Beautiful and Deadly...

In every small town, there is a sweet old lady, long bereft of her own family, who turns her attention towards the needy and the orphaned, the sick and the weak. This woman will bake pies until the sunrise, walk miles to deliver someone a carton of eggs, spray antiseptic mist on the smallest of abrasions and wipe away the thinnest tear with timeweathered hands.
Mary Gold was not this woman.
Mary Marguerite Goldmundson was the last in a line of would-be opportunists who had settled in this area long ago. Several generations back, when there was nothing here but dirt, no sound but the wind, no activity but the occasional bird falling from the sky of exhaustion or boredom (whichever cramped the wings first), Mary's great great afewmoregreats grandfather had come in search of his fortune. Gold. Aztec gold. Incan gold. Mayan gold. Maybe a little Visigoth gold. It didn't matter to Marshall Mundson. He had a vision of exceeding wealth, and it drove him to the far corners of the earth. In this case, the plot of land that would one day be known as Villa Sicko. In Mary's words, it was an heroic tale of bravery and visiondom. In most people's minds, it was more a case of 'where's grandpa? Oh, no, don't tell me you left the door open and now he's wandered off into the wild again'. It was somewhere in his immediate line that the 'Gold' began appearing in the family name. It was, apparently, the closest they ever came to the precious metal.
Generations came and went--there was a big game hunter who spent his time reconstructing jack rabbits to look like gargantuan werebeasts, a woman who claimed to have gone mountain climbing one afternoon with a statue of the virgin Mary, and a young man who claimed that the Holy Grail had been given to him by an Indian priestess, but when we put it to his lips, it contained hot soup, and he dropped it instinctively, causing the priestess and the grail to disappear instantly.
Mary, unlike her illustrious line, was a florist, and really a very good florist. Her home and land looked like a botanical garden. Even in the harshest weather, she could find a way to keep her flora thriving. But if her homestead was the garden of Eden, she was the serpent. Unlike the aforementioned sweet old maid, Mary was chronically nasty to people, and wholly unpleasant to be around. It was only out of desperation that Penny Detroit had called her in to handle the flowers at her husbands funeral, which is a story for another day.
Of course, rumors surrounded Mary, some up to and including that she had actually been responsible for the deaths of the townsfolk whose proceedings she had decorated, not to mention the wayfarer and the passerthrough. It was said that she used a very special kind of plant food to keep her garden as healthy as it was--human remains. None of this had ever been substantiated, understandably...these were only rumors...of the more...likely nature.