Murder Comes by Mail by A. H. Gabhart

couple of years, until he finally settled into a coaching job at a small college on the outskirts of Atlanta. By then, Alex was in law school. To her, the idea of roots choked out ambition and made a person settle for mediocrity. She didn’t think of Hidden Springs as being the slow lane, more like the exit ramp to a rest stop. A nice place to stop for a break now and again, but not somewhere to settle.
    Michael gave the rose roots an extra hard jerk, and Aunt Lindy looked up from patiently unearthing dandelions. “You must be thinking about Alexandria.”
    Aunt Lindy had an uncanny ability to read his thoughts. She said it came from crawling inside his head during the weeks he’d been in a coma after the automobile wreck that killed his parents. Whatever it was, there were times when he was almost afraid to think around her. He stood up now, the fragments of roots in his hand, and met her eyes without saying anything. She smiled and dug her trowel into the ground to oust another dandelion.
    “Wouldn’t chemicals be easier?” He asked the same thing every time they fought the weed battle in the garden.
    “The easy way is not always the best way, and you know chemicals kill the good along with the bad.” She let an earthworm crawl up on her gloved hand. “My mother kept the weeds out without any such poisons. I surely can as well.”
    “Your mother had Uncle Eunice.” Uncle Eunice had been his grandmother’s bachelor brother who earned his keep by making the gardens the showcases they still were. Michael had grown up on stories about his tall, thin great-uncle who preferred the company of his hoe to that of other people. People laughed at his slow movements, the way his bones cracked and popped when he curled down to the ground to nurse a seedling, and how he could go for weeks saying little more than yes or no. No matter what stories they told, nobody denied his roses were the most beautiful in Hidden Springs. Over the years he had developed a large pale yellow rose that still grew in the garden and that Aunt Lindy guarded diligently. To show how much she valued it, chemicals were part of the arsenal to keep it going.
    “And I have you.” Aunt Lindy smiled. She was also impossible to sidetrack. “Have you and Alexandria been talking?”
    “She talked to Betty Jean. I talked to her voice mail.”
    “Rather unsatisfactory, I would say, throwing your voice out along some wire to perhaps languish unheard for days. Letters are surely better.” Aunt Lindy dug around another dandelion. “She must have had a purpose for calling.”
    “I guess she saw the picture. Hank sold it to a dozen papers, last I heard.”
    “I hope he gave you a percentage.”
    “He said he’d tell Rebecca Ann to smile at me. Seems my picture is helping pay for her braces.”
    “Well, the child did need her teeth straightened, and Hank does struggle to keep on top of his bills, or so I’m told. I suppose that allows you to see an extra bonus in the story. The poor man you grabbed back from the brink has a second chance and Rebecca Ann gets a new smile.” She unearthed another dandelion and laid it in the pile beside her. “Not to mention giving you an excuse to talk to Alexandria.”
    “I don’t need an excuse to talk to Alex.” Michael smoothed the ground back down where he’d ripped out the wild rose bush.
    “Of course not.”
    He loved his Aunt Lindy, but sometimes she drove him crazy. For sure, he didn’t want to get into a conversation about Alex with her. Aunt Lindy thought all he had to do was ask and Alex would forget her career in Washington, DC, and come running to Hidden Springs. Why Aunt Lindy would think that, he had no idea. She knew Alex. Plus, she knew about being career minded. She was career minded. A devoted teacher for decades, seemingly happy with her single life. She had told him once that she had been in love when she was young, but her intended was killed in the service. Someday Michael needed to get her