Free Ashes and Bones by Dana Cameron

identity thief would use my name to send her flowers. My stomach began churning acid as I waited for her to get back.
    She gave me the information. “Thanks, Betty. I’ll call them right away, make sure everything’s okay. Maybe…maybe it would be a good idea if you didn’t handle the flowers”—I couldn’t bring myself to say, In case there is something dangerous in with them, but then my mother-in-law helped me out.
    “Okay, you’re right. They might be meant for someone else.”
    She sounded so sad that I could have kicked myself for not sending them. Damn. “Okay, you know, it might just be…I don’t know what it might be. I’ll call you right back.”
    “Please do.”
    “And, I’ll call Brian, too. Maybe he sent them, and they messed up the card.”
    “I bet that’s what it was,” she said, and I could hear the relief in her voice.
    We said goodbye and hung up. I called Brian, who had no idea what I was talking about, then I called the florist.
    “I can’t tell you the name of the person who sent them,” the woman on the line said. “That’s a matter between the recipient and the sender.”
    “What if I told you that I was afraid it was a matter of identity theft?” I said.
    “I doubt that very much,” the woman replied. “The customer paid with cash.”
    I racked my brains. “Okay, I understand that you can’t tell me who sent the flowers. Can you…can you at least tell me whether you made up the leis yourself? Maybe not you, personally, but in house?”
    “We would never send anything out that we hadn’t prepared ourselves.”
    “Straight from you to the address in San Diego?”
    “Absolutely, yes.”
    Okay, that at least ruled out the idea, crazed as it might be, that Tony or whoever it was had tampered with the flowers. A distant memory of Nancy Drew and a funeral lei came back to me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Betty might be in danger.
    “Thanks for your help.” I hung up then dialed Brian’s mom again and told her that there had been some confusion at the hotel where we’d been staying; they sent a thank-you gift to us, not to our address, but to our ‘in case of emergency’ address. “It’s some kind of premium, you know. You get a tour package and ‘thank-you gift.’ It wasn’t ‘from Emma,’ the card was saying but thank you ‘to Emma.’”
    It was a lame excuse, but the best I could do with the information I had at hand. “I’m just glad that they went to you, instead of getting lost altogether. You enjoy them, and make a lei for me next time I come.”
    “Oh, dear. Well, if you’re sure…?”
    “Absolutely sure. You’ll get more out of them, than I would. What am I going to do, wear it to class? I don’t think the orchids and other stuff would go well with khakis in Maine in the fall.”
    Then Betty laughed and I knew she’d be fine.
    I, on the other hand, was having a fit. If it hadn’t been for the lilies of the valley at the hotel, I would have been able to convince myself of some hospitality error as well. But Convallaria would always be associated, for me, with the death of my friend Pauline and the death of her killer by the poisonous plants that grew in her yard, and another coincidence with flowers just didn’t work for me.
    And the note. I surely didn’t relish seeing Tony soon. Even if it wasn’t him, it still struck me as threatening.
    I pressed the button and listened to the next message again. “Emma, this is Beebee Fielding,” a crisp voice announced.
    As if I knew thousands of Beebees. I sighed. My father’s second wife. Maybe she was just making sure that I knew that they were still married, maybe she just never shook offher business background. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt.
    “I’m not really sure how to say this. While I think it’s very kind of you to remember your father’s tastes, and to think of him, occasionally—”
    Okay, that was when I decided that there would be no more benefit of