Hangman's Root Read Online Free PDF

also a second-floor loft, accessible by a ladder through my bedroom, and a remodeled stone stable at the back of the lot that serves as a guest cottage. The loft handles storage and the cottage doubles as a classroom,

    although it's not large enough to put up the work tables for herb-craft classes.
    No, I told myself as I poured a cup of fragrant tea, my living quarters are quite ample. The problem's in the shop, where there simply isn't another spare inch. And while I was taking inventory, I might as well admit that the shop wasn't my only space problem. The herb gardens around the building are almost lilliputian. Seven people roaming the paths constitute a crowd, ten a herd, twelve a vast migration. Yesterday evening I noticed that my favorite rosemary had been trampled, and several pots of calendula were knocked over. You can't expect people to stay on the paths if there isn't any room on the paths.
    I shifted in my chair. This was one knotty problem that no amount of brooding was likely to unravel, so I might as well think about something else, such as the hundred or so things I need to do on the one day a week the shop is closed. The hummingbird feeders ought to be filled and hung, because the first contingent of black-chins would be arriving from Guadalajara, ravenous after their long commute. The sage should be trimmed. The artemisia needed thinning {where was I going to put the thinned plants?), and I needed to take a sharp spade to the cost-mary and horehound, both of which are determined to take over the place. Horehound blooms early here. The bees flock to its white flowers, which dry into gray knots that look nice in wreaths. Costmary leaves make a nice herb tea and are delicately fragrant in potpourri and sachets. My grandmother tucked them between the pages of her Bible to mark her place and keep out paper-eating bugs. Both herbs are worth having, if you have the stuff to be stern with them.
    But instead of rising immediately to the challenge of the herb garden, I poured another cup of tea and reached for the phone. The night before, I had dreamed about Dottie and Miles Harwick, one of those absurd chase dreams my psyche dredges up out of my

    unconscious every now and then. Dottie, astride a ferocious, lion-sized Ariella, was chasing a terrified Harwick around the neighborhood, cracking a whip over his head with a loud "Take that, you flea-brain!"
    It was a comic dream, but the real situation was serious enough. Dottie definitely had it in for Miles Harwick, who for his part seemed to get a charge out of provoking her. She was wildly passionate in her defense of cats and emotionally unpredictable: Witness the hammer-slinging incident. I wanted to check in on her and reassure myself that she had not gotten up in the night and bludgeoned Harwick in his bed.
    The phone rang as I reached for it. It was Blackie, calling from his car. Blackie sounds the way he looks: square shoulders, jutting jaw, regulation haircut, regulation posture. He's a dry, by-the-book man, but he also has both the intelligence and the wisdom (the two aren't always the same thing) to know when to put the book aside. Right now, his voice was metallic.
    "I wanted to let you know that your friend took matters into her own hands sometime last night."
    Uh-oh. My insides went cold. My dreams are almost never hooked to actual events, but there's a first time for everything. "What did she do?"
    "A little breaking and entering. With a bolt cutter." He chuckled wryly. "Of course, she denies it."
    I relaxed a little. Bolt-cutting, while legally impermissible, is more acceptable than head-bashing. "If she denies it," my lawyer-self challenged, "how do you know she did it?"
    Funny how I slip into that adversarial stance every time a cop and I discuss anything more significant than the drought or the Dallas Cowboys. For a decade and a half I took one side of the law, the police took the other. They got the crook, I got the crook off. It's a habit I haven't