The Night Swim(61)
Antique Flowers was a corner shop in a heritage building with large bay windows. The store exterior was painted a crisp shade of white. Its name was written in delicate matching white calligraphy on the windows. The brass bell tinkled as Rachel opened the door. She was immediately hit by the unusual combination of furniture polish mixed with a delicate scent of fresh flowers.
“Can I be of assistance?” A diminutive woman walked in from a back room with an armful of pale roses, which she placed on floristry paper laid out on an antique table. “Are you looking for furniture, or flowers? Or both?” the woman asked. She wore a natural linen apron with the store logo and a matching badge with her name, “Renata.”
“I’m just doing the tourist thing and window-shopping,” answered Rachel. “I’ve never seen a store that sells flowers and antiques together, and such beautiful ones at that!”
“The antique store is my dad’s business. My mom is a florist. A few years ago they combined the businesses. That way Mom could run the store while Dad went on antique-buying trips,” said the woman, as she clipped the stems of the roses.
Rachel was about to introduce herself when the store phone rang. Renata smiled apologetically as she took the call. Rachel used the time to wander around the store. The antiques for sale ranged from the elaborate to the simple. Rachel admired an old farmhouse table with knife marks indented into the timber and a distressed oak pantry cupboard with old-fashioned blue ceramic jars on its shelves.
“Are you enjoying your time here?” Renata asked conversationally when she’d finished the call, and began selecting a combination of cream and light pink roses from the florist’s table.
“I am. It’s a lovely town,” Rachel responded. “You’re very lucky to live here.”
“Oh, I don’t live here anymore. I only come back to see my parents or help run the store when they’re on vacation. To tell you the truth, I stay for as short a time as possible and I’m extremely relieved when I go home. But that’s just me. Most people love it here.”
“Why don’t you like it here?” Rachel asked.
“When I grew up, it was an insular town. People got stuck with labels. It was hard for them to, I guess, reinvent themselves,” Renata said as she arranged the roses and wrapped it all in floristry paper. She took out a spool and cut a long piece of ribbon, which she expertly tied around the bouquet. Rachel was disappointed to see that the ribbon didn’t at all match the ribbon that she’d found at Jenny’s grave. She sighed to herself. It was another dead end.
Rachel was about to leave when she decided that she’d show Renata the ribbon anyway in case she knew other stores where Rachel could ask. She was removing the ribbon from her purse when the brass doorbell chimed. A man stepped inside to collect the bouquet that Renata had just finished. Rachel waited as Renata packaged the order in a paper bag with the store’s logo and swiped the man’s credit card.
“His wife is one lucky lady. That is a stunning bouquet,” Rachel said, as the door shut after the man left carrying his wife’s anniversary present.
“I was worried that I might be out of practice. The lady who was supposed to have run the store while my parents are on their cruise broke her leg. I couldn’t get here until last night, so the store has been closed for the past week,” Renata said. “I’m still catching up on orders.”
“I’ll leave you to your work then. Just one quick question before I go,” said Rachel, holding up a plastic bag with the ribbon from the cemetery. “Do you know which florist uses this particular ribbon?”
Renata took one look and immediately opened a drawer under the flower-wrapping table from which she removed an oversized spool containing an expensive two-toned ribbon that was almost an exact match to the ribbon Rachel was holding.
“Dad brings it back from Europe when he visits on antique-buying trips. The ribbon is very expensive, so Mom saves it only for her premium bouquets,” Renata explained, leaning forward to examine the one Rachel held. “It’s badly faded. Where did you find it?”
“At a grave at the cemetery,” said Rachel. “I’m trying to find out who might have left it. Given that it’s your ribbon, the flower arrangement must have been from here. Do you keep records for all your orders?”
“Only for delivery orders,” said Renata. She clicked open the order database on a laptop next to the cash register. “I can check our old orders. Do you remember where in the cemetery you found it?”
“I found it by a grave. The name on the tombstone was Jenny Stills,” said Rachel. “She was a teenage girl who died here in the early nineties.”
“Jenny Stills,” said Renata, her hand frozen above the keyboard. Her voice was filled with a mixture of recognition and sadness. “I haven’t heard her name spoken for years.”
“You knew Jenny?” Rachel felt a thrill of excitement. “Were you friends?”
“I knew her from school. We weren’t really friends.”
“Do you know how Jenny died?” Rachel asked.
“I was in Europe with my parents that summer. It was a sort of sixteenth-birthday present. Dad bought antiques and we vacationed. We were gone for almost three months. Missed the first few weeks of school. By the time I came back, Jenny was long dead. I heard it was in an accident. A couple of boys died in a car crash that summer, so I assumed that’s how Jenny died, too.”