Writ on Water

by Melanie Jackson

  More distressing than the thefts themselves had been several incidents of contact between thieves and grieving relatives. So far, no one had died or even been too badly hurt, but police figured that it was only a matter of time before there was a confrontation between a greedy tomb-robber and some outraged guard who was intent on defending Granny’s headstone at any and all costs.

  Savannah and New Orleans had been especially hard hit by these robbers, but there had been problems in Williamsburg and as far north as Boston, and all the way out in California. The cops were doing their best to intercept and retrieve these unusual stolen goods, and were having some success, but they were soon stuck with warehouses full of unidentifiable tombstones and monuments, and left with no way to return the confiscated boodle to the rightful owners.

  That was why, in an effort to aid future efforts at property restoration, various cities’ famous, historic cemeteries were being photographed and added to a government database. But time and money for the project were both in short supply, so concerned owners of private cemeteries were left to take care of their own graveyards. To do that, they hired firms like Digital Memories, who specialized in such pictorial databases.

  At least, Digital Memories had done pictorial monument databases for genealogists and Civil War historians. This living and working for a private person in his own home—and a reputedly eccentric home at that—was new territory. Usually they worked for small companies or nonprofits who could not afford to invest in expensive equipment. But as the plum jobs were already taken by the company’s old-timers, and D.M. wasn’t presently larded with job opportunities for their newest hire—in fact, it had been this gig in a private cemetery in Virginia for Chloe or a university-funded plant spore study in the pest-infested Everglades—she had bowed before the force of nature that was Roland Lachaise and accepted the job. She figured that old bones and thieves were better than live alligators and malaria, and the weather might be marginally superior at the more northern latitude—something to think seriously about, given that it was near hurricane season.

  Besides, the Virginia job had come with access to the latest in the company’s digital cameras, with wide-angle lenses and other toys. And she would only be an hour’s ride from a metropolis where they would have Slurpees, fast food, and even foreign films, if such an urge for culture should overtake her.

  Chloe wiped the sweat from her brow and checked her mirror to be sure that her lipstick wasn’t running. She would have to get her air-conditioning fixed before the late summer heat arrived! The high temperatures and humidity were bad for the PC and her darling cameras, and it didn’t do much for her complexion either. She grimaced and looked away from her image.

  It was heresy to admit it, but most of what she did in her job was not that hard. The equipment was expensive, but anyone with a computer, the ability to learn a few image manipulation programs, and a reasonable ability with a camera could handle the job, if one was only after technical competence, not art. But she had discovered along the way that many people had a dislike of the technology that could help them, and the timid were willing to pay fairly big bucks to stay away from something that frightened them. This left the way clear for her, allowing her the scope to practice her art and still earn a decent wage.

  And, she reminded herself, her work was top drawer. She knew her funerary history, and the people she had worked for in the past were beginning to request her for repeat jobs. It was strange, but she was the top dog in the cemetery photography biz. Roland Lachaise had even admitted that she was the biggest fish in this small but growing pond, and had given her a raise! Sure; it was a small one, but it was still a raise, which was something very rare at Digital Memories.

  The great stone gates to Riverview Plantation eventually crawled into view. A sleepy Chloe gave her fellow travelers a toot on the horn and a last wave before turning off onto the gravel road.

  And, she fell down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. Her first inkling that she had entered a new world was the drawbridge suspended over a sluggish brown moat. In point of fact, it was merely a suspension bridge, but with its rusty chains strung from a buttress that looked a great deal like a giant cargo container of the type used on ocean liners—though, being overrun with honeysuckle vines, it was difficult to tell just what was lurking down below the emerald runners—the resemblance to an abandoned drawbridge was fairly strong. There were even thick wooden planks unevenly laid along the course, and evidence of horses scattered about.

  Chloe braked before venturing out onto the swaying structure with her car. The automobile was expendable, but the cameras were not. Like the warriors of old, she knew that she had to return with her shield or on it—either was probably fine with Roland, so long as he got his cameras back unharmed.

  Sighing, Chloe hung her head out the window and squinted into the sun-reflecting water. The bridge looked solid enough to her untrained eye, but she had never fancied herself as Alan Quarter-main or Evel Knievel. However, it was clearly the only path to the house, and she could see traces of dusty tire tracks on the graying planks, so she knew that other vehicles had traversed the bridge and survived to tell the tale.

  Unfortunately, it looked like she could carry on after all.

  She proceeded cautiously onto the causeway and was rewarded with a smooth ride and a safe conveyance the other side of the turgid stream, though the feeling that she had left the twentieth century behind on the paved highway remained strong.

  The drive to the house after the bridge was an increasingly odd one. The road was long and narrow, and lined with a plethora of plaster, blue-shirted, green-hatted gnomes that were only inches from a hit-and-run accident with the sides of her car. The driveway looked like the entrance to a cut-rate theme park, or one of those roadside attractions like the two-headed mummy or the world’s biggest ball of yarn, and she thought at first that it was some sort of a landscaping joke pulled by the local hoodlums. But after passing fifty or so of the squat gnomes, she concluded that this was too expensive to be a prank. Some garden statue aficionado had actually bought out the garden centers for the entire state and used his haul as curbstones for the drive.

  Chloe stopped counting gnomes and started watching her odometer. The colorful plaster chorus line went on uninterrupted for a half mile. Eventually the formal gardens came into view, and she slowed to a halt so that she could take a long look beyond the gnomes at the peculiar mulch that had been laid under the ancient azaleas and hydrangeas. The color was an unattractive liver brown and sported a waffle pattern that was visible even in the crepuscular light that had filtered under the giant shrubs.

  Chloe laughed once in disbelief.

  “Carpet padding!” Well, it probably made quite an effective weed barrier. Maybe she’d try it at home—buried under some conventional shredded bark, of course.

  Chloe put the car back in motion and the identical, pointy-headed gnomes smiled approvingly as she resumed her trip down their seemingly endless ranks. She sincerely hoped that she was on a one-way road, as there wasn’t room for two cars to pass without exchanging paint and bodywork and killing a lot of little plaster people.

  Around the next bend, the river again hove into view. It was broad and sparkling in the sun like a mile of shattered glass, but pretty as it was, the water wasn’t what caught Chloe’s attention. Standing on the bank was a young man wielding both a fishing gaff and a net. He was stripped to the waist and tanned to nut brown. Beside him was what appeared to be a mountain of sodden purple, red and yellow bowling shoes. He looked up at her and smiled engagingly. His teeth were crooked and badly gapped, but it was an infectious smile for all that. There was really nothing for it; Chloe had to grin back.

  She had read about some of the strange things that washed up on the banks of the river. Shipping crates frequently went overboard during storms. One town had been blessed with some fifty thousand pairs of athletic shoes that had been in good enough condition to wear. Of course, the sizes were all mismatched and
had to be sorted out at the town swap meet, but everyone in the environs had ended up with enough new pairs of sneakers to prevent the town’s shoe store from ordering any athletic shoes for over a year. Chloe suspected that these shoes were headed for a like fate. It would be a boon—if the town had a bowling alley. She hadn’t seen one on the drive in.

  She looked over at a smirking gnome and shook her head. On the other hand, given the joie de vivre demonstrated by the locals, maybe the bowling alley wasn’t necessary. Or maybe the shoes were for these barefoot gnomes—what did she know? Maybe everyone here was slightly mad.

  It occurred to her that the pile of sodden footwear supplied a reasonable explanation for the plaster statuary along the drive. She wondered also if this same teen had been the one to fish out the hideous carpet padding which she was fairly certain was more recycled river wrack.

  Chloe began to wonder seriously about how eccentric her new client was. Previously, she had only been concerned with running into tomb-robbers and being polite to her boss’s chum while he reminisced about women he had known. But perhaps that wasn’t the greatest danger facing her.

  Roland had suggested that MacGregor Patrick, while a bit of an old-style patriarch and firm about maintaining his privacy, was entirely rational and pleasant—not at all like his father, Callum Patrick, who had been fanatical about keeping his distance from outsiders, even to the point of shooting at them. Chloe had gathered that MacGregor’s view of the world was a monochromatic one, but the color was rosy since he saw himself at the top of the hierarchy, God’s own top-kick, and she had been given to believe he would welcome Roland’s protégé into his domain with open doors, and likely open arms.

  Yet, nothing had been said about the garden gnomes and there certainly hadn’t been any in the one old photograph of Riverview she’d seen on Roland’s wall at the office. Maybe this client had gotten weird since the last time Roland came to visit. Old age took some people that way. Chloe’s Granny Claire had certainly crossed the line from being eccentric to downright nuts.

  Of course, all this oddity was a far cry from the dark things Chloe subconscious had been planting in her dreams. This was quirky, not dangerous. Quirky she could live with. So it was, all in all, a relief to have finally arrived, and to put an end to her fears of haunted mansions and ghoulish graveyards.

  Chloe drove along slowly. She’d have answers to all her questions soon enough. The house couldn’t be too far on. The river took another turn less than a mile away; unless there was another bridge, Riverview had to be nearby.

  She kept a weathered eye out for more oddities along the trail, and soon spotted a clematis hedge that proved to be growing on a frame made up entirely of deer antlers stitched together with—what else?—Virginia creeper. It was a formidable structure, perhaps not as long as the Great Wall of China, but it would serve to keep out anything larger than a mouse unless it could fly. The gap for the gravel road was the only break Chloe could see.

  Roland had mentioned that MacGregor, in addition to liking his privacy, always had an eye out for a bargain. But wasn’t this taking thriftiness and privacy to ridiculous lengths? There weren’t enough deer in the state to supply the antlers for the hedge—not in one man’s lifetime! What had he done; gone scrounging out-of-state for cast-off horns in bankrupt steakhouses and hunters’ cabins? Why would anyone want or need such a fortification around one’s home anyway?

  Feeling both an enlarging curiosity and a return of mild trepidation, Chloe advanced slowly through the narrow, prickly gap and found Riverview itself waiting beyond the hedge.

  “Well, damn.”

  It was a pleasant house, if somewhat over-wrought for modern tastes. Ornate pilasters supported baroque architraves at every door and window, and the porch was overloaded with Doric columns and sculptures. It was also just slightly too tall for its width, even considering the porte cochere that had been added on to the south side of the building sometime in the twenties. The two wings met up awkwardly, reminiscent of the masks of comedy and tragedy. Taken all together, it gave the visual impression of existing on the other side of a giant wide-angle lens.

  But Chloe was too pleased with the shady trees and perfumed air to quibble with the architectural oddities. Whatever else might have been done with outer gardens that lined the drive, those closest to the house were immaculate and conventional, and pre–Civil War in their manicured magnificence. She hated to think what MacGregor Patrick paid for their upkeep.

  The only anachronism she spotted, after turning off the radio and climbing out of the car, was an abandoned tractor-mower that someone had left sitting in the shade of an ancient pecan tree. It seemed plausible to her that the gardener had been turned into a garden gnome by some southern cousin of the Medusa who attacked all pedestrians and transformed them into plaster garden ornaments, but it was more likely that he was at lunch. Or perhaps taking a siesta while waiting for the heat of the day to pass. Or maybe the mower had been abandoned by the boy at the river while he went fishing for bowling shoes. She wouldn’t blame him for choosing the watery shade over the sunny lawn. It would take a truly ambitious person to tackle the remainder of the acre-plus meadow that was still unshorn while the temperatures were in the nineties and the humidity just as high.

  Chloe stepped out of the car and enjoyed the old-fashioned sound of oyster shells crunching underfoot as she turned around to get a full view of the premises. She breathed deeply of the warm air that smelled of green things like honeysuckle and mown grass. On cue, the pure notes of birdsong filled the air.

  “Ashley Wilkes, I’ve come home.”

  “Yeah. It’s a regular Twelve Oaks,” said a deep voice behind her. “We’re short a few slaves though.”

  Chloe jumped and turned around, confronting a tall, tanned chest of the male variety. It was also a very sweaty chest, and had bits of grass lodged in its red-gold curls. The man—alas—couldn’t be MacGregor Patrick. He was at least three decades too young.

  The missing gardener, she thought with relief, urging her heart to calm down even as she pulled her eyes up another foot to somewhere near the seventy-two inch mark where it was more polite to stare. It wasn’t a complete hardship to give up on the chest, as the face was likewise very attractive, though also sheened with sweat and adorned with grass clippings.

  She couldn’t guess how he had managed to sneak up on her over the oyster shells.

  “I’m Rory,” he told her, head tipped to one side as he studied her face. His smile was polite, but not particularly inviting. He didn’t offer his hand either, but stayed three feet back while he stared hard into her sunglasses-covered eyes.

  Intuition told her that his gaze was more assessing than admiring, and the failure to offer a hand in greeting was from reserve rather than a concern with staining her clothes or offending her nostrils with his body odor. Given the level of friendliness she had encountered in town, this cool first reaction suggested that there wasn’t much chance for an immediate friendship with the hired help. It also quite ruined her fantasy about southern gentleman being invariably hospitable to the gentler sex.

  Of course, he wasn’t a gentleman; he was a lower-class working stiff. MacGregor would be different. Her fantasy could remain intact.

  Amused with herself and the gardener’s almost rude stare, Chloe’s lips twitched as she turned her body to face the man dead-on. She took off her sunglasses and returned his cool gaze. Granny Claire had taught her how to use the eye to good effect; the man’s hazel gaze at once riveted on her own and stayed there unblinking, just as it should.

  This man might be staring like a besotted idiot, but that didn’t mean anything. He was just doing the same double-take everyone did when they saw her irises in daylight for the first time. She had her Granny Claire’s eyes, and she knew how mesmerizing they could be when they focused, unblinking, on their target. If the gardener was normal, the next thing he would do was either make the sign of the cross, or else say was something fatuous about her gaz
e. It depended on whether he was more horny or superstitious.

  And if he was the type who liked Gone With the Wind, it was likely to be a lulu of a comment.

  Chloe waited a moment in ladylike silence for the gardener to speak, but as he only continued to stare, she decided to take a hand in their conversation.

  “Hello. So, what do you think?” She gestured at her face.

  Rory blinked. The woman’s eyes were the color of blueberries with the bloom still on them. They were deep wells of southern twilight, a dark shade so near purple that he suspected they were the result of colored contacts. He peered intently, but even the bright light of day failed to show a tell-tale ring around the iris that would reassure him that their color was man-made.

  Witch eyes.

  The bright light did, however, show a great deal of amusement lurking in her gaze. The dark eyelashes that fringed those amazing irises fluttered down in broad parody of silent movie flirtation, covering her dark eyes and allowing him a momentary reprieve during which he was able to pull his own gaze away.

  “Hello. So, what do you think?” she repeated conversationally. “Sparkling sapphires? Or maybe twilight in the arctic, lit by a million gleaming stars?”

  “No.” He shook his head, feeling both bemused and slightly embarrassed by the accuracy of her question, which suggested that people often uttered silly platitudes when confronted with the unusual color of her eyes. “Blueberries.”

  She snorted.

  “Ripe blueberries,” he amplified, knowing he sounded stupid. “Or perhaps Concord grapes.”

  Her lips, which he finally got around to noticing, twitched once but remained prim in spite of the laughter in her eyes.