Gun in the Gardenias Read online

  She stared at him. As she slowly sagged into her chair, she said, “Oh. Chances are the journalist uncovered all kinds of crap, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but, if Solomon had any actual evidence pointing to a crime, he would have handed it to the police.”

  “Unless he was planning on writing a book and doing it that way?”

  “No, he still would have given it to the police.”

  She didn’t like the thought that came to her mind. She opened her mouth, then closed it.

  Mack looked at her curiously. “It’s not like you to hold back on your theories,” he said. “Granted, you’re not so free to share facts with me.”

  Just then Thaddeus hopped up onto the table, walked over, and pecked on the folder.

  “Leave it alone,” Doreen told the bird. “All kinds of nasty stuff are in there that once you open it …”

  “Exactly what I would warn you about,” Mack said. “If we continue our investigation this way, it could come back to the fact you are the one who had the folder.”

  “Which would put me out there as a target.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. “What were you going to say?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve forgotten. I’m pretty sure it’s more about Steve. And just being aware he could be dangerous.”

  Mack abruptly stood and put the folder on the kitchen counter. “I want to look at the rest of these folders.”

  She raced behind him. “You could ask first.”

  He shot her a look, and she raised her hands in surrender. “I’ve never held anything back from you.”

  At that, he spun on his heels and said, “What?”

  She held her hands higher. “Well, okay. I don’t hold anything back from you for very long.”

  He rolled his eyes and pulled out one of the pot chairs.

  “Why don’t we lay the folders down so all the names on the labels are visible, and we take pictures?” Doreen asked.

  Mack nodded. “That’s an excellent idea.”

  So that was what they did. They took all the folders out of one box, then arranged them to see all the tabs of names, without anything else to distract them, and took several pictures.

  “I almost want to run all of this through the scanner so we have it saved in a digital format too,” Mack said.

  “I could do that, but it’ll take me a couple days or so.”

  “I know, and I hate to even ask you because I’m worried about somebody getting into your house and stealing these now. But I’m afraid you’d be faster at this than going through normal channels at work.”

  “I know,” Doreen said. “I could be sitting on a gold mine or a bomb likely to blast off in my face.”

  “Maybe I should talk to the journalist myself.”

  “You could try, but he’s in a hospice. He had his great-nephew bring all these to me so it wouldn’t be part of the estate. And I don’t know if other family members know the great-nephew did this.”

  “Interesting. Makes sense to do this now before he dies,” Mack said. “And then we may find out later that somebody’s been waiting for Solomon to die to get their hands on this. I’ll see if I get time, I might pass by. It’s not a criminal manner to hand these off and he’s not likely to pass any vital information that isn’t in the file given his health.”

  “In that case,” Doreen said, “I think I’ll start scanning.” While Mack put all the files back in the first box, she laid out all the folders from the second box and said, “Let’s get all the labels down so we have photographs of what was here.”

  Later Doreen groaned when the photos of the files from the second box were finally done. “This alone takes a while,” she said.

  “Let’s just keep the process moving,” Mack said, then paused. “Why don’t I finish up taking photos of the files from these last two boxes? For now though, while you run all that through the scanner, do you want me to take a look at the stack of stuff in the garage?”

  She nodded. “I completely forgot about that. Tons of stuff is still there.” She set up another folder with thankfully all normal-size papers into the scan tray and pushed the button before heading to the garage with him. He whistled when he saw the mound in the middle.

  “You know what? I knew you were doing this,” he said, “but I hadn’t realized how big a job it would end up being. A lot of this is just garbage though.”

  “I agree, but I don’t know how I’ll get rid of it all. It’s a lot to put out in the city garbage every week.”

  Mack moved a bunch of stuff around. “Some of this we can recycle. The others, we can probably take to charity. But old open bottles of shampoo? That’s garbage.”

  “Exactly. And again I don’t even know what I can recycle.”

  “Do you want to keep anything here?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe you see things you think are valuable or useable that I’m just not seeing.”

  “We can start by separating what gets recycled and what’s garbage. Then we can take another look.”

  Mack grabbed several bags and started tossing old shampoo bottles. Doreen smiled and headed back inside, setting the next stack of files to be scanned. Back and forth, back and forth—by the time they took a break, it was already eight o’clock.

  Mack looked at the scanner and said, “I’m surprised it’s not smoking by now.”

  “Don’t say that,” Doreen groaned. “I don’t have the money to replace it.”

  “Did you work at my mother’s place today?” Mack asked. “You normally go on Fridays, don’t you?”

  “Normally, yes.” She nodded. “But your mom had appointments and asked me to come tomorrow. And I was too tired to do much of anything today besides this spring-cleaning effort.”

  He shook his head. “That’s fine. I just didn’t know if I owed you for gardening or not.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “No, but I’ll do it tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m going over there to garden too, so, if you want, we can be there at the same time, and I can pay you at the end of it.”

  She brightened at that. “Perfect. Or I’ll do the gardening for free if you can help me dispose of all this garbage.”

  “We’ll see.”

  When Doreen came back from scanning the second box, she saw almost everything resting against the edge of the garage door. “So, was that all garbage?”

  “I’d say so,” Mack said with a nod. Then he pointed to a second pile equally as large. “We could do a charity run for those.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a big one on Springfield. Other than that, various other places make money off your donations too.”

  Doreen smiled. “I can probably fit everything here into my car. If I knew where to go, I could just drop it all off.”

  “I suggest the place in Rutland. You just pull up, open your vehicle, and they unload it for you. You don’t get any money though, but you get rid of what you’re taking there.”

  She laughed. “You know what? I really like that idea.”

  So they opened the garage door and loaded her car. Doreen smiled when it was all inside.

  “I wonder,” she said, “if any of those plastic containers in our garbage pile could go to them. If so, I think we could get rid of a bunch more of this stuff.”

  They worked the garbage pile down by another one-third. With her car completely stuffed, and only a few trash bags left, Mack said, “Your garbage goes out on Monday. Then, if you fill it again after it’s picked up, you can get rid of all these.”

  Doreen smiled and grabbed several bags. Together they filled her garbage can until the lid wouldn’t shut. Now only one bag was left. She smiled and said, “That was pretty easy.”

  “Yeah. I’ll take the last bag home.” Then Mack picked it up and tossed it in front of the garage. “My can’s empty.”

  “I have garbage I have to get out of the kitchen too. Maybe I’ll give you a couple more bags, if you don’t mind.”

  M
ack ended up with three more bags, which would make it possible for Doreen to get rid of her garbage all by Monday. He had also loaded several boxes filled with trash in his truck bed, specifically for a dump run. “I’ll take these to the dump. When you are sure you want to get rid of the spare bedroom bed, I’ll take that later too. Just let me know.”

  Tired but euphoric, she smiled and opened her arms wide. “Thank you. I cannot believe we got that done!”

  “I can’t believe it either,” Mack admitted. “You just have your living room floor to deal with now.”

  She groaned. “The closet contents. Right. But it’s only the closet. My house is cleaned out of everything but a few pieces of furniture.”

  “Not even much of that. We may have to get you some used furniture.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t know where to go for that either.”

  “Some secondhand furniture stores are around,” Mack said. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem once you decide what you want. But live with what you’ve got for a while and see how you feel about it. Maybe you want to do some work on the house before you start filling it again with furniture. Even painting it would give the whole place a different look.”

  Doreen nodded. “You’re right.”

  At that, Mack headed off. Doreen walked back inside, knowing she had done half the scanning, but another whole half awaited her. She also had a carload of stuff to get rid of, gardening at Millicent’s tomorrow, and the front closet stuff to sort. She didn’t know how her day had disappeared so fast, but it had.

  She set the alarms, propped the kitchen chair up under the side door to the garage to stop anybody from coming in her house from that direction, and headed to bed. It had been another good day’s work. But she was exhausted.

  Chapter 14

  Saturday Morning …

  The next morning, Doreen woke up sore and tired again but almost euphoric this time at the amount of work she had accomplished. She also had a new mystery to work on. As she went downstairs, she remembered that she hadn’t asked Nan about the boxes from the attic above the hall closet, and she still had the rest of the closet contents to go through. But it was also past eight, and she wanted to get Millicent’s gardening done.

  She stepped out into the garage and smiled. “Wow,” she said. “Look at this. It’s stunning!”

  She wanted to open the garage door for the world to see, but did she really want the media to photograph her garage? Besides, she should cook breakfast and then do the gardening job she currently had because money still needed to come in to pay her bills. Now that she had paid a bunch of the bills, her bank account had taken a hit. But she’d deposited the check for the car parts, so things were still good.

  She whipped up an omelet, almost laughing at how easy it was to do, and remembered the one leftover pork chop from the previous night. She wondered if she could justify eating it now but decided it was better to save it for lunch to go with a salad or something. So, seated with her plate and the animals sitting down to eat their food, she opened her laptop and browsed the internet for a few moments, looking for headline news.

  Unable to help herself, she searched on Google for the biker gang named Devil Riders that had made its home in Kelowna. Outside of the fact they seemed to own a ton of property in the Knox mountain side of Kelowna, there wasn’t much mention of them. At least not in the last ten or fifteen years. And that worked for her.

  On that note, she searched Steve Albright’s name, again in reference to the Devil Riders’ biker gang too because that would be interesting to find out more about. She still wanted to get through all the rest of that material that Solomon had left with her. And she hadn’t even started the scanning yet today on the last two boxes. Refusing to leave for Millicent’s until she at least got a section done, she opened the third box and found they were all fairly thin files. She set herself a thirty-minute deadline and worked steadily. When the minutes were up, she only had four thicker folders left. She finished them within another fifteen minutes.

  She still had to rename all these scanned files, but that would be a different problem. That would require another hour, which she didn’t have the luxury of using right now for that purpose. She took the three already-scanned boxes and moved them into the office alcove area, where the scanner was. She stacked the fourth one still to be done on top. Then she opened the lid and realized these were much thicker folders and would take a longer time. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe even when she got back this afternoon. She locked up her house, set the alarms, called the animals, and walked toward Millicent’s corner.

  As she walked into the backyard from the side gate, she interrupted Mack and his mother sitting on the porch. She waved at them and said, “Sorry. I hate to disturb you. I just wanted to get at the work early this morning.”

  Millicent was thrilled. She took her tea and walked to the edge of the porch. “So tell me. What’s your new case all about?”

  She heard Mack groan beside his mom. Doreen smirked and said, “Well, we found six boxes in Nan’s attic from what looks like a hope chest from more than a century ago, but I haven’t even asked Nan yet if she knows anything about it.”

  “A hope chest,” Millicent said with awe. “That house of yours, it ended up being a treasure trove, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s been fun,” Doreen acknowledged. Then she bent down and got to work on the weeding.

  Even just days since she’d weeded earlier, those pesky little buggers had popped up all over the place. She made a pile of weeds every so often and moved as fast and as efficiently as she could. Millicent kept talking with Doreen the whole time, wanting details of everything she’d found. When Doreen told her about the nightgowns, she looked up to see the older woman’s face softening.

  “I remember doing things like that,” she said. “I hand-stitched my first nightgown for my wedding too.”

  Doreen laughed. “Good thing I didn’t. I doubt it would have held together past the first night.”

  Just then she remembered Mack’s words from earlier. She groaned, but, of course, Mack had already taken note of that and grinned at her like a madman. She glared at him, then went back to weeding.

  “I told you that she was good,” Millicent said to her son. “Look at her move. How is she possibly that fast?”

  Doreen didn’t hear Mack’s response, but it was likely not terribly nice. She had gotten him into a ton of trouble and had created a ton of extra work with her efficiency, so she could understand if he wasn’t terribly thrilled.

  When she finished making her way around to the rear garden, she still had about twenty minutes left. She grabbed a bucket and scooped up all the weeds she had piled up at various spots. Then she turned to Mack and his mom and said, “I’ll move to the front and see how bad it is out there.”

  On the way she periodically stopped to pull up weeds that poked through the gravel along the sidewalk. When she reached her destination, she walked around the first garden bed. It looked pretty good, so she just grabbed a couple weeds, then headed to the second and the third beds.

  The third garden had been skipped the previous week, and it looked a little worse for wear. Doreen grabbed her tools and dug up some of the weeds by their roots to slow the weeds from developing again, and, when her time here was up, she was pretty happy with the way it had gone.

  She walked to the edge and dumped the weeds into the compost bin, then told Millicent, “You’ll have to consider separating some of these plants or at least divide the roots and maybe come up with a way to keep the beds in check. I know the daylilies are looking mighty healthy, but, after they’ve flowered, you might want to spread them out.”

  “Oh, dear, I do. And the gladiolas! They’ve become such a mess.”

  Doreen laughed. “You know what? I always figured that’s where they were happy. But, once they start growing higher, like they are now, we should probably cut and separate them off. Maybe you can make a new garden bed along the fence. You have that odd strip of gr
ass there.” She pointed it out. “I don’t really see the point of it unless you want to keep it.”

  “Oh, I hate that strip,” Millicent cried out. “That was my husband’s doing. He thought it would be nice to have some walkway around the place, but honestly, it just ended up being hard to mow.”

  “So think about it,” Doreen said as she motioned along the expansive fence. “We’d have to dig it out a bit and remove some of that turf, but you could certainly start splitting up a lot of the plants. I’m not sure what all else could use a bit of relief, but you can start with the daylilies and the gladiolas.” And then she frowned and said, “As I recall, you had a lot of tulips. We could dig up some of those and put a nice soldier row of them along the front.”

  Millicent didn’t respond, seeming to be in deep thought about it.

  So Doreen said, “Just think about it. Nothing has to be done for a long time.” Then she smiled and waved. “I’m heading home now.”

  Mack popped his head out. “How come you’re in such a rush today?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “Things to do, files to read.”

  Mack called her phone as soon as she walked in her door. “You’ll stay out of those files, right?” he asked in an ominous tone.

  “I scanned the third box this morning,” she said comfortably. “I want to get that fourth one scanned too.”

  There was silence at the other end before he grudgingly said, “Okay. That makes sense. Make sure you send me a digital copy of everything you’ve got.”

  “I will, but I have to rename everything, and that’ll take me a lot longer. I’ve got enough work for all of today just in doing that.”

  “Okay. Oh, and if you want to look for secondhand furniture, let me know.”

  “Will do,” she said cheerfully. She set the scanner going while the coffee dripped. She studied the coffeepot, a little worried maybe she was getting addicted. She was only a little worried because, even if she was addicted, she wouldn’t do anything about it. As she had found out too, since leaving her soon-to-be ex-husband, one joy in her life was having coffee outside in her garden. She wasn’t about to give that up. She had lost a ton of stuff when leaving him, but that was one of those little comforts that she planned to keep.