The Garden Club Alibi
Chapter 1
The Packet From a Dead Nursery
June Holloway found Arthur Bell dead before she found the missing raffle tickets.
She had gone into the potting room because Mabel Price insisted the blue ticket book had been left beside the seed scales. The Garden Swap could survive three hundred unnumbered tomato plants. It could not survive Marigold Green accusing one another of raffle fraud before lunch.
Arthur sat in the chair beneath the vent, his head tipped toward the rain on the glass. One hand rested on the treasurer's cashbox. The other held a brown seed packet between two fingers.
June stopped in the doorway.
The room smelled of damp compost, elderflower cordial, and the medicinal peppermint Arthur used to disguise the taste of his tablets. A glass lay on its side without having spilled much. His pill case was open.
"Arthur?"
She knew before touching him. Thirty-eight years in a public library had taught June that silence came in categories. Reading silence. Guilty silence. The concentrated silence of children planning damage. This was absence.
She pressed two fingers to his neck anyway, then called for Asha Reed before calling an ambulance. Inspector Reed was off duty somewhere among the herb stalls with her seven-year-old niece. June did not use the word dead on the telephone.
"The potting room," she said. "Come alone first."
Footsteps approached behind her. June stepped back and blocked the doorway.
Mabel carried a tray of scones against one hip. Flour marked her black apron. "Did you find the tickets?"
"Put the tray down."
Mabel looked past her shoulder. The tray tilted. June caught it before six warm scones joined Arthur on the floor.
"Oh," Mabel said.
It was the smallest sound June had ever heard from her.
"Did you come in here this morning?"
"No."
The lie arrived too quickly.
June kept her eyes on Mabel. Her friend had tied the potting-room key to a green ribbon at breakfast and worn it around her wrist because Arthur objected to keys near food. The ribbon was gone.
"Where is the key?"
Mabel looked down at her bare wrist. "Arthur asked for it."
"When?"
"Before the gates opened."
The brass key was visible on the worktable behind Arthur's chair.
Asha appeared at the end of the path in a linen jacket, her niece already handed to another officer. She saw June's face, then Mabel's, and came through the gate at a run.
"Nobody enters," she said.
"Nobody has."
"You?"
"Only the threshold. I checked his pulse."
Asha pulled on gloves. June moved aside.
The present difficulty was simple: Arthur was dead, Mabel had lied, and a hundred club members were twelve yards away swapping courgettes beneath bunting.
One detail made no sense.
June could see the seed packet again now that Asha had opened the door fully. The black illustration showed a climbing rose called Midnight Ledger. Along the bottom ran a green oval logo.
HART & SONS, EST. 1891.
Hart's nursery had closed eighteen years ago. June had helped box its catalogues when the owner donated them to the library.
"Asha. The packet."
"Don't come in."
"I know the printer's mark. That design stopped in 2008."
Asha crouched without touching Arthur's hand. "It looks new."
It did. The paper was crisp, the ink unfoxed. Someone had printed an old design recently.
Outside, the brass bell rang for the children's sunflower contest. Applause followed. The cheerful sound entered the potting room and failed to belong there.
Asha called for her team. Mabel picked up the scone tray and set it down again.
"His heart," she said. "It must be his heart."
"Perhaps," Asha said.
"He kept his tablets there. Look."
Mabel pointed through the doorway to the open pill case.
June turned to her. "How did you know where he kept them?"
Mabel's mouth closed.
The first officer arrived with tape. Asha began moving people away from the greenhouse. June did what she had done during three fire alarms and one escaped python at the library: gave clear instructions in a voice that made panic feel inconvenient.
She sent the children to the orchard. She asked Thomas Vale to announce a plumbing problem on his radio segment. She put the raffle table under Elsie Finch's supervision and told no one why.
When June returned to the path, Mabel was gone.
The scones remained.
So did the missing green ribbon, tied now around the handle of Arthur's cashbox.
Asha saw it at the same moment. "Was that there before?"
"No."
Someone had moved close enough to the doorway while June cleared the lawn. Someone who wanted Mabel's ribbon found beside the body.
Asha photographed it. "Go home, June."
"I am a witness."
"You are also retired. Try it."
June almost smiled. Then a scene officer lifted the seed packet into an evidence sleeve and turned it over.
On the back, beneath the fake nursery logo, was a purple oval stamp.
MARIGOLD LIBRARY - WITHDRAWN.
June had ordered that stamp herself in 1997.
Arthur had died holding evidence marked with her hand.
June did not touch the packet. She called Asha, then stood beside the body while the club's members gathered beyond the glass. Mabel arrived first, her gardening gloves tucked into her coat pocket.
"You said he was counting receipts," Mabel said.
"I said you told me he was."
The distinction mattered. Arthur's cashbox was open, but the money inside remained dry and neatly banded. The missing raffle book was the only thing absent.
Asha entered with Inspector Reed and stopped when she saw the stamp. Reed photographed June's hands before allowing her to move.
"When did you last use this stamp?" he asked.
"Twenty-nine years ago."
"Then someone kept a copy."
June looked at the seed packet again. Its paper was new, the nursery logo too crisp. Someone had printed an old mark and placed it in Arthur's hand to turn a club dispute into a trail leading to her.
Reed opened the cashbox with a gloved key. Beneath the ledger lay a torn strip of blue ribbon, wet at one end.
Mabel made a sound that stopped short of a sob. June recognized the ribbon from Mabel's committee badge.
"Do not let anyone leave," Reed said.
The instruction reached the lawn too late. A side gate clicked open, and footsteps moved through the rain toward the road. The gate had been wired from outside. Reed cut the wire while Asha called the county dispatcher. In the potting shed, shelves had been disturbed. A brass key lay beside a fresh membership list with June's name circled in red.
"Someone wants you to look appointed," Reed said.
"Or guilty."
Mabel admitted the packet had been meant for her and that she had tried to remove its final page before anyone read it. The Hallowell trust had left land to the club on one condition: the archive could not be sold.
June found a camera aimed at the shed, its memory card missing. Rain showed one set of prints leading from the cashbox to the road. The dispatcher reported the treasurer's van near the closed nursery.
Mabel reached for the cashbox. June blocked her. "You already lied about the tea."
"I lied to keep the club open," Mabel said.
Reed locked the shed. The red ink around June's name was still wet. Whoever wrote it had been inside minutes earlier. From the road came an engine starting. June pocketed the brass key and ran after the van.