Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2004

I stood and went back to my computer, feeling like I hadn’t had any sleep. Detached, tired, empty. I shuffled across the floor and brushed against tables, nearly knocking over a globe filled with late-season forced narcissus.

I caught it, held it, feeling the bubble glass in my hands. It would be so easy to crush the globe, feel the bulbs and squeeze them to death as well.

Life was so hard to cultivate, so easy to destroy.

I set the globe on the rough-hewn antique table I used for my more fragile vases.

The door opened and I whirled, careful to miss the tables this time, although I brushed part of a palm and broke off a branch. For half a moment, I feared the cops were back.

They weren’t. Stan, my delivery driver, stood in the doorway, looking at me with great annoyance. He was young, early thirties, and had visions of being a Broadway star.

He had the beauty for it, but not the chops. I’d seen him off-off-off-Broadway, and he was so wooden that I was embarrassed. Still, one couldn’t fault a man for his dreams. And with the money he earned from this, and his two other jobs, he paid for lessons at one of the acting academies on the Upper West Side.

“I knocked in back. Pounded in fact, and you didn’t even bother. I’m half an hour behind now. I couldn’t leave the truck back there and you know how hard it is finding parking up front.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The cops were here.”

He flushed as if he were the one they were after. “Cops? You okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said, surprised that I made the admission. I never talked much with Stan. He was too attractive, too young, and frankly, a bit too dumb for me. I didn’t want to get involved in anything more than the employer-employee friendship we seemed to already have.

“Nobody broke in, did they?” He had been driving for me when those kids came in with the shotguns. In fact, he was the one who helped me clean up the store.

I shook my head. “One of my customers was murdered.”

I guess I could call Dwight Rhodes that, even though I knew he had never really been a customer. At least, not voluntarily.

“Damn, boss, I’m sorry.”

I nodded, and decided that I had to move.

“I only have three deliveries this afternoon,” I said, and hoped it was true. I couldn’t remember any of the orders I’d taken. Everything left my brain when the police came through that door. “But if you finish early, check with me one last time. I’m a bit frazzled.”

“No kidding.” He pushed his way past the line of herb starts I kept for the locals. “I’d be too.”

I knew I could trust him to check back if he had the chance. Stan was good that way. He’d been one of the best employees I ever had, even though he wasn’t technically just mine. When I realized that I didn’t have enough business to pay for all his delivery runs, I got together with a few other smaller shops. We shared Stan as our delivery driver. It covered his vehicle costs, and it took the burden off our small businesses. None of us counted him as an employee. We all paid him under the table, and he took care of his own costs.

Of course, the only price we paid on that was a future one: If Stan ever got that Broadway job he dreamed of, we’d lose him in the space of an afternoon.

I followed him into the back. He grabbed the largest arrangement, a clichéd spray of carnations and greenery for a funeral, and carried it to the truck. I followed with the daisy basket I’d made for an upscale boutique and the delicate vase filled with the palest pink roses I had. We loaded up the truck and he left, after checking to make sure I was all right.

I said I was, and even I believed the lie. Until I found myself in the back, staring at the damn computer. I wasn’t looking at the missed deliveries, even though I had promised myself I would.

I was doing something I should have done that very first day, when Ruth-Anne Grant crossed my threshold.

I should have run a search on her name, seen how many other deliveries she got from me, and who had sent them.

The computer found five, spaced over five months. They came at the same time on the same day of the month, as if the guy had a ritual.

And of course, each name who sent the flowers was different from the last. The bouquets were different too, and so were the prices, almost as if this mook knew how much was on that credit card he’d stolen and how much he could spend without getting caught.

Roses in May, hyacinths in April, tulips in March, a mixed bouquet in February, and an expensive bonsai — one I had nurtured for nearly a decade — in January. That one broke my heart, as if this stalker had attacked me personally.

If Ruth-Anne Grant knew the bonsai was from the stalker, she had probably thrown it out.

All that work, all that love, lost.

Just like Dwight Rhodes was lost.

I did another search, this time for the names on the credit cards, to see if the stalker had used them more than once. He hadn’t, and they had never shopped here.