Garden of Thorns

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Mark had been rather surprised this morning to wake up an adult, not an eleven-year-old boy; his life hadn’t collapsed back on itself like the Escher video. He turned his back on the psychic black hole that posed as a house and went doggedly from each test trench to the next, checking on the students. The only dramatic findings were those in the garage ruins.

  Preston mopped his face. “How’s Vasarian?”

  “He’ll be okay. And believe it or not, he’s a cop, working for Interpol, the European FBI.”

  “Okay, fine,” said Preston dubiously and, while Mark filled him in, went on placing Juan Esparza’s ribs into their foam-lined box.

  Jenny inspected the boxes of carving, molding, and general all-purpose faking equipment, her features sharpened by contained emotion. Hilary touched up Preston’s sketches, her face compressed with calm and composure. Mark felt as though he were about to explode. He put the rings into a jeweler’s box; one of these two, or the one Jenny had already found, must’ve been the one Pamela had returned.

  Before long his chill had ebbed and his T-shirt was sticking to his back. The sky was a muted blue, the horizon blotted with smog. The breeze was fitful, scented with something spoiled, as though Osborne and its grounds were downwind from a landfill. But instead of gulls squawking over the garbage, the carrion crows of old nightmares circled Osborne, coming home to roost. Mark looked suspiciously up at the resident grackles. They grated back, unconcerned.

  “Let me do that,” Jenny said to Preston. “Bones are friable, especially after having been partially cremated, but a skull will collapse of its own weight.”

  Preston backed away. The students gathered around, their expressions ranging from morbid curiosity to queasiness. Jenny worked her hands under the skull, one below the vault, the other below the upper jaw, and lifted.

  “Alas, poor Juan,” said Mark. Hilary shot him an indignant look, but didn’t reprove his gallows humor.

  Jenny laid the skull in the box. “At least he can finally go home.” She stood, dusted her hands, and sent a level look at the house as though defying its definition of home.

  Intent on food, the students formed a phalanx and broke through the encircling reporters. Mark armed Amy and Hong with enough money to bring back sandwiches and drinks; it didn’t seem right to walk away and leave Esparza, now that he had an identity and was no longer a study in physical anthropology.

  Mark, Jenny, and Preston kept on collecting bits of bone and buttons from the soil. Hilary said over the drawing board, “I feel kind of sorry for Vasarian. He intended to blow the case open, but instead he became its latest victim. He sure is brave, hanging out with a bunch of murderers.”

  “I don’t doubt his courage,” said Mark. “But he should’ve told the truth right up front. We don’t need any wild cards in this game.”

  “Is he telling the truth now?” Jenny asked. “He might have winkled out something about the Cross, or Dolores, and be keeping it to himself. He might know where the real artifacts are.”

  Preston dumped another rivet into a plastic bag. “Lot of good they’ll do him now, when he’s laid up in the hospital.”

  “He kept them from being looted,” said Hilary. “And if he doesn’t have much to testify against the Coburgs, neither is he going to alibi them.”

  “He got Nathan killed,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “Well, no, you could say just as well that I got Nathan killed.”

  “We can drive ourselves crazy looking for someone to blame,” Mark pointed out. “What we need to do is….” He couldn’t find an end to his sentence. That irritated him.

  He sat back on his heels and considered Osborne House, aloof behind its veil of trees like an old woman hiding her sour disposition behind clothing and cosmetics. Its dormers and windows and the funny little tower made it a three-dimensional optical illusion. An illusion in time and space, with its resident ghosts. Most old houses had ghost stories, if not real ghosts. Even remodeling didn’t get rid of lingering spirits; Mark had read more than one account of ghostly figures trudging along knee-deep in a floor, walking on the surface they’d grown accustomed to in life.

  Not that Osborne had been remodeled. The room used as Sharon’s and Kenneth’s nursery had been papered and painted, but Arthur had allowed only the kitchen to be changed substantially….

  “Earth to Mark!” Hilary’s hand was on his shoulder. Jenny was watching Zapata advance across the debris. She was coming from the side away from York Boulevard.

  As soon as she was in earshot, she explained, “Anyone could leave a car on one of those residential streets behind the house and cut through someone’s back yard to get here. I’ve got Frank going from door to door, asking if anyone spotted a Cadillac parked there last night.”

  “I would imagine there are paths up to the back of the house,” said Jenny, “that look like the M1 Motorway.”

  “How are you coming with the bones?” Zapata went on.

  “We have a name for them.” Jenny told her about Lucia’s report and averted the aggravated roll of Zapata’s eyes by pointing out the gold tooth, the fractured arm, and the well-developed left arm and hand.

  Mark turned back toward the house, tapping his trowel against his leg. An idea coalesced in his mind like a planet from interstellar dust. He laid down his trowel, scrounged among the supplies in the toolshed, and found the tape measure.

  By this time Preston and the three women were watching him quizzically. He offered them a sickly grin. “I’m going to measure the rooms in the house, see if there’re any—well, secret rooms or passages or whatever. Remember how Arthur wouldn’t let the place be remodeled?”

  Jenny groaned. “I never thought of that!”

  “I know it’s a long shot,” Mark informed her. “But there’s no reason not to try it. We’re desperate. May I have the keys?”

  She pitched the keys to him. “Good luck.”

  Mark started toward the house. After the first few steps he realized he was going in there alone. But he could hardly turn around now and ask for company….

  Footsteps hurried up beside him. “Can I help?” Hilary asked.

  Her brave smile might have been just a bit stiff, but he was glad to see it. “Sure. Come on.”

  “Good luck,” called Zapata and Preston simultaneously.

  Mark and Hilary let themselves in the front door. Nothing had changed since they’d been there an hour ago; the atmosphere of the house was dense with decay and despair. Mark turned left into the shadows of the music room, took out the tape measure, and flipped one end to Hilary. She held her end against the baseboard. The lid of the piano was closed. Neither of them opened it.

  They worked their way from music room to drawing room, from dining room to conservatory, and rushed their survey of the parlor. By now, Mark reflected, the floorboards should have one of those supernatural bloodstains that couldn’t be scrubbed away. But the dusty air was scented with bleach rather than with blood.

  They measured the entry and then sat on the staircase to add up the numbers Hilary had recorded on a scrap of drawing paper. “Fireplaces,” Mark muttered. “Closets. Stairs. Okay, we’ve got a number for this floor.”

  “Excelsior,” said Hilary, gesticulating upward.

  He kissed her nose and they walked up to Arthur’s study. The smudged glass of the cabinet doors distorted their moving shapes. Only a hint of sunshine and warmth penetrated the dim chill of the room. Hilary stood at the base of the turret stairs and looked up. Mark could almost see the hair standing erect on the back of her neck. “Let’s go,” she said.

  He didn’t ask whether she’d sensed Arthur occupying his easy chair in the turret room. They went from room to room on the second floor, allowed space for plumbing, and added all their figures together. Their sum matched the measurements of the first floor.

  Yeah, Mark thought, this is working out just swell. He and Hilary plodded up to the attic. Here, at least, it was stuffy but warm, and the dirty windows radiated daylight. The f
loor creaked gently beneath their feet. The workmen poking holes in the walls hadn’t gotten here yet. Mark and Hilary went through each of the forlorn little servants’ rooms and added in the dormers. The sum Mark wrote on the paper was six feet less than the numbers for the first and second floor.

  Hilary said, “You were right. There’s another room up here. Didn’t Jenny say this was where she found the Ripper portfolio?”

  Mark wiped his forehead—no, he wasn’t yet sweating blood. He walked to one end of the attic and started rapping on the walls, wondering what he would do if anything rapped back. The secret room must be closed with a substantial enough door not to sound hollow, or Jenny would have found it.

  A hideous scraping made him jump out of his skin. “Sorry,” Hilary said, and propped one of the windows open with a stick. “I thought it would be nice if we had some air to breathe.”

  “Thanks.” The dust clogging Mark’s throat was swiftly hardening to concrete. He wasn’t sure he would be able to breathe even if he had air. His heart was thrumming so loudly in his ears that he didn’t hear Jenny and Zapata climbing the stairs until they were standing beside him.

  “We saw Hilary open the window,” Zapata explained. Jenny simply regarded him with her usual severe intelligence.

  I’m going to look like a complete idiot, Mark told himself. The thought of the house showing him up was worse than that of failing in front of Jenny, Hilary, and Zapata. “Must be at the other end,” he managed to say, and led the commendably quiet women to the farthest of the small rooms.

  In a corner was a closet, its protruding right angle taking up some of the already minimal floor space. Mark opened the door. The dark, musty, interior was festooned with cobwebs. The planks of the floor were smudged, but then, footprints covered all the attic floor. Mark scowled. Come on, give me a break…. He pulled out his Swiss Army knife, and with more frustration than science started slicing through the filthy wallpaper on the closet wall.

  When his knife snagged on metal it took him a moment to react. Squinting in the darkness, he peeled back the wallpaper and revealed a long rusty hinge. “All right!” said Hilary in his ear.

  Immediately the closet was crammed with people. Eight different hands moved up and down the wall. Which one found the catch concealed behind the baseboard, Mark couldn’t tell. “Open Sesame,” he proclaimed giddily.

  The door swung open. It was about four feet tall and two wide, a massive affair of brick on a wood frame. Mark wedged it open with Hilary’s scrap of paper. Jenny led them through the opening.

  An elusive scent of perfume tickled Mark’s nostrils. For a moment his vision went dark, and he remembered hearing the trill of the piano. “I smelled this perfume last night when we found Vasarian.”

  “You’re right,” said Hilary. “It’s Chanel No. 5. You had the Chanel dress at the reception, Jenny, but Dolores was wearing the perfume.”

  “She was, wasn’t she?” affirmed Jenny. “And she’s worn it since.”

  “Are you sure that’s what it is?” Zapata asked.

  “Yes,” said Hilary. “My brother always gives my mother a bottle for Christmas, even though she prefers a Guerlain eau de toilette.”

  “It’s not that stuff that Sharon wears, that smells like a wet dog,” Mark concluded.

  They clumped together inside the tiny room nestled beneath the eaves, the odor of perfume overwhelmed by that of mildew. Sunlight striped the walls, entering between the battens, and a loose shingle admitted a spill of light just as it had no doubt admitted rain—the floor was covered with worn, water-stained linoleum. Three plastic garbage sacks squatted along the wall.

  “Allow me.” Zapata reached into her shoulder bag for a pair of latex gloves, put them on, and opened the twist-tie on the first sack. She pulled out a complete Victorian costume, right down to the bonnet, pantaloons, and miniature ruffled purse containing a lace hankie. Everything was white, including the stockings —all three of them. “So much for your ghost. The third stocking was over her face, I bet. That would look pretty weird in a dim light.”

  Mark, Jenny, and Hilary sagged together, exchanging a look of mingled anger and embarrassment. “Dolores,” Jenny stated. “She’s been having us on.”

  “Not Dolores,” said Hilary. “Not if Vicky’s ghost has been here since the forties. She was just a little kid then.”

  “If we can have more than one killer, we can have more than one ghost.” Zapata opened the next sack. “Well, well—the Ripper portfolio.” She held it up. Inside the shiny cover, Mark saw the same letters and photographs Jenny had displayed in Osborne’s kitchen.

  “And a notebook….”

  Jenny snatched it from Zapata’s hand. “Arthur’s memoirs. I didn’t read them when I had the chance. Now I shall.”

  Zapata looked up, her mouth open as though to remonstrate. Jenny’s eyes looked like burning coals. “We’ll make copies for you,” the detective compromised. “There’re some more papers and books in here.”

  Mark and Hilary looked at the books and photocopied pages as Zapata held them up. The names of the authors were all too familiar; Preston had cited them in his stack of material. “Thomas Stowell,” said Mark, “the guy who first came up with the theory that Prince Eddy was Jack the Ripper. Michael Harrison, Stephen Knight, Joseph Sickert—they all expanded on the idea.”

  “That’s a novel on the same subject, Frank Spiering’s Prince Jack,” said Hilary. “Preston says it’s pretty racy, in a sick kind of way.”

  Zapata shut the book, thrust it back, and opened the third sack. The thick musky odor she released from it made her gasp, and the others step back. Holding her breath, she scrounged quickly and gingerly through its contents. “Black shirt, black pants. Stiff with what I’m willing to bet is Nathan’s blood. You couldn’t carve someone up like that without getting blood on you. And look. Nathan’s key to the front door.”

  Her voice was swallowed by the hush of the house. Mark visualized Dolores—or any one of the others, for that matter—brooding alone in this little room, above the earth but far from heaven. Into his mind came a line from an old Simon and Garfunkel song: “Silence like a cancer grows.”

  Jenny, her mouth crimped to a slit, walked out of the room without relinquishing the notebook. Briskly Zapata reclosed the bags. After a quick survey of the rest of the room and an experimental dig or two at the linoleum, she ushered the others out and shut the door.

  “This is where ‘Vicky’ vanished the night we chased her,” snarled Mark. “She was standing inside laughing at us.”

  “She’s spent altogether too much time with her ear to the kitchen door, laughing at us,” said Jenny darkly.

  “No Eleanor Cross,” Hilary went on. “But it would be sacrilege to keep it in that room.”

  “Hey! Rosalind!” Frank Yeager thundered into the attic. “Nobody saw any Cadillacs last night. You having any better luck?”

  Zapata told him all about it, her precise voice overriding any editorial comments the others offered.

  “Great!” Yeager replied. “I’ll order a forensics team. Good work!”

  If Zapata heard him, she didn’t react; she looked over her shoulder toward the room, eyes slitted.

  “It was Mark’s idea,” said Hilary, flourishing the tape measure.

  “Wasn’t much.” Mark had no trouble looking modest—the achievement seemed pretty thin, considering how stupid he felt for letting the “ghost” fool him. The entire house seemed like an elaborate fake. He wouldn’t be surprised if the walls dropped away like theatre scrims. He wished they would. Then everyone could simply get up and leave the auditorium, show over.

  They trekked down to the entry hall. Hilary shut and locked the front door behind them. As they walked around the side of the house they heard the phone ringing inside the kitchen. Still clutching the notebook, Jenny went to answer it. She looked out again a moment later. “It’s Lucia Hernandez. She’s quite upset, wants to speak to you, Detective.”

  Zapata he
aded inside. Graymalkin emerged with Jenny, wrinkled her nose, and whisked under the porch. Now what? Mark asked himself. Hilary contracted, drawing herself protectively inward.

  When Zapata came back her frown had metamorphosed into a ferocious glare. “Lucia’s son Gilbert is in the hospital. His brakes went out on Camp Bowie Boulevard. He’ll be all right, only caused a fender bender. The patrol officer says the brake line was cut clean as a whistle. It was no accident. Thank God his kids weren’t in the car with him.”

  Yeager swore. Jenny’s jaw went even tighter and whiter. Mark felt as though someone had punched him in the stomach. A good thing he hadn’t allowed himself to feel too much triumph over finding the secret room. “Just because the Hernandezes helped us, right? Rosalind, you have to put a guard on Lucia and Gilbert’s family. And on Preston….” He spun toward the dig. Sandwich in hand, Preston was shooing the returning students back to their stations. He saw the group by the back steps looking at him, and saluted them with his can of Dr. Pepper.

  “No,” said Zapata. “No. This is snowballing beyond belief. Soon I’ll be guarding the entire town. We’re spread too thin as it is.”

  “Have you any recommendations?” Jenny asked.

  “We’ve been sitting around like the proverbial ducks all this time,” added Hilary, “and things keep getting worse.”

  Zapata smiled. Mark had seen that smile carved on ancient Mayan stelae, on the faces of goddesses wielding ritual bloodletting tools. “So you continue to play ducks. Only this time, we’ll be waiting.”

  Mark, Jenny, and Hilary shared a dubious glance. Yeager’s brows went up. “Set a trap? Rosalind, you don’t have any authorization….”

  “Okay, okay, so I’m working without a net. But hell’s bells, Arthur was acquitted of killing Felicia because they had only circumstantial evidence against him. We have only circumstantial evidence this time, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let Dolores get off as well.”

  “Vasarian saw her,” Hilary hazarded.

  “He saw a woman. Fort Worth is full of women. It could’ve been you or Jenny, or me, for that matter.”