Garden of Thorns

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Through the open window drifted the sound of the wind in the oak leaves, and the chimes next door, and the dove calling sweet nothings to its mate. Hilary wasn’t sure Mark was breathing. She knew she wasn’t. Something in her loins reached critical mass and started to melt down. Any desire she ever felt before had been only a hint of the real thing.

  Mark laid his forehead against her thigh and shut his eyes. Pure agony tightened his face. He was brave enough to admit pain. He was strong enough to show tenderness. To surrender to him was to admit not defeat, but victory. “Mark,” Hilary whispered.

  He looked up, asking nothing, expecting nothing.

  She took his hand and laid it on the buttons of her blouse. “I love you. I’ve been taking birth control pills anticipating this moment. I want you. Please.”

  His gravity was transformed into a dazzling grin, the elation of a pilgrim seeing the pearly gates open at last. Hilary laughed, at him and at herself, and went willingly when he urged her toward the bedroom.

  The open windows were squares of translucence, summoning a dusky glow from the brass head and footboards of the bed. Mark’s lips were hot against hers, against her ears and eyes and throat, bellows brightening the fire in her belly. Every inch of her skin was supernaturally sensitive; even the dull itch of the ant bites seemed an exquisite tease. She wasn’t quite sure how he managed to evaporate her blouse, or her skirt and petticoat, and she was embarrassed for a moment when she remembered she was wearing plain cotton underwear. But then that, too, was gone, and she felt the incredible rush of her bare chest pressed against his.

  She lay down on the bed, the sheets cool against the fever of her skin. Mark’s slacks hit the floor with a thud, and then he was lying against her, holding her suspended in time and space.

  “I’m all right,” she wheezed into his ear. Yes, the visualization therapy had worked, she’d fantasized this scene so many times that the reality wasn’t a shock but a culmination. Funny though, she hadn’t expected her mouth to be so dry. That must be her voice making those incoherent squeaks and murmurs.

  “Love you,” Mark said into her ear, more with his lips and tongue than with his voice. “God, sweetness, I love you….”

  His hands moved swiftly and surely across her body, finding sensitive places she’d been only dimly aware she had, smoothly arranging and rearranging her limbs in relation to his own. She couldn’t quite replicate his movements, and at last stopped trying, simply holding the smooth muscle of his upper arms to steady herself. Yes, she’d fantasized this, the minuet of love. And yet she had the vague feeling Mark wasn’t dancing a minuet but a waltz. Well, he was experienced, he knew the routine, and she didn’t….

  He spread himself over her, pressing her into the bed, his urgent breath stirring her hair. “You all right, sweetness?”

  “Yes, yes, don’t stop.” It was hardly fair to stop him now, she told herself. Relax, it’s Mark, he won’t hurt you.

  Lights flashed across the ceiling of the room as a car turned into the driveway. The ceiling lights had been on in her bedroom that night. Laughing voices echoed distantly—Lucia’s family coming home—the television tuned to a sitcom….

  Mark hurt her. Her gasp, more of surprise and dismay than pain, mingled with his sharp inhalation of delight. No, something screamed in her stomach, no, it wasn’t supposed to be like this!

  Mark was miles away; he’d waltzed onto a transport of passion and left her standing at the curb. She gritted her teeth—no, thinking about Regensfeld didn’t help…. Doors slammed outside. The lights went out. The voices died away. Ben’s body crushed and stabbed her. No, no!

  Mark shuddered, sobbed something into her hair, and relaxed. For a few moments he was dead weight on top of her, gasping for breath. Then he raised his head and turned her face toward his. “Hilary?”

  She was trembling violently. Her hands were claws tearing at the sheets. Not only could she no longer feel Mark’s body, she couldn’t feel her own.

  “Hilary!” He pulled away from her and brushed her hair back from her face. “Oh God, I hurt you, didn’t I?”

  A cool breeze drew goose flesh from her skin. Despite her racing breath, her lungs were empty. Her head spun. She tasted lemon and camphor in the back of her throat. It was called post-traumatic stress in the self-help manuals. It had never occurred to her to visualize this as well.

  The kernel in her stomach detonated. Hilary cramped into a ball. Her mind retched. Hot, dry sobs ripped through her chest, burst from her throat, and sent waves of pressure through her head as though it, too, would explode.

  Mark folded her in his arms.

  “My parents, they should’ve protected me,” she gasped. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t.”

  “No.” Mark’s voice was scraped raw with emotion.

  “Ben had no right to touch me. He had no right to hurt me.”

  “No. No one does. No one.”

  Her body heaved in his arms, racked by anguished but silent screams. Tears spurted from her eyes, drenched her face, and ran hot and salty into her mouth. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!”

  “No, it wasn’t….” Mark’s voice broke.

  He wasn’t pushing her away in disgust. He was grieving with her. She grasped for her sanity and clung desperately to its edge. Her spasms slowed and stopped. Her sobbing died away. Sensation flowed back into her body. The fire in her belly had gone out, and Mark’s skin against hers was comforting, not stimulating. Odd, how it felt to lie naked in a naked man’s arms. She’d needed that comfort, not only the heat of the flesh, but its peace. “I’m sorry,” she said with a hiccup.

  “No, I’m sorry. I got into too big a hurry. I was afraid you’d change your mind.” He dashed away the moisture in his own eyes. “You scared me. You looked like a character in a B movie expelling a demon.”

  “Maybe I was.”

  “Let it go, sweetness. Please.”

  “I’m trying. Really I am.”

  Mark kissed her and then got up. His steps padded away into the darkness. Hilary heard the snick of the lock on the front door and water running in the bathroom. When he returned, he wiped her face with a cool cloth, then moved downward across her body, cleaning it of sweat, tears, and blood, too, she realized; she’d healed a little more than she’d have liked after Ben’s attack. He murmured more apologies and went on to her feet. The ant bites seemed to have been shocked out of itching.

  “I’ve seen monkeys grooming each other,” Hilary said drowsily. “Must be some kind of primate instinct.”

  “I’ll take mine in back rubs,” Mark told her. “Next time.”

  “Next time?”

  “Yes.” He climbed into the bed and drew the covers over them both. “I do love you, Hilary. That wasn’t a line.”

  “I love you, too…” Her words were muffled by a yawn. Every muscle in her body sagged like a rubber band stretched too far, too often. She felt as though she were being sucked into the bed. She lay back in Mark’s arms and slept.

  She dreamed they were strolling through a green pasture. Rosebushes sprouted from their steps, grew and blossomed and sprayed clouds of petals over them. But the odor of the roses was oddly metallic, and when the petals fell they thunked like slamming doors. Car headlights flashed and the roses vanished beneath roaring wheels. An icy cloth struck Hilary’s cheeks.

  The cloth was a band around her head, growing tighter and tighter like some kind of Inquisition torture, and she couldn’t tell her torturers what they wanted to hear because they didn’t ask any questions, they just kept calling her name over and over.

  With a hideous twisting heave of her stomach, Hilary woke up and saw a fiendishly distorted face looking down at her. No, that wasn’t a gaping mouth, that was a broad black moustache. She knew that face.

  “Hilary!” said Gilbert Hernandez. “Hilary, wake up!” And, to someone lost in a glare of light behind him, “Open the windows wider, Astrid. Mamacita….”

  His face vanished. Lucia se
ized Hilary’s shoulders and yanked her up against the headboard of the bed. The cold metal poles stabbed into her shoulders. The washcloth hit her face again. Her head throbbed, and her stomach flopped like a fish pulled onto a river bank. “Mark?” she tried to say, but her mouth was filled with acrid glue.

  “Mark, Mark,” Gilbert’s voice was saying now. “Wake up.”

  “Whazzama’er?” asked Mark. He leaned heavily against Hilary. She tried to shove him aside—people are watching us—must be the greatest show on Earth. Her stomach was hideously distorted, and the pain in her head wavered down and up into a crescendo like an approaching siren. Surely this wasn’t what usually happened after sex.

  Feet pounded up the staircase. Lucia vanished and reappeared with an old terry cloth bathrobe, which she crammed Hilary into like a rag doll. The room teemed with people, uniforms, medical instruments. “What happened?” asked a voice.

  “I stayed up late watching a movie,” said Gilbert. “When I went into the kitchen to get me a bagel and cream cheese, I heard my car. I couldn’t figure, so I came out to look. There was it was, engine roaring away, garage door shut. I thought of Mark up here asleep, and carbon monoxide and everything, so I ran back into the house to get the keys.”

  “I never again want to hear Mark complaining about drafts in the winter,” Lucia said. “If this place wasn’t so well ventilated, they’d be dead.”

  An oxygen mask covered Hilary’s mouth and nose. Delectable, clean fresh air flowed into her throat. Beside her Mark groaned and swore.

  Hands pulled her from the bed and laid her down on something flat, like an ironing board. No, a stretcher. Her stomach slopped into her chest cavity, and her head crashed onto the pillow like an anvil, sending a wave of pain against her eyes. She made a weak sound of protest.

  “You’re going to be all right,” said Lucia. “Mark’s going to be all right.” And, aside, “Gil, call Rosalind Zapata.”

  Great, Hilary thought. Everyone in town knows that Mark and I finally did it.

  Great. Someone just tried to kill us.

  She slipped again into a nightmare.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The sky was gun-metal gray, muting the colors of the trees and flowers, and the wind smelled musty with distant rain. Mark told himself he should never have trusted last evening’s postcard-perfect weather; trust was at a premium. He locked the door of his van and trudged past only one other car toward Osborne’s kitchen door. He’d timed his arrival for the students’ lunch break, but someone was still here.

  His muscles ached, and the ground swayed beneath his feet. A metallic flavor, part taste, part smell, lingered in his nose and mouth. The crunch of the oak leaves buffeted his brain. Swearing, he stopped and closed his eyes.

  He wanted to personally apply various instruments of torture to whoever it was who’d tried to kill Hilary and him. Of course, Zapata would take a dim view of that. It was Her Case. So where the hell had she been when a shadow crept up the stairway to his apartment and, finding the door locked, had turned to the garage?

  That was thunder—great, it was going to rain…. Mark opened his eyes and looked through the trees to see a B-52 bomber drifting down the wind toward Carswell Air Force base. Okay, so it wasn’t going to rain. And he didn’t know whether anyone had tried the door. Not that that made him any less grateful for locking it. While his Swiss Army knife had its uses, fending off a bowie knife wasn’t one of them.

  Still swearing—by clinging to rage he might forget fear—Mark plodded on toward the house. He was beginning to think his libido had a curse on it; the act of unzipping his pants attracted death and disaster. And poor Hilary! He’d at last played Prince Charming, fighting his way through the thorns that surrounded her and waking her with a kiss. The encounter had begun as sublimely as he’d ever imagined it would. But he’d been too overcome by the moment to pace himself. He’d awakened her, all right.

  A chunk of lava slid from one side of Mark’s skull to the other, making him wince. Next time, he’d told her. I love you. Strange how his desire had been transformed into commitment. He paused on the kitchen steps, probing that concept. It actually rang true. Count on Hilary to slip into a void in his heart he hadn’t recognized was there.

  From inside Jenny’s voice snapped, “Come off it.” Without bothering to knock, Mark flung open the door.

  Yeager and Zapata, back in pin-striped formality, sat on one side of the table. Earlier they had accosted Mark and Hilary in the hospital emergency room; Zapata had been in her “just the facts” mode, irritated that their answers were so fuzzy. When the detectives left he’d assumed they’d crawled back under their rock, but no, here they were harassing Jenny.

  She sat opposite them, her head sunk in her hands. Mark looked around for the truncheons and the rubber hoses. All he saw was Zapata’s open notebook and Graymalkin crouching on the chair by the fireplace, evidently imagining herself a porcupine.

  Jenny looked up. “Mark—how are you feeling?”

  “Like I was dragged through a barbed-wire fence backwards.”

  “I told you you were in danger,” Yeager said. “Someone knows you know about the fake artifacts. A killer rarely hesitates to kill again.”

  Quelling a wave of nausea, Mark slammed the door and walked to the table. He grasped the back of Jenny’s chair to steady himself.

  “I hope you see the connection between the attack on Mark and Hilary last night and the one on me,” Jenny said to Zapata.

  Mark asked, “Attack on you?”

  “Someone was here about one this morning,” Jenny explained. “Every door was locked, including the connecting one, but we already know the killer has keys. This time, though, he also had the misfortune to tread on the moggie. That’s what woke me, the cat yowling and a crash. But by the time I put on the light, the bloke was gone. Lucia’s sculpture was broken—I daresay he knocked it from the mantelpiece when he fell. And this morning I found the nursery monitor gone from the staircase.”

  Mark considered the shattered bones of the Day of the Dead sculpture spread out across the mantel, and Graymalkin’s aggrieved expression below. The old icebox/ivy planter was now blocking the connecting door. Jenny must have been terrifed to have moved such a heavy object alone. “Well done,” he said to the cat and Jenny both.

  “Mr. Hernandez found Mark and Hilary about one o’clock,” Zapata stated. “Vasarian was asleep at his hotel, Dolores at her house, Kenneth at his condo, Sharon and Travis at their house—I suppose the Wards can alibi each other.” She frowned, discounting her own supposition. “Dr. Bradshaw’s wife vouched for him. And Dr. Galliard….”

  “Graymalkin,” said Jenny, “can’t exactly provide me an alibi.”

  “Jenny didn’t kill Nathan,” Mark asserted, and was pleased that at last that concept also rang true. “She sure as hell didn’t try to kill Hilary and me. Why would she?”

  “Jealousy?” Yeager suggested with a smirk.

  Good God, the man thought Mark was some kind of Casanova, lusting after every available female. Zapata glanced skeptically at her colleague. Jenny’s mouth crimped with pity for the hopelessly befuddled.

  Yeager subsided with a shrug. “It’s helpful to know the killer won’t tackle an alert victim, even with a bowie knife.”

  “Not if you’re next on his list,” Mark said. “Seems to me the turkey started Gil’s car and then came over here, planning to eliminate everyone who knows about the forgeries. He didn’t know we’d already told you.”

  “That wouldn’t matter,” said Zapata. “Revenge is a motive.”

  “There’s only one explanation. This house is like a sieve. Anyone could have been listening at the connecting door when Hilary told us about the artifacts.” Jenny slumped back in her chair. Mark’s hand was still on its back. They touched and jerked away from each other.

  “Hilary hinted to Bradshaw,” Mark said. “And who knows how much Vasarian figured out?” He resisted looking over his shoulder toward the door. S
oon he’d be seeing spies under the bed.

  Jenny nodded toward a plastic collection bag. “Then I found that in the garage this morning.”

  Mark held the bag to the light. That wasn’t a lump of charcoal but a charred and dirty gold ring. Protuberances on one side must be gemstones; one had been rubbed clean, and glinted translucent crimson. He swallowed, and coughed acid from his throat. “A garnet ring. Nineteenth-century style. Could it be your mother’s, Jenny?”

  “It certainly looks like it,” she replied.

  “The ring was Felicia’s before it was Pamela’s,” said Zapata. “Pamela must have found out it wasn’t really Arthur’s to give, and returned it to him. But he never gave it back to Felicia.”

  “Why was it in the garage when it burned?” Yeager asked.

  Mark saw the shimmer of a television screen and heard his parents arguing in the next room. “Felicia was killed the night the garage burned. You suppose she set it on fire herself, out of spite? I know they said it was a defective space heater, but…”

  “The investigation wasn’t as thorough as it might have been. Felicia’s murder had priority.” Zapata’s eye glinted with sardonic humor. She turned to another page in her notebook and inspected her own tight, controlled handwriting. “Arthur was working in the garage that night, he testified. He realized he was late for a Foundation meeting and hurried out, leaving the heater on, which subsequently ignited something. Fine and dandy. But when I ran the file photos past our arson squad, they said the heater was as charred inside as out. It had been packed with some flammable substance. The question is, if the fire was deliberate, why?”

  “The heater should still be out there,” concluded Yeager, “bulldozed with the rest.”

  Outside, a car door slammed. Through the window Mark saw Hilary walking gingerly toward the house. When they’d been discharged from the hospital a couple of hours ago, she’d been worrying about being late for work.