"It's for me?" How long had it been since anyone had sent me flowers?

"Yes, ma'am," the woman said, beaming at my pleasure. "First order of the day."

I took the card out of the little plastic prongs and opened the envelope.

"You are beyond beautiful," the card said. It was signed "Robin."

I didn't melt on the spot, but it was a near thing. Tears welled in my eyes, which I kept very wide open.

"It's lovely," I said. "Thank you."

"Enjoy," she said, waving a casual hand, and returned to her van, parked illegally outside the main library doors.

I held the card to my chest like a schoolgirl, while I beamed at the arrangement. If Robin had planned a blitz attack on my body and heart, he was going about it exactly right. I could only be glad he'd decided to proceed with his campaign.

After the freezing-cold misery of the last year, I had the feeling I was sitting by a warm fire. That glow lasted all morning, with the exception of the few minutes it took to roust a reporter who came into the library to ask me how it felt to have been murdered by proxy, so to speak. Sam took care of him pretty quickly, and I was grateful.

The incident did set me to thinking back to that morning at the courthouse. I recalled sitting in the sun, waiting for Angel. I watched Will speak to Celia, shove the door shut with one hand while he carried a cup of coffee in the other. I watched Mark knock at the door in vain. Had Celia been angry with him? Had she already had the drugged coffee, begun feeling drowsy? Had she just been in the bathroom and unable to come to the door? Then the woman—Sarah Feathers, Arthur had told me—just barely opening the trailer door and speaking a few words, shutting it again. Then I'd lost a few minutes of surveillance while I talked to Carolina. Then I'd gone to Tracy's table in front of the Molly's van, watched her change jackets, had the orange juice. All trivial stuff.

I opened my eyes and focused on my flowers again. I'd been standing there with my eyes shut while I thought, probably a bad habit to get into. For the first time, I wondered if Sarah Feathers had heard a reply from Celia to whatever she had said. I didn't know Sarah Feathers, and I couldn't ask her, but I knew who could.

Sure enough, Angel had gotten Carolina's cell phone number.

"Hello!" Carolina said, after two rings. I asked my question, and she said, "I don't know why you want to know, but it's easy enough to find out. I see Sarah all the time."

Carolina agreed to call me back that evening. I went back to calling patrons about overdue books.

At noon, I trotted out of the employee door with my flowers held carefully in front of me. I was so busy planning how to place them in my car so they didn't fall over that I never saw the shadow behind me until it was too late.

"Roe! Roe! Are you all right?" A silhouette was between me and the bright fall sun, right overhead.

"What happened?" I asked, my voice weak and shaky.

"Someone ran up behind you and hit you," Perry Allison said. "Someone in a coat with the hood pulled over his head, so I couldn't see who it was. I called the police on my cell phone. They're coming."

"My flowers," I said, and I began to cry. That was why I felt wet. My flowers were all around me on the pavement of the parking lot, and the water in the vase had soaked my pants.

"I'm sorry," Perry said. "Are you hurt?"

"I'm okay," I said, trying to convince myself. A patrol car was turning into the library parking lot already, and a patrol officer I didn't know leaped out of it as though the car had an ejector seat. She was a small woman with short, dark hair, and she was already talking over her shoulder-rig thing.

"Which way did the assailant go?" she asked Perry.

Perry, trying not to gawk (he is a big fan of authoritative women) pointed in the direction of the heavily planted slope that divided the parking lot from the lower street. "He went in the bushes after he pushed Roe down," Perry called to the officer's back.

"Wow," Perry said, deeply impressed.

I sighed, glad I wasn't one of those self-centered people who think getting attacked is all about them. This was my day for people ruining "Aurora" moments.

Perry looked back down at me, maybe hearing something exasperated in my exhalation. "Can you sit up, Roe?" he asked. He slid an arm underneath me and I was upright. I'd never been this close to Perry before, and it felt funny. I would just as soon he let me handle this on my own, but there was no way I could say "back off" without sounding incredibly rude.

"This is good," I said, more or less to myself. My head felt fine. After a second or two of thinking about it and getting my breath back, I decided I wasn't really hurt, just astonished.

The patrol officer came back through the bushes. "I'm afraid the assailant has escaped," she said seriously. "There are other officers patrolling the area right now." I wondered if she always talked like that, or if she'd acquired the habit since she joined the force.

"I'd like to stand up if you would give me a hand," I said, giving Perry my right hand and extending my left to her.

"You sure you're okay for that?" she asked. "Did you hit your head?"

"No, I took a spill when she shoved me," I said.

"She? This man," she inclined her head toward Perry, "said your attacker was a ‘he.' "

"Why did I say that?" I asked myself, while they pulled me to my feet. I thought it over. "Perfume," I said.

"The person who pushed you had a on a woman's fragrance?"

"Yes, officer," I said. "But I didn't see her coming at all. She just ran up behind and pushed me down and I dropped my flowers." Embarrassingly, I began crying again.

"Who were they from, Roe?" Perry asked, probably hoping I'd stop with the waterworks.

"Robin," I sobbed.

"Way to go," he said. "I'm Perry Allison," he added to the patrolwoman.

"Uh-huh. Susan Crawford."

"Pleasure to meet you."

"How you doing, Miss?"

"Thank you, I'm okay." I was still drizzling tears, but physically I felt all right. "I'm Aurora Teagarden."

"You are?" Now she was fully engaged. I looked up into her face, and realized that Patrol Officer Susan Crawford must be the young woman Arthur had told me about, the new officer whose husband had left her. "I've wanted to meet you for ages," she said. "I'm sorry it's under these circumstances."

She pulled off her dark glasses, and I saw her eyes were clear and gray. She wasn't wearing a speck of makeup, and she looked just fine. "Thanks for coming so quickly," I said, not really sure how to proceed. "What do we do now?"

"I'll write up a report," she said. "Mr. Allison, how was the assailant clothed?"

"What?" he asked, as if he'd been jogged out of a daydream. "Well, this man—or woman—was wearing a hunter green coat with a zipper in the front and one of those hoods you can drawstring shut right around your face. He had on gloves and gray sweat pants, I think."

"Thank you. Is this your place of employment?"

"Yes, ma'am," Perry said. "Any time you need me, I'm right here."

"I'll bear that in mind." She wrote a few lines in a notebook, talked into her radio, and then began to look around the parking lot, which was not very large to start with. Perry and I began picking up the scattered remnants of my arrangement, and I began inwardly gathering myself back together. After all, the flowers could be rearranged. My clothes needed changing, that was all. I wasn't even hurt to any appreciable extent; bruises and scrapes only.

The attack had been malicious rather than harmful.

I half-expected Arthur to show up. Any time anything had happened to me in the past few years, he'd been there immediately. A police detective has no great problem keeping tabs on someone. But Arthur was a no-show, and I was really relieved. Sally walked down from the newspaper office (she had a scanner on, full-time) and took the incident as casually as I could have hoped.