Amy Lynn Greer sighed.
Her husband Reggie was working a crime scene, so she was the one who’d had to drop their three-year-old son off at day care half an hour ago, even though she had two articles that were both due to her editor by noon.
She would have loved to be covering the murders that Reggie was investigating, rather than writing her column on local politics or the follow-up piece on the amount of drug use in children of professional baseball players who use steroids, but her boss refused to assign her any articles that related to Reggie’s cases.
When Reggie had first gotten the job, she’d thought that in her line of work, being married to one of Denver’s crime scene unit forensics specialists might have its advantages, but Reggie was under the scrutinizing eye of Lieutenant Kurt Mason, who’d informed him when he got the job that if he ever released any details about any investigation to his wife, he would be without a job and in court facing criminal charges before her story ever ran. Period. She’d met Lieutenant Mason and could tell he was a man of his word.
She took a small break from outlining the steroids story, checked her email, and found five rejection letters, one from each of the literary agents she’d sent her book proposal to.
Five in one day.
That actually might beat her old record.
A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts.
“Yes?”
The door opened, and a vaguely familiar female voice said, “I’ve got something for you.”
Amy Lynn glanced over and saw one of the secretaries, a sandy-haired, thick-wristed woman she could never remember the name of, standing in the doorway, holding an oversized ceramic flowerpot filled with a shiny-leafed plant sprouting a cluster of half-inch-long, purplish-white flowers. The pot was so large she needed to use both hands.
“What’s that?”
“Flowers.” The woman explained as if Amy Lynn couldn’t tell. Her voice was strained with the effort of holding the oversized pot. “Can I set ’em down?”
“Sure.” Amy Lynn slid some papers out of the way. She tried to remember the woman’s name but couldn’t. She thought it was maybe Britt or Brenda or Brett or something preppy and girlish like that.
The secretary eased the pot onto her desk. “So, what’s the special occasion?”
Amy Lynn gazed at the flowers.
“There is no special occasion.”
Flowers?
Who would send you flowers? Reggie would never do that.
Small clusters of stamen stuck out of the center of each of the feathery-white flowers. The leaves overlapped and grew in layers, each set of two leaves at a perpendicular angle to the ones beside them. The strong minty scent was somewhat familiar, but also unfamiliar at the same time.
She knew how to identify a few kinds of flowers, but mostly just the ones everyone knew-lilies and daisies and roses. She didn’t have a clue what kind of flowers these were.
But she was more curious about who might have sent them than what kind they were. “Was there a note?”
The secretary with the all-too-forgettable name fished out a small envelope from where it had fallen behind some leaves.
The envelope was eggshell white and had only four words handwritten on the front: “To Amy Lynn Greer.”
She immediately realized that it wasn’t her husband’s handwriting and that if he’d sent her the flowers he wouldn’t have included her last name.
But if not Reggie, who? She had a few sources who were male, and a few friends who were a little more than friends-but none of them would have been brash enough to send her flowers. At least she didn’t think so.
The secretary lurked. “I didn’t open it.” She pointed to the envelope.
“Thank you… um, wait, I’m sorry. What’s your name again?”
The woman looked hurt by the question. “Brett Neilson. I’ve been working here for-”
“Thank you, Brett, yes. I’m sorry. I’m not so good with names.”
“It’s OK,” Brett said, but she didn’t leave, just stared longingly at the flowers. “My husband never sends me flowers.”
Amy Lynn didn’t know what to say to that. Finally, she just mumbled, “Well, men. You know.” It sounded pathetic when she said it, but it somehow seemed to satisfy Brett Neilson, who gave her a parting half-smile and backed out of the room, pulling the door closed behind her.
After Brett was gone, Amy Lynn studied the flowers again. They had a formal, functional quality about them rather than a flirty, romantic one. And that scent. Was it a spice?
And who sent them?
She had no idea.
The note.
Ripping open the envelope, she found a small slip of card stock paper with a short, cryptic, handwritten message:
Must needs we tell of others’ tears? Please, Mrs. Greer, have a heart. -John
John?
John who?
She didn’t recognize the handwriting.
Amy Lynn considered all the Johns she knew and almost immediately eliminated all of them from her list of people who might possibly send her flowers, especially ones with an enigmatic note like this.
Maybe a reference to a story she’d done? Something about grief? Tragedy? Someone’s death?
Amy Lynn turned to her computer and felt excitement stir inside of her for the first time that morning.
Figuring out who sent the flowers was much more interesting than analyzing local politics or writing about the families of drug-abusing baseball players. Her editor would just have to wait.
She shoved her other notes aside, tapped at her keyboard, and began to search through the articles she’d written, looking for references to anyone named John.
24
Cheyenne and I arrived at Baptist Memorial Hospital, one of the oldest and most respected hospitals in the state of Colorado, at 9:46 a.m.
The hospital administration had been renovating the eastern wing for the last six months, and I could see that they still had a long way to go. Local press coverage had emphasized how “patient care had not been compromised in the least” during the current renovations, but over the years I’ve seen how much spin finds its way into press releases, so I hadn’t been completely convinced by the hospital administrator’s carefully worded PR statements.
I was stepping out of the car when my cell rang.
“What did we do before cell phones?” Cheyenne said good-naturedly.
“Got into fewer car accidents.” I looked at the caller ID picture on the screen.
Lien-hua Jiang.
OK, this was inconvenient. Cheyenne glanced at me. “Excuse me for a minute,” I said.
“Sure.” She started across the parking lot, and I waited until she was out of earshot.
“Hey,” I said to Lien-hua.
“Hello, Pat. How are you?”
“Good. Things are good, pretty good.” A stiff and meaningless response. I began to follow Cheyenne but made sure I stayed far enough back so she wouldn’t hear my conversation. “How are you?”
“I’m OK. Thanks for asking.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah.” A pause that spoke volumes. “Pat, you know why I’m calling, I think.”
Wow. Well, she’s not wasting any time, is she?
“I’m thinking maybe I can guess.” The words had a bite to them, and I knew it, but I let them stand.
“Please, it’s hard enough doing this over the phone. You don’t have to make it worse.”
“I’m not trying to-” I really did not want to be doing this. Not here, not now. Twenty meters in front of me Cheyenne was entering the hospital. “Look, can we talk about this later, maybe later today?”
“I’m going on assignment to Boston and I don’t want to have this hanging over my head. It’s nothing against you, Pat. You know that.” I could hear pain in her voice but no condemnation. She still cared about me, wasn’t blaming me. And that just made this harder.
“It’s just…” she said. “Things haven’t been… It’s not working.”
For more than a month now things had been deteriorating, and we’d both been dancing around the issue, avoiding saying what we both knew we needed to. “Really, Lien-hua, this isn’t a good-”