I shook my head. “Mom is the one with the green thumb. I kill whatever I touch.”
He reached out to touch the delicate, variegated leaf on a nearby bush, stroking it gently between his fingers. “So . . . how was your date tonight?”
I almost choked on my smoothie. “Fine. Thanks for inquiring, I guess. Look, there is something I want to ask you.” I thought about being diplomatic but failed. “Why are you here?”
Matthew seemed confused. “You asked if I’d seen the garden, and I said I hadn’t, and you brought me back here.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I mean, why are you hosting acoustic night? You could play anywhere in town. Why here?”
Matthew leaned back on the bench, his eyes shuttered. “I owed Frankie a favor, and this was my way to pay up.”
I couldn’t imagine what kind of favor Matthew could owe Frankie and hoped it didn’t involve drugs or anything illegal. If Matthew was in any kind of trouble, the lawyers chasing us would sniff it out, and it could be the last nail in the Enchanted Garden’s coffin.
“Are you telling me the truth?”
Something strange flickered in Matthew’s expression before he shook his head. “Why would I lie?”
As much as I tried to control it, I blinked back tears. The stress had been killing me, and there was no one I could share it with. Mom would tell me life would turn out as fate determined and give me a serenity charm. Scott would listen but point out everything my mom did wrong, a pointless exercise. I knew exactly what she was doing wrong but felt powerless to stop her.
He let out a sigh, probably getting a hint about my emotional turmoil from the look on my face. “I’m here as a favor to a friend. That’s all.”
“A pretty big favor.”
“Frankie is a pretty good friend.”
Folding my arms across my body, I frowned. Something felt off about Mr. Matthew Monroe. I was sure of it. But I knew Mom wouldn’t listen. She refused to see anything but the best in people. I, on the other hand, had been naturally paranoid since birth.
As the fountain gurgled beside us and the twinkle lights sparkled in the trees, I stared at him. His face was partially shadowed, and his eyes were intense as he held my gaze. Other than the obvious fact he was very hot and extremely talented, I knew nothing else about him, and that made him dangerous.
“Trust me, Fiona,” he said softly.
Just as he said the words, a scream pierced the calm of the night, making me leap to my feet. It came from the narrow, dark walkway between the café and the building next door, and another scream quickly followed the first. I ran toward the side door of the garden, not knowing what I would find when I got there, but I did know one thing for certain. The screams came from my mother.
Chapter Three
In an emergency, always serve tea.
~Aunt Francesca~
I opened the wooden door, fumbling with the latch. We used it only once a week or so, when removing trash after tea parties. Old and in disrepair, like everything else at the café, it stuck. I had to push against it with the full weight of my body to get it to open.
Matthew followed close behind as I stumbled through the door. I looked around in dread, my eyes scanning the dark passageway. The only light came from a single dim bulb above the side door to the kitchen. We used this space to store our garbage cans, but drunks often saw it as a convenient place to relieve themselves. It reeked of urine, beer, and rotting food.
I panicked, my heart pounding in my chest. The screaming had stopped, and a horrible silence filled the air. I was about to run back into the café and call the police when I saw my mother kneeling on the damp cobblestone walkway next to a pile of rags. She held her cell phone in her hands, and she sobbed as she requested an ambulance.
There is peace in that time right before you get bad news. In the moments before you see a car crash or an accident happen. Right before you hear words that will change your life forever. It’s the last few seconds of blissful ignorance, like hovering on the edge of a cliff before you tumble over the side and into the dark abyss below. Even though the truth was in front of my eyes, I lingered in the space between not knowing and knowing until my mother hung up her phone and spoke. “It’s Moses. He’s hurt.”
She put her hand gently on the pile of rags, and I saw the battered old saxophone case on the ground. My knees gave out, and I sank down next to her, numb. We were both useless, immobilized by fear and sorrow. It was Matthew who covered Moses with his jacket to keep him warm and did a quick assessment of his injuries using the flashlight on his cell phone. I couldn’t move. I could only stare at the growing circle of red near Moses’s head.
“There’s so much blood,” I said. “Why is there so much blood?”
“A head wound always bleeds a lot. The cut itself isn’t huge, but we should apply pressure to it.” The matter-of-fact tone in Matthew’s voice kept me from losing it completely. Mom handed him her scarf. He wadded it up and held it to Moses’s head, pressing gently on the wound. “What do you think happened?”
Mom looked around, her eyes hollow and sad. “I heard a noise. I thought maybe Mrs. Felix’s cat had gotten into the garbage again. I don’t know how long he’s been here. We were so busy.”
My teeth chattered as my body shook. “I told him to be careful. I should have walked him home. I should have taken better care of him.”
Mom wrapped her arms around me, and I put my face into the curve of her neck like I had done when I was small. “You can’t blame yourself, Fiona,” she said. “There’s no way you could have known.”
I heard the logic in her words, but it didn’t erase the guilt and pain that drifted like a dark shadow over my heart. When we heard the whine of the approaching ambulance, Matthew went to meet the EMTs.
“You ride with them, Claire,” he said after they had stabilized Moses and loaded him onto a gurney. “I’ll bring Fiona and meet you at the hospital.”
I still wore my sundress, so I ran upstairs and changed quickly, grabbing a pair of yoga pants and a hoodie. I didn’t bother looking in a mirror. I shoved my cell phone into my pocket, put on a pair of flip-flops, and slipped out the door and into the night with Matthew.
I barely remembered the cab ride to the hospital, but the bright lights and chaos of the ER on a Saturday night jolted me out of my stupor. As Matthew went to the front desk, I stood in the middle of the room, staring around at drunk college kids who’d been hurt in bar fights, crying babies who’d picked the worst possible time to get sick, and a woman who looked like she was in the middle of an asthma attack. Her daughter sat next to her, and when the daughter’s eyes met mine, we both knew. We were in some special kind of hell.
Mom came out of a closed door with a big red sign above it that read “No Admittance.” Her gaze searched for us in the crowded room. Matthew grabbed my hand and pulled me over to her. My feet moved, but my brain refused to function properly.
“They did an initial exam,” she said, her white T-shirt dotted with Moses’s blood. “They don’t think he fell.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
Mom’s hands were splattered with blood as well. She tried to wipe them on her shirt. “They think someone hit him on the head from behind. He still hasn’t woken up. I don’t know . . . I’d better go back.”
She reached out to touch me but thought better of it, with her bloodstained hands. Giving me a tight smile, she nodded at Matthew and slipped back behind the ER doors.
I could barely process what she’d told us. As I sat in the crowded room with Matthew, I felt frozen. His quiet, steady presence was the only thing keeping me calm.
Slowly, other people from the neighborhood trickled in as the news spread. Madame Lucinda, the owner of the Hocus Pocus Magic Shoppe, sat next to me and held my hand. She’d been Moses’s friend for decades. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, the many rings on her fingers twinkling in the fluorescent lights of the ER. When a nurse came to let us know he’d been put i
n a room, Matthew, Madame Lucinda, and I walked down the long corridor together.
My feet stopped right outside his room, and I could go no farther. Madame Lucinda let go of my hand. She didn’t push me to come with her. Mom stuck her head outside to check on me.
“He’s going to be okay,” she said, her face awash with relief and exhaustion.
“Who did this to him?” I asked.
“We have no idea. Poor, dear Moses.”
As soon as she went back into the room, my teeth started to chatter again. Matthew put his arm around my shoulders, and I leaned against him, accepting comfort from a virtual stranger. I couldn’t help it. I needed his support. My knees wobbled so badly I could barely stand.
“You should go see him,” said Matthew, his voice soft. “It’s always better than what you imagine.”
“I have a pretty scary imagination.” My cheek rested against his chest, and I felt the faint rumble of his laughter against my skin.
“I promise. It won’t be as bad as you think.”
He led me into Moses’s room, and I realized Matthew had been both right and wrong at the same time. In some ways, it was better than I’d imagined. Bandages circled Moses’s head, and his face looked swollen and bruised, but he was still Moses. My Moses. The man who’d helped me with math in middle school. The one who listened to my angst-filled tirades in high school. The one who understood me better than most people ever would. The same person but so tiny, old, and fragile in that big white hospital bed. A machine measured his heart rate, and an IV bag hung next to him, dripping fluids into his body. I reached for his hand, wanting to hold on to him, and his skin felt dry and cool to the touch.
A dark-haired nurse around my age came into the room and picked up his chart. She wore scrubs and a nametag with “Brenda Clark” in bold black letters.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
“He has a pretty serious concussion. His CAT scan looked good, but the doctor worried there might be some swelling in the brain. An injury like this can be traumatic for someone his age.”
“When will he wake up?” The tears I’d been trying to contain slowly streamed down my face. Someone hurt him on purpose. Suddenly, nothing in my quiet little world felt safe or right anymore.
Nurse Brenda gave me a sympathetic smile as she adjusted Moses’s IV and checked his vitals. “That isn’t something I can answer. Rest is the best thing for him right now. The police are here. Do you mind if they ask you a few questions?”
The policemen waited right outside Moses’s door. Officer Miller had a crew cut, a paunch, and a resigned air about him, like he’d seen a lot of nights like this one. The younger policeman, Officer Belfiore, had black hair and a cleft in his chin. He winked at Nurse Brenda as she walked by, but she ignored him. He sighed and wrote in his notebook as Officer Miller asked us questions.
“When did you last see Mr. Richards?”
We told them about acoustic night and the approximate time of the attack. We also gave them Moses’s home address and promised to find the number for his sister who lived in Florida.
“He was a college professor at Duquesne until he got sick last year. Everyone loves him,” I said. “I can’t imagine why anyone would hurt him.”
Office Miller shrugged. “We don’t always know people as well as we think. We all have secrets, even Mr. Richards. But often these things are random. He may have walked into something he shouldn’t have, or maybe he just got mugged.”
“Right next to the café?” I asked. “He’d barely stepped out the door. It doesn’t make sense.”
The whole idea seemed hard to swallow. Other than a few incidents of petty theft and vandalism, there had never been serious issues anywhere near the café.
Officer Belfiore read my thoughts, his warm brown eyes kind. “Times are changing. The South Side isn’t as safe as it used to be, and we’ve seen a real increase in drug-related crimes lately. This could be as simple as a junkie trying to take his money and Moses putting up a fight. We’d like to check out the crime scene tonight. If you’re ready to go, we can give you a ride home in our squad car.”
Nurse Brenda promised to call the minute Moses woke up, and Matthew took Madame Lucinda home. Mom and I rode in the police car in silence, arriving back at the café as the sky slowly lightened and the sun came up.
It didn’t take long for the officers to figure out the assailant had hit Moses with Mom’s large wooden scrub brush. They found it in the alley and bagged it as evidence.
“In the next few days, keep an eye out for anything unusual, like strangers hanging around the shop. Lock your doors. Be aware of your surroundings. The usual stuff.” Officer Belfiore gave us his card before leaving. We promised to call if we noticed anything.
Mom wouldn’t allow me to help her clean up the blood. “My clothes are already ruined,” she said. I knew she didn’t want to add yet another terrible image to the ones already in my brain. For once, I didn’t argue with her.
She cleaned outside with the door shut. I thought I heard her sobbing softly, but I didn’t interrupt her. Instead, I paced around the kitchen, tidying things up. I froze when I saw a bag of crushed cookies on the floor.
“Moses’s cookies,” I said softly. I bent down to pick them up and noticed something odd. Two long black streaks led from my mom’s office to the door. I frowned, trying to figure out what had caused them.
Mom came in looking pale and tired, her clothes filthy. I showed her the marks on the floor, and she shrugged. “Maybe I did it when I hauled the bucket out,” she said, and it made sense. The bucket was old, and the wheels underneath it sometimes jammed up.
“I found these on the floor too,” I said, showing her the cookies. “I gave them to Moses before he left.”
She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know, Fiona. He probably dropped them on his way out.”
Mom looked so tired I didn’t press it. “Maybe,” I said.
She nodded, a deep desolation in her eyes I’d never seen before, and went upstairs to take a long, hot shower. When she came back down, she seemed a bit more like herself. I made a big pot of herbal tea, and we sat in the kitchen sipping it.
“Do you think he’ll be the same when he wakes up?” I asked.
She sighed. “I hope so.”
Not the answer I’d wanted. Now that it looked like he would survive, I worried about brain damage and other long-term repercussions. I stared down at my tea, a lump forming in my throat. “Why would anyone hurt him?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.” She got up and tidied the kitchen. “It was so crowded here last night. Did Scott drop you off? I thought I saw him, but it’s always a mad rush at the end of the night. I couldn’t be sure.”
I shook my head. “No. I took a cab home. Scott went to a bar with his friends.”
“I wish he would come by more often, especially to acoustic night. He might actually enjoy it. Last night was a blast, until . . .” She shook her head sadly and turned to me, drying her hands on a towel. “We need to focus on something positive. We should throw a party and invite Scotty and his friends.”
“That’s a terrible idea, and he hates to be called Scotty.”
“I know, but it reminds me of Star Trek, and I always sort of had a thing for that chief engineer,” she said with a smile.
“It reminds me of Mrs. Emerson’s dog.”
Mrs. Emerson lived across the street until she passed away a few years earlier. She had a little black Scottish terrier that humped everything it could reach. My old red sneakers had been one of his personal favorites.
“I remember that Scotty too,” she said with a laugh. “But about the party, I want to do it. And it would cheer us up. We could hang Chinese lanterns in the garden and invite all our friends. It would be so much fun.”
“We’ll see,” I said softly. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but it had the potential to be a total disaster.
She understood, and her shoulders slumped. “He doesn’t like me.”<
br />
I put my arms around her and gave her a hug. “He doesn’t know you.”
A wisp of hair had come loose from my bun, and she pushed it behind my ear. “I’ll try harder, Fiona. I’m sorry. I can pretend to be normal.”
I squeezed her again. “Normal is highly overrated.” It was something Kate said all the time, and it made my mom smile.
“But it’s what you want.” She took a deep breath. “Does this mean I have to wear a bra?”
I laughed. “The bra isn’t the problem.”
Her face grew sad. “Then what is?”
“It’s not you. He’s a little uncomfortable around all of this.”
I waved my hands around, encompassing the shop and the garden and the teas and the fertility charms. If I included the other things, like the monthly meetings the Wiccans held here and the posters about legalizing marijuana, it was a lot for the average person.
She straightened her shoulders. “I’ll make him like me. It’ll be my new project. He already loves you, and I love you, so we have that in common. He’s a nice guy. It won’t be too hard.”
She had a look of steely determination in her eyes, and I had to rein her in. “Just be yourself. Everyone loves you.”
She looked out the window at the fairy lights in the garden. “Everyone does love me except your boyfriend.”
I rinsed out my teacup and put it away with a heavy heart. She was right.
Chapter Four
There is nothing like a pretty dress,
some fancy cake, and a party in the garden.
~Aunt Francesca~
I managed to take a nap, curling up on the soft cushions of the window seat, relieved I didn’t have to clean the garden this particular Sunday morning. I awoke a few hours later, disoriented. It took me a moment to remember the events of the night before, but when I did, I sat up with a start. Mom was in the kitchen.
The Enchanted Garden Cafe (South Side Stories Book 1) Page 3
