Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

about your methods. Maybe even steal a cutting. But I guess you caught me. I’ll just put them back.”
    “I could shoot you where you stand,” she said. Yes, and from the look on her face, she’d enjoy it. I looked around for some kind of cover. Nothing but rose bushes. And while most of them were tall, healthy, and dense for rose bushes, they were still a long way from looking like plate iron or Kevlar or anything else you’d want between you and a bullet. Or a slug, or buckshot. Even if the shotgun was only loaded with birdshot, at this close range I suspected she could do some damage.
    “You could shoot me,” I said. “But how would that look? It’s not as if I was burgling your house. I’m unarmed, and locked inside a chain link fence. Doesn’t make a very plausible self-defense case.”
    “No,” she said. “But I have a small revolver in my pocket. After I shoot you, I’ll just throw it down inside the fence and claim you were trying to shoot me with it.”
    Just then my pocket began vibrating. My cell phone. Was itDad, belatedly trying to warn me that Mrs. Winkleson had left the house? I hoped so, since Dad did know, at least in theory, where I was. If the call was only from Michael, giving me an update on his ETA, it wasn’t going to help me escape from Mrs. Winkleson’s clutches.
    But if it was Dad, and I didn’t answer, and he got worried enough . . . I had to stall.
    “No one was trying to kill you,” I said. “You killed Mrs. Sechrest. Then you realized what a lucky break it was that she’d started dressing all in black when she came over here. People would assume the killer mistook her for you, especially after you made that big fuss about having received threats.”
    “I did receive threats,” she said. “I get them all the time. And for all I know, she could have been the one who stole my dog, out of spite.”
    “Did you accuse her of it?”
    “Yes,” Mrs. Winkleson said. “Of course she denied it.”
    That probably accounted for the paper in Mrs. Sechrest’s hand. Mrs. Winkleson had probably made her accusations by thrusting one of the threatening letters at Mrs. Sechrest.
    “And then you arranged your own poisoning,” I went on. “You waited until you were sure that Dad and Dr. Smoot were both there, and then you sipped the drink you’d doctored, and collapsed with as much fuss as possible. Doing it in the middle of your argument with me was a nice touch.”
    She twitched her mouth in what looked more like a grimace than a smile.
    “You should have seen your face,” she said. “But you deserved it. You were rude.”
    “I was rude? That’s the pot insulting the kettle.”
    “And it’s all nonsense,” she said. “What possible reason could I have for killing that poor woman? She was helping me with my roses. My health doesn’t permit me to do as much as I’d like.”
    She tried to look frail and exhausted, as she had while working on her roses, but the arms holding the shotgun didn’t waver at all, so I wasn’t buying it.
    “Mrs. Sechrest was going to reveal that you had stolen some of Dad’s prize seedlings and were entering their blooms as the results of your hybridizing program,” I said. “I don’t know how she figured it out. Maybe she helped you steal them, or maybe she just figured out that they didn’t come from any of the crosses she’d help you make. But she knew it, and you killed her to keep her from telling everyone.”
    I knew better than to mention the embedded name tag with Dad’s unmistakable printing on it, which was probably the way Sandy Sechrest had learned about the theft. If Mrs. Winkleson knew about it, she’d either remove it or hurt the plant trying.
    “You can’t prove it,” she said.
    “DNA doesn’t lie,” I said. “And if anything happens to me, my father will be even more suspicious, and will demand that the chief do a DNA test on your roses.”
    “DNA might prove that my rose is the same as one of your father’s,” she said. “But DNA can’t prove who stole it from whom. By the time they got around to analyzing it, if they ever did, I could prove that the Langslow family were trespassers and thieves. Now stand away from those roses.”
    I looked down. I was standing beside the stolen Matilda, and in the midst of all Mrs. Winkleson’s dark red roses. I didn’tknow what firing a shotgun at them would do to the roses. Evidently Mrs. Winkleson didn’t either.
    “I don’t think so,” I said. I planted