Spring has finally reached Gasper’s Cove, the small Nova Scotia town at the heart of Barbara Emodi’s cozy mysteries, and Krista Willett needs a job that gets her out of the house and away from her son’s report card. What she lands is a season at Harry Sutherland’s pop-up garden centre in the Foodmart parking lot, a boss with a shady past, and the kind of trouble that turns bedding plants into a crime scene. Here are the opening pages of the first Gasper’s Cove Quick Cozy.

Chapter 1

I was a failure. The papers in my hand said so.

My Family by Billy Willett (C-)

My dad is famous. He is a First Responder and one time he pulled a man out of a car just before it caught fire. His picture was in the newspaper. He was on TV. He saves a life every day. My dad’s twin brother, Big Bob lives with us. Bob invented the iPhone, but Apple beat him to it. Bob knows how to turn on the TV from another room. My mom wipes the counters. P.T.O

Riveted, I’d turned the page to see what else the oldest of my two sons said about me. She uses a green sponge or a pink one.

was a failure. The papers in my hand said so. My Family by Billy Willett (C-) My dad is famous. He is a First Responder and one time he pulled a man out of a car just before it caught fire. His picture was in the newspaper. He was on TV. He saves a life every day. My dad’s twin brother, Big Bob lives with us. Bob invented the iPhone, but Apple beat him to it. Bob knows how to turn on the TV from another room. My mom wipes the counters. P.T.O Riveted, I’d turned the page to see what else the oldest of my two sons said about me. She uses a green sponge or a pink one.

I looked out the window. Across the way, the McCarthers glared back as they cleaned up the debris winter had left behind. Most of it was broken branches from the unpruned trees on my side of the fence. By the end of the day, the sticks would be neatly bundled, tied with string, and lined up on the curb, an advertisement to the neighbourhood of who took care of business and who didn’t. Later, I’d bring in the laundry left out overnight in the rain and see the McCarthers out with weed diggers attacking the dandelions that grew from the gauzy seeds the wind blew from my yard to theirs.

Did they know I tried? I had two boys: a husband who worked shifts, and a brother-in-law who’d moved in and never moved out. Did they understand it was hard enough to take care of what was in my house without worrying about what was going on outside?

I put my hands back into the salted cabbage and pounded it with my fists, coaxing it to release brine. I heard the front door slam open. There was a thud when the doorknob hit the wall, where it would deepen the dent already there. The original inventor of the iPhone was home. From the sound his shoes made as he ambled down the hall, I knew Bob hadn’t put them on the mat as requested. He stopped at the kitchen door, poked his shaggy blond head in, and lifted his nose to sniff like a Labrador Retriever at a Thanksgiving dinner.

“Do I smell onions? Sauerkraut?” Bob asked. “My intestinal flora thank you. Did you know fermentation produces both pre-and probiotics? Let me explain.”

I cut my brother-in-law off. I was in no mood for an hour-long lecture.

“Sort of. It’s Curtido, sauerkraut from El Salvador. I’m trying to change things up around here.” I sat down in a kitchen chair. I needed more than a new recipe; I knew that now. “But fermenting isn’t a career, is it?” I asked Bob. “I have to find a real job outside this house.” I got up and pushed Billy’s essay back down to the bottom of the bin. “But what am I going to do?”

“Why don’t you go back to the hospital?” Bob asked. I’d been working in medical records when I’d met and married his twin brother, Jason, one of the paramedics.

“Position redundant. Records are now in a province-wide online system.”

Bob looked thoughtful, then cunning. “I could use a research assistant,” he suggested. “I have a number of ideas in pre-prototype.” He stopped, noting the skeptical look on my face. “You’ll be compensated when the company is sold. Don’t you wish you’d been paid in Microsoft shares in the 1990s?”

“Going to pass,” I told him. “No offence, but I need a real, not a working-for-the-relatives type job.” Surely, I had more value than a counter wiper and an intestinal feeder.

Bob looked hurt, then quickly rallied, as he always did, onto the next scheme. He walked over to the counter and ate raw shredded cabbage with his hands, holding it high and dropping it into his open mouth and all over my clean floor. Then he snapped his fingers, sending cabbage fragments across the room.

“Got it. A solution.” Bob liked to have an answer for everything. “I was at the boat club, working on a tidal pressure measurement system, private project, keep it to yourself, and I ran into Harry Sutherland. He’s looking for some help.”

“Harry?” I asked, opening the cupboard. “Here, eat over this.” I handed my brother-in-law a plate. “The guy who left council because of the expense scandal? The same one who drives the Zamboni at the rink in the winter and pours beers at the yacht club in the summer? That Harry?” I shook my head. “No way, I’m not working for him, whatever he’s doing.”

“Hear me out,” Bob said, a man with a shaky reputation coming to the defence of one of his own. “Harry’s going into business for himself, something to do with the environment, ecological responsibility, things like that. Not here in Drummond, across the causeway in Gasper’s Cove.” He gestured at the wreckage of my cabbage-covered counter. “You’re good on food security. It can’t hurt to give him a call, and see what’s up.”

I reached into the sink and squeezed the green sponge in my hand. I turned around.

“What’s Harry’s number? Do you have it?”

* * *

This was not what I expected. Over the phone, Harry said his business was in a prime corner location, but I didn’t know that meant a square space on the asphalt at the back of the Gasper’s Cove Foodmart parking lot. But there it was, temporary metal fencing up for the season, bags of sheep manure, peat moss, and fertilizer stacked to frame the entry of the garden centre like sandbags before a flood, ready for the onslaught of weekend gardeners, amateur landscapers, and optimists convinced they could grow their own food.

Harry had been wary when I’d called. “You’re sure?” he’d asked. When I’d assured him I was, we’d agreed to meet near the corral for shopping carts, next to a plastic banner on the fence that read “Sutherland Nurseries: Time to Spring for New Plants.”

As soon as I arrived, Harry got down to business. A small man with sandy hair and blue, fish-like eyes, Harry faced me, shoulders back, chest out, defiantly establishing an authority the world might not give him otherwise.

“It’s only seasonal,” he began. “This is Nova Scotia. Folks want to get the bulbs in, the annuals in the planters, and the vegetables in the ground by the first full moon in June. That’s when the window of opportunity slams shut.”

He was right, of course. The summers in the province were short but spectacular, unless it rained in July, as it often did.

“Seasonal is fine,” I said, thinking of the sponge.

“Minimum wage?”

“Okay.” I had my eye on a carboy for fermenting cider. Those things didn’t come cheap.

“Hours? Week-to-week?” Harry had the face of someone who was used to having it laughed at.

“No problem.” Big Bob, mumbling about needing the boys as focus group participants, had volunteered to watch them when I worked.

“No overtime?” Harry asked.

“Suits me,” I answered.

“Thirty minutes for lunch?”

“I eat fast,” I said, because it was true.

“How are you at eating in your car?”

“I do it all the time,” I said.

Harry’s look of suspicion faded into disbelief.

“This is a competitive position,” he said, pulling himself up to his full 5′ 5″. “You’re one of the stronger candidates. But one last thing.”

“Shoot,” I said.

“What do you know about gardening?”

This was a trick question. Did he know the McCarthers? All I could think of were the two African violets on my end table and the row of shocking pink flowers I planted under my big picture window. My father said even a moron could grow petunias.

“Vegetables are my specialty,” I said, remembering the cabbage, “and I love the smell of soil when the snow melts.”

Harry nodded and looked past my shoulder to the parking lot. “That your truck?” he asked.

“It is.”

“You drive it to work? Could you do the odd special delivery? After hours? For a couple of extra bucks?”

Did he say more money? “Don’t see why not.”

Harry put out a gnarly hand, dirt deep under his fingernails. “You’re hired. Welcome aboard. Now let’s go meet the rest of the team.”

Keep reading. Panic in the Pansies is available as an ebook, exclusively on Amazon and free to read in Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback. You can find it here.

Panic in the Pansies is one of four seasonal Gasper’s Cove novellas. All four are collected in Gasper’s Cove Quick Cozies Books 1–4: Witty and Whimsical Nova Scotia Amateur Sleuth Mysteries, available as an ebook, a print anthology, and an audiobook.