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“Here, Detective, take this rose home to your wife,” said Baxter.
“I don’t make it a habit to accept anything from serial killers.” “The only thing I kill–serially, as you put it–is bugs. This is from my prize roses.” “No, thank you. Tell me again, where were you on Friday night?” “What time exactly?” “Between the hours of 8 and 10pm.” “I was right here. All day, in fact.” “Why did you ask what time then?” “Sorry, I was focused on my flowers. Why are you asking?” “Your friend, Daniel, is missing.” “I wouldn’t call him a friend, really.” “Why is that? Did you two have a falling out?” “You could say that.” “What about?” “He grows roses as well, but you probably already know that.” “Yeah.” “And you probably already know that he stole a hybrid tea I was growing.” “Tell me more.” “It’s a special hybrid I grew, a cross of the Blue Moon and the Mr. Lincoln.” “Blue Moon and Mr. Lincoln?” “Yes, names of hybrid tea roses, Detective. You know, you and I are not all that different.” “We are very different.” “No, no, we’re the same. You and I are both experts at what we do. You are an expert investigator. So am I.” “An expert investigator?” “Yes. All roses are subject to predators like bugs or disease. Beetles are the serial killers of roses. So is mildew and other diseases. Anything can take out a rose.” “Quite the philosopher, aren’t you?” “Anyway, each prize rose is given a name. The Blue Moon is a lavender rose, and the Mr. Lincoln is a red rose, both very fragrant. I was going to call mine the Blue Lincoln. Your wife will love it.” “I’ll buy one at a florist.” “You could, but wouldn’t you rather get it straight from the inventor?” “In my book, God is the inventor.” “I guess you could call me a god. I would not take offense.” “I know you had something to do with Daniel’s disappearance.” “Daniel had a habit of disappearing without any help from anyone, including me.” “I haven’t heard that.” “Ask his wife.” “He was divorced.” “His ex-wife then. I didn’t know he got divorced. A man can die a thousand deaths from a divorce.” “Spare me the philosophy lesson.” “Know what the secret to a good marriage is?” “You’re going to tell me the secret to a good marriage?” “Bring her a rose every day. My wife never tired of it.” “Your wife died under mysterious circumstances.” “It’s not mysterious at all. I have poisons here for the bugs. She handled that part and got it in her system. I really should sue the manufacturer.” “Why haven’t you?” “I’m still in mourning.” “Daniel and your wife were having an affair.” “Apparently he had a secret with roses as well as women.” “What was his secret?” “He never told me. I tried to get it out of him.” “What is your secret?” “To women? I thought it was roses. To roses? Simple, really, and it’s crack for them. They crave it.” “What is it?” “Bone meal.” © 2026 Ed Ridgley About the author: Ed Ridgley (https://linktr.ee/edridgley) won a New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest in 2010, the cartoon showing a bar scene with a bartender, a detective, and a ballerina. His caption (the bartender’s words) said “The guy you’re looking for waltzed out of here an hour ago.” And he won the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine’s Mysterious Photograph Contest, July/August 2023 edition. Ed hiked to Everest Base Camp in Nepal in 2018 and thus crossed off number one on his bucket list.
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“I swear, bitch, if you did something to him, I’m out of here!”
“He was like that when I come out here to make coffee,” Stephanie said. “Swear on a bible.” John Lyndhurst lay on a couch with faded nap, a rictus grin on his face. A lifelong smoker, his face was crisscrossed with wrinkles, tiny fissures that captured shadows. A noisy man in life, his repose in death was unnerving. “He dead?” “Has to be.” The man hadn’t moved since Stephanie called her friend Patti over, a fifteen-minute drive. From time to time, she nudged his shoe with her foot to be sure. “Why the holy hell didn’t you call nine-one-one?” “I’m thinking about it.” “Well, hell, you want me to do it?” She reached in her purse for her cell phone. “Hang on,” Stephanie said, placing a hand on Patti’s phone before she could unlock it. “I’m thinking we can turn this into some good luck for us.” “How?” “Grab his legs,” Stephanie ordered. “I’ve got his bank book.” “Hang on,” Patti said. “What’s my cut?” “Twenty-five percent.” “Fifty.” “Thirty.” “Forty-five.” “Forty.” “Done,” Patti said. Stephanie moved the coffee table, sending Styrofoam cups, a gin bottle, beer cans, and pill bottles scattering across the hardwood floor. She rolled him off the couch by tugging his shoulders. Patti lost her hold three times before they got him propped in the car. “Let me catch my breath,” Patti said, holding the steering wheel like a lifeline. “Cut out the smokes, bitch, and you’ll have air.” Patti ignored her. “How much . . . are . . . you—we asking to withdraw?” “I’m going for five.” “That all?” The check with its forged signature was sucked into the tube system with its pneumatic whoosh in the plastic carrier. Patti continued her playacting, fluffing his collar while her knuckles whitened from the effort to keep John’s head stable. The transaction was taking too long. Patti’s fingers ached from the tension of holding John’s head steady, without making it look like she was trying to strangle the passenger in front of her. When the teller asked John twice if he wanted large denomination bills, she immediately tried to make her right hand prop his jaw playfully. Tunnel vision whisked away every other sense; she didn’t hear the teller or Stephanie speaking words, but the sound of fear got through. “Mister Lyndhurst, did you sign this check? Sir? Sir?” Stephanie couldn’t take another second of the tension; she hit the gas, burning rubber out of the parking lot. They drove aimlessly. “It’s your goddamn fault,” she blurted, breaking the silence. Patti leaned over the seat. John’s body, now canted at an unnatural angle into the foot well, seemed bent in half. She yanked up his shirt to move him and noted blood pooling in his lower back and buttocks. “My fault?” “You were massaging his head off his neck back there! She got suspicious!” That started a screaming match that resulted in a litany of filth and profanities ringing around the hunched man, oblivious to the world. They were on Lake Road going west, at the same spot where highway construction had widened the road, owing to subsidence. The yellow guard rail on John’s side of the vehicle had been removed, replaced by concrete bollards at the lip of the sandstone cliffs overlooking Lake Erie. Driving put Stephanie at a disadvantage. Her anger boiling over, she reached around to slap Patti’s face and lost control of the vehicle. She overcorrected without taking her foot off the gas. The car slewed from one side of the road to the other and back again, whiplashing them both, dislodging Patti from her perch in back. The car shot over the side without any time for Stephanie to brake. Inertia threw seatbeltless Patti upward against the roof. Not as airborne as her partner, Stephanie tried to use that moment of weightlessness to regain control of the car. Gravity, however, overruled everything and took full control. The car plunged over the dense canopy of stunted trees clinging to the side of the cliff face, skidding along the treetops for what seemed an eternity. A flash of the lake’s blue expanse was recorded in the eyes and neocortexes of the living passengers. They both lay unconscious, silent, bleeding from deep lacerations, matching their passenger in stillness. * * * The women were saved by turkey buzzards, the last guests to answer the dinner bell. Their spiraling circle over the car grew by dozens until an amateur photographer stopped to take a photo of the revolving cone of large-winged birds circling the shoreline. While he increased the shutter speed of his expensive camera to get the right blur for the bokeh effect he wanted, a spear of sunlight glinting from below through the trees startled him. A car aerial. The paramedics who brought them up rushed Patti into intensive care immediately. Half her face had turned septic and the skin had to be removed down to the subcutaneous layer. Maggots had burrowed into the wound and eaten enough dead flesh to save her life. Reconstructive surgery paid for by a GoFundMe project while she served her time in the women’s prison in Marysville. She left Northtown and rumor said she wound up on Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia’s notorious neighborhood for streets packed with dope-fiends bent over in their fentanyl and xylazine nods. Stephanie, being the “mastermind of the fraud perpetrated on an aging man,” to quote the prosecutor, received a five-year sentence in the Trumbull Correctional Institute. She became a devout Christian inside and a recluse after her release for good behavior during her third year. When she heart gave out, at 47, six firemen had to cut a hole through the wall to extract her body. Her weight was estimated at eight hundred pounds. Neither woman ever spoke to the other after their rescue. © 2026 Robb T. White About the author: Robb White lives in Northeastern Ohio. A Derringer-nominated author, he has three series detectives: Thomas Haftmann, Raimo Jarvi, and Jade Hui. Fade to Black is a collection of noir tales, and Jersey Girl is his latest thriller. A forthcoming crime novella is Easy Money from Brick Tower Press. |
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