Pressed for Murder

The lavender was being difficult.

Not difficult the way a strip of duct tape fights you when you’ve cut it at the wrong angle, or the way hot glue decides to string itself across your knuckles at the worst possible moment. Those are the small, honest rebellions of materials that want to cooperate but aren’t quite ready. The lavender was doing something more subtle. It was curling.

I’d laid six stems across a sheet of acid-free blotting paper on the long worktable at the front of Harper’s Handycrafts, spacing them a thumb’s width apart, fanning the tiny purple buds so each stem would press flat with its flowers intact. I’d positioned them with the care of someone arranging silverware for a dinner party where the guest of honor notices everything. And still, three of the stems had quietly rolled inward, tucking their buds under like they were changing their minds about the whole arrangement.

“They do that,” said Greta Alderman, who was sitting across the table with a fern frond balanced on her fingertips like a green feather. Greta was seventy-three, had been gardening in Briar Creek since before I was born, and spoke about plants the way other people speak about old friends who occasionally test your patience. “Lavender wants to curl. You can fight it, or you can let it settle.”

“How long does settling take?”

“Depends on the lavender.”

I smiled at that. It was the kind of answer my grandfather would have given. Not unhelpful, just honest. Some things have their own schedule.

This was the first session of a new workshop series I’d been developing for six weeks, and I still wasn’t entirely sure I knew what I was doing. Botanical pressing was a different discipline from anything I’d taught at Harper’s Handycrafts before. My shop ran on duct tape and paint swatches and furniture wax, on the kind of hands-on, fix-it-yourself projects where you could see progress in real time. You cut, you measured, you assembled, and at the end of the afternoon you had a shelf or a picture frame or a set of hand-stamped holiday cards. There was momentum in that work. You could feel it moving.

Pressing asked you to stop.

You laid your specimen on the paper. You covered it with a second sheet. You placed the weight board on top, firm but not crushing, and then you waited. Days. Sometimes weeks. The plant material dried slowly under steady, gentle pressure, and when you finally lifted the board and peeled back the paper, what you had was something that couldn’t exist any other way. A moment preserved by patience. Color held in place by time.

I was finding, to my own surprise, that I loved it.

“Junie, the anemones are here.” Nora appeared from the back room carrying a shallow cardboard flat packed with tissue-wrapped flowers, their petals the deep jewel-toned reds and purples I’d ordered from the supplier in Asheville. She set the flat down at the end of the worktable with the efficient confidence of someone who had already decided where it should go. “I put the extra fern fronds in the cooler. And the Saturday afternoon session is full.”

“Already?”

“I opened registration at eight. By eight-forty, we had twelve names. I put two more on the waitlist.” She slid her phone across the table so I could see the screen. “New system. Color-coded by session, with automatic confirmation emails.”

I looked at the screen. The booking interface was clean, professional, and entirely different from the paper sign-up sheets I’d been using for three years. Nora had rebuilt the whole thing over the past month, migrating our class registrations to an online platform she’d configured herself, and the result was the kind of system that made you wonder how you’d ever managed without it.

“This is really good, Nora.”

“I know.” She said it without arrogance, just clarity, and something in the simple confidence of those two words caught in my chest. Not worry, exactly. More like the awareness you get when a plant you’ve been tending starts growing faster than the pot can hold.

Nora Finch had started at Harper’s Handycrafts as my part-time assistant after her graphic design freelance work hit a slow stretch. That was three years and three murder investigations ago. She’d become my closest friend, my operational backbone, and, after the mess with Elena Frost’s charity gala last fall, a genuine investigative partner. She was smart, loyal, creative, and increasingly capable of running things I used to handle myself.

The part I wasn’t saying out loud, not even to myself most mornings, was that I was starting to notice the moments when she didn’t need me.

“I also updated the supply tracking sheet,” she added, unwrapping one of the anemones with careful fingers. “We’re low on blotting paper, and we’ll need more pressing boards before the Saturday session. I put in the order already.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. But I was already in the system.” She set the unwrapped anemone on the table, its petals fanning open like a dark silk handkerchief. “Also, you had a delivery while you were setting up.”

She reached behind the counter and produced a cream-colored envelope, heavy stock, the kind of paper that feels like it was made by someone who cares about paper. My name was written on the front in a careful, upright hand. Not calligraphy, but close. The penmanship of someone who had learned to write before computers and saw no reason to stop.

I turned it over. The back was sealed with a small embossed stamp, a botanical fern frond inside a circle, with the words Pine Hollow Botanical Heritage Society curving around the edge.

“Hand-delivered,” Nora said. “A woman brought it in about twenty minutes ago. Silver hair, reading glasses on a chain, very put-together. She asked for you specifically.”

I opened the envelope. Inside was a single card, cream stock to match, printed with a formal invitation to the Pine Hollow Botanical Heritage Society’s Annual Spring Showcase. The event was three weeks away. The invitation was beautifully produced, with a small pressed violet fixed to the lower right corner under a square of archival tissue.

The printed text was standard. Warm, professional, the language of a community organization that takes its public-facing materials seriously. But beneath the printed lines, in the same careful handwriting as the envelope, someone had added a postscript:

I’ve been following your work. I think we have more in common than you might expect.

It was signed Peg Hollis, Founding Member & Former President, PHBHS.

I read the postscript twice. It had the quality of a sentence that had been considered before it was written, each word placed with the kind of intention I recognized. This wasn’t a casual note. It was a door being opened by someone who had decided, after watching for a while, that it was time.

“Who’s Peg Hollis?” Nora asked, reading over my shoulder with the complete absence of pretense that was one of my favorite things about her.

“I’m not sure yet. But I think I’d like to find out.”

Greta Alderman looked up from her fern frond. “Peg Hollis runs the botanical society in Pine Hollow. Or she did for twenty years. She’s the reason that society still exists.” She adjusted her reading glasses. “Sharp woman. Knows more about pressed specimens than anyone in the county. If she’s reaching out to you, she’s got a reason, and it’ll be a good one.”

I set the invitation on the shelf behind the register, next to my grandfather’s framing square. The framing square had been there since I’d taken over the shop, a steel L-shaped tool worn smooth at the corners from decades of use. My grandfather had been a carpenter, and the framing square was his most essential instrument. Not his fanciest. Not his most expensive. Just the one he reached for first, every time, because it told him whether something was true.

Measure twice, cut once, he used to say. I’d thought, for years, that it was about woodworking. It wasn’t. It was about everything.

I picked up the curling lavender stems and tried again.

❦

The rest of the morning passed the way good workshop mornings do, with that particular blend of concentration and conversation that makes a room feel alive without feeling loud. Greta finished her fern frond and started on a spray of wild aster she’d brought from her garden in a damp paper towel. Two other participants, both regulars from my fall workshop series, worked their way through a sample set of pressed leaves I’d prepared as a practice exercise. Donna Kessler, who taught third grade at Briar Creek Elementary and attended nearly every workshop I offered, was pressing a maple leaf with the focused intensity of someone defusing a bomb. Beside her, Willa Tate, who ran the candle shop on the east end of Main Street, had arranged three different fern varieties in a diagonal line across her blotting paper and was studying the composition with her head tilted like a painter considering a canvas.

I moved between them, adjusting a stem here, suggesting a different placement there, answering questions about drying times and paper weight and whether it mattered which side of the leaf faced up. (It did, slightly. The underside pressed flatter because the vein structure was less pronounced, but the top surface kept more of its color. You had to decide which mattered more to you. Most things in craft work came down to a version of that question.)

The room smelled like green hay and old paper, a combination I was quickly learning to associate with the specific pleasure of slow, deliberate work. Through the front windows, Main Street moved at its usual mid-morning pace. A delivery truck for the hardware store two blocks down. Mrs. Calloway walking her ancient beagle past Morningside Coffee. The dogwood trees along the sidewalk in full, almost aggressive bloom, the way they get in April in the foothills when the weather finally commits to spring.

I’d been preparing for this workshop since January, when Elena Frost had confirmed the spring event commission that had come out of our work together on her charity gala. Elena’s commission was straightforward. She wanted Harper’s Handycrafts to provide craft programming for a series of spring community events she was organizing across the foothills, and she wanted the programming to feature a new specialism each season. The spring slot called for something botanical. Something seasonal. Something that connected to the land.

I’d chosen pressed florals partly because the timing was right (spring in the North Carolina foothills meant wildflowers along every ridgeline from here to Asheville) and partly because the craft itself appealed to something I couldn’t quite name. Maybe it was the patience. Maybe it was the way pressing turned something temporary into something permanent without changing what it was. A pressed flower was still a flower. It just lasted longer.

The Pine Hollow connection had come through Elena’s network. The Botanical Heritage Society ran an annual Showcase every spring, a juried exhibition and sale featuring botanical art, framed pressed specimens, and nature printing. Elena had suggested I reach out about a partnership, satellite workshops at Harper’s Handycrafts leading up to the Showcase, plus a selling display during the event itself. I’d sent a proposal in February. The Society’s response had been prompt, professional, and positive.

And now Peg Hollis had sent a personal invitation with a handwritten note that felt like the beginning of a conversation I hadn’t known I was waiting to have.

I thought about that while I pressed an anemone, placing the deep red petals flat against the blotting paper and positioning each one individually so they wouldn’t overlap. Anemones were trickier than lavender. The petals were thinner, more delicate, and they bruised if you handled them too firmly. You had to work quickly but gently, and you had to accept that some of the color would change during the pressing. The red would soften. The purple would shift toward blue. What you got at the end wouldn’t be exactly what you started with, but it would be true to what the flower had been.

There was something in that I wanted to say out loud, but the workshop wasn’t the right moment. I filed it away. I file a lot of things away. It’s a habit I picked up across three investigations where the detail that mattered was never the one that announced itself.

Around eleven-thirty, Nora brought me a cup of coffee from Morningside Coffee, black, one sugar, the same order I’d been placing since I opened the shop, and sat down across from me at the worktable. The workshop participants had left for the day, and the room had that pleasant, emptied-out quiet that follows a good session.

“So,” she said. “The Showcase.”

“What about it?”

“I’ve been looking at their website. The exhibition is juried. There’s a nationally known botanical artist coming in as the juror, somebody named Russell Crane. And the vendor display section has space for maybe fifteen exhibitors.” She paused. “It’s a bigger deal than I thought.”

“Bigger how?”

“Bigger as in this isn’t a craft fair in a park. This is a curated heritage exhibition in a converted Victorian greenhouse. The Society has been running it for over thirty years.” She pulled up a photo on her phone and turned it toward me. The image showed a glass-walled greenhouse interior hung with framed botanical specimens, lit with the kind of warm, golden light that makes everything look like it belongs in a museum. “This is last year’s Showcase.”

I looked at the photo. It was beautiful. It was also, unmistakably, the kind of event where Harper’s Handycrafts would be the newcomer, the outside partner, the small-town craft shop stepping into a space with a different gravity.

That should have made me nervous. A year ago, it would have. But something had shifted in me after Elena’s gala, after the glitter dust and the sabotaged centerpieces and the moment when I’d stood in a room full of people who doubted me and done the work anyway. I wasn’t fearless. I was just less afraid of being the new person in the room.

“It’s a good opportunity,” I said.

“It’s a great opportunity,” Nora corrected. “And we should take it seriously. I want to design the workshop display, not just set it up. I’ve been sketching layouts.” She hesitated, and the hesitation was the kind that comes before a sentence someone has been rehearsing. “I was thinking we could credit it differently this time. ’Workshop by Harper’s Handycrafts, co-designed by Nora Finch.’ If that’s okay.”

The words co-designed by Nora Finch landed in the room with the quiet weight of something that had been growing for a while. It wasn’t a demand. It wasn’t even, strictly speaking, unreasonable. Nora had earned it. She’d redesigned our class registration system, reorganized our supply chain, and run the workshop logistics for Elena’s gala with a competence that had made me wonder, more than once, what she’d accomplish if she had her own shop.