“I knocked in back. Pounded in fact, and you didn’t even bother. I’m half an hour behind now. I couldn’t leave the truck back there and you know how hard it is finding parking up front.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The cops were here.”
He flushed as if he were the one they were after. “Cops? You okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said, surprised that I made the admission. I never talked much with Stan. He was too attractive, too young, and frankly, a bit too dumb for me. I didn’t want to get involved in anything more than the employer-employee friendship we seemed to already have.
“Nobody broke in, did they?” He had been driving for me when those kids came in with the shotguns. In fact, he was the one who helped me clean up the store.
I shook my head. “One of my customers was murdered.”
I guess I could call Dwight Rhodes that, even though I knew he had never really been a customer. At least, not voluntarily.
“Damn, boss, I’m sorry.”
I nodded, and decided that I had to move.
“I only have three deliveries this afternoon,” I said, and hoped it was true. I couldn’t remember any of the orders I’d taken. Everything left my brain when the police came through that door. “But if you finish early, check with me one last time. I’m a bit frazzled.”
“No kidding.” He pushed his way past the line of herb starts I kept for the locals. “I’d be too.”
I knew I could trust him to check back if he had the chance. Stan was good that way. He’d been one of the best employees I ever had, even though he wasn’t technically just mine. When I realized that I didn’t have enough business to pay for all his delivery runs, I got together with a few other smaller shops. We shared Stan as our delivery driver. It covered his vehicle costs, and it took the burden off our small businesses. None of us counted him as an employee. We all paid him under the table, and he took care of his own costs.
Of course, the only price we paid on that was a future one: If Stan ever got that Broadway job he dreamed of, we’d lose him in the space of an afternoon.
I followed him into the back. He grabbed the largest arrangement, a clichéd spray of carnations and greenery for a funeral, and carried it to the truck. I followed with the daisy basket I’d made for an upscale boutique and the delicate vase filled with the palest pink roses I had. We loaded up the truck and he left, after checking to make sure I was all right.
I said I was, and even I believed the lie. Until I found myself in the back, staring at the damn computer. I wasn’t looking at the missed deliveries, even though I had promised myself I would.
I was doing something I should have done that very first day, when Ruth-Anne Grant crossed my threshold.
I should have run a search on her name, seen how many other deliveries she got from me, and who had sent them.
The computer found five, spaced over five months. They came at the same time on the same day of the month, as if the guy had a ritual.
And of course, each name who sent the flowers was different from the last. The bouquets were different too, and so were the prices, almost as if this mook knew how much was on that credit card he’d stolen and how much he could spend without getting caught.
Roses in May, hyacinths in April, tulips in March, a mixed bouquet in February, and an expensive bonsai — one I had nurtured for nearly a decade — in January. That one broke my heart, as if this stalker had attacked me personally.
If Ruth-Anne Grant knew the bonsai was from the stalker, she had probably thrown it out.
All that work, all that love, lost.
Just like Dwight Rhodes was lost.
I did another search, this time for the names on the credit cards, to see if the stalker had used them more than once. He hadn’t, and they had never shopped here.
Then I printed out the Ruth-Anne Grant order files. As they chugged out of my too-slow ink-jet printer, I studied them. Phone orders each one, each with a romantic message, each sent anonymously.
And those dates...
They weren’t really enough to let a woman know she had anything more than a secret admirer. What made a woman think she had a stalker? Frequent, persistent attention. Phone calls. Letters. Gifts.
Many, many gifts.
And clearly this guy wasn’t one who liked face-to-face contact. He ordered with false names and left no fake name on his deliveries.
The only other things I could tell about him were obvious: he had opportunity to get other people’s credit cards without them reporting the theft to the credit card companies, and he knew his flowers. He bought what was in season.
Frequent, persistent gifts. Once a month wasn’t frequent enough, and Ruth-Anne Grant’s anger made me think the flowers were a theme.
Persistent. That much was clear. But smart enough to cover his tracks over and over again. With the credit cards, with the names, with the anonymous messages.
I gripped the papers, still hot from my printer, and sank into a nearby chair. Ruth-Anne Grant hadn’t been lying about the stalker.
I whirled in my chair, grabbed the phone, and dialed Flowers by the Book, a boutique book and flower shop nearby. We shared Stan, and I liked to talk to the owner, Odele Page, an opinionated woman in her mid fifties.
I explained the situation, leaving the murder and the police out of it, by saying that I thought maybe a client of mine had a stalker, and would she look up the client’s name, see if she had anything on file with anonymous cards, and fax me the information.
She offered to do it then and there, on the phone. I cradled the receiver between my ear and my shoulder as I moved around the back, too stressed to stay still. I checked the mirrors and the door, making certain I was alone.
All the while, I listened to her computer system beep and ping, her fingers tapping lightly on the keys. She would sigh and then sigh again, and finally she gasped.
“Ruth-Anne Grant,” Odele said, and recited the address.
I stopped between the blue vases and the white ceramics I bought from a local artist. “That’s the one.”
“I’ve sent her something the first week of every month since December.”
“On an exact date?” I asked.
She paused for a moment, and I heard the sounds of keys again. “Looks like as close to the third as possible.”
Mine were around the twelfth.
“Can you fax me the information?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems private.”
“The only private thing on there is Ruth-Anne Grant’s address, and I already have that,” I said. “The rest has got to be stolen credit cards and false personal information.”
Still, Odele hesitated.
“Look, Odele, all I’m going to do is give this information to the police. I hope that they’ll go after this guy, whoever he is. Can I at least tell them to contact you?”
“I’ll fax you,” she said, and hung up. I smiled. I had figured she might respond like that. Odele was, after all, a typical former hippie, aversion to the police and all.
Odele wasn’t my only phone call. I contacted all the other florists who shared Stan. A few of them hadn’t heard of Ruth-Anne Grant, but a few others had, all of them near my neighborhood, all of them boutique shops like mine.
Each shop had its particular day, and they were close enough that I began to get a sense of what Ruth-Anne Grant had gone through. She was getting flowers every day of the week, anonymously, for five months — the December offering from Odele being the first.
It was also the most unique: a holiday package of greens, mistletoe, and holly around a large poinsettia. Along with the plants came a bag of Christmas cookies from a nearby bakery and various teas from all over the world.
But the centerpiece was Odele’s specialty, a large-sized, stunning gift book that she had first bought for the previous Valentine’s Day: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, with illustrations by well-known New York gallery artists.