Chapter 10
Ten
I didn't go straight home from Maggie's, even though I was curious what my guests were doing this afternoon.
My curiosity about Hyacinth Maxwell (there was a twist I hadn’t seen coming) outweighed any concerns about dissatisfied guests.
Instead I headed toward Perrault's Flowers on Magazine Street, close to my old apartment where I’d lived for three years before inheriting Midnight House.
I wanted to order flowers for Evelyn Carrington’s services and Dorothy Perrault was the woman to order them from.
She had chaired the flower committee for the Society for eleven years running and had never in that entire time met a piece of gossip she didn't want to share.
So yes, I was being polite and appropriate in ordering the flowers. While also being nosy. I wanted to know if Dorothy had heard anything about the investigation or any gossip pertaining to what might have led to someone rigging a straw to kill Evelyn.
Perrault's smelled the way it always did, like wet stems and floral blooms. Dorothy was behind the counter wrist-deep in a bucket of ranunculus when the bell over the door announced me. She looked up and beamed like Christmas had come early and no one had recently been murdered.
"Harper Bergeron. That was something else last night, wasn’t it? Tell me what you know and don't you dare give me the sanitized version you gave the newspaper."
"I didn't give the newspaper any version. I didn't talk to the newspaper."
"Well, somebody did, and it was boring." She wiped her hands on her apron and came around the counter.
“I came to order flowers for Evelyn’s service. I know the details aren’t out yet, but I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d stop in. I wanted to offer condolences as well. I know you and Evelyn have known each other forever.”
"Uh-huh." Dorothy straightened, and wiped the smile from her face. She shook her head. "It's just terrible. I still can't believe it. I keep waiting for her to call me about the invoices for next year and then I remember there isn't going to be a next year, not with her running it anyway."
"How long did you work with her? On the committee, I mean."
"Oh, gracious, twenty years if it's a day.
" Dorothy picked up a pair of shears and went back to her ranunculus, the way people did when they wanted to keep their hands busy while their mouth did something harder.
"She ran a tight ship. I'll say that for her.
Everything had to be exactly right, down to the ribbon width on the programs. Some folks found that exhausting.
I found it restful, honestly. You always knew where you stood with Evelyn. "
"She was definitely honest. Judgmental."
Dorothy gave me a look over the top of her glasses, the specific look of a woman who had seen her fair share of curiosity. “Did she have a thing or two to say to you?”
I shrugged. “Nothing major. She just corrected my etiquette a few times. My aunt thought it was funny. It kind of got under my skin, I can admit it. I still remember it a year later.”
“It was her delivery. She made people feel bad. No sugar from that woman.”
I nodded. “Exactly.” Since I couldn’t think of a clever segue to Hyacinth I just launched into it.
"So Hyacinth Maxwell said something to me the night of the gala that's been sitting with me.
I asked her a question, and she got cagey, and then she told me it had been so long since school that I don't really know her anymore.”
It had been sarcasm and we’d never been close but it was all I had.
“Hyacinth? That one.” Dorothy gave just the slightest roll of her eyes. “What about her?”
“It got me thinking about how well anybody actually knows Hyacinth these days. Including Evelyn, I guess. I know they've worked together on the catering committee."
"Oh, those two went way back. Evelyn and her grandmother were thick as thieves before Lilac passed a decade ago. Evelyn took on the role of surrogate grandmother.”
Hyacinth had a grandmother named Lilac. Because of course she did.
“Evelyn got her onto her first committee before she was even done with college, introduced her to Robert McClintock at one of Evelyn's own dinner parties, if memory serves, and they were married within a year.
There was a stretch of years there where you didn't see one without the other.
Evelyn used to call her 'my girl,' like she'd made her out of whole cloth. "
To be honest, I hadn’t even realized Hyacinth was married. I guess she was Hyacinth Maxwell McClintock. Which was a pretty darn good name, I had to admit. If she’d taken his name.
Personally, I was keeping mine exactly as it was. If I ever got married. I had to go on a date first for that to happen.
“How long has Hyacinth been married? My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail.”
Dorothy set down a stem and picked up another, unhurried. "Three years ago. That’s when things cooled between Evelyn and Hyacinth."
"What happened?"
"Nobody quite knows." Dorothy's shears paused, just for a second, which told me she knew more than nothing.
"Something shifted, a few years back now.
More like the temperature just dropped between them, gradually, and then all at once.
One spring Hyacinth was co-chairing the auction with Evelyn's blessing, practically heir apparent, and the next spring she'd been quietly moved off every committee that mattered and nobody would say why.
Evelyn never explained it. Hyacinth never explained it.
Which, in this town, is its own kind of confession, if you think about it.
If it was nothing, somebody would've explained it by now, just to get everyone to stop speculating. The silence is doing a lot of work."
I filed that away, that phrase, the silence doing a lot of work, because it was exactly the kind of thing I said on the podcast when I wanted to sound wise. "Any theories floating around? Even bad ones?"
"Every theory you can imagine. Some folks say it was about the Maxwell-McClintock marriage starting to come apart and Evelyn taking sides she shouldn't have.
Some say Hyacinth got too big for her britches and Evelyn didn't care for being upstaged by her own protégée.
I heard once it was over something Hyacinth said about Belle Rêve's history at a luncheon, something that annoyed Evelyn no end, though I never got the particulars.
" She shrugged. "Whatever it was, it never thawed.
Hyacinth stayed on the committee anyway.
Demoted, sidelined, whatever you want to call it, but she stayed put, right there under Evelyn's nose, for the last two years, being pleasant about it but I imagine seething inside. "
"That does seem odd," I agreed, working very hard to decide if this was relevant or just two catty queens fighting for dominance. "Especially if Evelyn had frozen her out that thoroughly."
"Well, and here's the other odd thing, now that you mention it, and I probably shouldn't say this, but you're not the type to run and repeat things, are you?"
This was not, strictly speaking, an accurate assessment of me, but I was not about to correct her. “No, of course not. You can tell me anything.”
"Hyacinth's had a rough go of it financially, since the divorce.
Robert did not leave her in good shape, is the polite way to put it.
There was a house that had to be sold, and not for what they'd hoped, and I know for a fact her dues to the committee were behind for two years running, because I do the books alongside the treasurer and I saw the ledger myself. "
"Behind, like, unpaid?" These Society dues were nothing to scoff at. Fortunately—or unfortunately?— for me, Odette had paid my dues for the next ten years.
"Unpaid, and then, this past year, paid.
" Dorothy set her shears down entirely now, which felt significant, like she'd finally decided the ranunculus could wait for this.
"Paid in full, right on time, and I remember being surprised, because I'd fully expected to have the same conversation with her I'd had the two years prior, the gentle reminder, the little grace period we extend to members who are struggling.
And instead the balance just cleared. I didn't think much of it at the time.
People's circumstances change. Maybe the divorce settlement finally came through, or a relative passed, or who knows. "
Hyacinth married and divorced and I had known nothing about it. We really didn’t run in the same circles. Or hadn’t.
"Interesting." Was Hyacinth a jewel thief? A hired hit woman? My imagination ran wild.
"I think," Dorothy said slowly, choosing the words the way she chose stems, testing each one before she committed to it, "that Evelyn Carrington told me, at the spring planning luncheon, not to worry about following up with Hyacinth on her balance, because it had been taken care of.
I assumed she meant Hyacinth had finally paid up herself, and I never had a reason to look closer, because why would I.
But I do the books, Harper, and I know what came in from Hyacinth's account, and it wasn't the full amount.
It was a partial payment. The rest of that balance got covered from somewhere else entirely, and it wasn't ever formally logged as a donation, which is the kind of thing that would normally make my accountant's heart very unhappy, except Evelyn ran that committee like her own personal fiefdom and nobody argued with how she chose to keep the books balanced. "
The shop was quiet except for the hum of the cooler case.
"So Evelyn paid Hyacinth's dues," I said slowly, "for a woman she'd frozen out for years. Quietly. Off the books."
"That's what it looks like, yes."
"That's generous," I said, and even as the word left my mouth it sat wrong.
Generosity, in my experience, usually came with some acknowledgment attached, a plaque, a mention in the newsletter, a hug at the gala.
Evelyn Carrington, from everything I'd gathered about her in the last two days, did not strike me as a woman who gave anything away quietly, without making sure everyone in a three-block radius understood exactly how generous she was being.
Evelyn was a woman who'd say something loaded about truth coming to light while lifting a mint julep in front of two hundred people.
Quiet generosity toward a protégée she'd spent years icing out didn't fit the shape of her at all, and things that didn't fit the shape of a person were usually the things worth looking at twice.
"That's what I thought too, at first," Dorothy said. "Now I don't know what I think. You start turning a thing over enough times, generous starts to look like a lot of other things, depending on the light."
"I definitely agree with that.”
Dorothy picked her shears back up and went back to the ranunculus, and I recognized the gesture for what it was, a door closing. Dorothy had already said more than she'd meant to, and now she was retreating to the safety of her flowers, and pushing harder would only make her clam up entirely.
I’d learned that the hard way with Hollis.
"Anyway," Dorothy said, brisk now, "I'm sure it's nothing.
People help each other out. Maybe Evelyn felt guilty about however things went sideways between them, and this was her way of making amends without having to actually say the words.
Some people are like that. They'd rather pull out their pocketbook than say I'm sorry. "
"Maybe," I said, though I didn't believe it, and I don't think Dorothy fully believed it either, based on the way she wouldn't quite meet my eyes when she said it.
“What should we do for Evelyn’s service?” she asked, suddenly all business.
“Something that you think my Aunt Odette would have picked out.”
“Aw, that’s a lovely gesture, Harper. Your aunt would be proud.”
After we handled business, I left with a bouquet of ranunculus she pressed on me that I hadn't asked for and definitely hadn't paid for, and the uneasy, restless feeling I got whenever a situation handed me a fact that fit two completely different stories depending on which way you turned it.
Story one: Evelyn Carrington, beneath the icy exterior, still had a soft spot for the girl she'd once called her honorary granddaughter, and quietly smoothed the way for her without asking for credit, because some kindnesses were only kindnesses if nobody saw you do them.
Story two: Evelyn Carrington didn't do anything without getting something for it, and a woman who paid off her estranged protégée's debts without being asked, without being thanked, without so much as a line in the ledger, wasn't being generous.
She was buying something. Silence, maybe.
Compliance. The right to keep a woman close enough to watch, close enough to remind, without either of them ever having to say out loud what the money was actually for.
I sat in my car outside Perrault's for a solid three minutes before I started the engine, turning it over.
The cooling friendship right around the time Hyacinth's marriage started coming apart. The bracelet buried in a hedge at a murder scene. The dues that got quietly, mysteriously, paid. None of it was proof of anything other than that people change. Relationships evolve.
And yet…
Dorothy hadn't said the word blackmail, and neither had I, though I don’t know who I would say it to considering I was in the car alone.
But I'd done four seasons of a true crime podcast, and I knew the shape of a secret.
Money moving quietly between two women who supposedly hadn't spoken in years wasn't nothing.
It wasn't proof Hyacinth had rigged a straw with a spring-loaded spike, God knew that took a kind of technical skill I couldn't picture her having. Not with those manicured nails and that helpless-debutante routine. Then again, I seemed to remember she’d done well in school.
And it was a thread, and Hyacinth had given me a ridiculous story about a missing earring that didn't hold up for more than three seconds under a porch light.
I pulled out of the parking spot and headed home, already composing, somewhere in the back of my head, the very careful, very casual way I was going to bring this up with Hollis.
Except casual only applied to my wardrobe.
I texted Hollis.
Need to talk about EC and HMM and the buried bracelet.
Not casual at all
And Hollis, because he was him, just texted back in his usual shorthand.
No.
It really felt like we were developing a partnership in all of this.
Not.
Yet his reply still made me smile.