Garden of Darkness

by Anne Frasier

  Graham looked at it in horror. “Was that hers?”

  “Yeah.” I rolled it up, belted it, and handed it to Graham. He did the same to the other two. We collapsed the tents, then threw everything in the trunk of his car.

  I took the camera and retraced the path I’d taken early that morning in the dark. Later I could make some adjustments so the footage would look like night and be a more accurate portrayal of the actual event. Or I could come back at night.

  No.

  Maybe.

  No.

  I held the camera low and moved through the dry grass. Dead leaves rustled under my feet. I was aware of Graham hanging back but following. Through a small valley, up the hillside, and there it was.

  Close enough.

  The body was probably gone by now, but a few cops were keeping an eye on the place.

  I zoomed in.

  Yellow tape was strung around the whole building. Television news teams were shooting an on-site report, using the brick restroom as their backdrop. A couple of men in dark suits wandered around the building, tablets and pens in hand.

  “Detectives,” Graham whispered, coming up behind me. “We should go. Before anybody sees us.”

  We backed up. Bent at the waist, we ran down the hill until we were out of sight.

  My camera stopped. I checked the meter and realized I’d used the whole tape. And the battery was almost dead and had to be recharged.

  “I need to go to a discount store or drugstore.”

  He checked his watch. “I have to be at work soon.”

  Graham knew Kristin was using him for transportation. At the same time, her friend had just died, so he could hardly be a jerk about it.

  On the way back into town he stopped at a discount store called Big Bargains.

  Inside, she quickly cruised the aisles. He watched her remove a three-pack of videotapes from the metal hanger and examine it.

  “That what you’re looking for?”

  “Maybe.” She grabbed another one, then cruised the aisles a little more, grabbing this, grabbing that. Reading the label on a pack of gum.

  Graham had stolen a few things in his life and he knew what it looked like. That air of distraction. The pretense of being interested in something you had no interest in while your heart was hammering and your mind was in overdrive. But he didn’t do that kind of crap anymore.

  She wasn’t even good at it.

  He saw her slip one of the video packs under her shirt, tucking it into the waistband of her jeans. Didn’t she see the damn cameras everywhere? And she was a cameraperson. Kinda funny, when he thought about it.

  She returned the gum to its hanger, then retraced her steps to the videotape area. She put the remaining package back. “I can get them cheaper somewhere else. Let’s go.”

  He glanced up and saw a man he figured was a store detective moving in their direction. The guy had that look about him: a hard jaw and a gaze that held no mercy. This is just the way it is, kid.

  Graham grabbed Kristin and pulled her close so only a few inches separated them. He slipped his hand under her shirt, felt the crinkly edge of the wrapper, and pulled the tape package from her pants. “I think you forgot something.”

  The detective hovered in the distance. Now he was pretending acute interest in something he had no interest in.

  Anger flashed in Kristin’s eyes. She compressed her lips in a straight line. “You asshole.”

  “I think you mean ass-saver.”

  He let go of her, grabbed the pack, strode to the checkout, and placed the tapes on the black belt. He normally didn’t have money, but he’d cashed his museum paycheck last night. He wasn’t going to have much left for gas and food now.

  Kristin was pissed.

  She left the store ahead of him. He wasn’t worried about her taking off, because all of her stuff was in his car. That was where he found her: standing at the passenger door, arms crossed, glaring at him.

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “They were watching you, idiot. You’d be sitting in a back room waiting for the cops to come if I hadn’t paid for this.” He tossed the bag at her. She caught it.

  “Nobody was watching me.”

  He let out a snort and shook his head. “Okay. If that’s what you want to believe.”

  “I don’t usually do stuff like that. I’ve never stolen anything before.”

  “No shit. That was pretty obvious. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I have to have videotape.”

  God, but he was sick of people dragging him into their bullshit.

  “I know you’re using me. I know you’ve done that from the beginning. To get to my dad. To get to Old Tuonela. A ride. What else do you want? My shirt? ’Cause I can give you that.” He reached up and tugged his long-sleeved T-shirt over his head. He threw it at her. It hit her in the chest and dropped to the ground at her feet.

  “My car keys?” He dug around in his pocket and made contact. He tossed the keys. She didn’t catch, and they went skittering across the blacktop to vanish under a car.

  Oh, shit. She was crying. Not making a sound, just standing there while tears tracked down her cheeks.

  “I saved your ass in there.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of the store, but his words were hesitant. He didn’t know that much about girls. There had been his crazy, nutty mother and the calm and level Isobel. “I saved your ass in there,” he mumbled.

  She bent and picked up his shirt, clutching it to her in a ball. Then she turned and haltingly looked around for the keys, her movements jerky and awkward.

  “I’ll get them.” He dropped to his stomach and reached under the car, stretching until his fingers snagged the metal loop of the key chain. Above him, he heard her gasp.

  He reversed and shoved himself to his feet.

  Her eyes were wide. “What happened to your back?”

  He grabbed his shirt. “Don’t you know it’s not polite to ask those kinds of questions?”

  “Somebody beat you.”

  He turned his shirt the right way, stuck his arms in the sleeves, then tugged the neck opening over his head and pulled down.

  “Your dad?” She looked extremely worried about that. “It was your dad, wasn’t it?”

  “No.” He smoothed his shirt, wondering at the burst of adrenaline and anger that had driven him to remove it. He never let anybody see him with his shirt off. “Evan would never do anything like that.”

  But he thought about the other morning when Evan had tossed the food on the floor, when he’d grabbed him by the throat. For a second Graham had thought his father was going to kill him. His uncertainty must have shown on his face.

  “Did he?”

  “No.”

  “Swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “Because if he did, you can’t protect him. Physical abuse is unacceptable.”

  “I know, I know. It wasn’t him, okay? It happened a long time ago.”

  Everything had shifted. He hardly knew her, yet they always seemed to climb on some emotional teeter-totter whenever they were together. This weird, volatile shift and trade-off. Your turn to lose it. No yours. After you, please. I insist. Yo u lose it first. I’ll lose it second.

  He tried to remember what Isobel looked like and sounded like and smelled like. It was hard.

  Chapter Thirty

  Kristin had no place to stay. Taking her to Old Tuonela was out of the question after what she’d witnessed there, so Graham took her to his grandfather’s house. Not the best arrangement, but better than her sleeping in the park or on the street or in the woods.

  While Alastair was at work, Graham and Kristin cooked scrambled eggs and toast. Scrambled eggs were Graham’s specialty.

  “This is a bad idea,” Kristin said between bites of food. “My staying here.”

  Graham popped open a can of diet cola and slid it across the table to her. “He never goes in the basement. I swear. You can sleep down there tonight,
then use my car tomorrow after you drop me off at school. You’ll at least be safe here.”

  “Just one night.” She took a drink of cola. “Then I’ll figure something else out.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Something.”

  They finished eating.

  “Do I have time to take a shower?” she asked.

  “If you hurry.”

  While Kristin showered, Graham paced and kept peeking out the front curtains, hoping Alastair didn’t come home early. Once Kristin was finished he took her down to the basement and helped her roll out her sleeping bag in the corner near the freezer.

  “He won’t come downstairs,” Graham told her again. “If he does, hide here.” He opened a door to show her a small closet lined with shelves that had probably held jelly and canned stuff at one time.

  It smelled like damp cement and rotting wood. Cobwebs clung to rafters and lights. He was sure she’d rather sleep in a tent if it weren’t for a murdering psycho roaming the streets.

  Kristin looked at the sleeping bag without enthusiasm. “Thanks.” She sounded exhausted. Now that she’d showered, her hair was darker and her skin seemed paler. Her eyes were puffy, with circles under them.

  “I’m going to go back upstairs,” he said.

  She grabbed his arm. “Stay here until your grandfather gets home.”

  She tugged him down until they both sat on the sleeping bag, cross-legged, face-to-face. She was wearing a different shirt: a thin black T-shirt with really short sleeves. He could see part of a tattoo poking out. Red and black.

  “Stay and talk to me for a while. Tell me what’s going on with your dad.”

  “There’s nothing going on.”

  “How did you get those scars on your back? Why are you staying here? With your grandfather?”

  “Is this going to be part of your movie? Is that why you want to know?”

  “I want to know because I like you. It has nothing to do with the film.”

  “Oh, film. Sorry. Film.” He got sarcastic sometimes. “It’s just easier to live here.” He shrugged as if that would drive home the lie. “With school and all.”

  “Come on, Graham. I saw your dad out there.”

  “Digging. So he digs. He’s like an archeologist. He writes about Old Tuonela. Why wouldn’t he want to find out as much as he can about it?”

  She touched the side of his face.

  He almost closed his eyes.

  Stupid, but the feel of her fingers against his skin made him weak and fluttery. Her hand dropped. “You’re a sweet kid.”

  “I’m not really a kid, you know. Not here . . .” He put a hand to his chest, then instantly wished he could erase that bit of drama.

  “You killed a man,” she stated. “How did it happen? Was it a car accident?”

  She so obviously wanted it to be a car accident, and for a moment he was tempted to say yes. “No.”

  “Some other kind of accident?”

  “It was intentional.” He suddenly just wanted to shut her up. Just wanted her to stop talking about it. “I stabbed him, okay?”

  That surprised her. He could see the whoa in her expression. And now she was afraid of him again. Shit.

  “Self-defense?” The question was tentative.

  He had no choice but to elaborate. “Look, he was going to kill my dad. He was going to kill Evan.”

  “You saved your father’s life?” She eyed him with renewed curiosity.

  “Yeah. I guess so.” He shrugged. It was just something that happened. Something he had to do. “Don’t put that in your movie.” Pause. “Film.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  A skinned squirrel. That’s what Rachel thought whenever she looked at the carcass on the autopsy table. Unprofessional of her, but there it was.

  She’d waited for rigor mortis to reverse. Night arrived and she was finally able to straighten the bent limbs, but even straightened, the body had lost much of what made it appear human.

  She turned on the voice-activated minirecorder.

  What made a person human? How strange that skin seemed to play such an important role in who we were.

  It’s what’s inside that counts.

  But maybe it was really what was outside that counted.

  Skin cloaked and wrapped and contained. It held and exposed our vanities. It carried expressions of individualism, like tattoos. Ed Gein of Plainfield, Wisconsin, had worn suits of human skin. When he was finally caught and his house searched, they found lamp shades and furniture made from his murder victims.

  The ancient exhaust fan created a hum in her head, reminding her that she’d forgotten her earplugs. A recent test put the noise level of the industrial fan above seventy decibels—leaf blower range.

  Sh,sh,sh.

  She hated the fan.

  Sometimes when it ran she heard voices buried below the din. Like a roomful of people talking and mumbling, their words indistinct. Just an audio illusion that had to do with the unnatural harmonics and white noise.

  You let us in.

  That’s what the people seemed to be saying. Or had those faraway voices always existed, and the continuous roar and hum of the fan somehow opened a door?

  Hearing was often about perception and not about what was really there. Lyrics played backward could sound like, “Paul is dead.” Or “There’s a devil in the toolshed.” The mind turned random, meaningless sounds into words in much the same way the eye detected faces where there were none.

  Making order from chaos; that’s what people did.

  Later, when she played back the recording, she was certain she would hear nothing but her own voice.

  Sh,sh,sh.

  Rachel forced her thoughts away from the fan and the murmur.

  She heard a movement behind her, but when she looked nothing was there.

  With each swing of her head the roar of the fan shifted and changed, seeming to come from different directions. She picked up a scalpel.

  The overhead lights clicked off. She dropped the scalpel and swung around.

  Evan stood in the doorway, a hand on the wall switch. “Rachel.”

  “Goddamn!” She took a deep breath, closed then opened her eyes. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  He pulled a key from his pocket and held it up with long pale fingers. His skin was ashen, his jaw dark with stubble. Was that gray at his temples?

  “I came across it a few days ago.” He placed the key on a stainless steel countertop. “I forgot I had it.”

  She thought about the handprints on her belly, and the times she’d felt she wasn’t alone in her apartment. Could Evan have come in when she was asleep?

  “This is the second body you’ve found like this?” He indicated the corpse on the table.

  He shouldn’t be in the room with the body. She quickly covered it with a sheet.

  “It looks more human now,” he observed.

  He was right. The sheet was lying against muscle, outlining. Even the face suddenly appeared feminine, whereas it hadn’t before.

  “Any suspects?” He stayed back, clinging to the shadows. “Other than coyotes?”

  She adjusted the swing arm so light shot in the opposite direction. “I shouldn’t be talking to you about this. Once again people seem to be whispering your name.”

  “No surprise there. And the skin?” he asked. “Did you find the skin?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “What about the first victim? Was her skin ever found?”

  She looked at him closely. “Wait.” She shut off the exhaust fan. “You know something, don’t you?” The sudden silence made her ears ring.

  His brows lifted.

  He was unwell. Such dark bruises under his eyes, and he’d lost so much weight. Now that the fan was off, the air in the room settled and she could smell him. He smelled of soil and decaying plants.

  “I . . .” he began. His voice dropped and adjusted to the lack of sound a
nd the echo. “I hate for you to think badly of me.”

  He was a lost soul, confused and tormented. But she couldn’t be his stability. She couldn’t be anybody’s stability. She had let him go.

  Yeah, like she’d let Tuonela go.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I have something to show you.”

  She fought the urge to touch him. And she suddenly forgot why she was angry with him.

  Old Tuonela.

  Yes, that was it. He’d gone behind her back and bought it out from under the city. They’d had plans to bury what was left and fence it. Put up KEEP OUT signs.

  “That place will drive you mad,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m fine. Things are fine.”

  So sad. Like talking to a drug addict or an alcoholic. “You’ve lost weight.”

  “I’ve been doing more physical work than I’m used to. Burning a lot of calories. I know I look different. On the outside. But what about me?” He put a hand to his chest. His nails were caked with dirt. “Do I still seem different?”

  She considered him. “Not today.” She could swear she heard the pounding of his heart. The steady, lub, lub, lub. It soothed her.

  “Sometimes I feel like . . . I’m fading,” he admitted after some consideration. “I forget what I’m like and who I am.”

  “You’re exhausted.”

  “I’ve been thinking. About you. Me. The baby. Could we have a normal life? Could we rent movies and eat popcorn together? Could we plant a garden? With flowers that would bloom at night?”

  “Night-blooming jasmine.”

  “Yes.”

  “We would grow tomatoes. Better Boys. I love those.”

  “You could pick them at the hottest part of the day, and they would taste like sunshine.”

  All dreams. Sad and impossible.

  “I wonder if there’s some way I can be in your life. Somehow. But I know that’s impossible. For so many reasons . . .”