Bone Deep. Janice Kay Johnson

she was in the big greenhouse filled with long, plank tables covered with tiny, potted seedlings and seed trays. The quiet that yesterday had seemed peaceful today felt…thick, as if her ears were stuffed with cotton. She strained to hear anything at all and began to wonder if she shouldn’t get her iPod out of her car to keep her company. But she knew she wouldn’t use it; with earbuds in, she really wouldn’t hear anyone coming. As it was, she remembered her start of near-terror yesterday when Jason had gotten so close without her even hearing the creak of the old door swinging open and closed.

      Sitting so that she could see the doors at both ends of the greenhouse, at least peripherally, she reached for another seedling, another empty plastic pot, and kept working.

      The rhythm freed her mind to begin circling old doubts, as if on a looped tape.

      She knew what people had said, out of her hearing, when Hugh disappeared. They speculated about their marriage and why a man as expansive and outgoing as Hugh had married someone so cold. Maybe running away was the only way he could escape her, they’d said.

      Kat hadn’t let herself do this in a long time. Mostly, she tried not to think about Hugh, beyond the inchoate desire to know what had happened, where he was. She believed he was dead. He’d had his flaws, but he wasn’t the man to leave her in endless purgatory like this, not on purpose.

      Only sometimes did her stomach clutch up and she wondered whether their marriage could have been bad enough that he’d wanted to escape and would take any way to do it. He’d always warmed and cooled toward her, going two or three months without turning to her in bed at all, then suddenly becoming the passionate man who’d wooed her in the first place. She couldn’t call it moodiness because he stayed cheerful. It even seemed to her that she was still his best friend. Just…not his lover.

      That had made her wonder, but she’d never had any proof, and he’d denied it the one time she confronted him and insisted he must be seeing another woman. So she let it drop because mostly she was happy. Not rapturously so, but she had a husband and a home and a business and somewhere to belong. Was any marriage perfect?

      No, she would swear Hugh wasn’t unhappy enough to run away. He had to be dead, not to have ever come home.

      But then, where was his body?

      Her trowel, dipped in the potting mix, seemed to grind on something.

      Kat froze.

      No. It couldn’t be. The bone had been in the compost, not the potting mix.

      Nonetheless, her breath came fast as she adjusted the angle of the trowel and scooped whatever it was up. She turned the trowelful over on top of the garden cart full of potting mix.

      Another bone lay, half-exposed. Another…what had they called it? Phalange?

      No, no, no.

      Heart lurching, she stared at it.

      Then, in a frenzy of fear, she set it on the table and began scrabbling in the potting mix with her gloved hands, flinging soil aside, not caring that she scattered it over the floor. Within seconds, she found yet another bone, smaller. Only when she reached the wooden bottom of the cart did she stop, panting, realizing that now she had a whole finger.

      The creak of the door brought her spinning around, a gasp escaping her. The heavy door bounced slightly, as it always did when the spring pulled it shut, but nobody was there.

      CHAPTER THREE

      “PROBABLY SOMEBODY STARTED to open the door and then noticed the Employees Only sign.” As close to hysteria as she’d ever been, Kat perched on the old kitchen stool in the greenhouse, her arms wrapped herself. Despite the warmth in here, she shivered. “Or the wind. I noticed how breezy it was earlier.”

      Grant didn’t bother commenting. He didn’t need to. The damp breeze couldn’t have stirred the heavy door.

      Her teeth wanted to chatter. She clamped them shut until she regained control, then said, “Or one of my employees was looking for me but got distracted.”

      He watched her stolidly. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, which bothered her more than she should have let it.

      Today he wasn’t in uniform. Wearing jeans, running shoes and a flannel shirt under a quilted vest, he leaned a hip against one of the potting tables, the same small spiral notebook he’d used yesterday flipped open. Kat couldn’t see that he was making many notes, even though he held a pencil in one hand.

      As always, his presence produced a flood of conflicting emotions in her. As scared as she’d been, his big, powerful body was a comfort, as was his very intensity and intelligence. She felt safe because he was here.

      She was also unnerved, physically conscious of him in a way she didn’t want to be, reminded that he’d evoked the same, unwelcome response in her when Hugh had still been around.

      “You’re afraid someone was watching you,” Grant said.

      This shudder shook her whole body. She tightened her arms around herself, as if she could keep from disintegrating.

      “Yes.” Her voice came out rusty, shaking. “Or—” and this was the more appalling fear “—someone was in here already and I heard the door when he was slipping out. I’d never have seen him if he was sitting under one of the tables.”

      “Waiting for you to find the bones.”

      “Yes.”

      He’d come the minute she called. Thank God she’d had her cell phone with her. She’d been so terrified, she hated to think what she’d have looked like if anyone had seen her burst out of here. As it was, she’d also called the front desk, and Joan had come tearing in to the greenhouse. She’d stayed protectively at Kat’s side, and now glared at Grant as if he were at fault for upsetting Kat.

      “We’ll find out if an employee started to open the door,” he said. “That’s easy. If it was a customer…we may never know.”

      Kat gave a stiff nod.

      For the first time, his tone softened. “I think it’s unlikely someone was waiting in here. Think about it. If you’d been a little busier, you might never have come to this greenhouse today at all.”

      That was logical. More logical than she’d been, in her fear. Of course no one had crouched in here waiting all day. She was letting paranoia get the best of her. Some of the tension leached from her body. “That’s true.”

      “But you told me you were heading back to this greenhouse,” Joan said unexpectedly. “Remember? We were out front. Somebody might have heard you. There were several customers in there, and I didn’t look to see if anyone was behind us.”

      Grant’s eyes narrowed. “Did you come straight here after you told Ms. Stover your intentions?”

      Kat shook her head. “I stopped by my office. It was maybe…ten minutes before I got here.”

      His gaze, intense to the point of being fierce, pinpointed first Kat and then Joan. “You’ll make me a list of anyone you’ve seen at the nursery today. And a separate one of anyone here yesterday.”

      “So you think someone was in here?” she whispered.

      “Not while you were. But it’s pretty clear these bones were planted.”

      She couldn’t help looking at them, lying on the splintery worktable, hard to connect with a real-life human being, and yet…gruesome. She wanted to wipe the bits of compost from the bones. Like yesterday, she was unpleasantly reminded of the dark, dank soil from a grave.

      “They might have all been there yesterday.”

      “They might.” His jaw flexed. “I wish like hell I’d poked through this potting mix, too. But I’ll tell you what. I’m betting they were added today.”

      “Why?” Joan asked.

      “If this was meant