The Azalea Assault (A Garden Society Mystery)
Chapter 1"Incoming!”Cam Harris pushed off her kitchen floor, propelling the wheeled kitchen chair she was sitting in to the sliding panel that hid the dumbwaiter. She opened it a hair and yelled to the kitchen upstairs, “Ready!” and shut it again, knocking off the “Over the hill” magnet her sister had recently given her. She heard her neighbor and best friend, Annie Schulz, lowering her treasure, which was how Annie referred to anything she lowered via dumbwaiter, then tramping down the back stairs to Cam’s apartment.The turn-of-the-century house, gifted to Annie when her grandmother had moved to a retirement home, was split into two apartments, upper and lower. The living arrangement was a perfect compromise for the yin-yang best friends. The two had tried to live together before, but Annie’s free-form approach to order drove Cam crazy; she’d grown tired of photos drying over the bathtub and finding every bowl in the house dirty because Annie had a wild hair and tried out four new cupcake recipes at once. In the current living  situation, they got all the bonding time they wanted, but with absolute boundaries about whose space was whose.Annie let herself in, as was her habit, and plopped into a chair opposite Cam.“Caffeine?” she asked, blowing a stray curl out of her face.Cam rolled her eyes, stood, and poured coffee into a travel cup for Annie,  then walked over and opened the dumbwaiter to inspect the goods. “Frazzled morning?”“Just a little wrestling with the juicer Petunia left. First batch was too pulpy, and I had to take apart the stupid thing to clean it.”“I thought all you had to do was bake and deliver,” Cam said.“Yes, but juice squeezed yesterday would not be fresh- squeezed, would it? No cream?”“Do I ever have cream? I’ve got that nonfat hazelnut stuff.”Annie made a face. “You, my friend, are missing the point of cream. It’s about texture.” They had an ongoing disagreement about coffee supplements. “Are you ready?”“I am. Just one more load?”Annie nodded and stood. “But let’s get this to the car first.” She went to the dumbwaiter and grabbed the first of the food.Annie was helping Cam, albeit indirectly. Cam’s sister, Petunia, was catering a several-day event Cam was coordinating for her employer, the Roanoke Garden Society. Petunia’s restaurant,  Spoons, bought  sweets from Annie’s cupcake store, Sweet Surprise, and Petunia had convinced Annie to trade delivery assignments. Petunia would trans- port the desserts that went with lunches and suppers if Annie would deliver breakfast, since a baker needed to begin work early anyway.Cam would have done it, but she needed delivering herself. She was saving for a new Mustang, but purchase was at least six months away. Normally she rode her bicycle, except when she needed to look professional, which was the case with this painstakingly orchestrated feature for Garden Delights magazine. For the next several days, she’d be begging rides from Annie, Petunia, and her boyfriend, Rob.Cam helped Annie load the breakfast goods into Annie’s Volkswagen. The car was not really suited to catering, since all Annie normally delivered were cupcakes, cookies, and special fancy desserts. After Annie’s return upstairs for the rest of the food, they finally accommodated the juice, coffee, fruit, and bagels, but the only spot for the tray of spreads was Cam’s lap. She wasn’t sure if she was more concerned about the garlic and green onion or the salmon, but she was fairly sure she’d be wearing one of them, given Annie’s driving.As Annie pulled out of their neighborhood, Cam spotted the giant neon star atop Mill Mountain, just visible through a sea of blooming dogwoods. She breathed in the scent of honeysuckle, laid her head against the headrest, and smiled. The dogwoods always made her happy. There was nothing better than pink trees.She had never been sorry to return to Roanoke, “America’s Most Livable City,” according to her PR peers at the chamber of commerce. Cam couldn’t have agreed more. She’d lived here twenty-seven of her thirty-two years, leaving only to attend graduate school at Northwestern and then work at a public relations firm in Chicago for a couple of years. When her mother died, Cam returned because she worried about her father. She was glad she had.Cam had to use a towelette to dab a spot of cream cheese from her gray linen slacks when they arrived. The Ann Taylor silk blouse, though, would have been far less salvageable, and it had survived unscathed. Cam felt it was a victory.“Cammi! There you are! You look lovely!” Neil Patrick stepped onto the porch to greet her. He was host of this event, founding member of the Roanoke Garden Society, and a perfect blue-blooded Southern gentleman. Cam adored him in all ways but one: he insisted on calling her Cammi.She would have thought, given his love for flowers, he would prefer Camellia, her full name. She preferred that to Cammi herself, though she liked Cam best. She chastised herself. Most men her father’s age got a free pass, but Neil’s young wife, Evangeline,  had changed her charitable attitude. A man married to someone born in the same decade as Cam should be more attentive to her preferences, but, as usual, she bit her tongue. “Mr. Patrick, it’s wonderful to see you. Have you met my friend Annie? She’s helping  Petunia  with some of the catering.”“Oho!”Mr. Patrick looked as if he’d never seen anything quite as outrageous as Annie. Cam felt a little defensive, though Annie probably should have known the nose ring wouldn’t fly with this crowd. Her clothes were actually rather conservative, so far as Annie went—a gypsy skirt, Birkenstocks, and a peasant blouse.Fortunately, Annie was unfazed by anyone else’s judgment. She’d decided as a teen she didn’t care for anyone’s approval who judged on first impressions. “Where would you like me to set up breakfast, Mr. Patrick?”  Her smile was straight and sincere,  and it had the effect it always did. Mr. Patrick’s short white mustache twitched in a smile.“There’s a tent off the patio, just through there.” He gestured and Annie began to carry the various trays through the house, leaving Cam to Mr. Patrick.“You have a lovely home, Mr. Patrick.” It was true— classic Georgian architecture, perfectly decorated. “The magazine crew should be here in an hour. I hoped we could make a list of ‘can’t miss’ features before they get here. Does that sound good?”He nodded,  smiling, less shy than usual, probably because there was no media spy pestering him about his marriage to the youthful former Miss Virginia. “Let me show you something.”He looked like a boy with his hand in the cookie jar. His blue eyes twinkled as he held out his elbow for Cam. She allowed him to guide her up the stairs, realizing halfway up how it might be misinterpreted if a photo were snapped. When she reached the top of the stairs and saw all the natural lighting through the French doors, though, she pushed ahead of her host into a room with a full wall of windows. It was a drawing room of sorts, but the focus was obviously the natural beauty behind  the glass; the garden below spanned an acre, at least. When Cam threw open the other set of French doors and gasped, Mr. Patrick chuckled.She looked down on his property  and the majestic background.“I’ve never seen such a thing. It’s amazing!” Mr. Patrick led Cam onto the balcony.At the center of his garden was a fountain with streams of water shooting  up like stamen; the yellow water lilies floating in the fountain’s pool looked, from a distance, like the pollen at the center of a flower. The arrangement radiated outward, a pattern of flowers that, from this height, created a perfect mural of a stargazer lily. Whites, reds, and pinks were perfectly distributed, allowing the bushes and smaller plants to create a breathtaking illusion.Cam was surprised, then, when Mr. Patrick leaned forward over the rail, pointing to a near corner, not part of the magnificence at all. “That trellis over the sundeck was built by none other than your daddy.”“Really? I didn’t know you knew my father.” Now that she’d noticed the trellis through the lush wisteria, she could see the beautiful craftsmanship; it had just been humbled by the extravagant floral display.“I don’t, really, not well. He built it when my father lived here.”Cam admired it a moment and then focused on the main garden again.“We’re lucky it’s been an early spring. This is a lot more advanced than normal for April, isn’t it?”“It is.”“We’ll definitely need shots from here, probably at several times of day, as I’m sure that view changes with the sun.”“Oh, that’s true. It’s spectacular at sunrise. You don’t suppose that fancy photographer would come for sunrise, do you?”He looked so hopeful that Cam couldn’t bring herself to answer honestly. “I’m sure he’d be delighted.”The truth was, it was a huge coup for the Roanoke Garden Society  to have lured Jean-Jacques Georges to do the photography shoot. It was an effort somehow managed by Samantha Hollister, the current RGS president, but Cam had heard he could be a bit difficult.Garden Delights was the premiere national magazine for garden lovers, and Cam had been courting them for seven months. Jean-Jacques was exactly the entice...