Within minutes, Missy and the park director, Hazel Velez, arrived in Hazel’s cart. Behind them were the Iona-McGregor Fire District ambulance, and the Lee County Sheriff and Ft. Myers Police patrol cars. Edna saw Hazel shake her head when the cars made muddy ruts through the grass.
Paul intercepted Hazel as she jumped out of the cart. She looked the size of a fifth grader standing next to Paul.
“You probably shouldn’t look,” Paul said firmly.
“Why? What? Oh, no!” Hazel said. Her brown eyes froze open.
Missy gasped, and then she cried in waves of sobs. Hazel sat with her in the cart.
Betty and Jack walked from the clearing in front of the Cactus Garden. Charly, a new volunteer who had started that morning, came down the path toting a bucket of weeds. She took off her ball cap and wiped the sweat through her short gray hair.
“Who is in charge here?” asked a sheriff’s deputy.
“That would be me,” Hazel said as she looked up. She’d been holding her head and gazing at her knees.
“I am going to ask everyone to stay here until we collect your statements. You all can wait over there.
He pointed to the Rose Garden gazebo on the southeast side of the garden. As they all walked in silence to the picnic table inside the gazebo, Hazel recovered her thinking well enough to offer to get Russ’s volunteer information file from her office. One of the officers went with her in her cart.
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t know if I can cope with this. I’m exhausted from that plant sale yesterday. We didn’t get out of here until after 6:30,” Betty said.
Everyone else groaned in agreement.
As they sat waiting for the officers, Edna’s mind wandered back to the first day she and Paul volunteered at the park. Two months earlier, they had met with the other volunteers in the same Rose Garden gazebo. That same morning, a group of people, some walking arm-in-arm, had followed a bagpiper to the Rose Garden circle. Betty and Missy explained that the ceremony was a memorial tribute.
“Bagpipes always make me cry.” Betty had said.
Missy had a comment, too, “Those bricks, several of them, were murder victims. That’s why we have some creepy things going on around here--restless spirits, you know.”
“Now, it looks like Russ’s name could be on the next brick added to the Rose Garden,” Edna thought.
“We were so close,” Missy said. “I was hoping that someday, after he was over his dead wife, that maybe we’d get together, be more than friends.”
Missy’s blonde hair reminded Edna of the pond waterfall. Her hair spilled over her folded arms as she put her head down on the picnic table. Betty patted Missy’s back.
“This is my first day. It’s only 9:30 a.m. I can’t believe my rotten luck!” Charly said.
The sheriff’s deputy came to the gazebo to start his questions.
“Was there any amount of money kept in this area?” he asked.
Paul spoke first, “We had some petty cash for the plant sale yesterday, but after the sale, Betty deposited the money. You took care of that, didn’t you, Betty?”
Betty looked at Jack. The two had started dating two weeks earlier. Her eyes opened wide.
“Betty and I were late for our dinner, and I thought, just overnight, that I’d put the money in the shed until 11:00 today when we could swing by the bank and deposit it,” Jack said.
“Show me where you put it,” said the officer.
Jack took the deputy to the tool shed next to the potting shed. The volunteers kept their “coffee club” supplies in a plastic bin in back. He produced a small can and opened it. Edna could see that it was empty.
After Betty stopped patting Missy’s back, she asked Edna what was happening in the shed.
“We worked our butts off, and now the money is gone?” Betty said, after Edna told her about the empty can. ”This is a nightmare.”
The deputy examined the small lock on the tool shed door. It was a pitiful thing that didn’t work. A screwdriver might have made the fresh scratches on the lock and latch, but any crook worth his title could have just given the old relic a twist to open it.
After collecting names, addresses and brief statements from the gardeners, the deputy dismissed the group.
“Expect a call from Detective Brandon Brumbaugh. He’ll have questions for all of you.”
Paul’s forehead wrinkled in the middle. He didn’t say anything and walked over to lock up the tool shed. As Edna and Paul went toward the parking lot, she pulled him toward the white wedding gazebo.
“I need this,” she said. “Aroma therapy--I need it bad.”
She stuck her head inside a gardenia bush brushing the plant with her short dark hair. She inhaled the intoxicating fragrance. She pinched off a bloom and sniffed the flower on the short drive home. She put it in a shallow dish of water by the kitchen sink. Then she took a bite of a Milky Way she had kept in the refrigerator and stuck it back in the empty butter dish. How she stayed thin was a mystery even to her.
“That detective’s name is familiar. I think he knows Joe.”
Joe Grimaldi was Edna’s son and Paul’s stepson who lived nearby in Naples.
Paul didn’t answer. He was lost in thought, no doubt about the garden. Edna kept seeing a vision of Russ’s body on the floor of the shed with the money tucked under his head. The grizzly mental image kept repeating and no amount of dog brushing or floor sweeping could make it go away.
After seeing an actual murder scene, she had a burst of admiration for the reporters she used to work with when she was the newsroom librarian for the Daily Record in Denton, Ohio. For twelve years, she had filed stories about the murder scenes that the reporters had to cover. Now she understood why they could be so quiet or moody.
One thing she gained at the paper was an appreciation for an orderly presentation of facts. She had heard the editor chew out many young reporters for getting information twisted or skipping important details.
Something was wrong with the details of Russ’s death. Edna felt it in the inky part of her newsroom veins.
“It is just like the Lucky Leprechaun contest,” she thought.
The advertising department held an annual spring event to increase readership. In one ad somewhere in the Daily Record, the composing room embedded the Lucky Leprechaun in an odd place. He could be standing up, lying down, or peeking around an object in the ad. If subscribers found it, they could enter a drawing that week to win a $100 gift card to Buehler’s food store.
“That money shouldn’t have been under Russ’s head,” Edna thought. “It’s the piece of the picture that doesn’t belong there.”
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