Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 97032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 485(@200wpm)___ 388(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 485(@200wpm)___ 388(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
“Good one, Pepper. So, this stays between you and me?” Danny asked to make sure.
I scrunched my face. “I will tell Ian. We’re in this mystery together, but he’ll keep it between us.”
“Ian is a good guy. I trust him and Amy as well. She always keeps your secrets,” Danny said, then went to a barrel filled with planting soil.
“Amy is a given. If I know, she knows,” I confirmed and watched him scoop up some soil with his hands and looked about to throw it around the area where I saw the body. I quickly stepped in front of him. “Stop! Let me get some pictures first.” I reached for my back pocket only to remember I didn’t have my cell.
“My phone back pocket,” Danny offered. “Take what pics you want, send them to yourself, and then delete them.”
While I did as he said, I asked him, “Why are you throwing that dirt around?”
“I know my wife and she knows me even better. She will assume I did not meet her standard of clean and she will hurry here to see for herself. This dirt is just enough to satisfy her expectations.”
I had to laugh. “You two are a perfect pair.”
Danny grinned. “That we are, and I am proud of it.”
“But you might want to mess up the dirt around the rubber tree plant or she’ll get suspicious,” I suggested.
“Good thinking, Pepper.”
We were barely finished when Kelly entered the greenhouse. “Mrs. Johnson kept me, though she made a huge purchase of plants. Thomas is loading her truck now. What’s going on here?”
“My fault,” I said.
“Oh, you had an accident with the rubber tree plant, and that’s why you wanted help. I knew I should have sent someone to help you get it. It could use more soil,” Kelly pointed out and Danny was quick to oblige her as she grabbed a broom and started sweeping.
I spotted a slip of paper sticking out alongside a barrel and to keep the two of them distracted so I could grab it, I said, “Are you filling that pot with too much soil?”
Kelly turned to see, and Danny was quick to scoop some soil out, giving me enough time to grab the paper and shove it in my back pocket.
It was almost an hour before I was done at the garden center. The bed of my truck was loaded with plants for my place and thankfully Dad’s plants were being put aside to be delivered with other plants my mom had picked out for the police station.
I didn’t get a chance to look at the slip of paper until I was home. I pulled it out of my back pocket once I got out of the truck and unfolded it. It was a page torn out of the book on the history of Willow Lake. It was a picture of inside the mausoleum and scrawled across the tomb of Verbena were two words… not there.
The sun had yet to set when Ian and I took our glasses of wine out on the front porch to sit and enjoy. It had been a busy day for us both and it wasn’t until suppertime that we got a chance to talk and discuss the torn page I had found at the scene of the body that had vanished yet again.
“It’s more a guy that keeps vanishing than a vanishing body we’re looking for,” Ian said.
“True, but what was he doing in the garden center? That’s a strange place to be when his interest is in the mausoleum. And how does he know whatever he was looking for is… not there?”
“And what is not there?” Ian asked. “I had no time to ask you this morning what Stone wanted with you.”
I wondered when he’d get around to asking me that.
“Wait, let me guess,” Ian said. “He wants you to help him prove that he is a descendant of the Willow family. But that’s a ruse. One, he is attracted to you, and two, he wants to stick close to you thinking you might find the answer to whatever it is he’s searching for.”
“That is why I love you so much,” I said with a grin. “You are terrific at fitting together pieces of a puzzling mystery.”
He chuckled. “And here I thought it was my good looks and fit body.”
I sprang forward in my wood rocking chair. “Fit body! Maybe the vanishing guy suffered side effects from the blow he suffered to his jaw, and he passed out in the greenhouse. But the question still begs… what was he doing in the greenhouse?”
“But as we discussed over supper, how he vanishes is another issue of its own,” Ian said. “How did he manage to get past us in the mausoleum is still puzzling but at least you spotted the side door in the greenhouse. That had to be the way he exited.”