Garden of Thorns

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “What do you mean?” asked Hilary.

  “I mean, did the killer accomplish what he or she wanted to accomplish, or will he….” A warning look from Preston stopped Leslie in mid-sentence.

  But Hilary was too quick. “Was Nathan’s death just an accident, like Felicia being killed when she supposedly surprised a thief? If so, will the killer be back to finish what he—she—started and was distracted from when Nathan happened by? Or was the killer out to get Nathan all along?”

  Thanks. Mark fixed Leslie with the glassy stare of a fish out of water. “Do you think Jenny might be in danger?”

  “I don’t think anything,” Leslie replied, making soothing gestures. “When you study police work, you get a little paranoid.”

  “Yeah,” added Preston. “She checks all the locks, inspects the closets, and looks under the bed before she turns in. So much for romantic spontaneity.”

  Mark felt his face crack into a grin. He thought, So that’s why they turned up together so early this morning. It’s just human nature to pair off.

  Hilary looked like a child watching other children frolic in a playground, her head stuck between the bars of the fence. Vaguely irritated, Mark said goodbye to Preston and Leslie and hurried Hilary down the lawn before the reporters baying around Zapata and Yeager sensed fresh blood and began pursuit.

  The air was actually warm, the sun erasing all remaining traces of sleet and cold. The police had rolled up their yellow tape. Only one squad car still sat in the driveway among the media vehicles, Osborne having already been dropped to a lower notch of importance. But the two patrol officers who paced along the veranda were evidence it hadn’t been taken off the list altogether.

  With one last glance at Osborne’s inscrutable brick and copper face, Mark climbed into Hilary’s car and hoped she would drive him sane.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mark lay back against the headrest, eyes bloodshot, face as gray as the sodden ashes of fireworks the day after the Fourth of July. “You remember from last summer how it is, how helpless you feel, how frustrated.”

  “I remember,” Hilary replied. She thought, So Arthur had more than feet of clay. Devoid of accountability, like all men. Most men. Mark had loved his daughter—he simply hadn’t loved her mother. If men didn’t separate sex from love, they wouldn’t cause so many problems.

  Lucia’s house was an oasis of normality, white clapboards and red shutters playing peek-a-boo with the leaves of the huge oak. Hilary turned into the driveway and stopped. “You need to get some sleep.”

  “Good idea. Maybe I’ll wake up and find it was all a bad dream.”

  “I hope so.”

  Mark’s brow furrowed with the effort to explain. “Last night, Hilary, Jenny asked me to come over. She’d seen the ghost, the woman in Victorian clothing, on the staircase. She’s been aware of something supernatural at Osborne all along, she just never admitted it.”

  “I’m not surprised that Jenny would see something, or that she’d not want to talk about it. I bet she didn’t tell the police, did she?”

  “No, she didn’t. But there was one thing she did tell them. That I told them, too.”

  “Yes?” Hilary had the queasy sensation he was walking her along the edge of a cliff.

  Mark looked right and left, up and down, as though hearing the swish of a descending blade. He said, “Jenny and I were in bed together when Nathan was killed.”

  Hilary scrabbled for purchase on the rim of the cliff and then fell into space. “You mean you and Jenny were….”

  “Making love? Having sex? Yeah. While poor Nathan was being cut to pieces in the front parlor and while you were alone with your folks’ problems.” The toothpaste scent of Mark’s breath didn’t quite cover a sour smell, that of stale wine and acidified spices.

  So that was the joke. And it was on her. Hilary stared at the house next to Lucia’s. Chimes hung from the porch roof, ringing gaily below the rustle of the leaves. Beyond the rooftops and the trees the sky arched blue, brittle, indifferent. She hadn’t expected her thesis on men, sex, and love to be so instantly proved. She ought to feel something—jealousy, envy, anger. But this revelation came like a pop quiz, and she hadn’t studied.

  “It was just a one-time thing,” Mark went on, his hand hovering at her shoulder. “It was completely separate from you and me. It’s over and done with, as if nothing happened.”

  “No,” Hilary told him. “Something happened.”

  Mark’s hand fell away. He looked out his own window toward Lucia’s garden fence. Pink roses peeked over the top.

  Mark had good taste, Hilary told herself; Jenny was someone she liked and admired. It wasn’t as though she and Mark had made any commitments. She’d told him in so many words he had no responsibility to her. Men were held hostage by their gonads; they enjoyed sex. Her girlfriends enjoyed sex. Jenny, obviously, enjoyed sex. Hilary imagined an airbrushed version of the scene, the bed moving rhythmically, the coupled bodies glistening with pleasure, voices saying “Oh!” just as her own voice had once. Only once. And that had been her voice alone.

  Now Hilary understood the accounts she’d read of mortally wounded soldiers feeling no pain. “It’s all right. I know how frustrated you are with me. I wasn’t there for you, and she was. You were there for her.”

  “God, Hilary,” Mark exclaimed, “just once will you stop being so bloody composed? Bawl me out, throw something at me, hit me upside the head, but don’t blame yourself!”

  “I’m sorry.” Odd, she wasn’t even breathing. Free-fall. Zero gravity. Dislocation. Nothing. “Get out of the car, please, Mark.”

  “Hilary….”

  “Get out.”

  He got out, shut the door, and stood beside the driveway, hands rammed deep in his pockets, jaw tight, eyes brimming with pain and pride, anger and chagrin.

  Very carefully Hilary drove back to her condo, averting her eyes as she passed Osborne House. She’d only been gone a few days, but the condo seemed subtly altered, like an optical illusion. Too many new patterns at once, she told herself. Psychic jet lag.

  She scrubbed her fingertips with a nail brush until they were pink again. Then she unpacked her bag. Her clothes smelled of disinfectant and smoke. She piled them in the washing machine. Placing her books on an empty shelf, she promised herself she’d get the rest as soon as she had a permanent place to live. She watered the plants and dusted. The clock read one-thirty.

  Exercise relieved stress. She walked the four blocks to the grocery store, where she bought bread and vegetables but not ice cream—she had to pinch her pennies, after all. She carried everything back, put it away, and moved the clothes from the washer to the dryer. Three o’clock.

  Hilary took her knitting bag and sat down on the couch in the living room. The cushion still held the imprint of her own heels, ground into the fabric in that moment of rapture the night of the reception. She picked up the cushion, pounded it vigorously, and replaced it upside down. That’s a man for you. Sex isn’t any more meaningful than a sneeze….

  She fell out of space and hit the earth, splattering like road kill across a pavement. Ben had ripped away her sexuality. Mark had given her recovery to someone else. She’d trusted him, and he’d betrayed her. He really was like all men. And, to add injury to insult, she would never have known about his infidelity if Nathan hadn’t died. She valued the truth, yes, and she’d gotten the truth right between the eyes. So had Jenny. But gloating over Jenny’s anguish sickened her.

  Gritting her teeth, Hilary pulled out the half-completed sweater and envisioned cramming it down Mark’s throat. It might make her feel better, but it wouldn’t help anything. She picked up the TV remote.

  Nothing was on the commercial channels but sports, Westerns, and monster movies. On PBS a calm voice behind scenes of slicing and dicing machinery described how to make a wooden rocker. Her wrists flicked the knitting needles and her fingers manipulated the yarn, blunting the whetted edge of her nerves. Nathan was dead,
her own problems were trivial.

  Nathan was dead. Maybe someone had stalked and killed him. Why? Not for the photo of Pamela. Not for the sweater. Not for the figure from the Cross, although the murderer might not have known Nathan had it in his pocket. Maybe the murderer was a casual passer-by. Nathan left the door unlocked, and a burglar had been watching the house and slipped inside. No, watching the house suggested premeditation. So did someone’s taking the crate with the figure from Jenny’s closet, even if that someone hadn’t been after Nathan.

  His death hadn’t been a random murder, Hilary concluded, and loosened the too-taut stitches on the knitting needle. She had known a murderer last summer. She didn’t want to know another. Mark wasn’t the killer, she assured herself—he was a sex-crazed rat, not a murderer. It wasn’t Jenny, Miss Ripe and Available. It wasn’t not Preston or Leslie, Lucia or Gilbert.

  The dryer buzzed. She was cremating her cotton blends. As Hilary rescued her clothing, the phone rang and she jumped like grasshopper. Mark? She didn’t want to talk to him.

  It rang again. Cautiously she picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Baby?” said Olivia’s voice. “What’s going on? Some lady detective named Zapata just called me, asked me when you’d left here this morning.”

  Hilary tried not to be irritated; Zapata was doing her job. “My boss, Nathan Sikora, was found—er—dead last night. Zapata’s just checking on where everyone was. I’ve already talked with her. No problem.”

  “Well, if you’re sure. I won’t tell your father. It might upset him.”

  Unless he sees it in the newspaper, Hilary thought. But he might not make the connection with Daddy’s little girl. “Thanks for calling, Mother.”

  Back in the living room Hilary found that the woodworking program had been succeeded by one on gardening. She glanced dubiously at the patio door, but it was closed and locked, the broom handle wedged into its track. Jenny was alone with only the little cat at haunted Osborne. I’d never be able to take it, Hilary told herself. You’re a better woman than I am, Jenny Galliard…. She realized she’d dropped a stitch two rows back and laboriously retrieved it. Yes, Jenny was the better woman in more ways than one. Mark had certainly taken advantage of that, hadn’t he?

  From the television came a new voice, this one droning about sizing, wallpaper, and sheetrock. Hilary’s head throbbed. Unlike mortally wounded soldiers who felt nothing, she survived to hurt. Unlike Nathan, who no longer felt anything at all. Now, safely alone, she laid down her knitting and cried, for him, for herself, for all the innocent victims of life and love and rage.

  Seven o’clock. Dusk thickened outside. Hilary washed her swollen face. She fixed herself a sandwich, consumed it, and went through the condo checking windows, closets, and under the bed. She threaded the end of a new ball of yarn into the sweater. A cooking show segued into a science program, Casablanca, and finally Dr. Who. Hilary watched and knitted, her eyes crossed, her wrists sore, her mind echoing, drained of all emotion.

  When she went to bed, she lay staring at the bedposts thrusting into the darkness and listening to the wind caressing the limbs of the trees below the window. At last she slipped into dreams of glittering knives and grasping, grunting bodies.

  By Sunday morning Hilary felt as though she’d run a marathon. Groaning, she crawled downstairs and brought in the newspaper. An article on the front page was headlined, “Lloyd Curator Murder Victim.” She scanned it worriedly, but Jenny’s revelation had yet to reach the ears of the media. Zapata was well and truly in charge of the case.

  Hilary was lingering over the bright, uncomplicated world of the comics when the doorbell rang. Through the fish-eye distortion of the peephole she saw Mark. His face was as drawn as that of an animal forced to gnaw off its own leg to escape a trap. Pretending she wasn’t there would let the wound develop gangrene. She opened the door. “Hi.”

  His face seemed too stiff to smile. He lifted his guitar with one hand and a paper sack with the other. “It’s a pretty day. Would you like to have a picnic in the Botanical Gardens?”

  This was as close to groveling as she’d ever get from Mark; his stubborn pride was something she’d always admired, after all. “If I’m going to hit you,” she told him, “I’d rather do it in private.”

  With an exhalation that could’ve been either relief or reluctance, Mark followed her through the living room. The back yard was the size of a commemorative stamp. A cottonwood tree soared above the fence, its leaves laughing, strewing bits of white fluff on the breeze. Purple martins indulged in matrimonial aerobatics around their miniature condo.

  Mark laid sub sandwiches, tortilla chips, a can of Coke for her, and a can of Dr. Pepper for himself on the umbrella-topped table. Hilary pulled up a couple of lawn chairs. They munched, exchanging looks as quick as a wet finger on a hot iron.

  “I walked over to Osborne,” Mark said at last, “and got my van. It was in the garage. I didn’t want to have to scrape ice off the windshield Friday night. I hadn’t intended to spend the night there. Jenny asked me to stay with her. It was spontaneous combustion.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘just say no’?” Hilary used a chip to scrape up a little pile of lettuce.

  “She wanted me. I wanted her. I’m not going to explain or apologize. I told you, it didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “If you’d been sleeping with me, would you have slept with her?”

  “Hell.” He shoved back his chair, took his guitar out of its case, and began tuning it. The plinks and plunks reverberated in the warm air. His body radiated irritation. The sun edged past noon, its light filtering through the cottonwood and filling the yard with an odd underwater luminescence. An odor of charcoal and barbecue sauce hung in the air as a neighbor enacted the ritual Sunday cookout.

  Hilary rested her chin on her hand and her elbow on the table, watching Mark’s fingers move on the guitar strings. They had played her, once. They had no doubt played Jenny just as well. “How could you hurt me like that? Why don’t you just plunge a knife into me?”

  “There’s a Freudian image,” Mark retorted. “You act as though I deliberately hurt you, as though I studied ways and means for a month before I found the best way—the worst way—to do it. You just don’t understand, do you, what it means to want and need someone.” His fingers began playing “Seventeen Come Sunday”.

  “I do understand. I want you desperately. But I’m like Tantalus, in the Greek myth, starving to death with the fruit just beyond his reach.”

  “You’re punishing yourself because of what Ben did to you. You’re punishing me because I have the same plumbing he does.”

  “Men think they have a right to sex, don’t they? All they want, whenever they want it, and let the woman pay the price.”

  The song ended on a crashing discord. Mark looked up from below his brows, irritation becoming anger. “I know better than that. I’ve never been anything but considerate of you.”

  What the hell did he have to be angry about? She was the plaintiff! “Sure. Hitting me when I’m down. I felt like I’d really made some kind of breakthrough in Indianapolis. I was coming back to you, coming home to you.”

  “Hilary,” he said, “I love you.”

  She crossed her arms protectively. “Damn funny way of showing it.”

  “I wasn’t trying to show it, not then. Now I am. Take it or leave it.” Mark strummed tunelessly, then began “Amazing Grace”.

  Hilary paced across the patio. She and Mark might as well have been on opposite sides of an abyss, trying to communicate with smoke signals. The smoke of their burning nerves, she told herself. It was almost funny. Jenny, with her mordant wit, would appreciate the humor.

  Hilary wondered suddenly if Mark doubted Jenny’s motives for approaching him Friday night. She’d been troubled by the ghost, by living in her father’s house, and by the burden of the ivory figure. Odd way to get reassurance, seducing a co-worker…. Well no. Hilary could understand that much,
why Jenny liked Mark. He knew what it meant to hurt.

  Mark had probably fallen asleep. If so, he hadn’t really been with Jenny the entire time. Surely he wasn’t wondering if Jenny actually had killed Nathan. Jenny was troubled, yes. Aren’t we all? Hilary asked herself caustically. But Jenny hadn’t killed Nathan. Over and beyond the logical objections she herself had made, Jenny was no murderer. If Mark thought she might be, his own guilt was speaking. And that was probably as loud as it would ever speak.

  Hilary leaned back against the cool glass of the patio door. With the fence cutting off the breeze, the yard was growing hot. The purple martins had decided it was siesta time. Even the cottonwood dozed, leaves muttering. Mark played “Look Away”. “I’m coming back,” Hilary hummed. “I’m coming back, though I go ten thousand miles.”

  One of these days she’d wake up and discover that like Everett, she too, was an old tortoise trapped in nets of belligerence and suspicion, incapable of any emotion except anger. She’d already decided not to expect too much of either herself or Mark.

  “You hurt me,” she repeated wearily.

  He finished the verse and looked up, his gray eyes silver in the reflected sunlight. “I’m sorry. That I hurt you, not for anything else. But I proved years ago that I’m no good with relationships.”

  “You didn’t prove a thing—you got burned, same as I did. Now you’re afraid of the emotional just as I’m afraid of the physical. Jenny didn’t ask anything of you. I do. Maybe too much. Men! Always separating the emotional and the physical!”

  “Well excuse me!” Mark said, but he looked up with a rueful smile. “I never promised you a rose garden, now did I?”

  Despite herself Hilary laughed. “I sure didn’t promise you one.”

  “Just a garden of thorns?” He shook his head. “Let’s go on over to the Botanical Gardens. It’s cooler there beneath the trees. We can take the crumbs and feed the goldfish.”

  “Just as long as we’re not pretending nothing happened.”