Nabbed in the Nasturtiums Read online

  Chapter 31

  “No, you didn’t tell me that,” Doreen said in confusion, although it made sense and did provide an interesting motive. She’d found it out in her own research, but the lies from Denise were hard to sort out. She looked at Mack and asked, “Did she tell us?”

  Mack shook his head. “No, she kept that little bit to herself.”

  “And the kidnapping?” Doreen asked Denise.

  “That’s because my uncle Dicky is in trouble. And his victim was coming after Uncle Dicky, but he paid him off.”

  “Oh, this is a mess,” Doreen said, shaking her head and struggling to understand the truth from the lies, which were piling up in multiple layers. “No,” Doreen said, “I think there really was somebody who he did crimes with who went to jail. He got released from prison, and he found out about your uncle Dicky not going to jail, that Charlie had served time instead. But that was the first you’d heard about it, so, for some reason, you killed your uncle Charlie.”

  “I told you already that I had killed him,” she said.

  “But you didn’t explain why. Were you trying to protect your stepfather? Your uncle Dicky?” When Denise didn’t answer, Doreen continued, “Fine, so what’s this other guy got to do with you, that you have done this for him?”

  “I didn’t do anything for him,” Denise said.

  “So who is it?” Denise stiffened, and Doreen stared at her and said, “Of course it’s all in the family, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, but fear was in the woman’s voice.

  “You’re trying to protect him, so he doesn’t get in trouble.”

  “He’s already suffered enough,” she said. “My uncle had no business taking him into the industry in the first place.”

  “Wow,” she said. “So who is he?”

  “None of your business.”

  “It’s your brother, isn’t it?” Doreen asked.

  The woman started to shake her head. “No, no, no. It’s not my brother.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “Your uncle Dicky got your brother into the industry. They were partners, and he threw him under the bus too, and your brother went to jail. Then he threw his own brother under the bus, who went to jail for him. Meanwhile your uncle Dicky has been living out here, free and clear, telling you that he changed his tune. But your brother gets out, finds out that, while he’s been in jail, the guy who got him into trouble hasn’t served a day, content to let his brother serve his sentence for him. So now your brother is furious and is after revenge, for himself and for your uncle Charlie, who served time he didn’t owe. Your brother is after Uncle Dicky.”

  “But I can’t let him kill anybody,” she said. “I must protect him.”

  “So why didn’t you protect Uncle Charlie, who had gone to jail? Why kill him? He already suffered unjustly.”

  “Because he would tell.”

  “Tell what?” Mack asked in frustration. “Everybody already knows everything.”

  Denise looked at him and said, “He would tell about my mother.”

  “Oh, so he would tell your brother about your mother,” Doreen said, as finally the tumblers fell into place. “Your brother didn’t know that you had murdered your mother.”

  “He knew that I was accused of it, but my stepdad always said that I didn’t do it.”

  “Which is why you’re staying with your stepdad, but now your brother will find out the truth—that you killed your mother—and you’re afraid of him.”

  Denise slowly nodded. “Yes,” she said, “but I love him. He’s my brother, and he really loved our mother.”

  Even to Doreen, this was a twisted and convoluted nightmare. She looked at Mack. “It’s really sad,” she said. “All of these people and none of them was ever ready to tell the truth.”

  Mack, his voice quiet, said, “I know, and so often it’s the way of it.”

  “But it’s wrong,” Doreen said. “It’s so wrong.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said gently, “because people lie, steal, and cheat all the time.”

  “I get that. I’ve seen it even,” Doreen said quietly. “I still think this is just so sad.”

  “Of course it is, but listen to her,” Mack said. “Here we’ve got one of the most twisted cases ever.”

  Denise laughed. “You guys are just chatting away, talking like I’m not even here. Like I have nothing to do with this.”

  Doreen realized that the other personality was now speaking. “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” She looked at the gun in her hand. “Did you guys attack me?”

  “No,” Mack said, slowly turning and reaching for the gun.

  But then, the other part of Denise stepped forward and said, “Oh no, you don’t,” brandishing the weapon at them both.

  “You’re losing control,” Doreen said quietly.

  The woman just glared at her.

  Doreen continued, “And what you can’t handle is the fact that this other, more innocent part of you, will find out everything you’ve done wrong.”

  “That won’t happen,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “If everybody hates me, nothing is left in my world.”

  “No, no, no,” Mack said in alarm. “We’re not going down that pathway.”

  The woman glared at him. “I’ll just kill you both,” she said, “and nobody will know anything. Nobody ever suspects. Nobody even knows how my sister and I live.”

  “That’s because she’s not your sister,” Doreen said. “You’re both parts of the same person. Different personalities within the same individual. One who’s there to hide and to protect, and the other one who doesn’t know anything.”

  “She’s weak,” the other personality said. “She’s so weak.”

  “How do you feel about animals?” Doreen asked.

  “I hate them,” she said. “I’ll just shoot them.”

  “We wouldn’t take that kindly,” Doreen said. She looked at Goliath, behind Denise, creeping slowly toward her, then looked back at Denise and said, “Besides, you’re about to meet one very closely.”

  “No,” she said, “animals stay away from me because they know that I don’t like them.”

  “Maybe,” Doreen said.

  Thaddeus hopped up from the floor, flying a few feet, and landed on Mack’s shoulder, then said, “Thaddeus loves Mack.” And he rubbed his cheek against him.

  The woman stared at the animal, horrified. “Oh, that’s so disgusting,” she said. “Gross, gross, gross! And you let that thing touch you?”

  Mack looked at her quietly and said, “Yes, this animal is very close to my heart.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said, the disgust evident in her eyes. “That’s just so sick.”

  Then Goliath leaned forward and let out a huge yowl, right at Denise’s feet.

  Denise jumped, and so did Goliath, using her back to claw his way up. She cried out and screeched. “Get it off me! Get it off me!”

  Mack plucked the gun from her hand and led her gently to a chair, Goliath still on her back, as she screamed and screamed. Mack held his hand over her mouth and said, “Goliath, off.”

  Goliath looked at him with disdain, then hopped off and curled up on the matching pot chair. The woman stopped screeching, then looked at the cat, but tears were in her eyes.

  “He won’t hurt you,” Doreen said. “Unless you try to hurt me.”

  “He’s disgusting.”

  Goliath swiftly jumped to the back of her chair, swiped a paw at her, making Denise lean backward, screeching. Meanwhile, Mack snapped the handcuffs on Denise’s hands in front of her.

  Doreen sighed and said, “Goliath, you don’t have to torment her.”

  He just looked at Doreen balefully, as if to say, Why not? He hopped to the floor and sauntered away. Doreen looked at the woman sadly, then faced Mack and said, “I don’t even know what you do in this instance.”

&
nbsp; “I do,” he said, as he fished his phone from his pocket.

  And the woman, instead of screaming, now just burst into sobs and sat in the chair and cried. Doreen looked over at Mack. “Is there anything you can do?”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes there is nothing we can do,” he said. “Sometimes there are no happy endings.”

  “It’s all so very sad.”

  The woman started to laugh and laugh. “God, you’re such fools,” she said in a flat tone.

  Both Mack and Doreen looked at her. “Was that all an act?” Doreen asked.

  “Graduated top of my class in acting school,” she said proudly. Doreen stared at Mack, as Denise looked at her and said, “You are such an easy mark.”

  “Oh, wow,” Doreen said, sitting down into the other chair with a heavy thump. “You are quite the actress.”

  “I am,” she said.

  “How much of any of that was true?” How many personalities resided inside Denise?

  “Most of it was true, except for all the split-personalities stuff, but I played that part to get away with my mother’s murder.”

  “So why is it you sent me the information on that murder?” Doreen asked warmly, not at all sure she was seeing the real Denise even now.

  “So it would throw suspicion off me. Because Mother was beating me,” she said flatly, “and my brother. I saved my brother, only to have my uncle send him into jail.”

  Doreen stared at her. “I don’t know if we can believe anything out of your mouth anymore.”

  “Good,” she said. “You should be wary of the world out there. Everybody lies, cheats, and steals.”

  “Was your stepdad really there for you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I did kill my mother, but I had a good reason to, with all the beatings going on. My stepdad used to protect me from the worst of it, even though he lost his temper sometimes.”

  “Good Lord,” she said, “that sounds like quite a mess of a family.”

  “It doesn’t matter at all,” she said. “You might be holding me now, but I’ll get out of prison because I can play crazy so well. Even now, if you could replay this for the people who eventually will be interviewing me, you’d realize that it wouldn’t hold me. Nobody will hold me.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then,” she said, “I don’t know. I guess I’ll move on in life and find something else.”

  “What about your brother?”

  “He’ll be free to go too,” she said. “I’ll serve a couple years in an institute. Then I’ll get free, and we’ll go off and live a better life than we’ve had so far.”

  “You’ve twisted my world inside out and upside downside,” Doreen said.

  The woman laughed. “I’m used to doing that. It’s chaos theory. You confuse the facts so much that nobody knows what’s up or down.”

  “Right,” Doreen said. “And I guess that works for you because it’s certainly been a crazy ride.”

  The woman laughed. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s how it works and why it works.”

  “Got it,” Doreen said quietly. And she turned toward Mack. When he looked at her, she shrugged and said, “So what now? Go down to the station?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Goliath was watching and hopped back up on the chair again. Denise said, “I really don’t like cats, so you better move him before I dump him.”

  “Oh, I’ll take him,” Doreen said.

  As she reached down to grab the cat, the woman snaked an arm around Doreen’s neck, flipped her to the floor, and then looked at Mack and said, “Give me the gun, or I’ll break her neck.”

  Doreen struggled in her arms, but the woman was incredibly strong, and she also seemed to know some martial arts, a fact that had Mack completely frozen at the moment. Doreen looked at Thaddeus. “Thaddeus, help!”

  Immediately Thaddeus dropped to the woman’s head, pecking away at her. She screamed and tried to hit out at him. And, with that, Doreen broke free in time to see Mugs come barreling toward Denise, to chomp down on her arm. Mack hauled him off.

  Once again the woman broke into tears. By the time Mack had everybody calmed down, Denise sat there, crying on her chair again.

  Doreen just looked at her, her heart saddened by this broken woman. She looked over at Mack, and he held up a finger. “Don’t,” he said, “don’t even say a word.”

  She immediately pinched her lips together and nodded. Because she didn’t know what was going on with this woman, so it was better to just not say anything and let it be. Within seconds, Arnold and Chester showed up at their front door. They looked at the woman, nodded to Mack, sighed, and came inside to lead Denise away.

  Epilogue

  Later Thursday …

  When Denise was safely in the vehicle, and Arnold and Chester drove her away, Mack wrapped an arm around Doreen and said, “We’ll let the shrinks sort it out.”

  “Is it possible to be crazy and sane at the same time?” she asked.

  He laughed. “More than anything,” he said, “I think she played us. But it’s also possible that the person who sounded so sane and normal at the end was really yet another part of her psyche.”

  “I’ve never come across a person afflicted like this,” she murmured.

  “No,” he said, “neither have I. Let’s hope we never do again.”

  She nodded. “I vote that we go for much simpler cases.”

  “The really comical part of it is how you were supposed to be looking into the Bob Small murders.” Mack lifted one eyebrow.

  “I meant to ask her about that,” she said, staring at the departing vehicle. “I wonder if her uncle even knew Bob Small.”

  “It’s hard to say, but you could never believe anything she said, so there’s a good chance she was grabbing at something to connect to you with. Time to park the Small cases,” he said. “Now find something completely unrelated to crime to focus on for a while. Just give yourself a week off, and let’s just shake this one out.”

  “It kind of feels dirty, like something is wrong with the world now.”

  “Absolutely it does,” he said, “so you need to find something fun and different to make the world brighter and nicer.”

  “I can do that,” she said. Then she smiled. “I saw a notice for an orchid show.”

  “Perfect,” he said, “and, if you don’t want to go alone, I’ll take you.”

  She looked up at him, smiled, and said, “Really?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, “it might be good for me too.”

  “It would be,” she said, grinning.

  “Last time I went to an orchid show, it was because of a murder.”

  She looked up at him, smiled, and said, “That’s not likely to happen this time, is it?”

  “I hope not,” he said, “but, if you’re coming, who knows?” And, with that, he rolled his eyes at her.

  She chuckled. “No,” she said, “I have no intention of getting involved in a murder case that involves orchids.”

  “Yeah, well, how will you stop it?” he said, looking at her with interest.

  “Hopefully it’s not something I’ll have to deal with.”

  “Maybe not,” he said, and then she started to giggle.

  “Did you ever solve that murder, by the way?”

  He shook his head. “No, unfortunately I never did. Why?”

  “Because,” she said, “we can call the case, Offed in the Orchids.”

  He glared at her. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, no.”

  “If it’s still a cold case—”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said.

  “You did say that you didn’t solve it,” she said, pointing a finger at him.

  He grabbed her finger and said, “Don’t say that. I don’t need to deal with any more murder scenes right now.”

  “But it’s a cold case, and it’s about flowers,” she said, “so how hard can it be?”

  He groaned. “Let’s go look
at the flower show and not deal with murder. How is that for an idea?”

  “That works for me,” she said, with a smile. This time she stepped up, wrapped her arms around his chest, and said, “Thank you for coming to the rescue yet again.”

  He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and held her close. “My pleasure,” he whispered.

  Then she popped her head back and said, “But I’m still looking into Offed in the Orchids.”

  He burst out laughing and said, “Okay, fine. I don’t think you can get into too much more trouble than you already have been.”

  At that, Mugs started to bark, Goliath howled, and Thaddeus flew up to her arm and walked up onto her shoulder, where he could better look at Mack, not quite at eye level, then cried out, “Thaddeus is here. Thaddeus is here.”

  And both of them burst into laughter.

  This concludes Book 14 of Lovely Lethal Gardens: Nabbed in the Nasturtiums.

  Read about Offed in the Orchids: Lovely Lethal Gardens, Book 15

  Lovely Lethal Gardens:

  Offed in the Orchids

  (Book #15)

  A new cozy mystery series from USA Today best-selling author Dale Mayer. Follow gardener and amateur sleuth Doreen Montgomery—and her amusing and mostly lovable cat, dog, and parrot—as they catch murderers and solve crimes in lovely Kelowna, British Columbia.

  Riches to rags … Finally it’s calm … At least for the moment … If she’s lucky …

  Needing a break from all the murder and mayhem, Doreen and Mack plan an outing to see the local orchid show. Some of the displays are in the community center, but the more prized specimens of this genus require a visit to some of the gardeners’ homes, a rare opportunity not afforded to everyone.

  This trip, not quite a date, affords Doreen a chance to enjoy not only the company of Mack but to get to know a few more of the colorful locals. But, when one of these locals ends up dead just after their visit, the dark underbelly of orchid growing is exposed and, with it, an old murder, … not to mention another new one.

  Doreen and Mack just can’t catch a break. But can they catch a killer before he kills again?