Bone Deep. Janice Johnson Kay
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the nursery, talking to customers who’d likely heard the whispers. She’d found herself looking at every single person differently than she had before. Wondering. It wasn’t pleasant, to find herself speculating about who might have planted those bones as a joke…or worse. About who knew exactly what had happened to Hugh and had kept his remains for some unimaginably horrific reason.
But she kept stumbling over the fact that she would have sworn everyone liked Hugh. He wasn’t perfect; she’d gotten so frustrated with him sometimes she wanted to bash him, although not lethally. His refusal to listen to ideas for changes at the nursery that might have required a little more effort on his part, or a modest outlay of money, had made her crazy. He liked plants, he liked people, but he had no business sense at all. And no ambition. He didn’t care if they made more money. He didn’t care if Sauk River Plant Nursery drew gardeners from beyond their small community. If she got mad when he blew off some suggestion of hers, he’d look at her in bemusement and wander away.
“Honey, bigger isn’t always better,” was one of his favorite lines.
No. It wasn’t. But better was better. It undoubtedly said something about her, that she couldn’t bear mediocrity, but Kat craved the success Hugh couldn’t be bothered to strive for. She even knew why. She’d been eight years old when her mother left her at a neighbor’s house and never came back. She wasn’t abused in the succession of foster homes that followed, but she wasn’t loved, either. She’d sometimes felt like a ghost. Foster parents and the other foster kids in each of the homes had known she was there, but, as though she were semitransparent, they never saw her, not really.
School was different, though. Teachers noticed when she excelled. And later, when she held after-school and summer jobs, employers noticed. If she did an assignment or a job right, better than right, they saw her and they smiled. Once she married Hugh, Kat threw herself heart and soul into the nursery business. There might be times he seemed to forget they were married, but if she could become indispensable at the nursery, she would matter.
Only, she hadn’t mattered very much, or he wouldn’t have left her.
It had bothered her terribly back then that she’d almost hoped he was dead, so she could believe he hadn’t abandoned her, not on purpose.
She worked until her muscles ached, until strands of hair stuck to her sweat-dampened face, until she felt a blister forming even though her hands were calloused and she wore heavy gloves.
The same thoughts circled maddeningly in her head. Why? Why kill Hugh, kind and disinclined to offend anyone? But if he’d died accidentally and someone had found his body… Why keep silent? Why taunt Kat now with bones?
None of it made any sense.
She saw Joan coming, stomping her way along the rows in her sturdy boots.
“Enough already,” Kat’s friend snapped. “What are you doing, trying to make it clean enough for somebody to eat off the ground?”
Kat glanced around. The shavings mounded in rows now had ruler-sharp edges. There were a few perfect circles protecting the roots of specimen trees. Not a wood chip was left on hard-packed paths. She had the sudden, fanciful thought that she was looking at one of the mysterious designs known as crop circles. Her own motivation in caring so fiercely that the nursery grounds be utterly pristine would be as unknowable to someone else as those crop circles were to the bewildered farmers who found them in their cornfields.
There was so much she couldn’t control, but the nursery was hers now. She could shape it to a vision only she saw.
She let out a shuddery breath. “I guess I’m done, anyway.”
“What set you off?” Joan asked.
“Gossip. Nasty gossip.”
Joan’s eyes narrowed. “Anyone I know?”
“Yes. And no, I won’t tell you who. Not until I decide what to do about it.” She turned and walked to the shed, her friend behind her. After hanging the rake on its hook, she said, “I guess I’m naive, but I didn’t realize there was still so much talk.”
“Things are changing with all the new people in town. But for the old guard…well, there hasn’t been that much to talk about. Hugh’s disappearance was too juicy to let go.”
“Does everybody assume I killed him?” Kat hated the helplessness that underlay her rage, but couldn’t entirely quell it.
Joan reached out and gripped her hand. Her expression was both kind and worried. “You know better than that.”
“I’m not sure I do anymore.” Kat shook herself. “Don’t listen to me. I’m in a mood. It’s like seeing the flash of lightning and now waiting for the boom of thunder.”
“But it’s been a week.”
“Think how much fun it is to draw out the suspense.”
A sound escaped Joan. “Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think!”
“Has Chief Haller—”
“I haven’t heard from him. Unless something else happens, I probably won’t.”
“Isn’t he talking to the people on our lists?”
Kat shook her head. “We agreed that wouldn’t accomplish anything but cause more talk and damage business. It’s not like someone was going to admit to planting those bones.” She snorted. “Planted. Get it? A pun?”
“Very funny.” Joan wasn’t amused. “But what if we never find out who did it?”
“Then…” Kat found herself voiceless for a long moment as she tried to imagine this week replaying over and over and over again, the tension stretching thin but never disappearing entirely. “Then,” she whispered, “I live with it.” She knew she could; after all, she’d had plenty of practice after Hugh’s disappearance.
“Ms. Riley?” It was another of her employees, a beefy young man named Chad Harris who wasn’t awfully bright but who could lift anything and worked uncomplainingly from the minute he arrived in the morning. “I’ve got those rhododendrons you ordered. Where shall I put them?”
“Excuse me,” she said to Joan, and went with Chad.
The day didn’t improve, either, because this was the every-other-week Thursday when she had to do payroll. There was no putting it off. Friday was payday, and everyone expected their checks. She’d added a time clock a couple of years ago, which should have made calculating hours a breeze but didn’t. Employees forgot to clock in, or clock out. Sometimes they clocked in and out for lunch, sometimes they didn’t. Now she had to figure pay down to the minutes they worked, not just the hours. The whole thing was a giant headache.
Kat reluctantly collected the time cards from the small employee room that had space for a bank of metal lockers salvaged from the old middle school, a microwave on a cart, a dorm room-size refrigerator and a plastic table with chairs that allowed people to sit to eat lunch. Then, after signaling to Joan, she closeted herself in her office.
It took her an hour and a half with paper, pen and calculator to figure out how much to write the checks for. After swearing for about the tenth time, she thought as she did every other week about how maybe it was time to consider computerizing. How hard could it be to learn QuickBooks or some similar program? Let it do the calculating, and she could even print the checks instead of writing them out by hand. Or maybe she was getting to the point where she could afford a part-time bookkeeper, although she didn’t really have office space to spare.
She opened the left hand drawer in her ancient desk where she kept the checkbook and was reaching in with barely a glance when her brain caught up with what her eyes were telling her.
A skeletal hand lay there. Not just a bone, or even a couple, or a jumble. An entire hand, laid out as carefully as her paths on the nursery grounds. A few of the ivory bones, she saw with horror, were strung