The Snow Garden

by Christopher Rice

  Kathryn felt something go soft inside her chest. “What?”

  “ ‘Who is Randall Stone?’ That’ll be the headline.”

  “In the Herald?”

  “Yeah. It’ll have to be subtle, and it’ll have to be mainly about the fact that he’s skipped town. The Herald will make it clear that in its attempt to write a fair and balanced piece it was unable to find any way to contact Randall Stone. Which will put the university on the spot, since they’re the only ones who have any concrete documentation on him. And if his identity is really as fake as you think it is, Atherton will figure out they’ve been conned too. Although how the twelfth-ranked school in the nation doesn’t already know is beyond me.”

  Kathryn nodded. “You just want to force him to come back and defend himself.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Tim answered sharply. “And maybe when you get over how much he betrayed you, you’ll remember there’s a dead woman at the middle of this.”

  Chastened, she took a breath before responding. “Fine. But he ran away before. Maybe he’s done it again.”

  Tim rolled his eyes and moved for the door.

  “Tim?”

  He stopped without turning.

  “You really believe she was murdered.”

  “Yes.”

  “You believe everything Randall told you?”

  Tim turned. “I don’t have to. The letter we found made it clear that Lisa knew her husband handed over an entire house to one of his grad students for free. Randall thinks they were some kind of cult, but that just sounds crazy... .”

  “Who?” Kathryn asked. Her blood had gone cold.

  “What?”

  “A grad student?”

  “Some guy named Mitchell Seaver. Total prick. Anyway, Randall thinks Mitchell used it to start some whacked-out cult that holds orgies or something. He found this weird essay in Eric’s house, obviously written to Mitchell, from this girl who’d been molested by her uncle. He tried to tell me it was some kind of application. The point is he was grabbing at straws, trying to delay the inevitable.”

  Cult. The word burned across her mind, stopped her breath in her throat.

  Tim continued, “Lisa was divorcing Eric and it wasn’t going to be pretty. Given his extracurricular activities, I think Eric would have liked to see that not happen.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to look up from the floor as Tim left the room. She was thinking of the essay she had slid into the mailbox at 231 Slope Street. Her stomach turned at the thought of six people reading it.

  As Kathryn approached 231 Slope Street, the brownstone rose out of what looked like an erupting cotton field; snowflakes were camouflaged by the milky white sky and visible only where they skittered across the house’s facade. With gloved fingers she dug into the mailbox slot, hoping to feel the slip of her essay against the metal, but the box had been emptied, her essay presumably taken in with the mail. The house’s gate was locked.

  Behind her an engine groaned up the hill. Kathryn saw a Honda Civic round the far corner—Maria’s car. She crammed her back against one of the stone posts, listening as the Civic slowed to a halt. The driveway gate clanged open and the Civics tires crunched gravel.

  Kathryn stepped out from her cover to see the gate make its slow swing shut. She ducked through it, as close to the hedge line as possible.

  At the end of the driveway, Maria popped the Civic’s trunk. She and Lauren dug inside and backed up, carrying opposite ends of something large and heavy. They squeezed between the car and the house’s side wall. Whatever they were holding responded with a clinking of glass.

  Kathryn waited until Maria and Lauren had disappeared behind the house. Then she moved quickly down the driveway and along the wall. At the back corner of the house, she could hear the girls grunting as they moved up the back steps. “Why don’t we take some of them out?” Lauren asked.

  “Just keep moving. Please.” Maria’s voice was tight.

  Kathryn dared to peer around the corner. They were inside, Maria’s butt still propping the back door open. Kathryn reached out and caught the edge of the door, letting it close on her gloved hand.

  Footsteps scraped across the kitchen floor, followed by the thuds of glass bottles hitting the countertop. Kathryn kept her hand wedged in the door. Snow dusted her face.

  “All right. What first?” Lauren’s voice asked.

  “Start by opening them.”

  “Yeah. I figured.”

  “This isn’t calculus, Lauren. You’ve seen Mitchell do it a hundred times.”

  “Stop it, already!” Lauren snapped. “I barely even know the guy and you’re treating me like I was his best friend. I understand you’re upset but— ”

  “That’s all you understand,” Maria barked. Where was the delicate, doe-eyed girl Kathryn had been introduced to at the library? After a tense silence, Maria continued, tone steady, “Grind them until there aren’t any lumps. Use the funnel to get them in the bottle and try to make sure it doesn’t stick to the side. Then put them back in the case ...”

  “I can’t believe you’re blaming me for this!’’ Lauren cut her off.

  “It was a stupid idea, Lauren!”

  “Why? If Mitchell wanted to know so badly, who better to tell him than that. . . faggot’s best friend? You should have seen them at the beginning of the year, they were like —”

  “I don’t care what they we’re like!” Maria shouted, sounding nothing like an angry girlfriend, and too much like a mentor whose patience had been tested to its limit. “Unlike Mitchell, I didn’t care what Eric was doing in bed with anyone. But—”

  “I told him to talk to her.”

  Maria continued over her, “But now she’s just a step away from living in this house. Can you not see why that bothers me?”

  Kathryn heard rapid footsteps leaving the kitchen and assumed that Lauren had exited in a huff. But it was Lauren’s voice that shouted, “How the hell was I supposed to know her boyfriend almost gave her AIDS?”

  Kathryn’s hand blocking the door tensed around its edge. The first sting of betrayal gave way to a cold fury that fueled her courage. She peered through the cracked door. Lauren stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at four bottles of white wine on the counter in front of her. She turned to one of the cabinets, reached in, and removed something. Kathryn saw her prying at the childproof lock on a bottle of prescription medication.

  Lauren uncapped the bottle and emptied pills into a ceramic mortar on the counter. She picked up the pestle lying next to it and angrily ground the pills into a powder.

  Previously, Lauren’s transformation had seemed cosmetic to Kathryn. But watching her now, Kathryn saw dark circles under her eyes that dramatized the pallor of her skin, which itself seemed more drawn. She’d lost weight, and the simple task of grinding the pills left her breathless. Then her attention began to wander from her repetitive work. Her eyes drifted to Kathryn’s unwavering gaze.

  Lauren cried out and leaped back from the counter, tipping the mortar and sending a shower of blue powder onto the floor. She lost her balance and hit the floor butt first. Kathryn kicked the door open, strode across the kitchen, shut the door to the dining room, and threw her back against it.

  “What are you doing?” Lauren gasped.

  “I ask the questions right now.”

  “Kathryn, any questions you have, you have to ask Mitchell. I’m sure he’s told you — ”

  “He hasn’t told me shit! He pretended to be interested in me, he asked me out on a date and the whole time I was pledging your fucked-up fraternity. What the hell is this, Lauren?”

  Lauren just sat there, her hands pressed to the floor alongside her thighs, seemingly so unthreatened by Kathryn that she wasn’t going to cry out. Kathryn stepped away from the kitchen door. “All right, fine, how about your question then? It’s a good one. You couldn’t have possibly known that my ex-boyfriend almost gave me AIDS. So how the fuck do you know now?”

  Lauren lifted her head,
expression blank. “Mitchell said it was the perfect lesson.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kathryn, I’m not going to talk to you when you’re—”

  Kathryn wrenched the collar of Lauren’s shirt into one fist and yanked her off the floor. “Get off me!” Lauren cried, grabbing at Kathryn’s wrist, and Kathryn shoved her, sending her into the side of the counter. She cast a nervous glance toward the door, but no footsteps came echoing through the house in response.

  Despite Kathryn’s display of force, Lauren remained unnervingly composed, staring blankly at Kathryn as if just biding the time it would take for her to leave. Lauren’s complacency was adding fuel to her already smoldering anger; Mitchell had shared everything she had told him with strangers, and she wasn’t about to be stonewalled by someone who seemed to be filled with the unquestioning resolve of a .. . she couldn’t think of a better term than cult member.

  “I know you were molested, Lauren. And I know Jesse knew too.”

  Nothing. Not a blip. Maybe false pity would do the trick. “And I’m very sorry.”

  Lauren straightened herself, raking her blackened hair back into place with one hand. “You think that’s why I’m here? I don’t need you or anyone else to feel sorry for me. And I don’t live here now because I need pity. We don’t deal in pity. And Kathryn, no one here’s going to hold your hand because you were so hot for your badass boyfriend that you turned the other cheek when he infected all your friends with AIDS. We’re not going to feel sorry for you because your sex drive almost killed you.’’

  Kathryn was too stunned to interrupt. Lauren’s composure was giving way to anger that forced breath between each of her words.

  “This house is for people who are fed up with being told that their bodies are something to be obeyed. They’re not. They’re something to be overcome. How many more false costumes will lust have to wear before everyone else figures out what we have?” Her words sounded rehearsed but urgent, and Kathryn had no doubt that Lauren believed them, with a little help from what she’d been grinding into a fine powder. “Our sex drives promise everything and deliver nothing. It offers only the briefest of pleasures and gives the most lasting of pain. And human beings are so weak that they endow this meaningless physical act with all the emotional qualities of fulfillment and purpose that can be found in every other aspect of daily life.”

  “Mitchell and Maria, they taught you this?” Kathryn asked.

  “My uncle taught me. And Jono Morton taught you.”

  Kathryn started to lunge at her and was happy to see Lauren shrink back against the counter.

  “Jono taught me that it was entirely too easy to live my life as nothing more than a product of what someone else did to me.” Kathryn’s voice was hard, the words of her reply becoming true and apparent to her even as she said them. “If he taught me anything, it was just how easy it is to consider yourself nothing more than the disease you might have, or what someone else did to you. The only thing you’ve been taught, Lauren, is how to make wallowing in your own self-pity sound like an intellectual pursuit.”

  Kathryn turned for the door. “I told him you weren’t ready,” Lauren called after her.

  “Yeah, well, maybe he just wanted to fuck me,” she answered without stopping.

  “Is Mitchell Seaver here?”

  The receptionist looked up from her magazine, startled to see Kathryn standing in front of her desk. Almost all the office doors on the first floor of the art history department were shut, and Kathryn guessed that emergency meetings were being held in hushed tones on the other side about the fresh disgrace Eric Eberman was bringing to their department.

  “You’re a student?” the receptionist asked, still holding her magazine open.

  “Yes. Not a reporter,” Kathryn answered with as gracious a smile as she could muster. -

  The old woman chucked. “Mitchell should be in Adamson right now. Filling in for Dr. Eberman.”

  Adamson Hall was one of the oldest buildings on McKinley Quad. Gothic in form, it held only two lecture halls, and when Kathryn stepped into the foyer she could hear Mitchell’s amplified voice coming from behind the swinging doors directly ahead. She stepped through the doors, surveying the darkened two-hundred-seat auditorium in front of her. Most of the seats were filled with students hunched over their notebooks. On stage, Mitchell lectured from the podium in a halo of light. The authoritative sound of his voice, rising and falling in pitch so as to avoid a boring monotone, recalled all the nicely packaged lectures he had used to calm her into letting down her guard and sharing her personal trauma.

  Before her renewed fury could paralyze her, she began walking down the aisle. A few students stirred in their seats, but when Kathryn glanced in their direction she saw that they weren’t students at all. The rear rows of the auditorium were filled with reporters, bored, some checking their watches or consulting notepads on their knees that were half the size of the ones the students were using.

  Despite the presence of the journalists who had come to document his mentor’s downfall, Mitchell Seaver was giving a command performance.

  She was halfway down the aisle when he spotted her, but he didn’t stop lecturing until she ascended the steps to the stage.

  “Kathryn,” he muttered as she approached the podium.

  When he saw the expression on her face, realization flickered in his eyes before it was replaced by a look of bewildered indignation. The star had been interrupted.

  Slapping a man was a revenge reserved for soap opera heroines; it was a desperate, usually hysterical attempt to show strength, and in her experience it usually failed miserably at making a woman feel better or a man chastened. Instead, Kathryn grabbed Mitchell by one shoulder to steady herself.

  “The answer’s no,” she whispered, before she rammed her knee into his groin.

  Shocked gasps turned to laughter, and as she left the hall, flashbulbs lit up the back rows.

  Eric held the front door open, expecting John Hawthorne to duck through it quickly as if seeking cover. When Hawthorne stepped formally across the threshold, Eric guessed that this meant the reporters outside had abandoned their vigil. By five o’clock, all three local television stations had already called the house, and Hawthorne had been lucky to get hold of Eric before he had disconnected the phone.

  Without a word of greeting, Hawthorne moved into the living room, eyes darting to the shutters that had been drawn over the windows. He scanned the room, maybe in search of the wrench used to kill Lisa in the library, Eric thought bitterly.

  “My office faxed a preliminary response to the Journal this morning, and then we put out a general press release.” Hawthorne tossed his coat onto the arm of the sofa and backed up to the gas fire, warming himself with his hands crossed behind his back. His eyes met Eric’s without warmth or sympathy. “The university is, of course, puzzled by these allegations and highly suspicious of the source.”

  “Something to drink?’

  “Talk to me like I’m a student, Eric. What’s going on here?”

  Eric gave him a dry smile and saw Hawthorne regretted his word choice. All he wanted with Hawthorne was to convey his unwillingness to fight. There was no lawyer present, and Eric didn’t plan on hiring one.

  “I didn’t kill my wife. Can you fax that to the Atherton Journal?"

  “That isn’t my concern,” Hawthorne said. Clearly he didn’t appreciate Eric’s candor. He surveyed Eric with disdain, as if he wanted to make sure Eric didn’t have any more barbs up his sleeve. “I am the first in a long line of visitors. None of whom you will want to welcome into your living room. I also happen to be the friendliest one of the bunch.”

  Eric managed a nod. “Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”

  “Is this humor that I’m being deflected with?”

  “Yes.”

  “I admire your levity given the circumstances.”

  “And I admire the fact that the university I’ve worked at fo
r over a decade has sent the campus publicist as its emissary,” Eric retorted. Hawthorne raised his eyebrows, indicating he was little more than impressed that Eric could attempt to be the angry one in the room. “Atherton will be rid of me soon enough. I’d like the remaining time I spend here in my own home not to be wasted.”

  “What do you have?” Hawthorne asked. Eric looked at him finally, puzzled. “To drink. What do you have?”

  “Wine. White.”

  “I’ll take it,” Hawthorne answered.

  In the kitchen, Eric poured Hawthorne a glass from one of the bottles he had stolen from the House of Adam.

  Hawthorne accepted it with, a wan smile and took a tiny sip. “Do you even know Randall Stone?” he asked after a heavy silence.

  Eric nodded at the fire. Hawthorne didn’t press any further.

  “The fact that Randall Stone made these claims to a newspaper has the administration viewing him with more dubiousness than it’s viewing you right now. He doesn’t have a prayer if he ever plans to file a complaint against you with the disciplinary council. Also, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but it turns out that Mr. Stone is currently nowhere to be found. All that being said, I was allowed to take a rather extraordinary step.”

  Eric, who had barely been listening, his mind on the purging that would take place that night, turned at Hawthorne’s final sentence.

  “I secured a copy of his application. Under the condition that I keep it to myself, of course.”

  Eric had to stop himself from asking Hawthorne if he had brought it with him. Even now, the idea of being given a glimpse into Randall’s past, a past the young man had ferociously guarded, lit a hot flicker of excitement in him. He managed to quell it with sarcasm, “That’s pretty impressive, John. If some students run for president, Atherton doesn’t want anyone finding out they were admitted with a two point zero high-school GPA and two parents who donated a new dorm.”

  Hawthorne blanched and stared at the floor. “Are you familiar with this young man’s background?”