Chapter One

Set-up

The town seemed too small to support two florists and tree nurseries, but the Garden of Weedin Florist& Nursery was an apparently thriving business, as was its only competitor, Ellen’s Flowers& Landscaping. Local retailers who sold flowers, plants and evergreens; gardeners and others from distant parts of the country traveled considerable distances and went to one or the other business for everything from a wedding bouquet to small evergreens for landscaping.

Both enterprises had been there seemingly forever, but before taking their present form, the properties were part of a single, sweeping, eight thousand acre estate that encompassed forests, lakes, ponds, mountain caves, game lands, a tree farm and several cottages and out buildings. Eventually, when the original lord of the manor died, the greedy surviving relatives elected to subdivide the lands and split them into two nearly equal plots, a north section and a south section, and sold them with the strict qualification that the plots could not be further divided for one hundred years. The town fathers, equally prone to seeking the maximum return, decided that since there were now two taxable entities, they would roughly double the tax assessment and thus gain sorely needed revenue to help provide future pension income for themselves. So, although the lands were sold for a fraction of their worth, the taxes and upkeep alone meant that only a very few well to do buyers bid in the eventual auction.

Both new owners were very attractive, thirty something, single women and those qualities were just about the only similarities they shared. But less apparent was their common interest in the esoteric and erotic pursuits that they chose not to list on their CVs. While inspecting the properties, the real estate brokers handling the sales noted that both women displayed a rather odd fixation with the cellars in the houses and barns, as well as a remarkable fascination with the multiple caves in the nearby hills.

Speculation in the local pubs held that the reason one prospective buyer sought bids on adding electric power to a group of deep caves and the other woman was concerned about the bearing strength of the floors and ceilings in the main house had something to do with the occult.

“Isn’t it a bit odd,” Doctor Frances LaMont, the only local physician, was saying one night in The Raven, a popular hang-out for many of the town’s people and best known for its requisite double measures of any bottled spirit it served. “They both seem to want their privacy, but are attractive enough to bring the flies to the bait, so to speak.”

“Ay, that’s for sure,” answered Claus, the pub owner and barman. “If I had my choice though, it would be the Southern lands owner, Miss Ellen. What a piece of ass that is.”

“Well, I am sure there are a lot of things we don’t yet know about either o