Poisoned Petals (3 page)

Peggy and her students from Queens University had helped him with the garden. They were there almost every day, planting and tilling. In all, they’d planted an acre of squash, corn, potatoes, strawberries, and peppers. They planted apple trees and blueberry bushes. All of the seed and equipment had been donated to the project from area garden suppliers. All the work had been done by volunteer groups from garden clubs, students, Scouts, and other individuals.

It had been a few days since she’d seen Darmus there, but he was usually at the garden early in the morning, and she’d been going later in the day. She decided to surprise him with some of the tubers she was bringing back. He loved native plants that had been in the region since before 1900. He’d be pleased and surprised to find some already planted in his garden when he came home.

Then she could swing by her garden shop, the Potting Shed, work for a few hours, post exam scores at the university, and finally go back to the Potting Shed and close up for the night. The pace of
her
life was grueling sometimes, too.

She was in the process of deciding if she should give up her position at Queens University. She’d only gone back after John’s death because she was heavily in debt and wasn’t sure if the Potting Shed could support itself.

But the little shop was thriving and needing more and more of her time. She had a wonderful group of students working for her, but it was getting harder to do a good job at everything. She was spread too thin, and even though she was afraid to take the plunge, she knew she was going to have to give something up to remain sane.

She’d pretty well decided it was going to be teaching. She was terrified, but there was no other answer. She could still do her group lectures about toxic plants, and the Charlotte Police Department had recently offered her an on-call position as a forensic botanist. Neither one of those would take up as much time as teaching several classes a day, but they would provide extra money.

But part of her hated to give up teaching. Darmus had certainly given her a hard time about it. To him, there was no greater application of learning than to teach. The idea that she would choose a garden shop over her professorship drove him crazy.

But Peggy knew he didn’t understand why the Potting Shed was so important to her. He’d only been married once, and that was for a very short time. She couldn’t explain how the pain of John’s death went away when she was puttering around the shop. And not everyone could be totally dedicated to the betterment of the human race like Darmus. His whole life had been consumed by his mission.

She always wondered what it would have been like if his early marriage hadn’t fallen apart. He’d married her best friend, Rosie, in college. Darmus was happy then. But the marriage fell apart quickly. After it was over, Darmus became obsessed with saving the world. Would he have been as willing to give up his life for his cause if he’d actually
had
a life?

There would never be an answer to that question. Fate had taken him down a different path. She turned her little red truck into Darmus’s driveway. He had a small, pleasant house with a magnificent garden on the north side of Charlotte, near the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he’d taught for twenty years.

People came from all over the state to study what he grew there. Sometimes he had cabbages the size of basketballs and sweet potatoes the size of potbellied pigs. It was a remarkable accomplishment and a wonderful teaching facility. Darmus never did anything small or anything that couldn’t be used for teaching.

She was surprised to see his Honda FCX, a small, limited-production hydrogen-fuel-cell car, parked in his driveway, but she was happy to find him home. This way he could help plant the tubers, and they could have a good talk.

She wasn’t sure if she was going to tell him about Luther. She’d have to see how he was that day. She might be better off keeping quiet about it for now. He’d had his good and bad days for the last few months. He was distracted and agitated as he tried to make sense of Rebecca’s death and struggled under the mounting pressure to keep Feed America growing.

She’d envied him his green car for a long time before she finally managed to get her little truck converted to electric power. She’d worked on a 1942 Rolls-Royce that had been in her husband’s family, but it was impractical to use. She had to settle for the truck. It was good for the shop and easier to get around in. Insurance and spare parts for the Rolls were astronomical!

Peggy tried to honk the horn to see if Darmus was home. It didn’t make a sound. For some reason, she was having trouble getting it to work. She got out of the truck slowly, stretching out the kink in her back as she did.

Darmus had crippling arthritis in his hands and feet. She didn’t know how he got so much accomplished yet never complained about being in pain. She knew there were times he had to be suffering. He’d actually had to quit teaching for a while because the arthritis was so debilitating. Then he found some wonder herb that allowed him to go back to work. It was the happiest day of his life.

She brushed her hand over some young bracken ferns starting to sprout in a shady spot beneath a flowering plum tree. No doubt someone would have them in their salad soon. They were edible while they were young fiddleheads but only ornamental when they got larger. The pink plum flowers seemed to float above her head as she looked through their open branches at the clear blue sky.

It had been a perfect day to collect the sunflowers. The area needed rain badly, but she was glad it had held off for another day. When it started raining, the ditch where the sunflowers were growing was going to be even more of a muddy mess, swimming with young snakes and turtles. The turtles she could get along with. It was the snakes she wasn’t crazy about. She knew they had their place, but they gave her the shivers.

Once when she was a child on her family’s farm outside Charleston, she’d pulled down a big piece of moss hanging from a live oak to give her mother as a present. She found a cottonmouth curled up in it. The snake hissed at her. She dropped it and ran back to the house. She was lucky it didn’t bite her. But she never forgot how scared she was that day, looking so closely into the snake’s eyes.

It made her shiver just thinking about it. Her hands were cold when she knocked on Darmus’s front door.

There was a peculiar smell coming from the house. She thought it was something cooking at first. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to taste it! Darmus had a habit of making all kinds of strange foods he liked to share with his unsuspecting guests. She decided to plead exhaustion if he wanted her to stay. She was filthy and tired. She couldn’t possibly—

Then Peggy realized she wasn’t smelling food. It was natural gas or propane. The scent was very strong. She tried the handle, but the door was locked. “Darmus!” She pounded on the door, then moved to the window to try to see inside. “Darmus!”

PEGGY COULDN’T TELL if Darmus was inside, but since his car was in the drive, the chances were good that he was. She ran around the back of the house and shouted his name over and over again, hoping he might answer from outside. There was no reply. She couldn’t find him in the yard.

She tried the back door, but it was also locked. She pounded on the door and screamed his name. Finally, unsure what else she could do, she called 911 and reported a possible gas leak. If she was wrong, she’d feel like a fool. But if she was right . . .

Peggy put the phone away, and anxiously listened for the sound of sirens.
Please, please let him be okay! Please don’t let him be in there.
When she didn’t hear sirens right away, she started running around the house, looking in the windows and pounding on the doors, calling his name.

She couldn’t recall what created sparks that could start a fire. Was it static? Could a door opening do it? If she threw a brick through the window, could that cause an explosion? She looked around and noted the closeness of the other houses. If Darmus’s house caught on fire, it could endanger the homes of his neighbors.

She took out her cell phone again to call and see what was keeping the rescue workers. As if it were a signal, an explosion rocked the house. The windows blew out, sparkling glass shattering everywhere. The door beside her blew off its hinges and went flying past her into the yard. If the explosion had occurred just a few minutes ago, when she was knocking on the door, it would have taken her down with it.

Flames started at the roof and roared through the open windows, where oxygen fed them. Smoke billowed out of the opening where the door had been.

Peggy knew she had to see if Darmus was inside. There wasn’t time to wait for the fire department. She got down on her hands and knees and started crawling through the house, shouting for him. The black smoke billowed above her head as she crawled quickly across the floors, unmindful of the glass and other debris, glad she was still wearing her gloves to protect her hands.

“Darmus!” she yelled and coughed as she went from room to room. “Darmus, are you in here?”

Then she saw him. He was in the kitchen, lying on the floor beside the stove. She could see his face and arms were badly burned. He wasn’t moving. He was probably unconscious. She was going to have to stand up to drag him out of the burning house and pray she wasn’t overcome by smoke trying to do it.

First she visually located the back door so she knew where to go. Flames seemed to be everywhere by then. Black smoke made breathing difficult, even on the floor. She saw a huge hole in the roof with flames burning up into the blue sky.

Desperately she grabbed Darmus’s hand. It was cold to the touch. She dropped it when the crisped flesh moved under her hand. She was going to do too much damage that way. “Hang on! I’m going to get you out of here.”

Peggy took a deep breath and held it. She grabbed the back of Darmus’s shirt, stood up, and was immediately pounded by the heat and smoke. She put her head down, held her breath, and narrowed her stinging eyes as she dragged him across the vinyl floor, keeping her gaze focused on the doorframe where the screen door hung by one hinge at the top.

Darmus was a small, slight man, barely five feet, but it was difficult for Peggy to pull him. The smooth floor helped, but toward the end, she could see it starting to crack and buckle from the heat. She could hear sirens now and someone on a loudspeaker instructing people to stay back.

Her lungs were bursting, but she knew she couldn’t take a breath of the poisoned air. It could mean the difference between life and death for both of them. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t let go, and couldn’t breathe until she could force them both through the doorway.

Something hit her. She thought it fell from the ceiling. Blood or perspiration dripped down the side of her face. She didn’t have time to see which it was. It didn’t matter. Her world narrowed to the doorway.

She didn’t realize she was on her knees, crawling, with her hand still tangled in Darmus’s shirt collar, until she looked up and saw a firefighter in full protective gear staring down at her.

“There are two people still in the house,” he said into his radio. “Both of them near the back door. I’m getting them out now before the roof collapses.”

He dragged Peggy out quickly and left her gasping for air on the ground beyond the porch. She tried to yell at him to get Darmus, too, but the words wouldn’t come out of her rasping throat.

She watched as he dragged Darmus out. He laid him carefully on the ground beside her. He shook his head at the paramedics as they approached with oxygen masks and stretchers.

“This one is gone.” He took off his mask. “Maybe just as well, with those burns.”

Peggy screamed in her mind.
Darmus!
Her throat was too raw to issue any sound. She collapsed and stared up into the clear afternoon sky above her.

Someone asked her if she was burned. Someone else asked her if she knew who she was. She couldn’t answer. She closed her eyes, hoping when she woke up it would all be a bad dream.

 
PEGGY WOKE LATER THAT DAY to find her nightmare was real. Darmus was dead. Apparently, he’d been trying to light a faulty gas stove and it blew up in his face.

Her son, Paul, sat with her at the hospital while a police community liaison officer told her what they knew about what happened. Paul was tall and thin like his father with Peggy’s green eyes and bright red hair spiked on his head. His dark blue Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department uniform reminded her too much of her husband, John, many years before. She turned her head on the smooth, white pillow so she wouldn’t cry.