Thyme of Death (7 page)

I was a little surprised. I wouldn’t
have thought that Roz would be into garlic. It just goes to show that
appearances don’t tell the whole story, or that garlic has a universal appeal,
or both. Probably the latter. Garlic is the most popular medicinal and
seasoning herb of all time. I found the extract for her, and a bottle of gel
caps.

“Would you rather have gel caps?” I
asked. With garlic, a lot of people worry about odor, although the extract has
been “odor-modified,” meaning that they took out a lot of the smell.

Roz shook her head. “Gel caps are
much less effective,” she said, with emphasis. “Jo introduced me to the
extract. I mix it with my morning tomato juice. I have high blood pressure and
an ulcer—it’s the show, of course—and the garlic helps both.”

I laughed. “It helps almost
anything,” I said. The world’s oldest medical text, the
Ebers Papyrus,
lists
garlic as an ingredient in twenty-two remedies for headache, insect and
scorpion bites, menstrual difficulties, worms, tumors, and heart ailments. For
a long time, people even thought it was a powerful antidote— a “charm against
poison,” as one seventeenth-century herbalist said.

Roz took the garlic extract and an
herb biscuit. She had turned away to look at the gift baskets when Violett Hall
came in, wearing one of her modest white-blouse-dark-skirt combinations. “I
wanted to tell you that Pudding’s ears are
much
better,” Violett said.

“Whose ears?” I asked, drawing a
blank.

“My cat. The one with ear mites.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Violett,” I
said gently, “but I think it will be several days before you can tell whether
your cat really is improved.” Healing herbs work gently and reliably, but I
hate it when people think they’re a miracle cure. I always try to make them
understand that herbs work more slowly than modern medicine’s silver bullets.

“Oh,” Violett said. She looked
around. “Anyway, Gretel asked me to pick up some more lavender oil,” she added.
“She—”

A book in her hand and a smile on
her face, Roz moved out from behind the paperback rack. Violett saw her and
stopped talking.

Roz adjusted her scarf, looking
distinctly uneasy.

Her smile faded as if someone had
hit the dimmer switch. “Hello, Violett,” she said.

Violett blinked. “What are
you
doing
here?” she asked in surprise. And then answered her own question. “Of course,
the memorial service.” She smiled uncertainly. “But why didn’t you call? We
have a lot to—”

Roz’s eyes flicked to me, as if she
were giving a warning, and Violett shut her mouth. Roz stepped smoothly into
the unfinished sentence. “I’m sure you weren’t expecting to see me. I haven’t
been able to get back to Pecan Springs very much lately. And of course I’m
still trying to recover from the shock of Jo’s death. It was so dreadfully
unexpected.” She took a bill out of her purse and handed it to me to pay for
the book and the extract. “Please tell Meredith that I’m looking forward to
dinner tonight, China.”

Violett leaned forward. “Maybe we
could get together,” she said. “I mink we have some catching up to do. Don’t
you?”

Roz’s nod was almost chilly. “But I
don’t have time to do it now,” she said. “I need to do some shopping. We can
talk at the service this afternoon.” With a wave to me, she left.

For a moment, Violett stood there,
frowning past me as if she didn’t see me. “Is there anything else I can get
you?” I asked.

“What?” She started. “No, this is
fine,” she said, taking Gretel’s lavender oil. She paused. “Is Miss Kotner
staying in your cottage again?”

I nodded. She paid me for the oil
and left, looking slightly troubled.

The next hour was busy. I had a big
order of books to check in and a solid stream of customers to tend to. One of
the TV cooks was doing a show called “The Herbal Gourmet,” and it was inspiring
people to stock up on dried seasonings they hadn’t any idea how to use, as well
as pots of fresh basil, parsley, oregano, and marjoram. With almost every
order, I sold a copy of
It’s About Thyme!,
a great book by Marge Clark.

I had worked halfway through the box
of books when somebody else came in. I looked up. The woman was tall, almost as
tall as Ruby, her dark hair pulled back into a sleek, no-nonsense chignon at
the nape of her neck, lips and nails a rich plum. She wore an elegant gray
gabardine suit, a softly tailored and tucked gray silk blouse, and gray leather
pumps. She carried a gray suede briefcase, monogrammed with a gold JD. When she
saw me on my knees in front of the bookshelf, one eyebrow arched. “Hello,
China,” she said.

I stood up, uncomfortably aware that
my jeans were dusty, my green
spice-it-up-with-herbs
tee had a coffee stain on the front, and my hair was hanging in my
eyes. “Hello, Jane,” I said. Her gray suit reminded me of one I’d paid a
fortune for a few years back at Neiman-Marcus. I felt like a scullery maid.

Jane Dorman is Roz Kotner’s agent.
She’s in her late forties, brusque and wittily articulate in the New York
style, and impressively competent where money is concerned, at least according
to
People
magazine. Apparently, Jane was the financial wizard behind
Roz’s toy empire. I’d met her once at a barbecue in Jo’s backyard, when she
came for a visit with Roz. Only once. Jane was friendly enough and she seemed
to be enjoying herself, even though she was dressed to the teeth and the rest
of us were wearing jeans and sneakers. She was as out of place in Pecan Springs
as Maria Callas at the First Baptist choir picnic.

Jane gave me a slight smile. “I was
in San Antonio on business when Roz’s producer called about the renewal of her
TV contract. Since I wasn’t sure when Roz would be in New York, I thought I’d
catch her here. I phoned her secretary this morning and learned that she’s
staying in your cottage.”

“Sure,” I said, blowing the hair out
of my eyes. “Just follow the path through the herb garden.”

Jane glanced around and curled the
corners of her lips in a smile. “Your shop is so charmingly rustic,” she said.

“And profitable,” I replied, stung.
But that was dumb. Jane’s idea of profit is more along the lines of the Fortune
500.

She smiled again. “I’m sure,” she
said, and left me seedling, wishing I’d had the sense to keep my mouth shut. I’ve
never been very good with the withering rebuttals that the Perry Masons of the
world produce spontaneously. And Jane gets to me. I have the feeling that she
basically dislikes all women but herself, and that she doesn’t really think of
herself as a woman.

Ten minutes and two customers later,
I was putting the last book on the shelf. Ruby poked her head through the door
that separates Thyme and Seasons and The Crystal Cave. She was wearing a beige
safari-style shirt and a denim skirt, with a red silk scarf tied around her
head, red hoop earrings, and Birkenstocks. “Hey, it’s twelve-thirty. I’m ready
to close. When are you knocking off?”

“Right about
now”
I said firmly,
pushing Haumea into the corner and closing the door. I penciled a note that
said “Closed for Jo Gilbert’s memorial service. Open tomorrow at nine,” and
taped it to the door.

I turned to Ruby. “There’s some
spinach-cheese lasagna left from last night,” I said. “Want some? We could eat
out on the back patio.”

“Super,” Ruby said enthusiastically.
Ruby is always enthusiastic where eating is concerned. But anybody who’s almost
six feet and only one-thirty-five can afford to be enthusiastic about food.

I locked up and we went through the
connecting door into my place. I stuck the lasagna in the microwave and found
several deviled eggs in the fridge, along with some celery and carrot sticks.
We carried our lunch trays out to the sunny flagstone patio under my kitchen
window, where the late-blooming butterfly weed was attracting the last of the
hummingbirds, tanking up for the long haul to Mexico, where they spend the
winter. If you sit out there for lunch in the summer, you’ll be barbecued in
nothing flat, but on an autumn day like today it was perfect, just the right
mix of sun, cloud, and breeze, seasoned with the sweetly pungent odor of the
sun-warmed creeping thyme that grows among the paving stones. It was going to
be a fine afternoon for a memorial service. Just the kind of day Jo loved.

Ruby and I were unusually silent.
When we were finished eating, she leaned back in her chair. “I still don’t
believe Jo did it,” she said testily, as if she were contradicting something I’d
just finished saying.

“You’ve said that before. Several
times.”

“I’ll keep on saying it.”

“Well, fine,” I replied reasonably. “But
I don’t know what you think it proves. Bubba says - ”

“Piss on Bubba!” Ruby ran her
fingers through her frizzy orange hair, making it even frizzier. “Bubba Harris
is a grade-A turkey. He doesn’t know the least thing about the way people
feel.”

I sighed. “I won’t dispute you
there. But feeling doesn’t have a lot to do with the facts in this case. And
Bubba knows plenty about police procedure. All the evidence points to—”

“The evidence could have been
planted.”

I stared at her. “Planted? By whom?”

“By the person who killed her, of
course. Who else would plant evidence?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Let me get this
straight. You mean, you think Jo was
murdered?”

“She didn’t kill herself, and she
didn’t take an accidental overdose,” Ruby replied firmly. “That leaves only
one alternative, doesn’t it?” She shot me a challenging look. “Well, doesn’t
it? You must have seen plenty of murders dressed up like suicides, back when
you were defending crooks.”

“Clients,” I corrected her. “They
might have been crooks before or after I defended them. But
while
I was
defending them, they were clients.”

Ruby waved a dismissive hand. “Crooks,
clients, whatever. Weren’t there cases that looked like suicide and turned out
to be homicide?”

“Her prints were all over the
bottle. And the glass.”

“Somebody else could have put them
there after she was dead, or unconscious. I’ve read about it in murder
mysteries. In fact, it was in one of the Kinsey Millhone books. The murderer
pressed the victim’s hand around the poison bottle, and viola! Prints.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said acidly. “Then why
don’t you tell me who you think did all this surreptitious fingerprinting? And
while you’re at it, P. I. Wilcox, you can also expound your theory of how the
pills got into her in the first place. Did somebody pry her mouth open and pour
them down her throat? And what about the note? And the motive? Just
why
would
anybody want to kill Jo?”

Ruby gave me an injured look. “You
don’t need to be so sarcastic, China. I was just telling you what I think.”

I modified my tone. “Well, who,
then?”

“Arnold Seidensticker, for one.”

“Arnold—” I stared at Ruby. “You
mean, you think that an illustrious city father and the owner of the town
newspaper would murder—”

Ruby spoke with dignity. “The owner
of the newspaper
and
the chief lobbyist for the airport. He’s been
courting the developers for months, China. He’s spent all his spare time and a
big hunk of change trying to convince the City Council that the airport would
be good for growth. Jo was standing between him and that airport, and the
Coalition was getting stronger every day. He wanted her out of the way. And
somebody was in that house, remember? That’s what Meredith says.”

I frowned. Ruby’s arguments made a certain
kind of sense. But Arnold Seidensticker was a cautious, conservative man with
an enormous sense of his own and his family’s importance. It was hard for me to
picture him pouring sleeping pills into a woman who would probably die of
cancer before she could do more than set back his schedule by a month or two.

“Arnold Seidensticker doesn’t wear
perfume,” I said.

Ruby sighed. “Well, then, Lila
Seidensticker.”

I hooted derisively. Lila was Arnold’s
wife, a skinny platinum blonde with arms like diamond-circled soda straws and a
mouth the color of a freshly painted fire hydrant. She was a total dingbat. But
Arnold wasn’t a dingbat. Nor was he a man to be trifled with.

I leaned forward. “You listen to me,
Ruby. Lay off that murder stuff. If Arnold Seidensticker hears you defaming his
sacred name, you’ll find yourself sued for slander in nothing flat. What’s
more, there’s not an attorney in this town who’d touch your case. And you still
haven’t told me how you think the murderer got the pills into her. Assuming of
course, there
was
a—”

Ruby cocked her head. “Listen,” she
said. “Somebody’s having an argument.”

“You bet your sweet bippy somebody’s
having an argument,” I replied warmly. “In my professional opinion, people who
go around making unsupported accusations deserve to—”

Ruby gave me a patient smile. “Not
us,
silly. The argument’s coming from back there.” She gestured in the
direction of the cottage. “Listen.”