Murder by Yew (An Edna Davies Mystery #1)

Murder by Yew (An Edna Davies Mystery #1)
Suzanne Young



One

“Why do you suppose she grew so many poisonous plants and shrubs in her yard, Benjamin?”

Balanced on the upper steps of a painter’s ladder, Edna Davies clipped away at the yew tree, one of a pair that stood sentry on either side of the front door of her recently purchased house.

Benjamin idly twitched his tail, quickly lapped three times at the ginger fur of his shoulder, then settled back to nap on the sun-warmed granite stoop.

Unperturbed by the cat’s silence, Edna continued to babble in rhythm to the clack of her large pruning shears. “I might understand … if they were indigenous … to this area.”

She knew that some species, like foxglove or the lily-of-the-valley that spread almost weed-like beneath the equally toxic rhododendron bushes, were native to the northeastern United States; but certainly, castor beans thrived in tropical climates and the oleander and jack-in-the-pulpit were more common to the South. How Mrs. Rabichek, the property’s previous owner and the “she” in question, got these plants to grow so far north was a mystery Edna was determined to solve.

When she and her husband Albert first looked at the Cape Cod cottage several months ago, Edna was thrilled by all the plantings. On the south side of the house was a kitchen garden, filled with herbs and vegetables. Closer to the edge of the property on that same end was a rectangular, more formal flower garden. Pots and hanging baskets dotted a flagstone patio that nestled into the southwest corner of the house, protected by the kitchen and mudroom ell.

Edna had planted tulips, daffodils, marigolds and other common border flowers around their house in the city when her husband still practiced in Providence and her children were growing, but she had been too busy with the social responsibilities of a physician’s wife to devote the attention she wished to gardening.

When Albert retired last year, she and he had spent considerable time searching for their ideal retirement home, driving from Rhode Island to South Carolina and back again before finding this three-acre property in their own home state. The locale had everything they enjoyed, from beaches to farms and woodlands. In nearby Kingston, the University of Rhode Island offered educational opportunities as well as plays and concerts, and the cultural wealth of Providence was available less than an hour’s drive away—close enough to take in an occasional dinner and play but far enough so Albert wouldn’t be constantly pestered by former patients stopping him on the streets to ask for “just an opinion, if you would, Doc.”

The mowed lawn immediately surrounding their new home was bordered on three sides by a stone wall, beyond which the west end of their property had been left uncultivated with apple, pear and peach trees sharing space with maples, oaks and evergreens. A grape arbor and raspberry bushes took up a good portion of the north side beyond the garage.

At first glance, the gardens looked unkempt, but closer inspection revealed a definite plan and design. Edna couldn’t believe her luck in finding a place that fit her dreams so perfectly, but the more she studied and learned about each plant, the more she began to wonder about the peculiar selections.

Along with all sorts of gardening tools in the shed behind the garage, Hazel Rabichek had left several spiral notebooks filled with comments, insights and recipes, as well as sketches of her garden designs. Edna, unschooled in other than bulbs and border flowers, was fascinated with the new world the journals opened up and had begun experimenting with concoctions and mixtures of her own.

At the moment, she was thinking of what she wanted to do with the lemon balm and mint she’d thinned out of the kitchen garden earlier that morning before she’d gotten sidetracked and decided to trim the unruly yew trees at the front door. Temperatures were warmer than usual for the middle of September, so Edna had dressed in a short-sleeved white blouse beneath a calf-length denim jumper. Leaning toward a particularly scraggly clump at the back of the six-foot evergreen, she felt the ladder begin to move with her.

“Watch out!” A shout from below, accompanied by the abrupt halt of her perch’s pitch, nearly catapulted Edna into the upper branches.

Grabbing hold of the ladder, she managed to hang onto the shears, horrified at the thought that they might have dropped onto the head of her neighbor, who had materialized below.

“You should be more careful, Edna. A woman your age …”

“Never mind my age,” Edna snapped with more humor than anger at the lanky, redheaded woman. Mary Osbourne, in her mid-fifties, was only a dozen years younger than Edna.

She turned to descend the ladder when a movement across the street caught her eye. “Mary,” she said, pausing on the step, “there’s a police car following a tow truck up to the Sharps’ house. What do you suppose…?”

“Oh, shoot, they’re already here.” Mary tugged on the hem of Edna’s jumper. “That’s what I came to tell you. Quick. We don’t want to miss this.”

“What is it?” Edna hurried to keep stride with Mary as they rounded the circular drive. She was puzzled by the woman’s urgency. In the two months she and Albert had lived in the cottage, Edna had seen this particular neighbor often but still didn’t know quite what to make of her.

Dressed in brown and green camouflage fatigues with a tan safari hat topping her mass of rust-red, shoulder-length curls, Mary would have been plain but for her brilliant green eyes. Nearly six feet tall with a lean frame, she towered over Edna, who had stopped measuring herself when she shrank from five-feet-five to five-feet-four-and-a-half inches at the same time she began to expand from a size ten to a fourteen.