The Honeypot Trap III. The Widow Jenkins

 Part I is here. Part II is here.

“Doris Jenkins moved here about 20 years ago, bought the house on the edge of town. You likely saw it; the one with all the flowers. We call her The Widow Jenkins as she was newly widowed when she moved here and has lost two husbands since. Heart failure. The last one just a month or so ago. No idea where she finds them. Must haunt the Lonely Hearts pages of The Western Seducer.

“She is now in her early 70s, lives frugally but certainly is sociable. You are always welcome for tea in her front deck. Never in the house though and she keeps people away from the backyard because of the bees. Comes to church in the hall every two weeks when the preacher is here. She and her husbands attended the dances and drove to the next town to theatre and so forth. Very outgoing, very energetic. Spends all her spare time working with her flowers and her bees. Her husbands must have died smiling. Best tell your client to avoid her”, she laughed. I didn’t.

I stirred my coffee thoughtfully and tried to pull together what my client had told me and what I had learned since. My client was a nurse. Her uncle had been Jenkins’ last husband. She was suspicious and asked for a coroner’s report. Her uncle’s heart was fine on his last medical, taken a few months prior to his marriage and no one in the extended family had ever had any heart trouble.  He was a spry old dude which is why he went looking for a wife in his old age.

He had an insurance policy worth half a million with Imprudent Life. It had been in the niece’s name, but he made the niece and his new wife joint beneficiaries. Did the previous husband have life insurance? I sent texts to three or four of the more popular companies with the name of the previous deceased husband, date of death, and an explanation that I suspected insurance fraud. They know me and I have worked for them before.

While I waited for replies, I decided to walk over from the hotel to check out the Jenkins residence and especially her flowers. I could take pictures and use them to identify the plants or shrubs. For some strange reason I bought three bottles of carbonated water from the locked hotel cooler.

The front flower bed was the usual pansies and petunias, begonias and not begonias. The backyard was a different matter. Shrubs 6 to 10 feet high covered in flowers. Yellow, red and all colours. I was taking pictures when the back door opened, and Doris Jenkins hollered at me. “What are you doing? Be careful you don’t touch any of those shrubs. They are lovely but will kill you if they get the chance.” Sounded like my Ex.

She was wearing surgical gloves, “Come around front and have some tea”. Yeah, right, I thought. We sat on the front deck. “I’m Mike Malone. I was passing through, stopped for coffee at the hotel and tried some wonderful honey that they said you had supplied. It was so good I decided to follow up. Sorry, no tea. Carbonated water for my upset tummy.”

We visited for half an hour, about life in general and honey in particular. She was not very forthcoming about her honey production. I went back to the hotel. Tomorrow would finish the job.