that finger bone was Hugh’s… But it couldn’t be. That made no sense at all. Finding it in her compost was cruel mischance, that’s all.
But the queasy feeling stayed in her stomach as she waited to hear from Grant.
George Slagle was back at the nursery today. It seemed he’d wanted her personal advice on what tree to choose.
“That kid who was trying to help me probably knows more about rock bands than he does plants,” George said dismissively. “They’re going to cost a pretty penny if I put in a whole row of the damn trees, and I don’t want something I’m going to have to tear out five years from now.”
“That’s smart of you,” she said. “I do teach all my employees about the plants I sell, but I’m glad to help you, George.”
“You have problems yesterday?” His eyes had an avid glint, as if he wanted to be the first one in town to know her troubles. Was he back today to be nosy and not because he wanted to buy those damn trees? “I saw Chief Haller’s car out front.”
“Nothing big. You know how it is.” She shook her head, hoping he’d assume she was talking about shoplifting. “He bought a nice daphne yesterday for his own yard while he was here.”
Apparently her suspicions were unfounded, because she was able to turn his attention to ornamental trees. She wasn’t surprised to find that he had his mind set on the typical spring flowering cherry or pear; he wasn’t interested in foliage or fall color. He liked pink. She steered him to a prunus cultivar with a columnar shape and semidwarf stature that wouldn’t outgrow the narrow strip or make passage on the sidewalk impossible, and promised delivery of eight trees as soon as he had the holes dug. He hinted that she might give him a price break, as a fellow chamber of commerce member, and she deftly sidestepped.
After he left, having paid full price but still smiling, Kat’s oldest—in both senses of the word—employee murmured, “I think he was flirting with you.”
They were having a momentary lull at the cash registers, although through the open double doors Kat could see several customers filling flats with annuals.
Flirting? “Is that what he was doing? Oh, ew.” She frowned at Joan. “You didn’t hear me say that.”
“Deaf as a post,” her friend and right-hand woman promised with unfailing cheer. “I’m just saying.”
“He’s got to be sixty!”
Batted eyelashes were incongruous on Joan’s round face. “May-December relationships can work, you know.”
“Am I May?”
“You just turned thirty-three. You might even be June. And, hey, at sixty, he’s not December, either. Maybe October.”
“God.”
Joan leaned an ample hip against the counter. “Were you planning to tell me about that finger bone?”
“Didn’t I…? No,” she said, remembering, “you weren’t here yesterday. Well, I gather Jason has beaten me to it.”
“And it really is human?”
“So Chief Haller says.”
“You’re okay?” Joan asked, tone tentative. “You’re not thinking—?”
“I’m fine. And no, I’m not thinking. Shoot,” Kat added. “I never connected with Annika yesterday. I’d better give her a call.”
“She was by half an hour ago when you were with George. She left flyers for the garden club meeting.” Joan gestured toward the table that held reference books, business cards for other nurseries and informational bulletins.
Kat glanced that way, then said, “I’m going to be in the office for a few minutes, then in greenhouse four if you need me.”
Kat hadn’t been back in the greenhouse since yesterday, her taste for potting seedlings having evaporated. But the work had to be done, business was slower today, and as long as she was brooding she might as well occupy her hands with something useful.
Once she made it there, she discovered that nobody else had taken up where she’d left off. Kat put on her gloves and resumed work.
It had to be the uneasiness she couldn’t shake that made her so conscious of how alone she was in the big greenhouse filled with long, plank tables covered with tiny, potted seedlings and seed trays. The quiet that yesterday had seemed peaceful today felt…thick, as if her ears were stuffed with cotton. She strained to hear anything at all and began to wonder if she shouldn’t get her iPod out of her car to keep her company. But she knew she wouldn’t use it; with earbuds in, she really wouldn’t hear anyone coming. As it was, she remembered her start of near-terror yesterday when Jason had gotten so close without her even hearing the creak of the old door swinging open and closed.
Sitting so that she could see the doors at both ends of the greenhouse, at least peripherally, she reached for another seedling, another empty plastic pot, and kept working.
The rhythm freed her mind to begin circling old doubts, as if on a looped tape.
She knew what people had said, out of her hearing, when Hugh disappeared. They speculated about their marriage and why a man as expansive and outgoing as Hugh had married someone so cold. Maybe running away was the only way he could escape her, they’d said.
Kat hadn’t let herself do this in a long time. Mostly, she tried not to think about Hugh, beyond the inchoate desire to know what had happened, where he was. She believed he was dead. He’d had his flaws, but he wasn’t the man to leave her in endless purgatory like this, not on purpose.
Only sometimes did her stomach clutch up and she wondered whether their marriage could have been bad enough that he’d wanted to escape and would take any way to do it. He’d always warmed and cooled toward her, going two or three months without turning to her in bed at all, then suddenly becoming the passionate man who’d wooed her in the first place. She couldn’t call it moodiness because he stayed cheerful. It even seemed to her that she was still his best friend. Just…not his lover.
That had made her wonder, but she’d never had any proof, and he’d denied it the one time she confronted him and insisted he must be seeing another woman. So she let it drop because mostly she was happy. Not rapturously so, but she had a husband and a home and a business and somewhere to belong. Was any marriage perfect?
No, she would swear Hugh wasn’t unhappy enough to run away. He had to be dead, not to have ever come home.
But then, where was his body?
Her trowel, dipped in the potting mix, seemed to grind on something.
Kat froze.
No. It couldn’t be. The bone had been in the compost, not the potting mix.
Nonetheless, her breath came fast as she adjusted the angle of the trowel and scooped whatever it was up. She turned the trowelful over on top of the garden cart full of potting mix.
Another bone lay, half-exposed. Another…what had they called it? Phalange?
No, no, no.
Heart
