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“A flower?”
“Yes, indeed. I know because I read a book about orchids a few years back, got curious and looked it up.”
“The journalist you said wasn’t mean.”
“Susan Orlean,” she said. “Very light touch. As opposed to.”
I studied the gray rectangle. “Don’t see anything floral about it.”
“You and everyone else, darling. It’s not exactly your cheerful sprig in a vase. What can you tell me about her?”
“Not much.” I summed up the little I knew.
She said, “Manipulative, illusive, and downright deceptive if she needed to be. Okay, makes sense.”
“What does?”
“Her identifying with the ghost orchid. It’s averystrange flower, Alex. Blooms infrequently, has stalky scales instead of leaves and this twiggy deal here for a stem that’s so thin it’s nearly invisible. More to the point, it doesn’t root in soil, just attaches itself to tree trunks and dangles. Gives nothing back to the tree, so it’s basically a parasite, though it does no harm.”
“Where does it grow?”
“Remote pockets of the Florida swamps. People looking for it have walked right by. As if it’s determined to hide.”
“Illusive and rootless,” I said.
“Sounds like your poor woman, no? Not that botany’s going to help you find out who killed her—let’s go inside, I don’t want to get too drowsy.”
I knew better than to say,For what?
CHAPTER
31
The following morning, after a two-mile run that barely hurt and a shower, I ate toast and drank coffee and deliberated telling Milo about the ghost orchid.
Botany won’t help.
If he was in a decent mood, he’d thank me and move on. If not, he’d grunt absently, thank me, and move on.
So put it aside for now.I spent a while doing my own reading about the flower, starting with the Orlean book then checking to see if anything new had surfaced on the Web since its publication.
It hadn’t. Nor had Robin omitted anything of substance.
That left me with a painting that had meant something to Meagin. And maybe to Doug.
An art chat between the two of them seemed unlikely. Despite Meagin’s evasiveness, had she told him something personal about the painting that made him determined to destroy it?
Had she somehow identified with a strange, parasitic organism and let that slip? Or was I way off and it had been something trivial.
Look, honey, isn’t this a great little weird thing. I’m going to paint it.
Sure, whatever.
A third possibility: the link being more concrete. And that led me to geography.
I paired Meagin’s name withflorida swampand found a huge state park called the Fakahatchee Strand where a decades-old ghost orchid had been discovered a few years back.
Coming up empty, I redirected the search to the town nearest the park, a former logging town called Copeland. Nothing. I cast the net wider:meagin southwest florida.Earned myself big bites of air sandwich.
