Christopher Rice - The Vines

He spins and lunges at her in the same instant, his arms out. She sees the glint of something in his right hand and before she can process whether or not it’s a weapon, she fires, and in the muzzle flash she watches her husband’s blood-encrusted gold watch tumble from the intruder’s hand and fall to the earth at her feet.

Just like the man she has shot.

“He’s not here, Nova.” It’s the fifth time Blake has said it, but Nova keeps searching the little house as if her father might be cowering in the few inches between the wall and the back of the sofa or curled up inside the tiny kitchen pantry.

“Maybe he’s been and gone?” Blake offers.

But Nova just shakes her head and keeps up her futile search, and Blake is sure she isn’t as frightened for her father’s well-being as she is furious he broke his promise. Which might be the reason he’s not answering his phone, he thinks. After their conversation a few hours before and the events of the past twenty-four hours, everything seems possible, none of it good. Willie ignoring his daughter’s wrath is the best of the scenarios Blake can conjure.

On their way in, they bypassed the plantation house and its grounds, taking instead the gravel road right to Willie’s miniature house. Which means it’s not the only place left to look.

“Nova. His truck isn’t here. He’s not here.”

“Maybe he parked up at the main house?”

“Which he never does.”

“No… but if Caitlin asked him to, he would. Come on!”

A few moments later he’s running after her up the same path they took earlier that afternoon, only now the cane field belonging to the neighboring farm is a curtain of shifting shadows beside them, the sounds of its rustling stalks easily mistaken for the careful footfalls of a predator sizing up its prey.

Blake sees the gazebo first and reaches out a hand to stop Nova. The grounds are shadow-filled and so is the soaring plantation house. But the single lightbulb inside the gazebo is on, making it look like the tip of a boat dock on a dark, expansive lake. From this distance away, he can see some of the floorboards are missing, and what appear to be several magazines strewn across the dirt.

When he starts for the gazebo, Nova lets out a small sound of protest and reaches out a hand to stop him, but he takes it in his and starts leading them across the garden. She follows, silenced by his determination that they stick together. He can feel her trembling slightly through her hand.

“What the hell ?” Nova whispers as they peer down through the gazebo’s missing floor. And Blake is surprised that despite her willingness to believe, Nova is more thunderstruck by the sight of the slick and impossibly large growths coiled below than he is. Maybe it’s some kind of denial mechanism, but Blake is fixated on the traces of recent human behavior all around them: the deliberately removed floorboards, the discarded red toolbox, the swirl of some sort of gold fabric wrapped up in the vine coil.

When Blake gets down onto his knees next to the hole, Nova hisses fiercely, grabbing for his shoulder, but he brushes her hand aside and braces himself against the edge of the opening with one hand while reaching down into the miniature pit with the other. As soon as his fingertips touch the strange band of gold, he can tell it’s made of fabric. The thick, slick vines barely protest as he pulls it free of their coil.

Nova goes silent, her hands rising to her mouth as Blake extracts the soaked and tattered necktie. He lifts it up toward the light overhead so they can both get a good look at it.

It feels to Blake as if the simple act of holding this discovery aloft is required to draw the implications of the scene before them into a coherent picture. The vines—if that’s what they are—are too thick and large and fresh-looking to have recently been disturbed by a human burial. And why would anyone just shove this once-shiny gold necktie down into their moist lair? And could a human hand have forced it to entwine with them so efficiently?

“Was this…?”

“He was wearing it last night,” Nova whispers through her fingers. “Troy. He was… That was his…”

The eruption of music from the main house and Nova’s scream seem to come in the same instant. The song now rattling the windows of the parlor is upbeat and cheerful, and Blake can’t process the jarring transition at first. It feels like he’s just rolled out of bed to find himself standing on a busy New York sidewalk. But the lyrics are familiar enough to send a spear of anxiety through his sternum.

The same Faith Hill song John Fuller would play when he called Blake late at night, when he was afraid whispering sweet nothings into the phone would be overheard by his parents, and so he let the music do the talking for him by turning the volume most of the way down and pressing the receiver’s mouthpiece right up to the stereo. Only a few people on earth knew John used to do that for him; Caitlin was one of them. And she is standing on the back porch now, a shadow silhouetted by a few dim lights she’s just turned on in the parlor behind her. He can’t see her expression through the shadows, but it looks like she’s waiting to see if they’ve noticed her.

“Caitlin…,” he calls out to her, and a few seconds later, she’s moving toward them.

When she’s within a few yards of the gazebo, she says, “You should go, Nova.”

“Where’s my dad?” Nova demands.

“Not here. Seriously. You should go.”

“We ne—no. We need to talk,” Nova says. But her words are shaky, and the glances she’s casting between Blake and Caitlin’s approaching shadow suggest that she’d like nothing more than to take off running. “We need to talk about what’s going on here. I’m not letting my daddy come back here, unless I know what—”

“I know you hate me, Nova. I know you always have. I know it never seemed like enough, the things I did for your father. For your family—”

“For us ?” she asks, angry at the insinuation. “What the hell are you— where is my father? ”

“—but trust me. I’m trying to protect you here. I am. Truly.”

“There’s nothing you can protect me from, Miss Caitlin.”

“Really? Want me to tell you what we did to those three boys who cornered you that day you were walking home from school? The ones that touched you even after you begged them to stop?”

Nova is visibly stunned, lips hanging open like a grouper’s as she seems to mentally reach for the memory while recoiling from it in the same instant.

“Sure, you’re a big girl now with a lot of opinions and college professors filling your head with all kinds of fantasies about how things are. About how they should be. But it wasn’t your father who walked those boys to the parish line and told them what would happen to them if they ever came back to Montrose Parish. It was mine . And he had friends with cop cars. So believe me when I tell you my family’s done more for you than you’ll ever know. And believe me when I tell you it’s time for you to leave.”

“What about me?” Blake asks, taking a few steps forward, hoping to see the expression on Caitlin’s face. No such luck. But he can see the outline of the pistol she’s holding in her right hand. “Why do I get to stay?”

Caitlin doesn’t answer, and the weight of her consideration sits over them all. Blake hears Nova’s sharp intake of breath, senses the start of a diatribe. “She’s got a gun, Nova,” he whispers. But apparently not quietly enough, because the next thing Caitlin says is, “I’ve got a lot more than a gun, honey.”