Roses Have Thorns, page 4
“Livingston,” Sawyer’s voice shouted through the phone. There was a lot of noise in the background, wind and voices and the steady clanging of a buoy.
“Sawyer? There’s... I found... He’s dead!” My voice was high, thready, breathless, and the sound of it scared me.
“Juniper? Who’s dead? Where are you?”
“I delivered flowers to the school earlier and I figured since there wasn’t anybody at the shop I’d take a longer lunch so I came to see Rob’s new puppies and the dogs were in the kennel and they were barking so I went around to the office because I thought he or Teresa would be back here but he’s just dead. Just... Just dead on the floor. Sawyer, his face is so awful.”
“Where are you?”
“Awen.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Go back to your vehicle and lock the doors. Okay?”
“Okay. But hurry.”
“Lights and sirens the whole way,” he said before hanging up.
I stuck the phone back into my pocket. “Sweet baby Buddha,” I said, pressing my fingers over my mouth again as I went around to the front of the house again to sit in the van and wait.
Sawyer arrived about fifteen minutes later, followed by a County Coroner’s van and another sheriff’s department car. I climbed out of my van and met Sawyer as he was walking towards the house. He scrutinized me, his steady gaze dragging from head to toe, before he nodded a little to himself. “Where?” he asked, his voice gruff.
I pointed a shaking hand towards the back of the house. “In the kennel office out back.”
“The kennel office? Not the law office? And you didn’t touch anything? Not the body or anything else?”
“No. I... I wanted to see if he had a pulse, but I... I just couldn’t. It’s too awful.”
“That’s okay,” he said, turning to nod to the female deputy. “Stay here.” He followed her without waiting for me to respond.
I bristled a little at being ordered around like one of my dogs but returned to sit in my van, watching through the windshield as the coroners brought out a flattened, empty body bag on a gurney and wheeled it around to the back of the house. Over the next two hours, Sawyer and the other deputy strung up crime scene tape and sealed the front door of the kennels, collected bits of evidence from inside the house and the office, and took a lot of photographs. The coroners trundled the gurney with the body bag containing Rob’s remains back to their van, loaded it up, and drove away.
Finally, just when I was considering going to ask Sawyer if I could leave, he approached my van and waved me over to him. I felt like a naughty child being called before the school principal, as if I’d done something wrong instead of just being unlucky enough to have discovered a dead body.
“Tell me everything from the beginning,” he said, a small notebook and pencil stub in hand. I told him exactly what had happened from the moment I’d arrived at the house, and he took notes, asking me to repeat certain things, to clarify others. When I was finished, he asked me to go over it again. This time, though, he was silent and his attention seemed to be on his notes, rather than me. Was he checking to see if I told him the same thing both times? Was he looking for holes in my story or inconsistencies? I was growing annoyed.
After the second iteration of my story, he nodded and slipped the notebook into the back pocket of another pair of well-fitting jeans. He pulled his leather coat tighter around his body and looked up at me, eyes searching my face.
“What?” I asked, feeling unnerved by his study. “What did I do?”
He chuckled and flashed me a crooked smile. “Well, you discovered a dead body. I don’t reckon it’s a frequent occasion for you, and I just wanted to be sure that you’re okay.”
“Oh,” I said, a sudden prickle of tears stinging my eyes. I began blinking, hoping that I could keep the tears at bay, but two traitorous drops streaked down my cheeks anyway. “I’m... No, it’s... It’s my first dead body,” I finished in a rough whisper. “I’d rather not do it again.”
Sawyer reached out and took my hand for a moment, giving it a squeeze before letting go. “If it’s all the same, I’d rather you didn’t do it again, too.” He turned away from me to look over the house. It looked like the other deputy was just about done with whatever she was doing, and Sawyer nodded decisively.
“Let’s get you somewhere warm,” he said, turning back to me. “Sarah watching the shop for you?”
“No, she’s in New York. It’s just me this week.”
“Okay. Well, let’s go see if Joss is free. I don’t think you should be alone right now. You okay to drive?”
“I think so.” I felt better now than when I’d discovered the body, calmer and less shaky.
“I’ll follow you back to your shop. Then we’ll go over to First Story to see if Joss’s free.”
“But wait. What about Teresa? Who’s going to tell her? And the dogs? The puppies will need looking after.”
“Deputy Wilkes will make the notification and she’ll also hang around to watch the dogs,” he said, nodding to the woman who was walking towards her cruiser. “She’s good with dogs. Loves ‘em almost as much as you do.” He flashed me a little smile. It was a well-known fact that I was the kind of person who would wind up on the floor playing with a party host’s dog instead of mingling with the human guests.
“Oh. Alright.” I did not envy Deputy Wilkes having to notify Teresa that her husband was dead.
Sawyer helped me into the van and closed the door once I was settled. I pulled out of the drive and onto State Street, watching as Sawyer’s unmarked car followed me at a safe distance.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sawyer parked next to delivery van in the back of the flower shop and followed me inside. He gave everything a careful once over as we moved from the back room to the sales floor, and he stood very close to me while I checked the answering service for calls. I hadn’t received any in the hours that I’d been gone. There weren’t any FTD orders, either, and considering the fact that it was already almost six o’clock, I didn’t bother going to flip the sign in the front door from closed to open.
“Are you ready to go?” Sawyer asked.
“Yes, I just need to do one thing first.” I went back to the FTD computer and shut it down, then withdrew the small amount of cash in the register and added it and a deposit slip to a zippered bank bag.
“All done?” he asked as I slipped the money into my purse.
“Yes. Let’s go see Joss. I’ll go to the bank in the morning.”
I followed him out of the back door, pausing only long enough to lock it, and then we went around the building and across the street to First Story Books. It was pretty late in the day, so luckily the store wasn’t packed with people. In fact, only Joss, Brad, and Noah were present. Sawyer nodded to Joss, shook hands with Brad, and laid his hand over Noah’s head, cooing softly as the little boy looked up at him with wide, curious eyes.
Joss gave him a weird look, one that shifted from him to me. An expression of concern crossed through her warm chocolate-brown eyes. “Who’s dead?” she asked, her voice rough. While it hadn’t been Sawyer who’d brought news of her mother’s death in a car accident several years prior, it had been a sheriff’s deputy. Seeing Sawyer with his badge on his chest and a serious expression couldn’t help but trigger those memories for Joss.
“What?” Brad said, immediately reaching for his wife’s hand. “What’s going on?”
“Juniper found a dead body,” Sawyer said.
Joss’s hand flew to her mouth and she rushed to me, gathering me into her arms and hugging me tightly. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Are you okay? What happened? Who was it?”
“Rob Baker,” Sawyer said. Brad and Joss gasped in shock. “June’s pretty shaken up.”
Joss let go of me but kept one arm around my shoulders as she turned to look at Sawyer. “Of course she is. She’ll come home with us tonight. Right, Brad?”
“Absolutely. Sawyer, you’ll stay for dinner? The pot roast will feed four just as easily as it will feed two.”
“I wouldn’t say no to Brad Hillard’s famous pot roast,” Sawyer answered.
I chuckled softly, feeling indescribably lighter. That was one of the best things about Dawn Cove, the way that neighbors took care of each other. I’d missed it during my decade in Scotland. “I need to stop home first and take care of the dogs.”
Sawyer nodded. “I’ll drive you. I need to ask you some more questions anyway, and you’ll be more comfortable if I do it while you’re at home.”
“I am not going over my story for a third time, Sawyer. I don’t want to keep thinking about what happened. I’m going to have nightmares about it as it.”
“No, no,” he said with a reassuring smile on his face. “I just want to ask some routine questions about Rob.”
“Well. Okay, then. That’s alright.”
“We were just getting ready to close up,” Joss said, giving me a pat on the shoulder before going to take Noah from Brad. “Seems silly to stay open until eight tonight. There’s only been ten people in all day.”
“I’ll bring her over later,” Sawyer said. “Shouldn’t be too long.”
Five minutes later, I was stepping through the front door of my house, being mobbed by what seemed to be approximately five Beaucerons and ten Corgis. They wound around my ankles, jumped up to try to lick my face, and raced in circles from the front door to the kitchen and back again.
“Wow,” Sawyer said after Cornbread had bounced off his knees for the forty-second time. “They sure are happy to see you. Are they always like this?”
“Only when I leave them home alone for longer than half an hour. I need to feed them and let them out. Come through to the kitchen.”
We followed the dogs down the hall, and I let them out through the back door before feeding them and changing their water. Dundee was a little standoffish and seemed reluctant to leave my side—probably because Sawyer was a stranger—but I finally was able to convince him to head outside.
“Remind me what their names are again?”
“The big black one is called Dundee, after Dundee black cake.” I chuckled at Sawyer’s blank look. “Think of a cross between a pound cake and a fruit cake. Only soaked in really good whisky. That’s a Dundee black cake. My dad named him.”
Sawyer nodded. “And the other one?”
“She’s called Cornbread. Want some tea?”
“Sure,” he said, settling on one of the stools at my kitchen counter. “Cornbread because of her color?”
“Exactly.”
Despite my request, he hadn’t left his gun locked up in his cruiser, saying something about regulations requiring him to have it on him whenever he was on duty. The handheld radio that usually rode at his opposite hip was on the counter in front of him, the volume turned low. He’d taken his Smokey the Bear hat and jacket off and left them on the hall tree next to the front door once Cornbread had stopped accosting him. Sitting in my kitchen now in a long-sleeved, khaki-colored, button-up shirt, his six-pointed star badge shining on his chest, and a notebook in hand, he looked very professional. I snickered a little and turned away from him to fill the kettle at the sink.
“Why are you laughing?” he asked.
I shrugged and settled the kettle on the stove. “I was just thinking about the summer before our senior year and juxtaposing it with now.”
“What about that summer?”
I turned to find him staring at me, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “You, me, Joss, Jason, your sister, and Charlie La Tour stealing Dr. Jones’s boat and nearly crashing it into Nautilus Rock. The illegal fireworks we set off on the beach. All the beer we took from your dad. Breaking into the museum and rearranging the mannequins in the displays. Who would have thought such a teenage delinquent would grow up to be a law enforcement officer?”
He snorted and shook his head. “If I remember correctly, you were the driving force behind all of my illegal behavior. You and Merrilee.”
“Your sister was pretty deviant,” I agreed. “I just followed in her footsteps. I was coerced. I fell in with the wrong crowd. The Livingston kids corrupted me.”
“Yeah, right. You were coerced into driving the boat.”
The tea kettle whistled, and I filled our cups with hot water then plunked tea bags into them both. I set his mug in front of him, along with the sugar bowl. “Well, I was the only one of the six of us who knew how. I had to.”
I took up a spot on the opposite side of the counter from him, leaning on my elbows and playing idly with the tea bag’s string. I was trying to not think about Rob’s death and what a loss it was for not only his wife but for the entire community, the whole state really. Not only was Rob a breeder of champion corgis, but he was also a real estate lawyer and a Maine state senator. He’d been elected by an overwhelming majority ever since he ran eight years ago. This would have been his last term due to limits on how long he could serve at a state level, but my father had mentioned that he was considering a run for national office.
A slightly awkward silence descended between Sawyer and I until one of the dogs scratched at the back door to be let inside. Sawyer got up and opened the back door, watching as they sniffed his ankles before going immediately to their food dishes.
“I’d love to have a dog,” he said as he reclaimed his stool. “But it wouldn’t be fair to get one. I’m hardly ever home and my work schedule is insane. I couldn’t really give a dog the attention they deserve.”
“You’re welcome to come over any time to visit with these two nuts. They’d love it. You could take them jogging. Well, Dundee anyway. Cornbread doesn’t run. She more waddles.”
He laughed. “I just might do that.” He doctored his tea, adding two heaping spoons of sugar to it and taking a tentative sip before leaning forward on his own elbows. Less than two feet of space separated us, and for a long moment, I longed to close the distance and kiss him, wanting the contact of another living, breathing human being to chase away the awful look on Rob’s face. Another awkward silence fell for a moment before we both straightened, clearing our throats and smiling with obvious embarrassment. Despite the awkwardness, I felt a tiny flush of happiness knowing that I wasn’t the only one feeling the spark that still existed between us.
“So, you said you’ve had orders for deliveries to Rob from Doug before?” Sawyer asked, dropping his eyes to his notebook, his tone and body language becoming professional.
“Well, I’m not certain it was Doug,” I corrected. “There was never a card and the sender’s information was pretty anonymous—a web mail account and information for some bank in Antigua or Anguilla or somewhere like that.”
“Anguilla?”
“I think so, yes. It’s almost the Spanish for eagle. Anyway, I can print out the orders for you tomorrow.”
“I’d appreciate it. Was there anything unusual about the bouquets?”
“They were such odd requests. Really customized and made up of strange flowers. Our typical deliveries are for pre-made bouquets or ones people find online, and they’re for...” I cast around for a good adjective. “They’re for what you’d think of as normal flowers—roses, carnations, lilies, sometimes potted plants like ivy and ferns. You know?”
“Yep. But these orders weren’t for things like that?”
“Exactly. They were totally random. Carnations, sure, but also forsythia and camellia and asphodel.”
“I don’t know those.”
I took my phone out of my pocket and brought up my camera roll. I snapped photos of all the custom bouquets I made for display on the shop’s website, and showed Sawyer the ones that had gone out to my dad and the others.
“Those are pretty,” he said as he scrolled through them then handed the phone back. “But you’re right. They’re unusual. Why do you think there’s a hidden message in them? That floriography thing you were talking about before, I mean.”
“They’re too random. At first maybe I thought they were in a garden where something important had happened. But the flowers don’t share the same growing habits or even blooming season, so that was out. Then I thought maybe they were chosen for their fragrances when combined, but...” I wrinkled my nose in distaste and shook my head. Sawyer smirked. “I landed on floriography as a way to make the arrangements less random.”
“And you’re sure of their meanings? The first deliveries being positive and the last negative?”
“No, I can’t be certain. Floriography isn’t a science and many of the flowers have contradictory meanings. I just guessed.”
He nodded and scribbled something down in his notebook. “Okay. What meanings exactly do you take from each flower in each bouquet? Were they the same flowers to all the guys?”
“Yes, five exact bouquets each time. One each for my dad, Steve Jones, Brad Hillard, Julian Paquet, and Rob Baker.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, remembering the flowers. “The first bouquets were made up of white anemones—sincerity; maidenhair ferns—bonds between people; white camellias—I'm waiting; and forsythia—anticipation.” I opened my eyes and found Sawyer’s attention was on his notebook again. “They were really quite pretty, a striking arrangement with the long, thing branches of the forsythia against the more architectural shapes of the ferns.”
Sawyer nodded. “And the last bouquets?”
“Yellow carnations—disappointment; purple columbines—ingratitude; and asphodel—someone’s regrets following them to the grave.” I shrugged a little and looked down into my almost-empty tea cup. “Not quite as striking as the first but still pretty. A nice color combination. And only four orders this time. Rob didn’t get one.”
