Lavender Lies Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for

  LAVENDER LIES

  “A plausible plot and realistic, likable characters are

  mingled with twists and red herrings ... Albert does

  a credible job of weaving a murder mystery and

  China’s personal life.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Mystery lovers who also garden will be captivated

  by this unique series.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  ”Albert does a deft job of balancing China’s

  investigations ... with dense small-town detail.“

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Raves for

  SUSAN WITTIG ALBERT’S

  previous China Bayles mysteries . . .

  CHILE DEATH . . .

  “Satisfying.... Not too spicy, just right.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  LOVE LIES BLEEDING . . .

  “The best yet in an appealing series that just

  keeps getting better.”

  —Booklist

  RUEFUL DEATH ...

  “A page-turner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ROSEMARY REMEMBERED . . .

  “Memorable, indeed.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  HANGMAN’S ROOT ...

  “Fine observations and sly humor.”

  —Wilson Library Journal

  WITCHES’ BANE . . .

  “A delightful cast of unusual characters.”

  —Booklist

  THYME OF DEATH . . .

  “Lively and engaging.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  And don’t miss

  MISTLETOE MAN

  China Bayles Mysteries by Susan Wittig Albert

  THYME OF DEATH

  WITCHES’ BANE

  HANGMAN’S ROOT

  ROSEMARY REMEMBERED

  RUEFUL DEATH

  LOVE LIES BLEEDING

  CHILE DEATH

  LAVENDER LIES

  MISTLETOE MAN

  BLOODROOT

  INDIGO DYING

  A DILLY OF A DEATH

  DEAD MAN’S BONES

  BLEEDING HEARTS

  SPANISH NIGHTSHADE

  DAGGER

  AN UNTHYMELY DEATH

  CHINA BAYLES’ BOOK OF DAYS

  With her husband, Bill Albert, writing as Robin Paige

  DEATH AT BISHOP’S KEEP

  DEATH AT GALLOWS GREEN

  DEATH AT DAISY’S FOLLY

  DEATH AT DEVIL’S BRIDGE

  DEATH AT ROTTINGDEAN

  DEATH AT WHITECHAPEL

  DEATH AT EPSOM DOWNS

  DEATH AT DARTMOOR

  DEATH AT GLAMIS CASTLE

  DEATH IN HYDE PARK

  DEATH AT BLENHEIM PALACE

  DEATH ON THE LIZARD

  The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter by Susan Wittig Albert

  THE TALE OF HILL TOP FARM

  THE TALE OF HOLLY HOW

  THE TALE OF CUCKOO BROW WOOD

  THE TALE OF HAWTHORN HOUSE

  THE TALE OF BRIAR BANK

  Nonfiction books by Susan Wittig Albert

  WRITING FROM LIFE

  WORK OF HER OWN

  THE BERKLEY PUBISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  LAVENDER LIES

  Copyright © 1999 by Susan Wittig Albert.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12753-7

  Visit our website

  www.penguin.com

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are

  trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am especially indebted to Bertha Reppert and Betsy Williams, who have taught me a great deal about the traditions of wedding herbs and the fragrant meanings and delightful uses of lavender. Sadly, Bertha has died since the writing of this book, but her memory will remain ever green as the rosemary she loved.

  And as always, I am inexpressibly grateful to Bill Albert, comforter, computer wizard, and co-author. His love and constancy not only makes writing a long series possible, but a great deal of fun, too.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Texas Hill Country setting of the China Bayles books is a fictional one. (This doesn’t make it any less real, of course, for imagination and memory are closely allied and our recollections of fictional places we love are often as vivid and delightful as those of places we have actually visited.) The people aren’t real, either, except for Bertha Reppert and Betsy Williams, who have graciously consented to allow their fictional counterparts to appear in these pages. However, the herbs definitely are real, and their uses may have both favorable and
adverse consequences. The medicinal and therapeutic uses of plants I mention in this book are documented by scientific research or by long practice, but please don’t take my word for their appropriateness in your particular situation. You should do your own research or seek advice from a qualified practitioner before treating yourself with any plant medicine.

  To my daughter Robin, on her marriage:

  here’s lavender for devotion, dear heart

  CHAPTER ONE

  Traditional Bride’s Cookies

  1 cup butter, softened

  ½ cup sifted powdered sugar

  2 cups flour

  1 cup finely chopped pecans

  1 teaspoon mace

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  Powdered sugar for dusting

  Tiny silver balls for decorating

  Cream butter and sugar. Add flour, pecans, nutmeg, and vanilla. Shape into 2-inch crescents and decorate with a row of silver balls. Bake on a greased cookie sheet at 325° for 20 minutes. Dust with powdered sugar while warm and store in an airtight container. Makes about 4 dozen.

  “You’re not practicing that hocus pocus on me,” I said. “If you have to tell fortunes, Ruby, start with Justine.”

  Across the table, Justine Wyzinski looked up from the lavender stems she was attempting to braid. “Palm reading is only a parlor game, China. Just superstition. Play along—it won’t hurt you.” She tossed the braid onto the table with an impatient gesture and leaned back in her white wicker chair. “Isn’t there something else I can do besides making these ridiculous lavender hearts? Ruby’s are perfect. Mine are hideously deformed.”

  “Justine,” I said, “you only admit to being incompetent when you don’t want to do something.”

  Ruby put the heart she had fashioned into the box in the middle of the table and swatted away a bee. My front porch isn’t screened, and the fragrant honeysuckle draws bees from three counties. “For your information, Justine, palm reading is not a game, it’s one of the great mystical arts. And as for superstition—”

  I picked up one of the four dozen cookies Ruby and I had turned out earlier in the afternoon and began to taste-test it, while Ruby launched into a lecture on palmistry, her latest occult passion. As the owner and manager of the Crystal Cave, the only New Age shop in Pecan Springs, she has to know about such psychic oddities as astrology, tarot, and numerology. But weirdness is right up Ruby’s alley, which is clear from the moment you meet her. She is a wild and wonderful six-foot-tall redhead with her own wacky brand of outrageous exuberance. Today, she was wearing a long, slim, yellow knit dress, yellow sandals, and a yellow upper arm bracelet. She looked like a luscious lemon popsicle topped by a frizz of carroty hair. Her eyelids were shadowed to match the green of her contacts and she had applied mascara and eyeliner with a dramatic hand. If I went out in public looking like that, people would double over in hysterical giggles. But when Ruby wafts past, there are murmurs of awed admiration.

  “Well,” Justine said reflectively, when Ruby had finished her lecture, “all I’ve got to say is—yee ha!” And with that, she leaped from her chair, yanked both my hands onto the table, and pinned them there, palms up. “I’ll hold her, Ruby. You read.”

  “This is assault,” I said, and closed my hands into fists. “And you’ve made me drop my cookie.”

  My third taste-test had fallen onto the porch floor, right under Howard Cosell’s nose. Howard is a crochety old bassett hound whose favorite exercise is lurking under chairs in anticipation of falling cookies, bits of bread and jelly, and other delectable doggie treats. Unfortunately, these goodies have done a number on his liver. He’s been under the weather, and the tests show that his liver enzymes are out of alignment. Every day now, Howard gets his dog food with a topping of milk thistle seeds and a sprinkling of turmeric. We’ll see what the retest shows.

  “Don’t be a sore loser.” Justine straightened my fingers. She is a large person with a strong will. I yielded the point.

  “Okay,” I said. “Ruby, you can read my palm—first. Then it’s the Whiz’s turn. Her palms have lots of lines. But I’m on record as saying that this is all a bunch of hooey.”

  Justine relaxed her hold. “Of course it’s hooey.” She let go of my hands and pulled her chair next to mine. “But if Ruby’s going to engage in this mystical claptrap for hire, she needs to practice. How else is she going to be able to fleece her unwitting victims?” She leaned over and said, in a stage whisper, “When they threaten to sue, refer them to me. Consumer fraud is such fun.” She reached for another cookie. “What’s the flavoring in these? Is it legal? They’re pretty tasty.”

  “Mace,” I said.

  Justine sputtered and Ruby laughed.

  “Not that kind of mace,” I said. “This one is a spice. The dried covering of the nutmeg fruit, which looks like a pear. Cut the fruit open, and you’ll find a seed. That’s the nutmeg itself, which is covered with a sort of fibrous stuff. That’s the mace. It—”

  “Spare me the botanical details.” Justine yawned. “I get the picture.”

  When Justine and I were in law school together a million years ago, she earned the nickname the Whiz because she was so damned smart. Her brown hair might not have been combed for a day or two, she might have spinach on her teeth, and she had the social savoir-faire of a three-toed sloth, but nobody doubted that, intellectually, this woman was light-years ahead of the rest of the class. After graduation, the Whiz hung out her shingle in San Antonio, where she is now one of the city’s most respected renegades, still fast, still tough, and still very, very smart. I joined the law firm in Houston where my father had once been a partner and began a career as a criminal defense attorney. Unlike Justine, though, I didn’t stay with it. A few years ago, having concluded that the herbs growing in the greenhouse window of my condo were far more interesting and less stressful than the career I was cultivating, I turned in my boardroom key, cashed in my retirement plan, and opened an herb shop called Thyme and Seasons in Pecan Springs, a small Texas town halfway between Austin and San Antonio. It hasn’t been the uneventful life I anticipated and I’m certainly not reaping bushels of money. But my earnings don’t grow out of somebody else’s grief, and I’m doing what I want to do. What’s more, I can enjoy the luxury of closing the shop on Mondays and sitting on my porch with friends, making lavender hearts and getting my palm read. It isn’t a bad life.

  “I’ll try not to commit any fraud,” Ruby said, with a glance at Justine. She studied my right hand as if it contained the secrets of the universe. “Palmists say that the shape of a person’s hand tells a lot about her character,” she remarked. She looked at my hand for a few seconds longer. “Yours is square.”

  “So far so good,” I said. “I am an extremely square person. In bed every night at ten, nose to the grindstone from dawn to dark. No hanky-panky.”

  Lately, at least, this was true. Back in June, following the annual Cedar Choppers Chili Cookoff, I’d had the misfortune of breaking my femur, cracking an ankle socket, and getting generally scraped when I got stuck—and nearly incinerated—in an abandoned barn. I spent June and July and part of August in a traction rig and then in a cast. When I finally limped back to the shop, I was so far behind that I’ve had to work double time to catch up. And for the past three weeks, I’ve been getting ready for a wedding—mine. I haven’t had a spare second for hanky-panky, even if I were inclined in that direction.

  “People with square hands are successful in business,” Ruby went on. “They enjoy making money. They’re good partners because they are scrupulously honest, although their independence sometimes gets in the way.” Her fingers traced a line on my palm. “See this? This is the money line. It ends under your index finger—which means that you will make a lot of money in business.”

  “Good deal,” the Whiz said approvingly. “I’m all in favor of making money. The more the merrier.”

  “She isn’t reading my palm,” I said, “she’s speculating.” Ruby and I are partners in a
soon-to-open tearoom called Thyme for Tea, which is located behind my herb shop, which is next door to the Crystal Cave. All very convenient for a partnership, although I confess that I haven’t quite gotten used to the arrangement. Ruby won the lottery, you see—not the Big Sweet One, but big and sweet enough to yield a very substantial annual income. She might have retired to Jamaica for the rest of her life, but for some weird reason she had set her heart on having a tearoom. I was opposed to the idea at first, because ... well, because I am independent, damn it. I’ve lived forty-five years without a partner, and I don’t function well when I have to ask permission. But one of the lessons I learned this summer is that even fiercely independent people sometimes have to ask somebody else to help them get into their pantyhose. We can’t fly solo all our lives. So I signed the partnership agreement and Thyme for Tea is about to open. Ruby is providing the capital, I’m furnishing the space, and both of us are contributing ideas and labor. We may argue violently over the details—the menus, the decor, the kitchen layout—but we haven’t gotten a divorce yet. I’m not one to make optimistic predictions, but it just might work out.

  “The fingernails tell a lot about you, too,” Ruby said, turning my hand over. I tried to jerk free, but it was too late. Ruby gave a disapproving tch-tch. “I hope you have a pair of decent gloves for the ceremony.”

  “I am a gardener,” I said with dignity. “I garden in alkaline soil that eats fingers to the bone. If McQuaid doesn’t like my hands, he can find himself another wife.”