Pretty Poison Read Online Free PDF Page B

friend’s house or a hotel.
    Yet there he was lying dead in her shop. While none of the hypotheses made any sense, the result was incontrovertible.
    A tiny chime sounded from a clock on the mantel across the bedroom. She jumped up and fumbled around for her slippers. With her glasses in one hand, she ran down the broad spiral staircase that led to the ground floor.
    The house was chilly, as always, when the weather got cool. John had frequently complained about the quirks and problems of living in a big, rambling house from the turn of the century. Upkeep was ridiculous and sometimes improbable.
    But Peggy loved the old house. She loved the feel of the cool marble stairs on her feet in the summer. She loved all the nooks and crannies. She kept a thirty-foot blue spruce growing in the entrance hall. Each room in the house had a fireplace. The ceilings were still the original plaster.
    But the basement was her passion. Here she dabbled and played with Mother Nature. In her botanical lab, she cross-pollinated and modified, looking for new varieties of plant life for pleasure as well as medicinal purposes.
    The basement sprawled the length and width of the entire house, but it still wasn’t enough room for her pets. It opened into an acre garden that she cultivated by the season. Here she produced a black rose last summer. Under a two-hundred-year-old oak with branches thicker than her body, she grew purple mushrooms. Two years ago, she produced a small green melon that tasted exactly like a peach.
    Tonight, she was going to view her night-blooming water lily for the first time. It was named Antares for the largest red star in the constellation Scorpius. A friend of hers who worked at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania sent it to her last month. She put it in her indoor pond and was quickly rewarded with gorgeous dark green and purple leaves.
    An array of various heat lamps and ultraviolet lights guided her way through her experiments. She caught her breath when she saw the lily. It was as wide as a dinner plate. Its velvety scarlet petals were reflected in the filtered water where it floated. She immediately took out her camera and notebook. Then she pulled up her sleeves and started in on the real work. She was hoping to create the first rose to only bloom at night.
     
     
    PEGGY DIDN’T LOOK UP AGAIN until she heard the doorbell ring at eight-thirty. She was wet from working in the pond and covered with dirt. “And that would be the police,” she muttered to herself as she put the teakettle on to boil.
    She never actually went to sleep last night. She took off her gloves, brushed the loose dirt from her pants, and looked at herself in the antique mirror that hung in the foyer.
    Her green eyes seemed greener the last few years, more summer green than spring. She had more white in her hair. Like being blond from the summer sun, only older. The color ran out of her hair after John died. Until then, the red only had traces of white through it.
    She touched the fine lines that ran from her eyes and mouth, not willing to spend the time or money to make them less noticeable. She still had a strong chin, like her mother. And too many damn freckles! Pushing her shoulders back under her purple sweater, she opened the door.
    “Hey, Peggy.”
    “Hello, Al. Would you like some tea?” There was deep concern and embarrassment in her old friend’s eyes. She didn’t know the younger man at his side. But his gaze was impatient and irritated.
    “We have a few more questions, Peggy. You know how it is. This is my boss, Lieutenant Rimer. Lieutenant, this is Dr. Lee.”
    “How do you do, ma’am?”
    “I’m fine, thanks.” She extended her hand to him after wiping it on her pants. “Nice to meet you, Lieutenant Rimer. You must be new. I don’t think I recognize you.”
    “I transferred from Ohio recently.”
    “I hope you’re feeling at home here?”
    “Not really. Not yet anyway. My wife’s from Charlotte. All her family’s