The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree (Berkley Prime Crime)

Nothing like the scent of a rose, she thought to herself, to wash away your troubles, if you had any.
    For the most part, Verna didn’t, although she was always just as glad to borrow somebody else’s. That was her nature, always had been, always would be, and it had driven her husband, Walter—now deceased—almost crazy. Walter had taught history and civics at the Darling Academy and always seemed to be living (or so Verna thought) in another time and place. He never paid enough attention to the real world or the minutiae of real life (except for his camellias, upon which he lavished hours every week). And he never was bothered by much of anything or anybody but Verna.
    “Why are you so suspicious?” he would ask helplessly, when she raised a little question about this or that. “You’re always poking around, looking for problems where they don’t exist. Why can’t you just accept things at face value? Trouble will go away, if you give it half a chance. Look at the Romans. And Hannibal. And the French and Indian War. All over now. All gone away.”
    Verna didn’t quite get his point about the Romans and Hannibal, or about the French and Indians, either. But accepting things at face value wasn’t her nature, which was good, given what she did for a living, working in the probate office. Her detail-oriented focus came in handy when she had to do a plat search or look up property records, and the people who worked with her had learned to rely on her ability to smell a rat when there was one in the neighborhood. Or not even a rat, necessarily, just something that wasn’t right and needed fixing.
    So Verna went on being naturally and happily suspicious and mistrustful and wary, and Walter went on being driven almost crazy by Verna until he died ten years ago, when he crossed Route 12 without looking up and the Greyhound bus ran over him. Verna always suspected that when it happened, he was crossing the Alps with Hannibal or building Hadrian’s Wall with the Romans or was off someplace else where there weren’t any buses but maybe a lot of camellias.
    She opened the screen door and went into the cool, quiet dark. She still lived in the same small house that she and Walter had lived in. She liked it because it was paid for and Verna was always one to be careful about money, and didn’t mind it being small because she didn’t have any children.
    Inside the door, she was met by her black Scottie, Clyde, who climbed into her arms and washed her face thoroughly while he was saying hello. Then he jumped down and ran into the kitchen to wait for her to open a can of Ken-L Ration—horsemeat, although Verna had never told him what it was. Clyde adored Racer, the bay gelding who belonged to old Mr. Norris, next door on the south. Mr. Norris’ son Buddy owned a motorcycle, but old Mr. Norris refused to have anything to do with automobiles and hitched Racer to a two-wheeled cart when he had to go somewhere that was more than a good walk away. Racer spent his off-duty hours in the pasture behind the Norris house, where Clyde kept him company. Clyde would be horrified if he knew he was eating horsemeat.
    Verna went into her bedroom, took off her hat, and put it on the dresser. Then she changed out of her brown-and-orange plaid dress and into her garden clothes—a pair of Walter’s baggy green canvas pants and one of his old plaid shirts (Verna never threw anything away), and went out to the garden. Clyde immediately scampered off to see what Racer was up to and Verna went to her garden shed for the hoe, then headed out to give the weeds in the bean rows a quick haircut.
    Walter had never cared much for vegetable gardening. It was flowers he had his heart set on. In fact, Verna always suspected that he loved his camellias a great deal more than he loved her. He had filled their backyard with them, big floppy bushes with big floppy flowers that she had never appreciated, never even liked very much. To her, they always seemed exotic (well, of course—they came from Asia, didn’t they?) and overly demonstrative, flashy, flamboyant show-offs that took up too much room, took too much pampering, and seemed only too willing to surrender to root rot, dieback, bud drop, sunburn, scale, scab, and flower blight. And if Walter’s anxious fussing enabled them to survive these afflictions, they were bound to keel over the next time the thermometer dropped down to twenty, which it did every three or four winters—just often