Grave Concern Read Free Page A

often, but when they did, it was an occasion. Kate remembered her mother bending down, swiping a handkerchief across Kate’s patent leather shoes just as they entered the store. The man there always gave Kate a twisty peppermint sucker, something Kate never saw anywhere else. She was taught to say Thank you so much , Monsieur Marcotte , and not to stare or gawk. Then she would be sternly warned not to touch a single thing , and she would wander about, sucking her sucker and making sure not to let any part of her body or clothing brush the antique oil lamps and mirrors, while her mother and Monsieur Marcotte conferred over a cherrywood drop-leaf table or a bird’s-eye maple armoire.
    No rocking chair now. The Marcottes must have sold the house in town and moved out here when he retired. Kate glanced down at the card attached to the floral display: Love from Guy and the gang in Wollongong , it said. Wollongong — sounded like Africa. Or Australia. That was it, Australia.
    The old man was waiting, his green eyes piercing her confidence, just as they had all those years ago. Kate averted her own gaze and held the flowers out. “For you, Mr. Marcotte. Merry Christmas!”
    Monsieur Marcotte . Antique seller, keen curler, but, more relevant to Kate, the father of Jean–Philippe (J.P.) Marcotte , object of her first heart-stopping, knee-wobbling, gut-searing love. A love Kate had learned to ignore but never, in thirty years, got over. Somehow she remembered to hand Marcotte senior Flower Power’s business card.
    Back in the car, she turned the key in the ignition, saying a silent prayer to the gods of internal combustion. Yes — the engine caught. An ironic reversal. For it seemed not out of the realm of possibility that, at some time between Monsieur Marcotte’s answering his door and Kate’s return to the insouciant Chevy, her own beating heart had come to a complete stop.

    Kate found herself back in town with little memory of the return. Her last delivery was at a large, white house with pretentious black columns and a portico. This house and its owners had been reviled when she was young, their grandiose renovation of a post-war bungalow considered spendthrift and somehow unseemly. Still reeling from the shock of encountering Marcotte the elder, Kate reached automatically to pluck the flowers from the seat behind. The bouquet consisted of a dozen enormous roses, six white, six pink, all swathed in a froth of ferny greens. Congratulations on your new baby daughter , the card read.
    Kate snapped to. Oh, God. In forgetting Nathan Niedmeyer’s double anniversary, she’d also missed the relevant order deadline for Binary Blooms, the online discount supplier she normally used. There were nice Christmas greens at the ValuMart, but the cost would eat up much of the profit on the Niedmeyer order. What on earth would she put on Adele’s Nathan’s grave?
    If Kate’s soul could be said to have a Facebook wall, it was now the devil made his first post. Kate looked up at the quiet house, its curtains closed. She glanced around the cul-de-sac, checking for spies. None. She flipped a tawny hank of hair from her eyes, gently caressed the bouquet on her lap. Crazy — the extravagance, the expense. Complete overkill, likely bigger than the baby it celebrated. She gently tugged at the thick satin bow binding the stems together. Really, in the great scheme of things, what were a few roses more or less?

    Grave Concern, Inc. was located beneath the community bowling alley, which resided in what had once been the town’s community centre. While Kate had been knocking about in the larger world, the aged building, a millstone around the municipal neck, had been snaffled at a bargain by Bill Chambers, a local entrepreneur. Its many clubrooms were now divided up into small retail and office space.
    When Kate had first apprised him of the nature of her business, Chambers, an old classmate,