Petals, Property, and Peril: The Maple Creek Mysteries: 1

Fourteen peonies. Not thirteen. Not fifteen. Emily Periwinkle has sold houses in Maple Creek, Michigan for thirty-one years, and she has never once walked a property without noticing what doesn't belong. So when she takes the listing on Blackwood Manor - empty since 1995, roof sagging, every room breathing dust - the thing that stops her isn't the house at all. It's a flower bed behind the springhouse. Weeded. Edged. Mulched. Fourteen peonies in a tidy row, tended four times a year for fifty-two years, paid for out of a trust with no human name anywhere on it. Then, under a loose floorboard on the third floor, Emily finds a lozenge tin: a tarnished locket, a hospital bracelet reading Baby Girl Talley, and a note in a young woman's hand that ends, I'll come for you when the peonies bloom Ruth Ann Talley was nineteen years old when Maple Creek decided she had gone to Chicago. She never went to Chicago. Emily is not a detective. She is a Catholic woman of fifty-eight with a patient husband, two golden retrievers, and a pew she has occupied since 1987 - and she cannot let it alone. But in a town of two thousand people, a name said out loud becomes a permanent fact. That is precisely why half of Maple Creek chose silence over lying, and why somebody would rather those peonies were moved before anyone thinks to dig. A warm, gentle mystery about old secrets, small-town loyalty, and the quiet courage it takes to say a name that everyone agreed to forget. No gore. No profanity. A dog on nearly every page.