Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

so I wouldn’t get cut to ribbons. I hadn’t quite figured out what to do if the razor wire turned out to be electrified.
    Fortunately it wasn’t, and the horse blanket cushion worked. I climbed part of the way down and then jumped, landing lightly beside the first row of roses.
    I pulled out the makeshift DNA collection kit I’d assembled from materials available in the prep barn, including a small pair of pruning shears, a box of plastic zipper Baggies, and a black waterproof marker. I drew a quick map of the red rose of them on the first Baggie. The garden contained twenty-three of them in three rows of eight with one empty space near the end of the farthest row, presumably where one bush had died. Then I numbered the bushes on the map and began bagging my specimens, cutting the smallest possible leaf from each bush, numbering the Baggie to match the bush’s place on my map, and adding the name or number of the rose from the tags.
    Some of them were familiar names from Dad’s dark rose collection: Deep Secret, Black Baccara, Midnight Blue, and of course Black Magic. Others were identified only by numbers. Mrs. Winkleson favored a six-digit system beginning with zeroes, and had only gotten up to 000117, which meant she had room to add nearly a million more hybrids before she had to amend her system.
    Toward the end of my sample collection, right after theblank space, I found something interesting. Yet another bush labeled “Black Magic,” but it didn’t look like the other Black Magics I’d sampled. The leaves were smaller, and instead of the deep, glossy green of the other Black Magics, they had a slight lime or chartreuse cast to them.
    While the blossom left on it was only partially open, I could already see that it had more petals than the other Black Magic blooms. This was definitely the bush from which her entry in the show had come.
    I snipped two leaves from that bush.
    I checked the label again. Yes, the tag hanging from the bush said Black Magic.
    Then I spotted something else peeking out from the bark mulch around the base of the bush. I brushed the mulch away to see more clearly.
    It was a length of yellow plastic plant tie material, about half an inch wide. Dad used the stuff not only to stake wayward branches but also to label plants temporarily, using a waterproof marker to print on the plastic the name and planting date and any other information he wanted to remember.
    In fact, this plant tie had writing on it. In Dad’s unique, meticulous printing, so like calligraphy, it said “L2005-0013.” Which, if memory served, was what Dad had been calling his new hybrid before christening her Matilda.
    The stem of the rose bush had clearly grown since the label had been attached. It had grown around the plastic, so the label was inextricably enmeshed in the plant. Dad never left his temporary labels on the plants long enough for that to happen, but apparently Mrs. Winkleson wasn’t as careful.
    It was Matilda. Or if not Matilda, certainly one of Dad’s hybrids.
    It all fell together. The person who’d been arguing with Mrs. Winkleson up at the house— the one who’d said, “I’m tired of covering this up. And if I went public with it, you’d be the one ruined.” Could it have been Sandy Sechrest? I hadn’t recognized the voice, but I was ready to bet it was— Sandy who had been helping Mrs. Winkleson with her hybridizing. She’d have had ample opportunity to uncover the plastic label the same way I had, and I’d probably overheard her finally confronting Mrs. Winkleson about it. If so, I’d bet anything the killer hadn’t mistaken Sandy Sechrest for Mrs. Winkleson. More likely Mrs. Winkleson had killed Mrs. Sechrest, trying to cover up her theft of Dad’s rose.
    That meant that Mrs. Winkleson had probably poisoned herself last night. We’d all been saying how lucky she had been, to have taken a less than lethal dose of cyanide with two doctors nearby. Nothing lucky about it— she’d been taking a calculated risk to throw off suspicion.
    I had to get back to the barn and find Chief Burke. Once he saw this—
    “What are you doing in my rose garden!”
    I looked up to see Mrs. Winkleson standing outside the chain link fence, pointing a shotgun at me.

Chapter 41
     
     
     
     
    “Taking cuttings,” I said, with what I hoped was an inane, innocent smile. “Dad was amazed at your entry for the trophy. And jealous. He begged me to see if I could snoop around and find out more