The Wrong Wreath at Willowmere
The wreath arrived on a Tuesday, propped against the front door of Ivy Cottage like an accusation.
Agnes Plum noticed it on her morning walk, just as the mist was lifting off the duck pond and the smell of woodsmoke from the Barker farm was threading through the lane. She stopped. White chrysanthemums, bound with a pale ribbon, the kind used for condolence arrangements. A small card tucked into the stems, cream-coloured and printed rather than handwritten.
The cottage belonged to Mr. Gerald Foss. Gerald was sixty-three, stout, and very much alive. Agnes had seen him at the post office only yesterday, arguing cheerfully about the price of stamps.
She stood at the gate for a moment, her leather gloves pressed together, and then walked on.
By half past nine she was back, this time with her shopping bag as cover. Gerald was crouched in his front garden, the wreath on the path beside him, turning the card over and over in his thick fingers. His face had gone a colour somewhere between cream and paste.
“Dreadful mix-up, I expect,” Agnes said, from just beyond the gate.
Gerald looked up. “Miss Plum.” He cleared his throat. “Yes. Must be.”
“Who is it addressed to?”
A pause long enough to be its own answer. “No name. Just the address.”
Agnes studied him. His collar was damp. He had not knotted his tie properly. “Shall I find out where it came from? I know Dorothy at the florist’s in Colstone.”
Gerald set the card down on the path. “No need to trouble yourself.”
But his hand, as he said it, pressed flat against his knee as though steadying something.
Agnes telephoned Dorothy Hatch at Colstone Blooms before eleven o’clock.
“That arrangement?” Dorothy said, and Agnes could hear the crinkle of cellophane as someone worked in the background. “Ordered by phone. Paid in cash, collected by a young lad on a bicycle. The note with it said Ivy Cottage, Willowmere, no recipient name. I thought it was a little irregular, but the money was right.”
“When was it ordered?”
“Thursday last. Late afternoon.”
Agnes thanked her and stood for a moment by the telephone table, her finger resting on the notepad where she had written nothing because she needed to write nothing. Thursday afternoon. She knew where Gerald Foss had been on Thursday afternoon because she had been at the village hall committee meeting, and so had Margaret Foss, Gerald’s sister, who had mentioned with some satisfaction that Gerald was in Colstone seeing his solicitor.
Seeing his solicitor. Updating his will, Margaret had said, with the particular brightness of someone who has learned something they consider advantageous.
Agnes put on her coat.
Margaret Foss lived in the newer part of the village, in a semi-detached with a glossy red door and a garden kept in perfect subjugation. She answered on the second knock, wearing an apron printed with lemons, and her expression did something complicated when she saw Agnes.
“Miss Plum. I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“I won’t keep you,” Agnes said pleasantly. “I’m just making enquiries about the wreath sent to Gerald’s cottage this morning.”
Margaret’s hand tightened on the door handle. The knuckle whitened, then softened, then whitened again. “A wreath? Good heavens. To Gerald’s?”
“Yes. Rather a fine one. White chrysanthemums.”
“What a strange mistake.”
“Quite,” said Agnes. “Except that it wasn’t a mistake, was it, Margaret?”
The lemon apron rustled. From the back of the house came the faint sound of a radio, someone reading the news in a calm, measured voice.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you ordered it to frighten him,” Agnes said. There was no heat in her voice. “Gerald is your sole heir under the old will, and you under his. But if he’s changed those arrangements, as I imagine he has, you wanted to remind him of his own mortality. To unsettle him. To perhaps encourage him to reconsider.”
The silence in the doorway stretched like cold toffee.
“That’s a terrible thing to suggest,” Margaret said at last, but she said it to the doorstep rather than to Agnes.
“It is a terrible thing to do,” Agnes agreed. “Sending a funeral wreath to a living person. There are people who would call it threatening behaviour. I’m not sure the police would disagree.”
Margaret looked up then. Her eyes had gone very still.
“I imagine,” Agnes continued, folding her hands over her bag, “that a written apology to Gerald, and no further interference in his affairs, would resolve the matter quietly. Gerald is fond of you, in his way. He wouldn’t want unpleasantness.”
She left Margaret standing in the doorway and walked back through the newer part of the village, past the duck pond where the mist had fully lifted now and two mallards were arguing over a crust of bread, and down the lane where the woodsmoke smell had gone and in its place was something green and damp and clean.
Gerald’s gate was shut. The wreath was gone from the path.
Agnes walked on home, put the kettle on, and found that her good biscuits, the ones with the dark chocolate base, had been precisely where she left them all along.
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