Read Online Drop Dead on Recall by Sheila Webster Boneham - Free Book Online Page B

for the moment. “And what, pray tell, was that business with Tom’s hand?”
    “Just checking.”
    “Checking?”
    Goldie is not merely a New Age seeker of enlightenment. She’s been this way since the sixties. For all I know, she was born this way. More than once. “Feeling his energy,” she shrugged as she plunked both flower oils into her basket and furrowed her forehead. “I know him from somewhere.” Then she grinned at me. “Hey, girlfriend, go for it!” She adjusted her glasses halfway down her nose and spun the seed display rack.
    “I’m not interested in going for anything!” I glanced into Goldie’s cart and did a double take. She must have had thirty bottles of vitamins and herbal concoctions. Saw palmetto. Green tea. Cat’s claw. Stuff I’d never heard of. What’s up with that?
    I couldn’t think of what to say, so I read the names on the seed packets she was studying. Alyssum. Bachelor’s buttons. Calendula. Castor bean. “Castor bean? Aren’t these poisonous?”
    “Deadly.”
    “And they sell them?”
    “Oh, my dear, lots of plants are poisonous. Castor plants are gorgeous big things. Just don’t eat the seeds.”
    “Seems a bit casual to me.”
    “Oh, heavens, we’re surrounded by toxic plants. Did you know that rhubarb leaves are poisonous? Tomato leaves too. Daffodil bulbs. Lily-of-the-valley. Here—foxglove—poisonous.” She pointed to a packet of Digitalis purpurea, then anotherwith blue flowers like those painted on the Rule of Three sign in her garden. “Monkshood too. Deadly. Used to be known as wolfsbane. Those yews in front of every other house in suburbia? All toxic. Shall I go on? And then of course there are the wild poisonous plants—jimsonweed, the hemlocks, pigweed …”
    “Okay, okay. I get it. Remind me not to piss you off.”

18
    “Holy moly,” said Goldie. We had just pulled up in front of the Dorns’ house, one of a handful scattered around this slick new subdivision. The nearest neighbor was a block away, although not for long. Streamers of fluorescent orange tape flapped from stakes in the lot next door.
    The front of the Dorns’ house was all glass, taupe-tinted brick, and putty-colored woodwork. The double front door was one of those snazzy jobs with an intricate full-length pattern of clear leaded glass set into a frame of rich, luminous cherry-stained wood. The landscaping, mostly shrubs and groundcovers and saplings, was professional and neat, but lacked the joy and passion of Goldie’s plot of ground. The path to the door was fancy aggregate set in concrete and hemmed on both sides by brick to match the house. It struck me as a swanky piece of impersonal architecture, but not a home to comfort those within, the expensive, hard facade of the house not unlike the face that Abigail herself had shown the world.
    An engine roared somewhere nearby but out of sight, and as I stepped from the car a noxious blend of gasoline and new-mown grass surged into my nose and planted a blade of pain in my skull. I was scurrying toward the front door and trying not to inhale when a boy of about fourteen pushed a beat-up mower around the corner of the house. He waved at me through the blue fumes, mowed to about ten feet from me, and cut the engine. The silence was deafening. The boy shoved a shock of brown hair off his forehead. “Mr. Dorn isn’t here right now.”
    “Any idea when he might be back?”
    “No. Not for a while, I guess. He paid me in case he doesn’t get back before I finish. He had to go to the store, for the new locks, I guess.”
    I guessed I’d leave a note, and the kid nodded, restarted the mower, and roared away to where the yard met a raggedy lot aglow with early yellow sweet clover. There he turned and disappeared toward the back of the lot again.
    Why did Greg need new locks? According to Connie, he and Abigail were separated. Had she changed the locks? I filed my questions away for later, finished the note, and went to the front