Killing Weeds (12 page)

“Have you been watering the poor thing?” Lilla asked.

“Of course she’s been watering it.” Ranson deflected his wife’s acidic tone. “This is something else.”

Peggy examined the tree carefully. Of course it was going to die someday—no plant, tree, or person lived forever. But this wasn’t a normal death.

The tree had been healthy last month when she’d done her semi-annual checkup on it. It should have had years to live.

“Help me with the floor, Paul,” Peggy said.

She and John had a special trap door put in the wood floor so they could get to the roots of the tree that were growing from a deep, ceramic well that had been created for it. The base of the tree reached up from the basement area through the hole in the floor.

“Should we go down into the basement to look at it?” Paul asked.

“No.” Peggy had seen what she needed. When the trap door had been opened, a plastic vial with dozens of holes in it dropped to the floor at her feet. She used a pair of gloves that she’d always kept in the antique table at the foot of the circular stairs to protect her hands when she worked on the prickly boughs.

“Someone poisoned it.” She held the vial up to her nose and sniffed it. “Someone came into the house and killed my tree.”

There was a painful sob stuck in her throat that she refused to release. She pushed past her friends and hurried to the basement where she could analyze the poison.

Steve followed quickly behind her. “Wait, Peggy. Maybe you shouldn’t try to do that yourself.”

“Why not?” she demanded. “Someone came into our house and did this—probably this morning when I went outside to help Sam with the plan shipment. I forgot to set the alarm or lock the door. I want to know what’s in this and who did it.”

“Is there something I can do to help?”

Her green eyes were calm and cold. “Go back upstairs. Look for the killer. Don’t let anyone else come down here.”

He started to speak again but gave up, nodded, and went upstairs.

Hundreds of memories rushed through Peggy’s mind. All the Christmas celebrations with Paul and John held at the base of the growing spruce. Years of tending the tree and watching it grow. The day she’d told John about her idea to plant a tree in the old house. The tiny spruce that had stood tall in the main hall. It had been barely a sapling that they passed each day.

She refused to cry as she dumped the rest of the poison into a pot and began experimenting on it. Various chemical compounds responded to her tests. Whoever had poisoned the spruce knew exactly what they were doing—as they had with the hogweed in the lining of the mink coat.

When she’d finished her testing, she sat in the office chair she kept at her desk in the basement. It was too late to save the spruce. Enough of the poison in the cylinder had gone into the dirt and roots to keep her from stopping it.

Shakespeare had stayed in the basement with her. He whined as he stared at her, as though he felt the terrible sorrow that was clutching at her heart.

“There’s nothing we can do,” she whispered to him. “It’s dead. We might as well have someone remove it.”

He rolled over and covered his eyes with his paws.

“Who could hate me enough—and know me so well—to do something like this? It has to be connected to the garden shop and setting Paul up for the murder. I understand that, but I can’t imagine who I’ve harmed so badly that they would want this revenge on me.”

Peggy sat there for a while longer, taking it all in and wondering what the next thing would be. This was obviously a personal campaign to hurt and embarrass her, maybe ruin her entire life.

She had to find a way to stop this. She had to figure out who was behind it.

Blue Spruce

Blue spruce is rarely used for lumber because the wood is brittle and full of knots. But because of its lovely shape and color, along with its thick boughs, it is planted in landscape settings.

Chapter Eighteen

Peggy finally went upstairs. Ranson and Lilla had remained behind. Al and Paul had gone back out to find more information about the woman in the drawing. Millie had gone to join Norris at the office. Steve was nursing a glass of whiskey at the kitchen table.

When they saw her, Walter was first on his feet.

“Let me take a look at it. My specialty is trees, remember? I can probably save it.”

“It’s too late.” Peggy told him the chemicals and their amounts that she’d found in the poison vial. “There is no way to save it. We both know it.”

Walter hung his head. “I’m so sorry, my dear. Do you think one of the police officers did this today?”

“I don’t think so. It’s been a few hours.” She put the kettle on to boil. “I think it happened this morning, but it may have been formulated to be fast-acting.”

“You have an alarm,” Lilla said. “No one can go in and out without you knowing. How could this happen?”

“The same thing happened with The Potting Shed alarm,” Steve added. “What company is the house alarm with, Peggy?”

“I had Dalton change alarm companies to the same one Brevard Court uses for the shops.” Peggy felt a flutter in her chest as she said it. “Does that mean whoever is doing this works at the alarm company?”

“It’s possible.” Steve put his arm around her. “I’ve heard of cases like this before. I’m going to talk to someone at the company, and we’ll see what’s going on. Please stay here with your parents.”

Peggy wrote the name of the company on a slip of paper. “Why? Whoever did this could have poisoned me at the same time but didn’t.”

“Please.” Steve’s brown eyes stared into hers. “Let’s not take any chances.”

The kettle whistled. She nodded. “All right.”

Peggy stayed at the house with her parents. She spent the time on her computer looking up the names of the people she’d taken from the fur shop. If there was anything suspicious about them at all, she couldn’t find it. She also came up with a list of people who might hate her. The names were from cases she’d helped the police solve.

She figured out the approximate amounts of hogweed to the other poison plants in the mixture that had killed Nita Honohan and texted it to Millie.

At that point, her mind just wouldn’t let her go any farther. She sat, staring at her computer, until a chime sounded on her phone letting her know that she had a call.

It was her friend, Nightflyer.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ve been out of town.”

“There was nothing you could do.”

“Do you know who’s done these things?”

“No. The police are still trying to figure it out. They don’t have much to go on.”

“But you have a feeling?”

“I have no idea who could hate me this much.”

“You’re letting your emotions cloud your analytical skills.”

“Maybe.”

“You have to be sharp about this. I’ll do what I can to help from here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Hong Kong. And I only tell you that because I’m leaving.”

“I’m sorry. Is there nowhere you can hide?”

“No. And there is nowhere the woman stalking you can hide either. Not if you really look for her.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“No. I wish I did. Be careful. From the pattern of her actions, she wants you to be terrified before she kills you. Don’t give her that luxury.”

“Thanks.”

But there was no reply.

Peggy had no idea who Nightflyer really was. She’d started playing online chess with him after John’s death. He’d told her they could never meet. Now she suspected he might know who actually killed John, and why.

He’d been on the run the last few years after trying to get away from his past life. He never stayed anywhere for more than a day or two. She thought he might be a spy or some government official.

She wished he would have had a better explanation for what had been happening to her. A lot of times he knew things before the police even though he was thousands of miles away. She pictured him in a room with dozens of computers and newsfeed coming in from all over the world keeping him updated.

And yet it seemed he couldn’t even save himself. How did she expect him to know how to save her?

For a while, before they were married, Peggy had suspected Steve of being Nightflyer. There was that night in the park across the street where she was supposed to meet her computer friend. Steve had been there, supposedly keeping an eye on her.

Once they were married, Steve had such hard feelings about Nightflyer that she couldn’t imagine it was him anymore.

“Get your head together, Peggy.” She looked at the people on the furrier’s list and the people on her list of possible suspects.

What did they have in common?

What was the one important clue she couldn’t tell from their names and addresses?

“I can’t tell what you look like.” She circled the names of the three women on Stewart Purl’s list.  The killer was careful with her identity. She went to great lengths to disguise herself from Paul and Sam. She could be anyone.

She looked at the list of people she’d sent to jail. She’d barely known most of them—some of them not at all.

“It can’t be one of those people. They’d only be guessing at what they could do to get back at me. This has to be someone who knows me personally.”

Peggy circled the only name on the list that matched all the criteria—Ruth Sargent.

Years ago a good friend of hers, a specialist in underwater forensics, had an affair and killed the man who loved her. The police had asked Peggy to look at a plant that was twined in the victim’s hair. She’d identified it as duckweed. Then she’d met her old friend, Ruth, who was working on the double homicide, also working for the police.

Peggy hadn’t put the facts together until after everything was over. She’d realized that Ruth had killed her lover and his wife. Once she knew that Ruth had committed the perfect murders, and made a fool of her in the process, Peggy felt that she had to call the police.

Ruth had been arrested and been charged with the murders. She was serving two life sentences somewhere in the state. She couldn’t be out of prison yet.

Peggy called Al. She asked him about the case that had involved her old college friend.

“Sure. I remember that. There’s no way she’s part of this. I can understand why you’d think she could be. But she’s still in prison.”

“Are you sure? Is there any way to check?”

“I can check with a phone call, Peggy. But there’s no way she’s out yet, not even for good behavior. I’ll call the prison and let you know for sure.”

“Thanks, Al.”

Peggy put her phone in her pocket and turned her mind to how it was possible to make the paste she’d found in the lining of Nita Honohan’s mink coat.

Of course any plant, poisonous or not, could be made into salves and ointments. It was where the first medicines came from. All someone needed were the basic elements of the plant—flowers, leaves, berries, roots, or stems. Any of those could be, and had been, made into gels, powders, and other topical solutions.

But if she was correct, and her stalker was Ruth, where did she get the idea? Ruth was clever, but she wasn’t a botanist. Putting together a poison solution to kill the tree she knew Peggy loved was one thing. Figuring out what to do with the giant hogweed was another.

Still, it was possible. Ruth was intelligent and resourceful, as she’d found to her chagrin.

Peggy looked through her journals that arrived monthly from various botanical groups and institutions. There were several mentions of hogweed and its march through the U.S. Everyone was worried about what would happen when it came into contact with larger numbers of people.

She couldn’t find anything about experiments being done with hogweed. She checked everywhere she could think of online, but there was nothing.

Her father brought her a cup of orange spice tea, one of her favorites.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“I think it’s possible that I know who’s behind all of this. Ruth Sargent. She specializes in underwater forensics. I don’t know how much of a leap that would be into botany, but it makes sense.”

Peggy explained about their friendship and turning Ruth over to the police. “Al says she’s still in prison, but he’s checking to make sure. Right now, she’s the only one that was my friend for many years, and would know all about me. I think she’d be capable of doing this.”

“But if she’s in prison, Margaret, that wouldn’t make any sense.”

“I know.” She sipped her tea. “We’ll see what Al has to say.”

Her phone rang. It was Al.

“Well, I found Ruth Sargent,” he said. “She’s not in prison.”

Peggy’s heart fluttered as she carefully set down her cup of tea.

“She escaped? Shouldn’t we have known about that?”

“You could say she escaped. Actually, she died last year.”

Arrowhead

Also known as Indian Potato because their tuberous roots can be eaten like potatoes. Native American women collected the plants by digging them out of the water with their toes. They were baked in fires and were a staple of their diet. Mostly wild today but also used as pond plants for indoor gardens.

Chapter Nineteen

“Are you sure?” Peggy asked.

“Yeah. Pretty sure. She was killed in a knife fight at the prison. There was an autopsy and everything. She’s not our killer.”

Ranson waited until Peggy said goodbye to Al.

“So not the person you thought,” he guessed.

“No.” Peggy thought hard about Ruth. “She was the only one I could think of. How could anyone else know where I lived, what I did, and exactly where to hurt me?”

He hugged her. “You’ll come up with another name. There’s someone out there you’re not thinking about, honey. Maybe you should get off the computer for a while and come downstairs with your mother and me.”

“You know, Dad. I think I’ll get away from the computer for a while, but I’m heading to The Potting Shed.”

“There’s nothing you can do there right now. And you promised Steve you’d stay here so we know you’re safe.”

“Dad, I—”