Floral Depravity (16 page)

“Then you have heard of it. We can check the records and see if you've had any dealings with them.”

Strickland sighed and let his head rest back against his chair. “Will it help me if I talk?”

“No promises,” Bixby said meekly. “But I'll see what I can do.”

Oh, brother. Bixby was attempting his Mr. Rogers routine on Strickland.

Strickland paused for a minute. “Then Brooks was a crook, too. Or someone in his organization.”

“How's that?” Bixby asked.

“They got me for watering drugs, right?”

Bixby nodded.

“And selling them to kids on the street,” my father said under his breath.

“Yeah, well, I'd been doing it for quite some time. Nobody ever noticed. No complaints. Nobody got hurt. I knew exactly how much I could take. It was only when we started filling scripts from Brooks's company that I was caught.”

“Meaning?” Bixby asked.

“The drugs were cut before we got them. Before they left the plant. Does that help me at all?”

Bixby said, “I don't see how.”

But my father snapped his finger. “Of course,” he said. “They'd cover for him, too.” He grabbed my shoulders. “Don't you see? Those inferred secretive connections. Brooks could get someone on the floor or in the labs to cut the drugs. Then he was free to sell the extra and the money went straight into his pocket. But that would have been large amounts! Ha, ha!” He pulled me into a hug and practically twirled me around the room. “We got him. That would prove Brooks's connection with organized crime.”

“Got who? Brooks is already dead.”

That took the wind out of his sails pretty quickly.

“Was that why you were taking pictures of Brooks?” I asked. “You were trying to catch him in the act of doing something unseemly.”

He nodded.

“You should show those pictures to Bixby. Might be something to help him in his case.”

“How would I explain them without . . .” His arms were still around me when Bixby exited the interview room. My father cleared his throat and stepped back. “Well, Chief? Can I take my prisoner?”

“Not yet,” Bixby said. “I can hold him on assault in the meantime. But I'd rather you stick around while the murder investigation continues.”

“Do you suspect me of something?” There was that beatific smile. He could pull it off without even wearing the garb of a friar.

But I wasn't sure if he was any match for Bixby's Mr. Rogers routine. Bixby sat on the corner of his desk, crossed his arms casually in front of him, and tilted his head. “Should I suspect you of something?”

My father just shrugged and smiled back at him.

After a moment, Bixby turned to me. “So, Audrey, when we first arrived at the scene of the fight, exactly why did you call out, ‘Dad'?”

I ate another chocolate kiss from Mrs. June's desk and looked back at the closed door of the office where Chief Bixby was talking with my father.

“You should go home, child,” she said.

Instead I stood up and paced in front of her desk again. “Can Bixby hold him on anything?”

“Hard for me to say,” she said. “Could . . . your father . . . have interfered in the investigation in any way?”

Was hiding the fact that you once worked with the victim interfering? I flung myself back into the chair and buried my head in my hands. “He didn't kill Barry Brooks. I know that much.”

“Shh.” Mrs. June rolled her chair over to mine and waited until I managed to look her in the eyes. “Of course he didn't.”

“Audrey?” I hadn't heard the door open. Chief Bixby took two steps out of his office. “Mrs. June, could you give us a couple of minutes?”

Mrs. June patted my hand. “I've been meaning to run to the ladies' room all afternoon. I'll be back in a few.”

As she scurried off, Bixby lowered himself into her chair, still facing mine. “This must be difficult for you.”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“You should have told me. He should have told me.”

I nodded again, in danger now of becoming a human bobble-head doll.

“I'm going to keep him.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Bixby held up his hand. “Not that I think he killed Brooks, but I need to get the whole story. Do you trust me?”

Good question. I'd known him to arrest the wrong person before, but not without good evidence. I didn't always think he told me the whole truth, but perhaps that was part of the job. “I think you're good at what you do,” I finally managed.

“I'll take that,” he said. “But I want you to go home now. There's nothing else that you can do here. If your father is open and honest with me, he could be out later today.”

“He didn't kill Barry Brooks.”

“I hope you're right.” Chief Bixby stood and held open the door for me. “Mrs. June can drive you home.”

*   *   *

When I got
back to the cottage, I stayed inside only long enough to feed the cats before I grabbed my shovel and headed out to the grassy area by the driveway, where I wanted to plant some shade trees. I attacked the ground with gusto, rehearsing recent events in my head to the cadence of the shovel breaking the dirt. I ignored the mosquitoes, the clouds of gnats, and the burning where my ungloved fingers chafed against the wood shovel handle, and I stopped only when I heard the crunch of tires in my driveway. I looked up to see Liv and Eric hop out of his truck. Well, Eric hopped. Liv half climbed and half slid to the ground.

I rubbed the back of my hand against my sweaty forehead and went to meet them. “What's up?”

“Eric wanted to double-check the tarp on your roof and I rode along,” Liv said.

“May be a storm this weekend, they're saying on the Weather Channel.” While Eric pulled out his ladder and headed to the roof, Liv joined me where I'd been digging.

“Who are you planning on burying here?” she asked, pointing to the embarrassingly massive pit I'd excavated. “Kane Bixby or your father?”

“I just got carried away.” I wagged a finger at her. “But I like the way you think.”

I moved over to where I wanted the next tree and started a new hole.

“Who are we planting in this one?” Liv asked.

“It's a good thinking activity,” I said. “Digging. I was thinking about the case, but then I started thinking about my dad and what it was like when he left. If it weren't for Grandma Mae, I never would have made it through. Mom hasn't seemed completely happy since, either. It's amazing how much misery one man can cause.”

I didn't look up to see Liv's reaction. I just kept digging.

“And then I was thinking about Raylene Quinn. Barry Brooks made her life miserable. What a brilliant woman, and here she was kowtowing to a sleazeball like Brooks.” I looked up. “Notice the theme yet? The common thread?”

“I'm not sure I like where you're heading,” Liv said.

“And then there's Kathleen Randolph. She seems quite happy running her business as a single woman. Happier than with any of her exes, that's for sure. And when I remember the funk I was in when Brad left—”

“Audrey—”

“Whoever said happily ever after had to involve a man? Here I was thinking I had to decide between Nick and Brad. But guess what? There's another option. I can choose neither. I can decide to live a perfectly happy life without either of them. No more drama. Maybe I've decided to do just that.”

“Oh, Audrey. And what? Live here with an increasing horde of cats?”

“I have my work. I have this place to fix up. I have you. Maybe I just have no desire to have my happiness tied to a man. Any man.”

Liv spent the next few minutes stammering and sputtering, doing her best to persuade me not to decide anything rashly.

“I tied down that tarp the best I could,” Eric said, loading his ladder into the back of his truck. “It should hold up to a decent storm.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I watched as Eric held open the car door and then helped hoist Liv into her seat. She gave me a worried look as they drove away together. Back to their house that they were fixing up and turning into a cozy home. Eric just finished remodeling the kitchen, turning it into a chef's dream, despite that fact that Liv's most extravagant cooking endeavor to date was mixing together two different kinds of canned soups. Still, their house was the place where family and friends gathered, and the walls echoed with love and laughter, even if Eric eyed a few cracks in them critically, threatening to eventually rip off the plaster to see what was going on behind them.

And now the cute green and yellow nursery with the hand-painted giraffes and the frilly white curtains stood completed at the end of the hall, awaiting only their baby.

And suddenly my commitment to this new solo-life thing dissolved like sand slipping through my fingers.

*   *   *

I spent the
rest of the evening consuming most of a box of stale graham crackers while watching a marathon of
Dog the Bounty Hunter
, wondering what life was like for my dad after he left us. The stress of the day must have tired me out, because I fell asleep on the couch with the little black kitten lying on my chest. When I woke up, moonlight was streaming through the multipaned windows and I somehow caught a whiff of Nick's scent still lingering in the sofa pillows.

The kitten shifted and started purring loudly. Or maybe she was snoring.

I lay there, exhausted but awake, for what seemed like hours, my mind awash in thoughts of the investigation, my relationships with Brad and Nick, and my father's arrival. Sleep wasn't coming anytime soon.

As I stroked the kitten's shiny, soft fur, I knew Nick was right about one thing. She needed a name. I looked up at the moon. “Hello, Luna,” I said, trying the name out loud. “Maybe Clair de Lune, Luna for short?” She nuzzled my chin.

And Nick was right about something else. I couldn't live my life waiting for people to leave. And despite my earlier impulsive rationalization that I could be perfectly content embracing a single life—and that was probably true—it wasn't what I wanted. No, I couldn't say I was unhappy being single and working at the shop. It was a good life. But I also wanted a home and family of my own: crying babies, runny noses, soccer games, teenage angst, grandkids someday. And I wanted a good man to stand beside me. I was also pretty sure I knew who I wanted that to be. And I needed to tell him that.

I settled the kitten onto her favorite throw pillow, slipped back into the bedroom, and changed into my Joan of Arc clothes. My heart beat faster with new resolve. I would not let past disappointments keep me from committing to a relationship. Wouldn't Liv be surprised at the sudden turnaround!

I fed the cats their breakfast early—in my experience, cats are always ready for breakfast—and left the house, driving the CR-V to Larry's place. There was no sign of him guarding the fence, but I hadn't expected to see him at this time of night. There was, however, a lock box near the fence with a cardboard sign that said, “
TOLL: FIVE DOLLARS
.” I wasn't sure it applied to me, but since I hadn't brought five dollars, it wasn't an issue.

The moonlight that had helped me navigate Larry's driveway wasn't as helpful in forging my way along that deer path through the woods. I clutched my arms, as the air seemed chillier than I initially thought. Or maybe I was cold from the blood loss, because the mosquitoes had taken enough to support a whole colony for three years. I managed to find my way more from memory, and was relieved when I stumbled into camp—yes, literally. Stupid tree root.

At least here I was free of the dense canopy of leaves, and the moonlight made the camp navigable. Bats and moths weren't the only things flying around. I had more than a few butterflies in my stomach as I stole through the deserted pathways to Nick's tent.

Only somewhere along the way I lost my nerve again. Which was probably for the best. The last thing I needed was to bounce from one rash decision to another. Whatever happened to levelheaded Audrey? Apparently she was a bit stressed at the moment.

And unfocused. What in the world was I doing running around camp in the middle of the night, thinking of love, when there was a possible murderer still on the loose? Ugh, my father's reappearance seemed to short-circuit my rationality and send me right back to adolescence. I was surprised my face hadn't erupted into acne.

Perhaps the cooler temperatures had frozen some of the giddiness out of me and replaced it with cold, hard facts. If Nick didn't want to commit to a relationship until the bakery was solvent, what would he do if Mel Brooks's lawyers sued him over the poisoning? Even mounting a defense against the litigation could put him under. No, any serious talks about the future of our relationship would have to wait until the killer was identified and behind bars.

I wandered around the camp a little longer, rubbing my hands together to try to generate some warmth. I felt foolish for having come all the way out here, but it didn't make sense to trek back through those woods in the dark. Maybe I could just wait somewhere until the camp woke up.

And then I remembered. Chandler Hines, Eli Strickland, and my father were all in custody, leaving that whole area of the camp unoccupied. I could hang out there and wait for morning to come. After all, my father had a warm, empty sleeping bag in his tent.

Better yet, I could do a little snooping.

I was tempted to search my father's tent again, but as I approached the food vendor's empty stall, I thought about how Barry Brooks had been killed. Someone had put monkshood—probably a cooked root—into his food. But only his food. Which means the killer had some means of cooking it.

Eli Strickland would have had a fire or stove or something. If he'd cooked potatoes with nobody noticing, why not monkshood? And maybe he'd only pretended to be surprised to learn who Barry Brooks was. Strickland had a twisted motive, if he somehow attributed his arrest to Brooks.

I didn't know if Strickland would be stupid enough to leave evidence lying around, but he hadn't been the focus of the investigation. And he couldn't have predicted that he'd be in jail right now. Was it too much to hope that he'd left something incriminating behind?

And searching the food stall wouldn't even be breaking and entering. The booth was open to the elements.

I slid under the counter, finding a cardboard box underneath the draping. Did they have cardboard in the Middle Ages?

I tugged the box onto the counter into the moonlight and started to rummage through it. On top were several printed flyers for various Renaissance fairs—apparently Strickland traveled the circuit. Underneath were all kinds of modern kitchen supplies. Matches. A lighter. A vegetable peeler. MSG. Yeah, Eli Strickland wasn't really with the program. Perhaps the medieval circuit was just his way of staying off the radar and avoiding people like my father.

I had my nose buried in the box. Something in the bottom was wrapped in layer after layer of shiny butcher's paper. Very suspicious. What was the mousy little food vendor hiding in the bottom of this innocent, albeit anachronistic cardboard box?

I removed layers of paper much as one might unwrap a mummy—or perhaps more like trying to get the toilet paper off the trees during spirit week at the middle school. I had just reached the center when I encountered what felt like fingers of dried flesh. I dropped them back into the box. I shined my cell phone into the bottom to see what exactly I had touched. A little bit of wrapping remained. Dried cod. At first I was relieved, until I caught instructions on the side for something called lutefisk. Yeah, sure. Take these dried-up leathery bits of fish and soak them in lye. Yum? I shuddered.