The Snow Garden

by Unknown Author

  “Oh, no. Your powers of analysis seem to have been devoted entirely to someone else.”

  It bit hard and sank deep, but Mitchell had no way of knowing that—until he saw her glowering at the harsh light of the highway ahead. “Which might not have been such a bad thing. If Randall hadn’t lied to you.”

  Kathryn kept silent until Mitchell hooked onto an off ramp she didn’t recognize.

  “Where are we going?”

  “My place. Is that all right?”

  Realizing he had never once mentioned where he lived, she was surprised. And excited. “Absolutely,” she answered as calmly as possible.

  Bayfront Storage had no sign. Behind a chain-link fence topped with battered coils of razor wire, two banks of single-story, garage-size lockers were laid out in an L shape. The neighborhood was mostly abandoned warehouses, their cargo doors left open or splintered, offering unwanted glimpses of shadowy possibilities inside.

  With one hand on the steering wheel, Tim reached over and popped the glove compartment and dug inside, feeling for something Randall couldn’t see. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking something.”

  “Oh, for the love of God, Tim!”

  “For your information”—Tim found some identifiable part of the gun Randall guessed he was looking for, withdrew his hand, and snapped the glove compartment shut—“once you leave the safety of our little hill behind, Atherton happens to be one of the most crime-ridden cities north of New York. Besides, it’s only a .25 caliber semi. My mom used to keep it in her purse, till she did some research on my new place of residence.”

  The place was devoid of all life, like the neighborhood. “I thought they’d at least have a dog.”

  “Sixty bucks a month doesn’t get you top-notch security.”

  “Pull up a little bit,” Randall said.

  “What do you mean he attacked you?”

  “I mean, he threw me up against a wall and called me a whore. For the tenth time. Can you pull up, please?”

  Tim shook his head and complied. They sat on a steel-girder bridge that crossed over a drainage canal. The canal’s sloping concrete walls funneled ice-strewn debris toward the bay, several blocks to their left. Evenly surfaced maintenance walkways had been set in the walls in a steplike formation. The highest walkway was a five-foot drop from the bridge’s rail.

  Randall tapped the window. “See? The fence ends.”

  Tim bent forward over the armrest. The chain-link fence stopped perpendicular to a concrete wall that matched the fence in height, but, blessedly, was free of the razor wire. The wall ran twenty feet down the top of the canal. On the other side sat one bank of lockers. “Back up a little bit.”

  Tim let out an annoyed snort, but complied. “So, you didn’t get a chance to look for the key?”

  “No,” Randall answered, eyes out the window.

  “So what? He just flipped out?”

  “He was drunk.” Randall almost sighed when the lockers came into view again; the two banks didn't meet. “How high do you think that back wall is?”

  “High.”

  Randall turned. “For two people?”

  Tim grimaced as if in the throes of a migraine headache. “Come on, Randall!”

  “Look, if we can get over the back wall and into that alley, we can just walk out into the middle of the parking lot. We’ll be right in front of her locker.”

  “And then what?”

  Randall examined the lockers nearest to the fence. Padlocks dangled from their garage style doors. “It would be basically breaking and entering if we had the key or not, Tim. No one was going to give us permission” he said. Tim slumped against the driver’s seat. “Tim,” Randall said more carefully. “Look around. A woman coming down here by herself. This was a secret.”

  “One last time,” Tim insisted. “What the hell did Eric do to you?”

  “I showed up. He was drunk ...” Randall stopped. How could he have forgotten? Eric’s violent outburst had almost blotted out the memory, that was why. “He emptied out the goddamn liquor cabinet.”

  “You’re just remembering this now?” Tim asked, urgently.

  “Shit,” Randall whispered.

  “He knows you have the bottle, Randall. That’s why he flipped out!”

  “Maybe not. He was pissed because Kathryn knows.”

  “Kathryn. Murder weapon.” Tim lifted his hands as if they were scales, and then dropped his right one hard. “You decide!”

  Tim drove with the speed and quick thinking of a white boy trying to get out of the ghetto, and soon they were speeding through desolate downtown. “If he gets his leave of absence, when does it start?” he asked.

  “End of the semester.”

  “That’s barely four weeks from now.”

  “Not much time.”

  Tim didn’t interrupt with a shrill plea for Randall to run to the authorities, and Randall was relieved. The reporter could finally see his big story taking shape. “I’m about to tell you something I probably shouldn’t,” Tim said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because it violates a little pact I made with myself. You remember, the one about not getting involved in this just so you could sleep better?” Tim glanced at him sourly. “I talked to Richard.”

  “Goddammit, Tim!”

  Tim held up one palm to quiet him. “I didn’t tell him squat. And he didn’t think it was unusual, considering we talked so much about Eberman when the accident happened. So chill and let me finish.” Randall sat back, still steamed, still scared. “Do you remember what time you got to Eric’s house that night?”

  Randall thought for a second. “It had to be after eight, ’cause I called around seven thirty and Eric thought Lisa was already on her way to Paula’s.”

  “She was,” Tim answered. “Richard told me the 911 call reporting the accident was placed at seven thirty.”

  Something inside of Randall leaped, and he twisted against his seat belt. “You didn’t know this before?" Randall almost shouted.

  “I didn’t ask before. And look, it doesn’t mean Lisa didn’t know about the two of you. The only reason I even bothered to check is because Eric has to know what time that call was placed. So he probably knows there’s no possible way she was driving like a madwoman because she had just seen the two of you in bed together. But that’s still what he wanted you to think.”

  Randall felt a surge of satisfaction. He spotted the bridge up ahead and expected Tim to make a left turn. “It’s good to know you’re still on my side,” he said quietly. Any distance —of time or otherwise — between him and Lisa’s death was a small relief. But that left the matter of her note. What did she know, and what did she see?

  As the Jeep moved across the bridge, both of them noted wordlessly that it had been repaired, the barricade removed, the newly placed metal a polished blemish against the length of weathered rail.

  Randall stepped out of Tim’s Jeep amid returning students lugging their suitcases up the front walk of Stockton. He fell into step with them, then heard Tim call out to him, “Kathryn!”

  Confused, Randall pivoted around to see that Tim had lowered the window.

  “How did she find out?” Tim asked.

  Randall searched for the best response as he approached the Jeep. When he saw Tim’s arched eyebrows, he realized he was prepared for Randall to duck the question. So Randall answered as close to the truth as he could. “A little bird told her. But he’s flown the coop.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “He barely knew anyone,” Randall said, and walked away before Tim could ask him to elaborate.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ICE-LACED HEDGES CONCEALED THE FIRST-FLOOR WINDOWS OF THE brownstone. Mitchell held open the front gate and Kathryn passed through it, up the front walk through a generous front yard that had garden potential but was mostly snow-smothered grass and bushes. Two-thirty-one Slope Street sat behind a stone fence topped with cast-iron spikes. The shutters were d
rawn over all four windows in the house’s stark brick facade. '

  For some reason, Kathryn had assumed Mitchell lived in one of the nicer row houses just east of campus, not far from his mentor, Dr. Eberman. She’d been surprised when he made a right several blocks short of the hill’s crown, taking them into an Unfamiliar neighborhood of low-end apartment complexes descending the hill’s eastern slope. Compared to its neighbors, the brownstone seemed downright stately, a holdover from the neighborhood’s better days.

  “You live here?” she asked. Mitchell nodded, tugging his keys from his pocket as he moved past her.

  He threw open the front door. She took a few hesitant steps into the darkened foyer. Mitchell flicked the switch and light from a brass chandelier fell on walls painted so white she almost squinted. She followed as Mitchell ducked into the living room. Another chandelier came on and she gasped.

  Mitchell turned to see her reaction.

  Kathryn held up both hands as if to shield her eyes.

  “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Mitchell informed her proudly.

  It took up the entire living-room wall, in vivid color and dizzying detail. She had glimpsed the painting before, but enlarged onto an entire wall its effect was overwhelming. The naked figures cavorting in a surreal garden of science-fiction-like fountains and gently rolling hills looked like pure anarchy. The scene showed pleasure taken to its most ghastly extreme. From where she stood in the doorway, the clusters of naked figures looked like swarming insects. The living room itself seemed designed not to distract from the reproduction. A faded Oriental rug covered the hardwood floor. The sofa and chairs were a muted beige. The other white walls suddenly made more sense; she guessed each one was a potential canvas.

  As she approached the wall, she almost walked into the glass-topped coffee table; only its slight metal frame made it visible.

  She felt Mitchell move next to her.

  “It’s...”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “It should be,” Mitchell answered, not offended.

  “What’s it supposed to be? Heaven?”

  “Not even close. Earth.”

  “If you went to Woodstock, maybe.”

  Mitchell laughed. “Interesting you should say that. Hippies in the nineteen-sixties were all too eager to embrace the central panel as a glorification of their own beliefs about free love. Promiscuity. But of course, they conveniently forgot that this is only the central panel of a tripartite altar piece. Several inches to the left, Bosch punished these figures by piercing them with spears and feeding them to monsters.” Mitchell sounded matter of fact, playing the museum director in his own home, but in his tone she could detect a hint of disdain for the naive love children of the 1960s.

  Kathryn backed up several steps, taking in the huge, colorful canvas, then turned to Mitchell, bringing their faces inches apart without meaning to. “Hell has no place in the living room, right?”

  Mitchell met her gaze. “Not enough space.”

  “Well, it’s kind of a dated idea anyway.”

  Mitchell backed away from her before sliding one arm out of his coat. “Dated? What do you mean?”

  “The idea that we have to be shipped off someplace else to be punished for everything we’ve done. Aren’t there enough punishments here on earth?”

  Mitchell dropped his jacket on the sofa. “Exactly.” His smile lifted his features so completely she felt a swell of pride. He gestured back to the wall. “Some scholars have nicknamed this Satan’s garden. It’s all the pleasures and temptations of the physical world. The evil influence of the flesh at its most beautiful.”

  Kathryn looked back at the wall. Memory struck: Folberg Library the night before break, Maria bent over a color photocopy of a painting—which, she now realized, must have been a Bosch—a grid designed for accurate enlargement. “I don’t think it’s that beautiful,” she said.

  “Something to drink?” Mitchell asked, surveying her.

  “What do you have in the way of alcohol?” she asked with a grin.

  “Wine?”

  “White if you have it. Red will knock me on my ass.”

  “White’s all I have, actually. From a special vineyard outside of Santa Barbara.” Mitchell moved into the dining room, hitting the light switch as he went. Yet another chandelier threw light across a black wooden slab of a dining table fringed by six cream-colored upholstered chairs. Not the type of furniture you expected to find in a grad student’s house. What she was seeing was a minimalist showroom. The muted colors and freshly painted walls suggested not only renovation, but almost an antiseptic cleanliness. It gradually occurred to her that there wasn't a single personal effect in the room. No photographs. Nothing on the walls beyond a mural so extravagant you could almost walk into its wild dream of a landscape.

  She had picked up a candelabra from the mantel when Mitchell returned with her glass of wine. “These are nice,” she said, turning it over in her hand. The candelabra were an identical pair in polished silver, but to each of their three candleholders someone had affixed a white pearl. “Did you make these yourself?”

  “I did. Actually.”

  “Crafty,” she said. Gay was what she meant.

  Mitchell gently removed the candelabra from her hand and pointed her to the wall. “Bottom left. See the man bent over what looks like a giant fruit?” She did. The man's back was unnaturally, painfully arched as he bent over. The fruit—if you could call it that— opened like a blossom, spilling what looked like giant berries. “See the pearls?” Mitchell asked.

  “That’s what they are?” She asked, approaching the wall. Closer up they looked like marbles, but when she bent forward, she realized they had a sheen to them.

  Mitchell was right behind her. “According to Catharism, the pearls represent the fallen souls of angels that have become trapped in the mud of the material and the physical. They are the souls of people still trapped within their physical shell, but spiritually alive. Cathars called them The Living Ones.”

  “Why six?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Is six some sort of significant number?”

  Startled, he looked down at the candelabra in his hand and finally got the drift. “No. Three candleholders each. They had to match, didn’t they?” He shrugged and returned it to the mantel. She nervously slugged her wine. Mitchell settled onto the couch, but she was too nervous to sit and continued looking at the Bosch, less to look at it then to have a safe place to rest her eyes.

  “Are you renting this place?”

  “No. I own it.”

  “Wow.”

  “I had a good lead. And you saw what the neighborhood is like.”

  She nodded, noticing that he had brought himself water back from the kitchen. “You’re not going to join me?” she asked, lifting her glass.

  “I drink only on special occasions.”

  “So I guess I’m not special, then?”

  He smirked and met her eyes. “Annoying children are special.”

  Go for it, she told herself. “I think you know what I meant.” She crossed to the couch, easing down next to him before she took another swallow of the wine. He watched her, his face tight, his eyes distant. “Thanks,” she said softly.

  “For what?”

  “Picking me up at the airport. It meant a lot.”

  “It wasn’t any trouble.”

  “Maybe not. But you were exactly who I wanted to see when I got off the plane.”

  His eyes narrowed and his wan smile tightened his jaw. At the sight of his discomfort, she downed the last of the glass and set it down on the coffee table with a hard click. “You’ve got to meet me halfway here, Mitchell.”

  “Maybe if I ask you how your trip went you could tell me the truth.”

  Kathryn felt abruptly abandoned. “Oh, I get it,” she groaned. This wasn’t Mitchell’s regular reticence—this was about her. She got up from the sofa fast enough to quicken th
e wine’s pulse in her temples. “Going on the way I did, at dinner. About Jono. You think I’m damaged goods.”

  Mitchell folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head to one side in an exaggerated display of attentiveness as she continued. “Admit it. I scared you off. And let me tell you, you got the Reader’s Digest version, buddy.”

  “I don’t scare very easily,” he said, his voice almost hard. “And if I did, why would I be asking you for the whole story?”

  “Noblesse oblige. I learned that phrase from my roommate. Supposedly it means charity. But only if you’re rich. And you”—she gestured to the surroundings —“are obviously rich.”

  Mitchell picked up her empty wineglass.

  “Thank you. I’d love another.”

  He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Obviously, he’d intended to go and put her empty glass in the sink. But he got up from the sofa, bowed his head, and went to the kitchen. Part of her knew she might be blowing her chance with him, but another part thought his frigid response might be a sign of resistance going brittle and giving way. Yet another part of her already had a splitting headache, and behind all that churning lay the hard fact that if she didn’t end up in Mitchell’s bed, that meant going back to the dorm and encountering Randall.

  Mitchell returned and she was touched to see he’d filled the glass all the way. She reached out to take it, but he didn’t let go of the stem. “Go easy,” he said.

  “On what? You or the wine?”

  From his blank expression, it looked like the line was a bomb. She gave the stem a tug, fingers wrapped around his, and he released the glass gently. “You don’t want the whole story,” she muttered before taking a slug. “He’s dead anyway, so what does it matter?”

  “Why don’t you start by telling me how he died?”

  “Why don’t I start by moving on?” she snapped.

  Mitchell didn’t answer that and she let out a defeated breath. “Mitchell, I spent months listening to psychologists tell me how to make a chart of how angry I got and when. One of them told me that I might be able to deal with everything better if I cut caffeine out of my diet.”