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

Then I printed out the Ruth-Anne Grant order files. As they chugged out of my too-slow ink-jet printer, I studied them. Phone orders each one, each with a romantic message, each sent anonymously.

And those dates...

They weren’t really enough to let a woman know she had anything more than a secret admirer. What made a woman think she had a stalker? Frequent, persistent attention. Phone calls. Letters. Gifts.

Many, many gifts.

And clearly this guy wasn’t one who liked face-to-face contact. He ordered with false names and left no fake name on his deliveries.

The only other things I could tell about him were obvious: he had opportunity to get other people’s credit cards without them reporting the theft to the credit card companies, and he knew his flowers. He bought what was in season.

Frequent, persistent gifts. Once a month wasn’t frequent enough, and Ruth-Anne Grant’s anger made me think the flowers were a theme.

Persistent. That much was clear. But smart enough to cover his tracks over and over again. With the credit cards, with the names, with the anonymous messages.

I gripped the papers, still hot from my printer, and sank into a nearby chair. Ruth-Anne Grant hadn’t been lying about the stalker.

I whirled in my chair, grabbed the phone, and dialed Flowers by the Book, a boutique book and flower shop nearby. We shared Stan, and I liked to talk to the owner, Odele Page, an opinionated woman in her mid fifties.

I explained the situation, leaving the murder and the police out of it, by saying that I thought maybe a client of mine had a stalker, and would she look up the client’s name, see if she had anything on file with anonymous cards, and fax me the information.

She offered to do it then and there, on the phone. I cradled the receiver between my ear and my shoulder as I moved around the back, too stressed to stay still. I checked the mirrors and the door, making certain I was alone.

All the while, I listened to her computer system beep and ping, her fingers tapping lightly on the keys. She would sigh and then sigh again, and finally she gasped.

“Ruth-Anne Grant,” Odele said, and recited the address.

I stopped between the blue vases and the white ceramics I bought from a local artist. “That’s the one.”

“I’ve sent her something the first week of every month since December.”

“On an exact date?” I asked.

She paused for a moment, and I heard the sounds of keys again. “Looks like as close to the third as possible.”

Mine were around the twelfth.

“Can you fax me the information?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems private.”

“The only private thing on there is Ruth-Anne Grant’s address, and I already have that,” I said. “The rest has got to be stolen credit cards and false personal information.”

Still, Odele hesitated.

“Look, Odele, all I’m going to do is give this information to the police. I hope that they’ll go after this guy, whoever he is. Can I at least tell them to contact you?”

“I’ll fax you,” she said, and hung up. I smiled. I had figured she might respond like that. Odele was, after all, a typical former hippie, aversion to the police and all.

Odele wasn’t my only phone call. I contacted all the other florists who shared Stan. A few of them hadn’t heard of Ruth-Anne Grant, but a few others had, all of them near my neighborhood, all of them boutique shops like mine.

Each shop had its particular day, and they were close enough that I began to get a sense of what Ruth-Anne Grant had gone through. She was getting flowers every day of the week, anonymously, for five months — the December offering from Odele being the first.

It was also the most unique: a holiday package of greens, mistletoe, and holly around a large poinsettia. Along with the plants came a bag of Christmas cookies from a nearby bakery and various teas from all over the world.

But the centerpiece was Odele’s specialty, a large-sized, stunning gift book that she had first bought for the previous Valentine’s Day: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, with illustrations by well-known New York gallery artists.

Love poems, and love art, along with flowers, sweets, and tea. Anyone would have been happy to receive a present like that. And the first offering would have seemed marvelous — a gift from a mysterious admirer, perhaps even someone Ruth-Anne Grant thought she knew (and secretly hoped cared for her as much as she cared for him).

Over time, though, as the gifts became routine, as she started asking her friends and colleagues who sent them, Ruth-Anne Grant must have realized that the presents which had given her so much pleasure had a sinister undertone to them.

A bell tinkled in the main part of the shop. A young man, no more than twenty-five, stood between the orchids and the eucalyptus, looking lost. He wore a black suit — a Ralph Lauren knock-off by the way it gathered at the seams — and a pale pink shirt. His tie combined both colors in just the way a sales clerk might think was attractive.