Poisoned Petals Read Free Page B

Darmus. She reached his voice mail. Despite the fact that he was a very public figure, Darmus was still a very private man. There were many times when he went for weeks without checking his messages or answering his phone to get away from everything. Sometimes it was very frustrating.
    He was probably in the Community Garden. It was part of the Feed America plan, and the first garden for the masses the city of Charlotte ever had. Feed America was trying to put a large garden in every city from Richmond to New Delhi. Darmus’s principle was that no one should ever go hungry on the planet. She liked the concept, but putting it into practice had been mind numbing for him.
    Peggy and her students from Queens University had helped him with the garden. They were there almost every day, planting and tilling. In all, they’d planted an acre of squash, corn, potatoes, strawberries, and peppers. They planted apple trees and blueberry bushes. All of the seed and equipment had been donated to the project from area garden suppliers. All the work had been done by volunteer groups from garden clubs, students, Scouts, and other individuals.
    It had been a few days since she’d seen Darmus there, but he was usually at the garden early in the morning, and she’d been going later in the day. She decided to surprise him with some of the tubers she was bringing back. He loved native plants that had been in the region since before 1900. He’d be pleased and surprised to find some already planted in his garden when he came home.
    Then she could swing by her garden shop, the Potting Shed, work for a few hours, post exam scores at the university, and finally go back to the Potting Shed and close up for the night. The pace of her life was grueling sometimes, too.
    She was in the process of deciding if she should give up her position at Queens University. She’d only gone back after John’s death because she was heavily in debt and wasn’t sure if the Potting Shed could support itself.
    But the little shop was thriving and needing more and more of her time. She had a wonderful group of students working for her, but it was getting harder to do a good job at everything. She was spread too thin, and even though she was afraid to take the plunge, she knew she was going to have to give something up to remain sane.
    She’d pretty well decided it was going to be teaching. She was terrified, but there was no other answer. She could still do her group lectures about toxic plants, and the Charlotte Police Department had recently offered her an on-call position as a forensic botanist. Neither one of those would take up as much time as teaching several classes a day, but they would provide extra money.
    But part of her hated to give up teaching. Darmus had certainly given her a hard time about it. To him, there was no greater application of learning than to teach. The idea that she would choose a garden shop over her professorship drove him crazy.
    But Peggy knew he didn’t understand why the Potting Shed was so important to her. He’d only been married once, and that was for a very short time. She couldn’t explain how the pain of John’s death went away when she was puttering around the shop. And not everyone could be totally dedicated to the betterment of the human race like Darmus. His whole life had been consumed by his mission.
    She always wondered what it would have been like if his early marriage hadn’t fallen apart. He’d married her best friend, Rosie, in college. Darmus was happy then. But the marriage fell apart quickly. After it was over, Darmus became obsessed with saving the world. Would he have been as willing to give up his life for his cause if he’d actually had a life?
    There would never be an answer to that question. Fate had taken him down a different path. She turned her little red truck into Darmus’s driveway. He had a small, pleasant house with a magnificent garden on the north side of Charlotte, near the University of