use. He’s the Clue Killer.” I inspect the blank message card again. No florist logo. It might as well bear Professor Plum’s demented smile.
“He wants to kill us all because he lost Clue?” Brandy says doubtfully. “This can’t be right.”
We dive back into our research.
A different website proclaims that oleander means enjoy what’s in front of you and leave the past in the past, which is a nicer alternative to watch out, but then Zach finds a site that looks pretty legit. It informs us that oleander is universally interpreted as caution in the flower language world. I hear the slow, somber bells of my funeral toll and hope someone competent does my makeup if it’s going to be open casket. It occurs to me that I’m a little bit morbid.
“Can you die just from being exposed to it through the air?” I ask. “Do you have to touch it or is standing too close enough?”
Zach, hunched over his phone, mutters, “Yahoo Answers is a cesspit.”
“Was the delivery guy wearing gloves?” Melissa asks. None of us can remember. At this point I don’t remember a single detail about the deliveryman. Maybe it was a woman. A figment of my imagination. I’m hallucinating in the ER.
“Your fiancé might be a maniac,” Brandy tells me. “Come home with me. Wait. I’ve got a date tonight.” She pauses. “You could stay at my sister’s place! She does have five cats, though, so you might sneeze a lot.”
It’s a sweet offer, but there’s no way I’m sleeping with cats. Their hair gets stuck to everything and I’ll get perma-red eyes that will make it look like I’ve been eating special brownies. I don’t want to stay with my own sister, either, who lives forty-five minutes to the east. We’ve found this to be a nice buffer distance, which is why my brother lives forty-five minutes to the west. My siblings and I don’t have much to say to each other and interact mostly on holidays at our parents’ house, which sits an hour north.
“Actually, I think I should confront him.” I’m so brave, I impress myself. “Yes, that’s what I must do. I can’t let him get away with intimidating me like this.”
Brandy gasps. “No!”
“You’ve got to break it off.” Melissa’s eyes are black and predatory. She leans in so close to me that I revisit the grapefruit she ate for lunch. “Naomi. You have to break up with him. There’s no other choice. Do it now. Text him.”
“Yeah, don’t break up with him to his face,” Zach advises. “I once dated a surgeon and I drove across state lines before I left a voicemail saying we were breaking up. This is the same shit; Nicholas is right at home with sharp tools. Those tooth-scraper things could be like a scalpel to the jugular if you know what you’re doing. He could turn out to be the Sweeney Todd of dentists.”
I know Zach doesn’t believe a word of what he’s saying, but I get a flicker of slasher-film Nicholas in his white lab coat, eyes glowing red over a hypoallergenic face mask, wielding doll-sized weapons. He’s high on bubble-gum-flavored laughing gas and in the fog of his zombiefied brain all he can remember is that I insulted his tie.
“If you don’t see me tomorrow, it’s because I’m dead,” I say.
Zach reminds me that we don’t work tomorrow, Leon does.
“If you don’t see me Wednesday, it’s because I’m dead.”
“Okay. We’ll wait till Wednesday to call the police, then.”
I chew my fingernails. Fuss with the flowers even though they might be poisonous. They’re so pretty that it’s hard not to. Nicholas is pretty, too. His pretty face will be the last one I see before I drift from this life. I’m only twenty-eight and I’ve barely done or seen anything. I hear his voice, my memory curling its edges into a taunt. You’re barely living, you know.
I’ve got to destroy these murder flowers.
We’re running around like animals escaped from the zoo, trying to figure out how to get them out of the store without touching them. Melissa, Brandy, and I are staunch feminists but today we turn our backs on equality by playing the help-me-I’m-just-a-girl card, and vote Zach to take one for the team.
He sets his mouth in a grim line and risks it all like a trooper. We package his arms in plastic bags, all the way up to the shoulders, and secure them in place with rubber bands. We pull up his collar