Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery by Rosemary Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

nurseries, no matter what time of year it is. My new favorite was D’Angelo’s, forty minutes west of Springfield, on the other side of the Paradise. The owners did their best to make the place a destination even though gardening season was winding down. They geared up for Halloween with hayrides, a haunted house, mountains of pumpkins and ornamental kale, and a fall sale on perennials that would save me dough and time next season. As long as everything was well watered, fall was an even better time to plant than spring because it gave plants the chance to establish themselves before the growing season kicked in.
    I pulled out my shopping list and dragged around a flatbed dolly with uncooperative wheels, piling on threes and fives of my favorites. I stalked the false lamiums.
    No matter how hard I tried not to, I invariably fell in love with some plant or shrub that wasn’t on my list and would put me over budget or, worse, that I didn’t have an appropriate place or client for. Early in my gardening career I’d killed a few spectacular plants by making rash purchases. I still had their sap on my hands and mourned them every time I went to the nursery and saw a magnolia ‘Edith Bogue’ or a hibiscus ‘Lord Baltimore’ like the ones I’d killed—as if these shrubs knew what I’d done to their brethren, and would somehow punish me for it if I took one of them home.
    I was struggling to lift a lovely but totally unnecessary Japanese cutleaf maple onto my cart when a white pickup pulled into the garden center. Was it the creepy guy from the diner? I hunkered down and hid behind the tree, kicking myself for not having chosen a wider shrub that would have made a more effective screen. I left my cart where it was and crawled on all fours behind a lush, and thicker, miscanthus. I peered around the plant and saw first, work shoes, then a pair of denimed knees, and a beaded belt that claimed the wearer loved, or more precisely “hearted,” Guatemala.
    “May I assist you with something?” The man’s T-shirt identified him as a nursery employee. What could I say? “No, thank you, I’m hiding because I think I see an ex-con who doesn’t know a countertop from a kayak?” Nah.
    “I think I lost something,” I lied and patted the gravel, which had by then had stuck to my hands and made little pockmarks in my palms. The nursery employee bent down to help me look.
    “What was it?”
    Yeah. What was it? Wallet? Keys? Nope, too big and too noisy.
    “An earring…No! They’re both here! Boy, that’s lucky.” I grabbed both of my ears.
    He stood and was polite enough not to ask the obvious question: Why are you still crouched on the ground if you didn’t lose your earring?
    I mumbled something about my back, my age, my sciatica, and my inability to stand up fast without the blood rushing to my head and making me dizzy. I rattled off so many fictitious ailments it’s a wonder the man didn’t ask where my caregiver was.
    I made a show of getting up slowly, eyeballing the garden center and looking for the white pickup that I thought belonged to Countertop Man. I saw one idling, all the way to the right in the back lot where pros were shoveling mulch and compost into their trucks.
    “Are you taking the maple, senorita?” the man asked when he was sure I was okay.
    “No, I’ve changed my mind. I was looking for the false lamiums. Are they in yet?” Right…I mistook a tree for a perennial.
    “Maybe our next shipment,” he said. “Try again in a few days.”
    “Just these plants, then.” The man pushed my cart to the checkout desk for me, walking at a funereal pace in deference to my wretched physical condition until we reached the outside counter, where yet another employee would tally my purchases and hand me a slip to take inside to the cashier. Everyone’s a specialist.
    I glanced to the right and saw the white pickup turn around and come barreling toward us. I leaned back slightly so that my face was hidden