The worst part was that I liked it.
“Do you think all that crap about Elisha Poole and my great-grandfather might have something to do with Jacqueline’s death?” asked Caroline.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Harrington seemed interested enough.”
“He did, didn’t he?” She took a drag from her cigarette. “I had a strange feeling in the restaurant when you and he were discussing this thing about Poole. It was more like a déjà vu than anything else, but I felt it. It was like there weren’t only three of us at the table anymore, there was someone else, sitting with us, casting a coldness over everything.”
“A ghost?”
“No, a presence, maybe just a memory. But it made me shiver.”
“Who? Your grandmother?”
“Someone else, someone strange to me. It was almost like my great-grandfather was there, listening to us talk about him. Is that weird?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was just a draft.”
“Whatever it was, it was really cold.” She took another drag and then stubbed out her cigarette right on the table’s surface. “I think it’s time I learned the truth about my family’s history. I think I want to know everything that happened, from the very beginning to what is left of us now. I want to know if it was always rotten or if there was a moment of brightness before it turned.”
“Conciliation, expiation, redemption,” I said.
“Yes, I want to know about that too. Especially the redemption.”
“You might not like what you find.”
“I don’t care. What could I ever learn that could make things worse for me?”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive, as long as you’ll do it with me.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want. You’ll see it through to the end, won’t you, Victor? You won’t desert me like every other man in my life, will you?”
Perhaps it was all part of the masculine ego rush that comes after hard sex, accentuated by the glimpse I had caught of the dark truths in my soul, but just then I didn’t feel like every other man. Just then I felt within me a strange and unique power, not only to do financial good for myself but to do good for Caroline, too. She had said before that she wanted to be saved; maybe the truths I would unearth in her family’s past could provide the first crucial steps toward her salvation. It was a maybe, only a maybe, but a maybe could warrant a hell of a lot. As a lawyer I had gotten pretty damn good at self-justification.
“I won’t desert you,” I said. “I’ll see it through.”
“So where do we start?”
“I have an idea, but you’ll think it crazy.”
“No I won’t.”
“Forget it,” I said. “It’s too wild.”
She turned over on her stomach and drew her fingers lightly across my chest. “What is it, Victor? Whatever it is, no matter how insane, we’ll do it, I promise.”
“Anything?”
“I promise.”
“Well, what I think we should do next,” I said, sitting up and looking straight into those rich, blue eyes, “is dig up your grandmother’s garden.”
THE VAST STRETCH OF LAWNwithin the iron gates of Veritas was a sea of blackness, the windows of the mansion were dark. I parked the car on the upsweep of the driveway so as not to wake anyone who might have been in the house. It was a pitchy night, the moon was new, and in the expanse of sky that spread over the estate the stars peered forth like a million frog eyes. Caroline led with the flashlight as we made our way quietly around the house and to the rear gardens. In my right hand was a shovel we had just purchased from Home Depot for $9.99, a long-handled discount jobber with a sharp blade of flawed steel ready to chip at the first pebble. In my left hand was a kerosene lantern I had dug out of my closet from among my camping gear. We had stopped at a gas station to fill it with unleaded but I had misjudged the process and had drenched my pants with gasoline. Along with the fear of self-combustion was the dry sour smell that followed me wherever I moved.
As we sneaked around the ballroom side of the house, I tripped over a stone and cracked my shin. I let out a short sharp cry. Caroline turned the beam of her light into my face.
“Shut up,” she whispered fiercely, a shadow behind the blob of light. “If you can’t be quiet we’ll just forget it.”
“I’ll be quiet,” I said quietly. I rubbed my shin. “I just fell. Get that light out of my face.” I pushed myself back to standing. “Let’s go.”
“This was a bad idea,” she said, her inquisitor’s light still blaring in my face. “We should forget it.”
“You said you wanted to dig into your family history,” I said. “That’s just what we’re doing. It’s your house. I don’t know why you’re so jittery.”
“You don’t understand my grandmother. She wanted her garden left alone and she was not one to be defied.”
“She’s dead, Caroline.”
“If there’s anyone with the power to control this world from her grave, it’s my grandmother.”
I was surprised to see how nervous Caroline had become. When I first mentioned the idea a few nights before she seemed amused by it, as if it were a prank as harmless as toilet-papering a house or leaving a burning bag of manure on a doorstep. But as I explained my reasons she grew more and more apprehensive. She was afraid Nat would find out, or her father, or her mother, or Consuelo. It was clear that for a woman who claimed she believed in nothing, she found much in the Reddman family to fear, including her dead grandmother. She had insisted she would only go along if we were silent and did our best to replace the torn-up garden, all of which I had agreed to.
“I’ll be quiet,” I said. “Just stay close, I don’t know the property as well as you do.”
Side by side now, we followed the distorted oval of light on the ground. It led us across a side porch, around the swampy pool, to the giant square of untrimmed hedges looming large and mysterious in the night.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“I’m sure,” I said, though in the presence of those living walls I was not so positive as I sounded. Maybe I was just catching some of Caroline’s fear, or maybe there was something inside those thorny walls that resonated at the low pitch of horror, but whatever it was, as I approached the secret garden I felt more and more uneasy about what we were about to do.
We moved around those great walls until we arrived at where the entrance to the maze should have been. In the flattening beam of the flashlight it was hard to see any gaps. There was an irregular dark line of an opening at one spot. I put down the lantern and stepped up to the uneven line. When I reached through I felt something bite my hand. I snatched it back and found a thorn embedded between my forefinger and thumb.
“Damn it,” I said as I yanked it out with my teeth. “These thorns are lethal. That’s not it.”
“Maybe over there,” she said.
She was pointing the light now at a ragged vertical line that looked just like the last ragged vertical line in which my hand had been attacked. I reached in again and this time felt nothing impeding my hand once I got past the first layer of scraping branches. I pulled out my hand and turned around to look at her. She was almost cringing. Behind us, like a huge black bird extending its wings, crouched Veritas. Not a light was on inside. I picked up the lantern, whispered vague encouragements to Caroline, and slipped through the narrow opening, feeling the scrape of the spiny leaves on my arms and neck. Caroline squeezed through right behind me.
In the darkness, the pathways seemed narrow and malevolent. I remembered how bright and fresh they had been when I entered in the daylight, how the birds had sung and the butterflies had danced, how the smell of wildflowers had suffused the atmosphere with a sweet freshness, but we were no longer in the daylight. The air was thick with moisture and smelled of rot, as if whatever had been infecting that dinosaur of a mansion seeped out from the stones and mortar and wood, under cover of darkness, to taint everything within its reach. We followed the pathways from one entrance to another, searching for our way through the maze. I wondered if this was how rats felt. I slashed the shovel into the ground as I walked, using it like a walking staff. Finally, after a few wrong turns and a few dead ends and a few moments of blind panic when there appeared to be no way out, we entered upon the very heart of Grandmother Shaw’s private garden.
Читать дальше