The Hothouse Deception

The Hothouse Deception

Masquerade Inc. Cozy Mysteries #2

Patti Larsen

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 by Patti Larsen

Find out more about me at

http://www.pattilarsen.com

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Moment de la Mort

It’s grown cold since the sun set and she shivers as she hurries to finish the job. She can’t be caught out here, not now. Things are moving faster than she wanted and any slipup could mean the end of her enterprise.

She’s sacrificed too much to fail now.

The tractor engine quits before she’s through and she curses its faithlessness. All attempts to restart it meet with the ruh-ruh-ruh of fruitless effort.

Fine. She’ll finish by hand. She’s running out of time, so it must be quick.

She lands hard on the ground, both feet taking the brunt of her leap from the tractor seat, a faint groan escaping as her bad knee buckles. She’ll deal with it later when she’s sipping champagne on a Costa Rican beach. Until then, she’ll just have to tolerate it.

She’s tolerated worse up to now. Time for her to win for once.

The spade is familiar in her hands, as it should be. She’s spent her early life wielding one. But this is the last time. She catches herself in a bark of a laugh, the hole she’d begun with the tractor almost deep enough. A few heave hos and this will all be over.

If only she paused to look up, paid attention. Noticed she isn’t alone. Instead, she shovels with enthusiasm born from impatience and confidence, while the dark figure climbs into the tractor seat. Turns over the engine now restored on purpose, with purpose.

She turns in shock, the bright headlights shining in her eyes. She shades her face, squinting, confused. What are you doing here? I told you, I’m taking care of this.

No reply. Except for the groan of the hydraulics. The rise of the bucket digger. The slow approach. She staggers back, falling into the compost heap, so startled by the turn of events she doesn’t even think to run.

Or ask why as the bucket’s controls release and it falls, fast and deadly.

She’s made one last sacrifice. And it’s a doozy.

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Chapter One

Who knew weeding could be so boring?

Oh, wait. Me. I knew.

Not that Dad hadn’t tried his best to interest me in his gardening obsession. Okay, so he puttered, but that qualified to someone who abhorred dirt, despised humidity (my hair would never forgive me) and utterly and completely hated anything to do with working with her hands.

Yours truly. Princess? I’d take that label and own it, thank you.

I pushed back my damp bangs from my continually dripping forehead with the wet forearm of my uniform shirt, the thin cotton rolled up from the edges of my filthy gloves. Maybe if the sun didn’t beat down through the clear glass of the greenhouse and attempt to melt me on the spot, I might not have been in such foul humor as to vengefully dig out a weed—I hoped it was a weed because all plants looked the same to me, frankly, and though the real me would hate to kill the wrong kind, greenhouse me was past caring, really—with a vicious chop of my trowel. Taking out my temper on a helpless root system was preferable to the alternative. I looked up from the long, narrow bed I was working on, elevated, at least, in a wooden tray stretching the full length of the massive hothouse. That meant I wasn’t on my hands and knees. Nope, not yet. That would come later, likely when I had to tend to some of the outdoor plants.

Before you start to think I’d lost my mind and taken a job to pay the bills, well. I had. Only, this was meant to be as fun, glamorous and altogether profitable as my last gig, helping my friend, Reggie Nolan, to save her theater and bar from her horrible ex-husband and the assassin hired to kill one of her customers before burning her place to the ground.

One short month ago. I scowled at the mangy little outgrowth of what had to be an unwelcome guest in the moist soil, thinking about the high I’d been riding after the incident at After Hours, Reggie’s club, and my successful uncovering of the truth, if not with an entirely happy ending.

Not my fault and I refused to linger over fussy details the cops were now responsible for. Instead, I’d accepted the vaguely mob money (hush, conscience) Reggie paid me, as promised, paid off some of my debt, got my finances in the kind of shape they hadn’t seen in a decade and even spent a little on my new apartment.

I’d surprised myself with my restraint, really, expending as little as possible (second hand in Martingale, Virginia, meant rich housewives decided the sofa they purchased last season needed replacing, equating to nearly new everything for yours truly), on my new digs, though part of me quailed over putting out any of my hard-earned (hey, I almost died) cash on fixing up the space over my parent’s garage if only because doing so meant, on some level, I’d committed myself to staying.

Which, assuredly, was not and never would be, the case. Meaning, I needed to keep working, and the appeal of what I’d done for Reggie? Who knew solving crimes was my forte when I’d never, ever, thought about following in Dad #1’s footsteps?

Not that I wanted to be an FBI gal like Supervisory and Very, Very Special Agent Andrew Walker (insert heavy sarcasm here because we were fighting, what else was new). Wearing a suit to work every day and stooging for the feds felt like sticking my soul in a box and mailing it to hell.

Yes, I was exaggerating slightly, but there you go.

But this deception expert thing? Just thinking about it gave me goosebumps of excitement and thrills beyond anything I’d ever experienced. The idea I could—and would—take on jobs of varying length and complexity in an array of situations and a vast slew of opportunities to learn new things?

If I could spell heaven, it would be, well.

Deception.

Never mind what that said about the state of my soul.

Sweat trickled down my collar and ran down the back of my neck, the discomfort of the wet fabric on my skin making me cringe. The heavy work boots felt like lead weights holding me to the ground, clumsy gloves coated with some kind of silicone making it difficult to trowel. Add to that the hum of a fly nearby trying to find a place on my sorry excuse for a weary body and I was so over this whole thing, I could barely breathe.

No, wait. That was the excess humidity. Got it.

Argh to the millionth power.

One more rub of my forehead on my shirt and I dug in again, refusing to check the clock hanging at the far end of the greenhouse, to count down the minutes of torture to the measly break I was afforded, the pathetic excuse for a lunch I’d be eating in (yes, I peeked), fifteen and a half minutes.

I’d thought all the experience and school and brief employments I’d started and left would be excellent background for this job I’d fallen into, this odd and appealing career choice I’d made. I wasn’t comfortable with the ethical process of the decision, being that I was hiring myself out to business owners to ferret out wrongdoing in their workplaces. One might call such a person some rather bad names that involved stitches, even. But I had a higher purpose in mind, and this was no simple snitch scenario.

I was making a difference, damn it.

Okay, and it was fun, and I got to be different people and how cool was my life?

The trowel thunked on the side of the tray as I dug a bit too deep, my hand aching from the blow. Maybe I’d gotten a bit ahead of myself ordering business cards and asking Jordan to help me build a website. Perhaps I’d been optimistic in my estimation of my ability to find new deception positions to continue to feed and clothe and house me while paying off my accumulated debts in short order so I could move out and not live with my dads anymore. It’s quite possible, ultimately, I’d taken Reggie’s offering as a typical payday that might not, in the end, have been an accurate expectation of what I could expect to generate on the income side with little to no experience in the actual field and no contacts or prospects or trust built around my name.

Mind you, the last month had been educational. I’d updated my firearms certificate, begun the process of acquiring my private investigator license (two freaking years of experience? Were they kidding me already?) with help from D.C. violent crimes Detective Elle Gordon who for some reason thought I was worth keeping around.

Even if her asshat partner didn’t.

As for work in that thirty-day time period, however, I’d come to the realization my idealistic and hopeful expectations were destined for disappointment.

There were no deeper depths of despair than realizing the only emails my new website received were spam.

Then again, that Nigerian prince really sounded like a nice guy.

Someone sighed nearby and I glanced to my right, catching sight of one of the other workers, her dark skin shining with sweat, too. At least she looked like she knew what she was doing, the bucket at her feet filled with unwelcome plant guests at Casa Hothouse. Mine? More dirt than green and maybe to a quarter of capacity.

I really, really hated weeding.

Like, really.

And yet, I persevered, and you know why? Because I wasn’t a quitter. That Petal, the younger (stupider, more selfish and pathetic) version of me could just suck it. I was a grown woman with grown woman responsibilities and grown woman (holy heck) bills to pay and, by Hannah, I was going to stick to it and make my dads proud of me.

Wait, no. Me. Make me proud of me. My dads could also suck it.

Yup. Fighting.

I stepped back from the tray to move my bucket sideways down the line before digging back in, using the vitriol of the situation against my enemies. It wasn’t that my fathers didn’t want me to work, exactly. When this job came up and Elle offered it to me, I was overjoyed.

The dads? Not so much. Never mind it was a simple one-week live-in situation at a greenhouse complex. Or that while the contract paid crap, it was, at least, experience for my resume and my PI license. Sure, the place was run as a rehab facility for female ex-cons looking for a skillset to help them find jobs. And many of the young women weren’t exactly model citizens, done with their sentences or not.

I attacked a nasty clump of weed (I think it was a weed), hearing Dad’s voice in my head.

This is crazy, he’d argued. You’re going into a dangerous situation with no backup and zero experience.

What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, that smartass response hadn’t been my finest moment. Nor had the following fight over me being my own person, yada, et cetera, ad nauseum.

I hadn’t meant to leave angry the next morning, Elle Gordon picking me up to take me to the site. She trusted me, a hardened police detective. Why couldn’t Dad?

She’d handed me over a file to read over during the one-hour drive to the greenhouse complex. Just get settled for the week, keep your ears open and see if you can make a few friends. That’s it, Petal.

I perused the paperwork while she spoke. Catherine West opened the Harmony Hothouse Company three years ago?

Her daughter was convicted of dealing drugs, the detective said. Catherine wanted a place for Annie to land when she got out. Except for management, the staff is all ex-cons, eighteen to thirty, so you’ll fit right in.

Do I get a background story? Okay, maybe a bit too eager. I could be a mob stoolie, got in too deep, betrayed my boss after turning state’s evidence. Did I mention I had a vivid and excitable imagination?

Elle’s scowl agreed with my assessment but wasn’t going for it. Your background is there. She jabbed at a page, a single sheet with a single conviction for drug possession along with a new name and hometown. These aren’t hardened criminals, she said. They are young women who made bad choices because of their situations. That’s it. Keep it simple, keep your head down and keep me informed.

Grumble, growl, fine.

She did supply me with a burner phone, so that appeased my clearly infantile need for clandestine trappings to make me happy.

Elle dropped me off after I’d memorized the new