Garden of Death Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Mailing List Signup

  Juniper Grove Mystery Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Death of a Professor Cover

  From the Author

  More Books

  GARDEN OF DEATH

  A JUNIPER GROVE MYSTERY

  KARIN KAUFMAN

  Copyright © 2018 Karin Kaufman

  Series cover design by Deranged Doctor Design

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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  JUNIPER GROVE MYSTERY SERIES

  Death of a Dead Man (Book 1) — Out Now

  Death of a Scavenger (Book 2) — Out Now

  At Death’s Door (Book 3) — Out Now

  Death of a Santa (Book 4) — Out Now

  Scared to Death (Book 5) — Out Now

  Cheating Death (Book 6) — Out Now

  Death Trap (Book 7) — Out Now

  Death Knell (Book 8) — Out Now

  Garden of Death (Book 9) — Out Now

  Death of a Professor (Book 10) — Coming Soon

  CHAPTER 1

  If not for Valerie Siegler’s stunning hydrangeas and some fabulous miniature fruit tarts making the rounds, I would have made my exit. Admittedly, it was mostly the tarts that kept me from leaving. The tarts and the fact that my neighbor, Julia Foster, was enjoying herself. For the first time in all her years in Juniper Grove she had been chosen as a judge in the town’s annual Garden Design Show, and now, at a party in the prize-winning garden, she was in her element. Chatting with the other judges, for once an equal.

  I bit into my fifth tart—they were small—and gazed in quiet envy at Valerie’s white and pink hydrangeas growing in the dappled shade of two young peach trees. I had heard too much snark since first arriving at the Sieglers’ home on Blue Pond Road. This or that garden hadn’t been up to its usual standards, one entrant had inexplicably used orange-colored mulch in her perennials bed, and another entrant, if he had any sense at all, had no business entering any kind of garden contest.

  It was to be expected, considering that the other guests, all seven of them, were either judges or their spouses. Judges judge, and maybe their spouses had picked up the critical habit. But the pettiness was grating on me. Couldn’t they just take in the beauty of the Sieglers’ backyard? The contest was over, for crying out loud.

  “Are you a fan of hydrangeas, Rachel?”

  I looked to my right to see Valerie making her way down a paver path set in her emerald-green lawn. Wearing dressy high-heel sandals, she tottered slightly, managing her too-full glass of iced tea by holding it away from her body and letting the spilled tea dribble safely to the ground.

  “Never wear sandals in the garden,” she said as she sidled up to me. She grinned, dimples creasing her cheeks.

  I don’t know why, but I had always considered dimples the sign of a friendly, open personality. Then again, my dimples theory had been proved wrong on more than one occasion. “I’ll remember that,” I said. “Your hydrangeas are beautiful, and so is the rest of your garden. You deserve your gold medal.”

  Valerie beamed. “Thank you! Lucas and I work so hard on it. To be honest, it takes up most of our free time. You came with Julia Foster, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, she’s my next-door neighbor.”

  “And you like the tarts, I see.”

  I glanced down at the half tart in my hand. “You noticed that, did you?”

  Valerie bit her lip and snickered good-naturedly. “There are plenty more on the kitchen table, so help yourself. I’ve had three, and I’m just getting started. It’s fruit, right?”

  Now I was beginning to enjoy myself. In her mid-sixties, with white-gray hair and a pleasant, round face, Valerie seemed in a non-snarky mood. But then, she and her husband had just won the Garden Design Show’s gold medal. “Just blueberries and strawberries. That’s what I’m telling myself.”

  “Have you met Lucas, my husband?”

  “Only on TV,” I replied. “I haven’t been here that long. He’s quite the gardener.”

  Lucas Siegler was a minor TV personality in Juniper Grove. Once a week in the summer, he drove the sixty miles from our little town to Denver to tape a weekly three-minute gardening segment called Front Range Gardening. And every now and then, the station would send a van to Lucas’s house and he would tape a segment in his own garden, which he was justly proud of. I’d always found him lacking in details—not surprisingly, given television’s time constraints—but I disliked his show for another reason. I couldn’t stand the man’s facial tics.

  Everyone has tics, but Lucas was an extraordinary practitioner. So much so that I often wondered how he held on to his job. During his segments, every ten seconds or so, he’d blink with force, bringing the bridge of his nose up—along with his glasses—and his eyebrows down, wrinkling his forehead in the process. Sometimes he’d add a dry sniff to the mixture. It wasn’t pleasant to watch, and because I didn’t like the thoughts that ran through my head while I watched him, I shut off the TV when he came on.

  “I wonder where he went to,” Valerie said, scanning her large backyard. “Though, let me say”—she leaned close—“with Lucas’s background, we get into some snits over what to grow, how much to grow, and where to grow it. I still can’t believe we pulled this garden together.” She plucked a thick lemon wedge from her glass, squeezed the juice into her tea, and dropped the wedge in her glass. “There’s Doyle Charming,” she said, nodding. “In the white suit jacket with his plate piled high. Have you met him?”

  “Not yet.” But I’d walked by him earlier and heard his snort of laughter as he described a “delusional” entrant’s “diseased roses.” I popped the rest of the fruit tart in my mouth and resisted the urge to ask her if Doyle Charming was his real name.

  “Doyle!” Valerie called out.

  Doyle pivoted at the waist, raised his chin in greeting, and then headed our way, a devilish smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

  “Please don’t be a jerk,” Valerie said under her breath.

  I shot her a sideways look. “Me?”

  “No, not you. Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Valerie, Valerie, there you are,” Doyle said, ambling up to her, blue plastic plate in hand. By the looks of it, he was eating as many tarts as I was. Wearing a white jacket, navy blue pants, and a blue-and-cream tie, he looked stylishly out of place. “I lost you in the house somewhere. Have you seen Caroline yet?”

  “Behave yourself,” Valerie said.

  “The Kentucky Derby was two months ago.�
�

  “Doyle.”

  “Daisy wreaths,” he said, using his forefinger to draw an invisible halo around his head. “She’s being dived-bombed by bees.”

  Valerie ignored his hat commentary. “I’d like you to meet Rachel Stowe, Julia Foster’s friend.”

  “Well, a pleasure,” Doyle said, briefly taking my hand. “I don’t know if she told you, but Julia and I disagreed strongly on second place.”

  “She didn’t say a word.”

  “Good for her,” Doyle continued. “She may be a novice at judging, but she did very well, and she held her own when some of us disagreed with her. I think we’ll invite her back next year. Now, let’s stop for a moment and drink in this garden.”

  Doyle spread his arm out, presenting the garden as though I’d just walked through the gate. He was older than Valerie by a good ten years, I thought. His hands were generously sprinkled with liver spots, and except for a half circle of white hair growing from one ear to the other, he was bald.

  “I still can’t believe I won the gold medal,” Valerie said.

  “You did, my dear, and it was almost a slam dunk.”

  “Almost?” Valerie asked.

  Doyle shrugged and looked away. “There’s your husband, coming out your patio door.”

  “Finally. I’ve been looking for him. What’s he been doing?” Valerie said.

  “He’s been fixing drinks and eating tarts in the kitchen, I believe,” Doyle answered. “And there’s Caroline. How does she walk upright with the weight of that thing on her head?”

  “Where is her husband?” Valerie asked.

  “I’d say helping her hold up the backside of her hat, but he didn’t come,” Doyle said. “He was invited, but maybe he and the hat couldn’t fit into their car.”

  The female subject of Doyle’s questionable wit was exiting the Sieglers’ patio door, right behind Lucas. Caroline had a fruit tart in one hand and a drink in the other—judging by the short glass and the color of its contents, whiskey or bourbon on ice. Sure, her hat was a little large, and there were a few too many flowers on it, but it didn’t merit Doyle’s snide remarks. She was in her mid-forties, but even so, her shoulder-length hair, flowing like velvet ribbons from under her hat, was dark brown, thick, and glossy like a teenager’s.

  I immediately went into envy mode, comparing her locks to my own thin, limp, and graying brown hair. I’d never had hair like hers, and at forty-three, mine wasn’t going to get any better.

  “You don’t drink, Rachel?” Doyle asked.

  I snapped out of it. “Not at two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Excuse me, Rachel,” Valerie said. “I need to talk to Lucas. See you later, Doyle.” She headed across the lawn, her sandal heels making hard work of her trek to the patio.

  Doyle watched Valerie momentarily, and then his head swiveled toward me. “Have you seen Lucas on television?” he asked.

  He stared intently, waiting for my answer. I had the feeling he’d been wanting to ask me that since meeting me and had been biding his time.

  “A few times,” I said, glancing at Lucas. The man had completely shaved his rapidly balding head since I’d last seen one of his TV segments. But not recently because I can’t bear to.

  “And what do you think?”

  What did he want me to say? I answered as ambiguously as possible. “It seems like hard work, trying to pack useful information into a three-minute slot.”

  Doyle smiled. I didn’t like his smile, so I searched the yard for Julia and spotted her talking to two women, one of them with blue streaks in her long black hair and the other a little older and a little more polished looking. I’d overheard them both, though, before grabbing my first fruit tart. The blue-haired one had talked about So-and-So’s bad delphiniums, and the polished one had concurred and then shared her horror of the lack of standards among this year’s entrants.

  “Should they give Lucas Siegler five whole minutes, I doubt he could do better than he does now,” Doyle said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Once more he shrugged and looked away. He wanted to dish the dirt, but he didn’t want to be pinned down as the source of that dirt, so he remained cryptic. Message sent, no price to pay for sending it.

  I was about to excuse myself and wander over to Julia when I heard shrieks from the vicinity of the patio. Caroline, screaming and flapping one arm, was running in zigzag formation as if dodging sniper fire.

  “Take off the hat!” Doyle shouted.

  I started for the patio. Short of grabbing her hat from her head, I didn’t know what I could do, but no one else was moving. Even Valerie and Lucas, who stood nearest Caroline, were merely observing the commotion. There wasn’t a hint of concern on either of their faces.

  Before I could reach her, Caroline wised up and tossed her hat. I heard a loud snort and turned to see Doyle doubled over with laughter.

  “It’s not funny, Doyle!” Caroline yelled. She started toward him, her hands curling into fists, but was swiftly intercepted by the polished-looking woman.

  “You weren’t stung, were you?” the woman said, laying a hand on Caroline’s arm.

  “No, but only just,” Caroline said, still glaring at Doyle. “He’s knows I have asthma. The jerk.”

  “It’s a garden, Caroline. There are going to be bees. It’s not a big thing.”

  “Thank you so much for your wisdom, Allegra.”

  As Caroline shook away from the woman, her face contorted in disgust and she bared her teeth in an almost comical display of anger.

  Two seconds later she dropped her glass. And then she fell like a sack of potatoes to the ground.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Do you think she was allergic to bees?” Julia asked me. We sat at the Sieglers’ enormous kitchen table, watching through the sliding glass patio door as the coroner’s team carted Caroline’s body from the scene.

  “I heard her say she hadn’t been stung,” I said. “And I don’t think people react that quickly to bee stings, do they? They swell up or have trouble breathing first. Did you know her well?”

  “She called me up two weeks ago, inviting me to be a judge this year. I met her the next day, and then again when we judged the gardens, but I can’t say I knew her very well. She seemed like a nice woman, though. She was kind to me.” Julia shifted in her seat, angling herself away from Valerie and Lucas, who sat near the head of the table. “I can’t say that about the rest of them,” she whispered, “except maybe Allegra and Stella.”

  “The two women I saw you talking to? One of them with blue hair?”

  Julia nodded. “That’s Stella Patmore,” she said quietly, “and the other is Allegra Jones. You wouldn’t believe the stories I’ve heard, and I don’t mean about gardening.” Her eyes roamed the kitchen, traveling from Doyle, who was leaning glum-faced against the refrigerator, to Stella and Allegra, who were whispering in a corner under the vine-like stems of a sad-looking pothos in a hanging planter.

  My neighbor had a lot to say, and I was eager to hear her, but the Sieglers’ kitchen wasn’t the place, and anyway, our conversation came to a halt when Chief James Gilroy pulled the patio door open and strode into the kitchen. On his heels was Officer Derek Underhill.

  “Thank you for waiting,” Gilroy said. “I’m going to interview each of you individually, and when I’ve finished with each of you, you can go home.”

  “Why do we have to be interviewed?” Doyle asked. He raised his chin and yanked at the knot in his tie.

  “Because you’re witnesses to a death,” Gilroy said. He looked down at the Sieglers. “Do you have an office or someplace private for the interviews?”

  “An office,” Valerie said, pushing to her feet. “Back this way.” She had turned a little pale in the immediate aftermath of Caroline’s death, but she rose without effort, and her strides were strong and sure as she led Gilroy and Underhill into the living room. They disappeared down a hall, Valerie’s sandals clacking on the wood floor
.

  Although there was as yet no cause to suspect murder, Gilroy liked to interview witnesses separately, ensuring their answers to his questions were theirs alone, candid and unfiltered.

  Doyle exhaled with a groan and took a seat on the other side of the table. “I need to go home,” he groused. “I feel quite sick.”

  Lucas squinted at him. “Do you need a doctor?” he said flatly.

  “No, I do not. I was speaking metaphorically.”

  “This isn’t the time for metaphorical talk.”

  “It’s always the time for metaphorical talk.”

  I heard an even louder groan from the corner of the kitchen. “Oh be quiet, both of you.” Allegra Jones, the Polished One, marched to the table, her flowery dress swinging, and planted her hands on her hips. “I’ll tell you what it’s not the time for,” she chastised. “Arguing. Not now.”

  “We apologize,” Lucas said in the same flat tone he used on Doyle.

  “Do we?” Doyle said.

  “We’re upset, that’s all,” Lucas went on. He ran a hand over his hairless head. “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m wrecked,” Allegra said. She was in her mid-thirties, her light brown hair was short and straight, and I now noticed her narrow but sharply hooked nose. The kind of nose that had probably brought her a lot of grief in high school. She let her arms dangle, and as she surveyed the backyard, Lucas followed suit. Flattened grass still marked the spot where Caroline had fallen and lain until the coroner had taken her away, but her whiskey glass had been removed.

  “She didn’t bleed or anything,” Doyle said, reaching out to finger a stack of blue plastic plates next to Valerie’s tray of fruit tarts.

  “It’s not like someone hit her,” Lucas said.

  “What I mean is, she just keeled over,” Doyle retorted.

  “There wasn’t even a bee,” Lucas said. “I don’t know what she was running around for.”