Free Death Under the Lilacs by Richard; Forrest Page B

scrambled for a yellow legal pad and began to make notes.
    He would visit each and every Lilac listing in the hope that …
    No! It was a wasted effort. He tore up the notes, wadded them, and threw them across the room. If the lilac clue were a direct reference, her kidnapper would not have allowed it on the tape.
    It had to be something more oblique. But what?
    He took the stairs two at a time as he hurried to his book-lined study. He read the brief entry for lilacs in Volume 14 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica several times. Lilacs came from Persia. An interesting fact, but he could not make it connect with anything. Persia was now Iran, the Middle East … No. Too vague. He slammed the heavy volume shut and threw it on the desk.
    He stood before the desk and found that he was hyperventilating. He seemed to rise above himself, and the room, the most familiar of his life, took on an unreal aura. His heart began to pound and he felt a deep, unreasoning fear.
    He was having an anxiety attack, a panic reaction, he thought to himself angrily.
    He sat down in the deep leather chair and leaned back. He consciously forced his breathing level to return to normal. The room gradually returned to its usual state, and the attack was over.
    Their life had been torn asunder, and he wondered if it would ever return to normal. He was exhausted—tired physically and drained emotionally. He longed for the quiet hours they had spent together, and realized that in three days it would be Sunday, normally their most relaxed of days. Under ordinary circumstances they would follow their years-old routine: breakfast of plump western omelets, steaming mugs of coffee, probably freshly ground Kilimanjaro, along with rounds of English muffins. The massive editions of The New York Times and the Hartford Courant would be spilled over the breakfast-nook table.
    He would grab for the funnies from the Courant and then read the Sunday Times Book Review section. Bea would take the Times Magazine section and immediately turn to the crossword puzzle.
    She was the only person he knew personally who did the Sunday crossword in ink without the aid of a dictionary.
    Every third Sunday or so, the Times would print a puns and anagrams puzzle in addition to the crossword, and Bea’s eyes would light up with a special animation.
    Anagrams!
    He careened off the chair and hurried to the desk where he tore a fresh piece of paper from the stack by the side of the typewriter.
    Lilacs.
    He began to write variations of the word: lailcs, caills, scilla. There didn’t seem to be any anagram that made any sense at all, or much less gave him a clue.
    He examined the words again and then reached for a nearby dictionary. Scilla—he turned pages rapidly until he came to the proper entry.
    â€œâ€¦ Old World bulbous herbs of the lily family with narrow basal leaves and pink, blue or white racemose flowers.”
    He stared down at the entry. It didn’t seem to help either. What were racemose flowers? Back to the dictionary.
    Racemose, Webster’s Collegiate told him, was “… having or growing in the form of a raceme.”
    A raceme, Webster’s further informed him, was a form “… in which flowers are borne on short stalks of about equal length and equal distance.…”
    He slammed the dictionary shut.
    Bea had composed a message under the most difficult circumstances. Could she have been confused about racemose and meant for him to read it as “racehorse” or even “racetrack”?
    There weren’t any horse tracks in Connecticut, but there were car and dog tracks.
    Was she held prisoner in some isolated and seldom-used track? He shook his head. Too far afield. He was reaching and would have to approach the problem from a different angle.
    He inserted fresh paper into the typewriter and began to peck out the exact words Bea had spoken on the tape.
    â€œHe picked me up at the shopping center parking lot,