Nightshade on Elm Street: A Flower Shop Mystery (23 page)

Marco’s sister Gina was putting together a bouquet of roses at my worktable.

Wearing
my
florist’s apron and wielding
my
floral knife.

The takeover was complete.

“H
i, Abby,” Gina said, glancing up, as if there were nothing unusual about what she was doing. “How do I wrap these once I get them all trimmed?”

What could I do but show her? I didn’t want to stand there with my hands on my hips and a perturbed look on my face, demanding to know why she not only had invaded my space but was also touching my personal items. It wouldn’t do to have Gina think her brother was marrying an unappreciative stick-in-the-mud devil-witch, even though that was exactly what I felt like.

Gina Salvare Ferraro was two years younger than Marco, with the same glossy dark hair, dark eyes, and olive complexion that Marco, Rafe, and Francesca shared. She was a strikingly attractive, curvaceous woman a year older and a few inches taller than I was.

Gina and I had been on shaky footing at first because I hadn’t been in a rush to get married and have a baby, making her suspicious of my intentions. Over the course of the past six months, our relationship had evolved, and although we weren’t best friends, we also weren’t enemies, and I didn’t want to rock the boat now.

“Use this clear wrap,” I said, and tore a sheet off the
roll hanging under the worktable. “Then tie it with the ribbons from the spool on the wall. It has a cutter on one side.”

“Thanks.”

“So, Gina, how long have you been working here?”

Why did I sound like I was trying to pick her up?

“Just about an hour. Things got so hectic,
Mamma
asked me to come lend a hand. And I hope you don’t mind, but I had to bring—”

Her words were drowned out by an ear-piercing happy-child scream. That was followed by a small whimper from beneath the worktable that turned into a full-blown baby cry. “Christopher!” Gina called sharply, kneeling down in front of the table, “you woke your sister.”

“Christopher is here, too?”

She stood up cradling Rosa, her eight-month-old daughter, dressed in a pink baby outfit, and began to pat the infant’s back. “Chris is playing around here somewhere,” she said with a shrug, apparently unconcerned about her three-year-old’s whereabouts. She sniffed the baby’s midsection, then, with a wrinkled nose, walked over to the back counter, where a large pink and green quilted bag lay and began to dig around inside until she found a diaper.

“Someone did a big ol’ poops,” she cooed, laying Rosa on my counter.

I glanced around for Marco’s nephew and spotted one of the cooler doors standing partway open. I darted over to the cooler and pulled it open all the way. There sat Christopher in the midst of my buckets of fresh flowers, splashing water and laughing at the mess he’d made.

“I found him,” I called. “He’s in my cooler…playing with my flowers.” More like destroying them.

“Oh, wait! Let me get a photo!” Gina said, and came
hurrying to the door with her cell phone ready, the baby over her shoulder, bare butt in the air. Gina laughed as she snapped a picture. “You are too cute, Chris,” she said, and walked away chuckling and shaking her head.

“It’s really cold in the coolers, Gina,” I told her.

“It’s okay. Chris loves the cold,” she said, then began talking baby talk to Rosa.

“He’s getting wet,” I tried.

“Yeah, he does that a lot,” she replied.

Realizing there’d be no help from that source, I lifted the boy under the arms and set him on his feet. “Come on, Chris. This isn’t a place for little boys.”

“I wanna stay!” he said, stamping his little sports shoe in the puddle for emphasis. “I.”
Splash.
“Want.”
Splash.
“To stay!”

“Okay, that’s it. We’re going now. Your mama wants to see you.”

“No!” He stamped his foot again, spraying my clothing with water. That seemed to please him no end, so he stamped again until I lifted him out of the water and carried him outside. I shut the door behind me and leaned against it. “Sorry. This is off-limits.”

Christopher squeezed his small hands into fists and had a tantrum—right there in my oasis—screaming until his face turned beet red and stamping both feet so hard, they had to hurt.

“Stop,” I yelled over the noise. “How would you like it if I screamed?”

He couldn’t hear me and wouldn’t look at me. I was at a complete loss.

“Don’t worry. This happens all the time,” Gina said, as she put her daughter back in her traveling seat beneath the table. She pulled a candy bar from a side pocket of her diaper bag and held it out to her son. “Look, Chris. It’s your favorite.”

“No!” he cried, and slapped it out of her hand.

As the bar slid beneath my worktable, Gina fished a packet of cookies from another pocket of the bag and tried to entice him with it. “How about this, Chris?” she cried over his earsplitting screams. “Yum. You like these.”

“No!” he said, and smacked her hand as hard as he could.

I was expecting her to give him a swat on the behind, but instead, in growing consternation, Gina dug through her bag and came out with a small bottle of apple juice. “How about
this
, Chris? You love apple juice. Don’t you? Right?”

“No!” he cried, and began stamping and screaming again.

At that point, Gina panicked. “Do you have any peanut butter?”

Dear God, I hoped so.

I headed for the tiny galley kitchen at the back of the shop and opened the refrigerator door. Gina squeezed in beside me, scanning the shelves for anything her son might like. She grabbed a package of Lottie’s deli-sliced cheddar cheese and ripped off a piece, running back to the workroom to try tempting him with it, but that didn’t stop the boy either.

As she returned to ransack my small kitchen, I said loudly, “Maybe you should isolate Chris until he stops screaming. My mom used to stand us in the corners when we misbehaved.”

“No, he’d hate that,” she shouted back, uncapping a jar of strawberry jelly to sniff the contents.

“That’s the whole point,” I called. “If he hated it, he’d stop.”

“That’s just cruel.”

Making someone’s ears bleed was cruel, too.

Gina shoved the jar into the cabinet, slammed the
door, and headed for the workroom. “Do you have food anywhere else?”

I was considering whether to shut myself inside the cooler when the curtain parted and the SS
Grace Bingham
sailed in, obviously hearing my silently screamed SOSs. She took the child by the hand, led him into the bathroom, and closed the door. Gina glanced at me in horror, as though she feared Grace was going to flush Chris down the toilet. She rushed toward the bathroom and lifted her fist to knock when at once the tantrum stopped.

I was halfway expecting to hear a toilet flush when the bathroom door opened and Grace led a subdued Christopher out.

“Tell your mum you’re sorry,” Grace said, pushing the boy forward. “Go on, now.”

“I’m sorry,” Chris said, sniffling back tears, one finger in his mouth, his gaze on the floor.

“There’s a good boy,” Grace said. “Now tell your mum you won’t do it anymore.”

Chris mumbled something that sounded close enough, so Grace said, “That’ll do,” and sailed back through the curtain. Tallyho. Mission accomplished.

God bless the English navy.

By one o’clock, Gina and her kids had left Bloomers—forever, I hoped—and Francesca had gone to the grocery store to buy more ingredients for the appetizers she planned to bring in tomorrow. Somehow I had to find a way to dissuade her—I didn’t want my flower shop turned into an Italian eatery—but that was a subject I would have to tackle after I’d cleaned up the cooler.

I was mopping up the water when Lottie and Grace poked their heads in.

“Are you still speaking to us?” Lottie asked, then saw
the floor of the cooler and gasped. “What on God’s green earth happened here?”

“Christopher made this his playground,” I said, sweeping a big pile of flower petals and crushed leaves onto a dustpan.

“His mom let him get away with that?” Lottie cried. “I’d have paddled his backside.”

“Paddled whose backside?” my mom asked, stepping in between my assistants.

“Marco’s three-year-old nephew’s backside,” I said.

Mom gasped at the disarray.

Lottie shook her head. “I can’t believe his mother didn’t stop him.”

“Gina didn’t seem to mind,” I said. “In fact, she thought it was so cute, she took photos.”

“I’m sure of one thing,” Mom said. “Francesca would never allow her grandchild to get away with such bad behavior.”

“Francesca wasn’t back here,” I said, and possibly for the first time, I wished she had been.

“I know what I would have done if this was your child, Abigail,” Mom said.

“Stand him in the corner with his nose against the wall,” I recited, remembering the feel of cold plaster against my so-called “perky” proboscis.

“It worked, didn’t it?” she asked.

Grace shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid Christopher’s mum is one of those parents who thinks everything her child does is cute and therefore permissible. It’s quite unfair to the child, really, to grow up believing that. Doesn’t prepare them at all for life in the real world, does it? As your American jurist Clarence Thomas once said, ‘Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.’”

“Thanks for coming to my rescue, Grace,” I said.

“You’re welcome, love. I didn’t work as a nanny for one of the most prominent households in London for nothing, you know.”

“You were a nanny?” I asked. Grace never failed to amaze me. “For whom?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” she said. “Confidentiality clause in my contract, you know.”

“So how did you get Chris to stop screaming?” I asked.

“It was simple really,” Grace said. “I told him if he didn’t stop at once, I would flush him feetfirst down the toilet.”

Better than standing in the corner for half an hour.

I shut the cooler door behind me. “We’re going to have to order more daisies, Lottie. Chris pulled the petals off ninety percent of our supply.”

“I’ll get on it,” Lottie said. “Our flower stock in the display case is wiped out, too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many customers in one morning.”

“I’m completely out of scones and clotted cream,” Grace said. “It was a madhouse.”

“And yet,” Mom said, “my elm tree is still full.”

Silence followed. Having no gentle way to explain that her sleep masks had bombed, the three of us stood there mutely, gazes meeting, then dropping, until Grace started for the curtain, saying, “I should make more coffee for the midafternoon crowd.”

“I’d better get those flowers ordered,” Lottie said, and scurried toward the computer.

Rats deserting a sinking ship.

Mom turned toward me, a look of bafflement on her face. “I don’t understand why they’re not selling, Abigail. What’s wrong with my masks?”

So there I stood, the full dustpan in one hand and
broom in the other, wishing someone would flush
me
down the toilet.

Then the bell over the door jingled in the outer room and a moment later my cousin swept through the curtain, singing, “I found the perfect name!”

Saved by the Jill.

“Perfect name for what?” Mom asked, as Jillian came to a dead stop, a look of shock on her face.

“For”—Jillian glanced around wildly, her gaze landing on me—“Abby’s baby.”

Statement retracted.

Mom’s eyeballs grew so big, it was a wonder they stayed in their sockets. Even Lottie swung around in the desk chair to stare at me wide-eyed.

“Abigail,” Mom said, her voice choking up, “are you—?”

“No!” I cried. “Jillian, tell them what you meant! Now!”

Jillian swallowed. “What I meant?”

My cousin was not known for thinking fast on her feet. “What. You. Meant, Jillian.”

“I meant that…
someday
Abby will have a baby,” Jillian said. “And when she does, I have the perfect name for her—him—it.”

My mom put her hand over her heart. “Don’t ever do that to me again, Jillian.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Mo,” Jillian said, and wrapped her long spider arms around my mother. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Good.” Mom leaned back to study her suspiciously. “Now tell me why you’re thinking of baby names for Abby.”

“Because—” Jillian looked at me in alarm, realized I wasn’t going to throw her a rope, and then finished with, “Abby asked me to.”

I was going to stuff
her
feetfirst down that toilet.

“For a game,” I said immediately. “A shower game. But judging by your reaction, I can tell that it’s a bad idea, so let’s just drop it.”

“Now you’ve got my curiosity up,” Lottie said, playing along. “What’s this perfect baby name you found for Abby?”

“Well,” Jillian said with a smile, “Abby has always loved poinsettias—until recently, when she told me they’re poisonous—so I thought, what’s close to a poinsettia? And then I thought, how about Poinciana?”

Mom and Lottie looked at each other. “Poinciana?” Mom asked, shifting her gaze from Jillian to me.