“And to give you two scares, not just one.”
“Does this person…um, have more bones?”
He shut his small spiral notebook and shoved it in a breast pocket. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
Kat swallowed. “Is there any way to check those bones for DNA?”
“I don’t know.” When he’d disappeared, the police had taken hair from Hugh’s comb, so they’d have it as a reference if needed. “The thing is, even if we can, it often takes months. I can’t demand a rush job. This is upsetting for you, but it’s not as if we have a serial killer operating here. On the scale of crimes, this is about a one.”
Months? she thought, aghast. And then she took in his dismissive one. Her spine stiffened. “If those are Hugh’s bones, and somebody kept them, then the chances are he was murdered. That’s a one, in your opinion?”
“Only in terms of urgency.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what.” Mad now, she slid from the stool and faced him with her chin thrust out. “I’m feeling a little urgent here. Whether those are Hugh’s bones or not, this feels a lot like a threat to me. I’m taking it seriously, even if you aren’t!”
“Oh, I’m taking it seriously.” His eyes still glittered with what she suddenly realized was major tem per. “Can you sit down and make me those lists right away? In the meantime, I’m going to go talk to anyone who is working today, find out if they were back here and if they saw anyone else nearby. We’ll get lists of names from them, too.”
With his anger both comforting her and ratcheting up her fear again, Kat nodded. “We’ll be at the cash registers.”
He went out ahead of them, pausing to examine the door with its rusting, wrought-iron handles, then shook his head as if in frustration. Kat guessed he was thinking of fingerprints, and realizing the pock-marked handle was unlikely to provide a good surface for lifting a print. Besides…how many people had grabbed it? Even on a glossy surface, could one print be lifted from atop thousands?
She and Joan walked to the main nursery building, heads ducked as if that would keep them from getting wet. The earlier mist had become a steady, cold rain, one that wasn’t more than five degrees Fahrenheit from turning into snow. Ah, spring, Kat thought wryly.
The few customers had evaporated, and who could blame them?
“Ugh,” Joan said, when they hurried inside. She, at least, wore a vest. Anticipating the near-tropical warmth in the greenhouse, Kat had left her jean jacket in her office earlier despite the bite to the air outside.
They shook off the rain. Kat grabbed a notebook and they both sat on stools behind the counter. “Let’s start with today,” she said.
“George Slagle.” Joan rolled her eyes.
“He was here today and yesterday,” Kat said, explaining.
She started two sheets, labeled the top of each Wednesday and Thursday, then wrote George’s name on both. “Annika. You said she was in today.”
“Right.”
“Yesterday, too,” Kat said, and wrote her down. “Uh…I waited on Becca Montgomery. Her teenage boy was with her.”
“Billy. He’s a good kid.”
Despite the hair dyed goth-black and the tattoos spreading like a skin fungus on his lower arms. Kat had seen the way he dragged after his mother, every line of his body resisting the necessity of being at a nursery with her. He was probably petrified that one of his buddies would see him. But he hadn’t argued when his mom asked him to heft five gallon pots, so maybe he was okay.
“Jason said Mike Hedin came by yesterday,” she remembered.
“He was here today, too.” Widening, Joan’s eyes met hers. “Just after you called. I was ready to sprint back to you, but he stopped me and asked for you. I lied and said you were gone for the day.”
Mike Hedin was an odd duck, but he’d been nice to Kat. She detested this, having to suspect everyone. “Did you see what direction he came from?” she asked.
Joan shook her head. “He just…appeared. You sounded so freaked, I wasn’t noticing anything else.”
Carefully, Kat wrote Mike Hedin.
“Lisa Llewellyn was here today, remember? She bought a bunch of annuals.”
Their lists grew. Carol Scammell, a school board member, had bought a Japanese maple to replace a tree in her yard damaged by a February storm. Greg Buckmeier, one of the few male members of the garden club, trolling for the unusual perennials that were a specialty of the nursery. People neither knew.
“I didn’t take the receipts to the bank yesterday,” Kat admitted. “Which is lucky. I’ll look at the checks and credit-card slips. I’ll bet I can add more names.”
By the time they were done, they had over thirty people listed for Wednesday, eighteen…no, nineteen for today even though business had been slower. And those were only the people either she or Joan had personally waited on or noticed. Kat had had at least two other employees working both days.
Worse yet, the nursery wasn’t fully fenced. Somebody on staff would probably spot a customer who parked in the lot and came in the front entrance, but Hazeltine Road ran north-south alongside the nursery, and who’d notice a car parked on the shoulder for a brief time? A dirt lane behind the nursery led to the Schultz farm, once a going concern and now more of a hobby for Will and Martha Schultz, who Kat happened to know were still in Arizona where they wintered.
Oh, yes, it would be all too easy for someone to slip entirely unnoticed onto the nursery grounds, keeping the greenhouses between him and the main grounds of the nursery.
Only…how would someone like that know that she was the one working in greenhouse four? Didn’t whoever left those bones almost have to have seen her go in there yesterday morning and then leave her work undone when the nursery got busier?
Confused and frightened, she said, “I’ll leave this here for now. We can add to it if we remember anyone else.”
Joan nodded. “Is that rain turning to snow, or am I imagining things?”
Kat followed her gaze and grimaced. “Boy, that’s great for business.”
Even worse, she thought, would be the story coming out of human bones being found here at the nursery. People would be reminded about Hugh’s disappearance. The whispers would start again, maybe even worse because everyone would see how well she’d done without him. No, the taint of murder would not be good for business.
Which might be the whole point of this, except she couldn’t for the life of her imagine who would benefit from hurting her business. She didn’t have any real competitors, only a couple of specialty nurseries that benefited, if anything, from the success of hers. For goodness sake, she bought her rhododendrons from Mountain Rhodies and her bearded iris from A Rainbow of Iris, and happily gave both a plug in case a customer wanted more variety than she could offer. And she couldn’t imagine the garden manager at Lowe’s Home and Garden Center sabotaging her.
No, dumb idea. Something else was behind this grisly plot. Someone playing a mean game, and Kat was pretty sure she was meant to lose.
She sucked in a ragged breath. Right now, what she wanted most was to know whether those bones were Hugh’s.
HE HAD NO OBJECTIVITY whatsoever where Kat Riley was concerned, which made him a dangerous man to be conducting this investigation. Trouble was, he didn’t trust anyone else to conduct it, either.
Grant dug out the binder that held police reports and notes on Hugh’s disappearance, in case he’d forgotten anything. He hadn’t. But now, reading again the original missing persons report, he had to ask himself: Could she have made all that up?
Sure