pulled it out of his grasp as I struggled to sit up. “Tansy?” I asked hoarsely, relieved to sound intelligible again.

Marco took me in his arms and held me. I heard his voice in my ear. “She didn’t make it.”

She’d taken her life for her loved ones. The whole horrible, senseless tragedy, from Cody’s selfish actions to Tansy’s unselfish ones, brought back my tears. I wept hard, clinging to Marco, and it only got worse when Herbert charged into the room just as the EMTs wheeled his wife’s body out of the bedroom.

“Tansy!” he cried in a panic, cradling her lifeless body in his arms. “Oh, God, no! Tansy, please don’t leave me. How could you do this to us?”

Marco scooped me up, carried me out to his car, and took me to the hospital, where I was examined, tested for drug toxicity, then given the okay to go home and rest. Back at my apartment, Marco poured me a glass of ginger ale to help settle my stomach, then sat on the sofa with his arms around me, letting me know he was there.

For a while I trembled so violently that all I could do was hold on to him, letting the shock of Tansy’s confession and death sink in. After a while I was able to describe what had happened in as much detail as I could remember. It still seemed unreal.

“I was so certain Herbert was the murderer,” I told him. “The pieces just fit. But it was meek little Tansy. To think that the strength of her love was so powerful that she would sacrifice herself for her husband and grandson. I wish I could’ve stopped her.”

“You did your best,” he said, and kissed my forehead.

“I wanted to tell her that she was making a mistake, that killing herself would hurt Herbert and Andrew, not help them. If I could have spoken, I might have been able to talk her out of it, Marco. I might have saved her and spared her family all that sorrow.”

“Listen to me, Abby. You can’t blame yourself. Tansy drugged your tea because she didn’t want you to stop her. She would have taken those pills no matter what you said. She wasn’t thinking rationally. You can’t reason with someone in such a highly emotional state. And if you had talked her out of it, she would’ve gone to prison. Would that have been better? Would it have made Andrew feel any less guilty? Would Herbert not be as lost?”

“No. You’re right.” I took a sip of ginger ale and waited for the fizz to reach my stomach. “Did you find the letter addressed to Dave? It’s Tansy’s confession.”

“The police have it. They’ve already let Dave know about it.”

“It’s amazing, isn’t it, that despite all of Herbert’s problems, Tansy never stopped loving him?”

“That’s what true love is.”

“I think we have that kind of love, Marco.”

“I think so, too.”

I leaned back to gaze into his eyes. “I don’t want to waste a moment of what we have, because we don’t know what’s ahead. I think we should set a wedding date.”

At that, anguish washed across Marco’s strong features.

“What?” I asked in alarm.

Instead of answering, Marco pulled me against him, running his hands down my back, as though he didn’t want to let me go. My heart began to pound. Something had happened.

He got up from the sofa, took an envelope from his coat hanging on the back of a chair, and handed it to me. “This was waiting at my apartment.”

It was a letter from the Department of the Army, addressed to Lieutenant Marco Salvare, RA 55667591.

I read the letter in shocked disbelief. “An active-duty officer?” I turned to gaze at him, my eyes awash in tears. “You’re being called back?”

“It appears that way.”

“Do you have to go?” I whispered hoarsely.

He sat down beside me. “I took an oath, Abby. I have to fulfill my duty to my country even if it means putting our plans on hold.”

My heart felt as though it were cracking into a thousand jagged pieces. “What are we going to do?”

“Let it play out, I guess.”

I searched his eyes, realizing I was facing the very real possibility of losing him.

“It’ll be okay, Sunshine,” he said, gathering me into his arms. “Nothing can really separate us.” And then he kissed me like he’d never kissed me before.

Don’t miss the next delightful Flower Shop Mystery,

Available in April 2011 from Obsidian.

 

 

 

 

 

O
f course I could handle the flower shop for fifteen minutes. It was my shop.

Or so I said to Lottie, my assistant, who needed to deliver floral arrangements to the funeral home before five o’clock. Still, she was hesitant to leave me alone, and not out of fear of a burglary. Bloomers couldn’t have been in a safer location. The courthouse was directly across the street, the police station a block away, and my fiancé’s bar, Down the Hatch, two doors north.

No, Lottie’s fear was one of someone causing me physical harm—that someone being me.

Because of an ankle sprain I’d suffered two days before, I’d been ordered to stay off my right foot for two weeks, forcing me into an existence ruled by crutches and a wheelchair. So far, I’d slipped twice; fallen once; gotten wedged halfway inside the shop’s front door, unable to move in or out; crushed half a dozen fresh Red Beauty roses; and toppled the towering dieffenbachia in the corner near the glass display case. That was me on crutches—in my first two hours at work.

So I’d ditched the crutches and switched to the wheelchair, for obvious reasons, and had thus far banged into three doorjambs, dented Marco’s passenger-side car door, run over Lottie’s foot,
and
mangled Grace’s new eyeglasses.

Hence Lottie’s hesitancy. “I’d feel better if Grace were here,” she said from the back of the shop.

“I’d feel better if I hadn’t broken her glasses. Thank goodness she was able to get her new ones before Eye-Caramba’s closed today.”

Grace Bingham was my other assistant, a slender, sixtysomething Brit who had been a legal secretary in a law office where I’d clerked during my only year in law school. Grace had retired just before I bought Bloomers; then she’d decided she was bored and came to work for me as our coffee-and-tea-parlor hostess. Both Grace and the parlor were big hits with our customers.

But the parlor was empty now, and I’d be closing up shop soon anyway. “Lottie, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“It’s not you I’m worried about, sweetie. It’s Bloomers.” She winked.

Lottie Dombowski was a big-boned Kentuckian with a soft heart, brassy curls, and a penchant for pink. She had a true gift for floral design and was in the process of passing on her knowledge to me. Lottie had owned Bloomers until her husband’s health problems had nearly forced them into bankruptcy. And there I was, freshly booted out of law school and in need of employment. So I’d used the remainder of my grandfather’s trust to make a down payment on the shop, hired Lottie and Grace to work for me, and the rest was, well, owned by the bank.

“That Marco has a lot of making up to do for this,” Lottie said. “I hope he’s taking you somewhere special for dinner tonight.”

“No, thanks. Going somewhere special for dinner is how I sprained my ankle in the first place.”

Well, to be fair, it wasn’t the
going
that had caused the sprain. It was Marco accidentally bumping me off my new bargain-find-of-the-century five-inch-spike heels. To think my only desire had been to be fashionable—and taller—which hadn’t seemed unreasonable, given that I was twenty-seven years old and stood at a mere five feet two inches. The ER doctor, however, hadn’t shared my feelings on that subject. He’d seen too many women with sprains and broken bones caused by stepping off ridiculously high heels.

The shame of it was that I’d worn the sexy shoes only once before, at a disastrous dinner thrown by the parents of the girl Marco’s brother had wanted to marry. I’d ended that evening by walking barefoot to the car and freezing my toes rather than taking a chance of slipping on ice in those treacherous heels. This time I’d landed in the emergency room of the county hospital, waiting three hours for a diagnosis. The high heels had landed in a donation box.

Marco was taking full responsibility for the accident and had been doing everything possible to make it up to me. He’d even rented the wheelchair and bought the crutches. And while I didn’t mind the pampering, I did mind my loss of independence. With my right foot in a boot built for Frankenstein’s monster, with miles of Ace bandages wound underneath, I couldn’t fit my foot in the driver’s side of my old yellow Vette to work the pedals. Even drying my hair, which involved either propping my injured foot on the bathroom counter or squeezing a chair into our tiny bathroom, was a test of endurance. It explained why my do looked more like a pile of red matchsticks than a sleek bob.

But the worst part of all was that Marco was supposed to check in at the army base in three weeks, and I’d be spending two of those three immobilized. At least we
had
three weeks. At first, we’d feared his departure was imminent.

I still went cold all over when I recalled the moment he’d shown me the letter. It was from the Department of the Army, addressed to Lieutenant Marco Salvare, RA 55667591.

Marco had served with the Army Rangers for two years, but until his full six-year commitment was up, he was subject to recall. I’d never imagined it actually happening, especially on the eve of our engagement, and now that it had, I was faced with the very real possibility of losing him. It was a thought so frightening, I had struggled daily to block it from my mind.

The creak of rusty hinges on the back door as Lottie let herself out jerked me back to the present. The shop was quiet, so I wheeled myself to the big bay window to look outside, where a fine mist, overcast skies, and approaching dusk seemed to cast a pall of gloom over the town square. Even the stately limestone courthouse across the street seemed more of a ghost image than an actual building.

Suddenly, a figure separated itself from the gloom and strode up the sidewalk in my direction. Because of the dark hair and black coat, I thought, at first, it was Marco, who favored his black leather jacket no matter what the weather. But now I could see that this man wore a long black trench coat, his collar turned up against the damp, his dark hair slicked back by the mist, a sharp contrast to his pale skin. He seemed to be heading straight for my shop, so I backed away. I didn’t want him to think I had nothing to do but stare out the window.

When the bell jingled, I was arranging the floral display on a table near the back. I turned my chair around, expecting to see the man standing near the front counter. Instead, he was directly in front of me, so close I could see the droplets of moisture on his coat. I craned my neck to look up at him and stared straight into a pair of pale gray wolf eyes, which were gazing back at me as though I were dinner.

I tried to back up but hit the table behind me. With nowhere to go, I found myself wishing I hadn’t been so hasty in sending Lottie away. And when the stranger stepped closer and reached into his coat, all I could think was that he was going for a weapon.