Free The Geranium Girls by Alison Preston

seen something. That was her only hope.
    She wanted to think it was a friend who had done her a favour but she knew it wasn’t. Anyone who was her friend knew how she felt about this chore. She loved it! Someone had either intentionally ruined her fun or, worse, was terrorizing her in a way so subtle it made the hair on her arms stand up.
    Beryl walked around to the front of her house and sat down on the deck in the shade of the Russian willow. This was an impossible situation. She couldn’t phone the police: “Yes, I’d like to report some lobelia that have been deadheaded.”
    To wait a bit seemed a good idea, to let the situation settle. Maybe she herself had done it and forgotten. No. Maybe it hadn’t happened and her eyes were playing tricks on her. She got up and looked again at each planter in the yard, abundant with the healthy blue flowers. No.
    She doubted she could even tell a friend. It was too weird. If she tried to explain it to anyone they would think she was nuts. Tending flowers wasn’t what criminals did.
    Dhani! She could tell Dhani! She felt a sudden rush of love for her new friend, the one who caused her so much trouble and worry. It filled her up quite unexpectedly. He was just odd enough and in exactly the right way, to understand the importance of this situation.
    She phoned him at the pharmacy. He had booked off for the morning and still hadn’t made it in. They had just heard from him; he was on his way. The lovely feelings she had, ever so briefly, evaporated. Dhani was the culprit. Who else? She even remembered telling him about her love of deadheading. It struck her that it was precisely the type of thing he would do. But why? As punishment for not agreeing with him about everything? Had she disparaged him?
    Maybe he wasn’t her friend anymore. Definitely a possibility since the other day and their argument about… What had they argued about? The part that stayed with her was him opening a drawer in her kitchen desk to have a look inside. She wished so much that he hadn’t done that.
    She tried to look at it in a different light: if she was alone in Dhani’s kitchen would she open a drawer in his desk? Yes, she would. But only if he was nowhere in the vicinity, only if there was no chance in this lifetime that he would find out. So all that meant was that she was a more devious person than Dhani. At least he was honest about nosing around in her private stuff.
    But he had confronted her with what he’d found! Surely that was wrong. It was one thing to come clean about his despicable behaviour but quite another to gloss over it and start accusing Beryl. If he was going to admit to rifling through her drawers he could at least do so with cap in hand.
    Beryl realized she didn’t even know where Dhani lived. It was hard to picture his kitchen, his kitchen drawers and what he kept inside of them. She expected they’d be tidy. But really, she didn’t know very much about him at all.
    He was behind the prescription counter at the drugstore when she finally tracked him down later in the afternoon. She wanted to see if he could account for his whereabouts in the morning. And he could, unless he was lying. But she didn’t think he was; it wasn’t his style. She was both relieved and disappointed. In a way, she wanted it to be Dhani who had tended her flowers. It wouldn’t feel so dangerous if it was him.
    “I was at the toe doctor,” he said.
    “The toe doctor? You don’t have any toes.”
    Dhani didn’t respond and Beryl felt terrible. “Sorry,” she said.
    “Once a year or so I check in with the orthopedic surgeon who removed my toes.”
    “So, how is everything?”
    “Okay.” He shrugged. “With my toes, anyway.”
    There were no customers, but Dhani busied himself with something. The counter was so high that Beryl couldn’t tell what he was up to. She wondered why pharmacy counters were so tall.
    She turned away, changing her mind about confiding in him.
    “Beryl, wait.