Garden of Darkness (21 page)

“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 and 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 . . .”

She wanted to tell him he’d betrayed her; she wanted him to admit to it, but at the same time she didn’t want to start an argument that would go nowhere.

He passed a hand over his face. “I’m living in two worlds.”

“Move back to Tuonela.”

He let out a snort of shock and shook his head in disbelief.
Yo u don’t get it.

But she was trying to. “I have a lot to deal with myself right now.” Did she always have to be the wise, stable one? The person others came to with their problems? What about
her
? Wasn’t she allowed to fall apart?

Both of her parents were dead. Evan had his father. He had Graham. Who could she count on? Who would she call if she needed help? Who would come? David Spence? Yes. David would come.

Not Evan.

She loved him. There was no doubt in her mind about that. But love didn’t always mean a future together. That’s what kids didn’t get. You could love someone from afar. You could even love someone close. But it didn’t always mean a life together. It didn’t mean you were good for each other.

She snapped off her gloves and tossed them in a nearby hazardous waste container. She reached behind her back and untied her gown as she walked toward him. “Let’s step out of here.”

She tried not to think about what had happened in this very room last spring. Sex in the morgue.
My God.
That was the kind of thing that made a person question her own sanity.

Heat shot up her neck and crawled into her cheeks. She hardly remembered it, and yet she had proof it had happened. But it all came back to her when she slept. She would wake up consumed by a sweet ache, a sweet yearning, missing what she didn’t even remember.

A faint illumination came from the emergency bulb near the elevator; Evan had turned off the hall lights when he’d come in.

She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “What are you doing here?”

A shadow fell across his face, and she could barely make out his features. He fiddled with a button on his long wool coat.

Fingernails caked with earth. The nails themselves were pale and smooth. Did they look slightly like the nails of a cadaver?

What a cruel thought.

I’m so sorry, Evan.

“Was your grandmother’s name Emily Florence?”

“Yes.” She frowned. “Why?”

“What was her mother’s name?”

“Florence Elizabeth. Florence Elizabeth Cray.”

“Born in 1906?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Florence had a sister named Victoria. Victoria was one of the women murdered by Richard Manchester.”

Victoria.
How did he know about Victoria? She didn’t want to hear about Victoria.

She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the skinned corpse. Victoria hadn’t visited Rachel in months.

“I don’t want to talk about her,” she whispered. Talking about her, thinking about her, might bring her back.

But Evan was suddenly animated.

“Remember the photo at my house on Benefit Street? The photo of the woman in the tub? I think that’s Victoria.”

Rachel swallowed. “Yes. I know it is. I’ve known for a long time.”

“What you didn’t know is that Victoria was your great-aunt.”

“You can’t know that. My ancestral line was lost in the big move.”

“Not lost.” He unbuttoned his coat and reached inside. “Just left behind.” He pulled out a book. A leather-bound book in faded red, the page edges yellow and uneven. “A journal,” he explained.

The book smelled of damp earth, mildew, and ancient paper.

He wanted her to take it.

She didn’t want to touch it.

Yet in her mind she could already imagine how the embossed floral design would feel against her fingertips.

He brought the book close, opened it, and reverently searched the pages until he found what he was looking for. Then he turned the journal around so she could read it.

“This is why I’m staying out there.
This
is why I saved Old Tuonela from being destroyed.”

“It’s too dark.” She took a step back. “I can’t see.” But she could make out strong cursive letters that had been written with a sharp quill pen.

“Florence Elizabeth Cray and Victoria were sisters. Victoria was killed by the Pale Immortal.”

“You already said that.”

“Florence plotted her revenge. She tried to poison Richard Manchester, but succeeded only in making him temporarily ill and extremely pissed off. So she got back at him in the best way she could. She made him fall in love with her.”

Rachel stared at the book, intrigued now.

“Do you want to read it?”

“No, you tell me.” She was only remotely aware of her hushed voice and the hand she held to her throat.

“She gained his trust, and when she was finally alone with him she killed him with a dagger. Your great-grandmother put an end to the Pale Immortal’s reign of terror. I thought you would want to know that. I thought you should know.”

She smiled, and a lightness fluttered inside her.

“You come from a line of strong, tough women. You should be proud.” Evan’s heart was beating loudly again.

“That’s not all, is it? That’s not everything.”

“No.” That single syllable carried so much weight. “Maybe that’s enough for now.”

“Tell me. You might as well tell me everything.”

“Before Florence killed Richard Manchester . . . Before she killed him, she seduced him and slept with him. And when she killed him, she was pregnant with his baby.” Evan watched her with an intense, unreadable expression.

Her eyes stung. “No.” Her chest suddenly felt hollow, and she realized fear was really the absence of something, not the addition.

Why was he telling her this? It was cruel. “I was right. You should have left Old Tuonela alone. What good can come of such information?”

“We all deserve to know the truth.”

She shook her head and pressed a palm to her trembling lips, then a hand to her swollen belly. This was where they clashed. This was where she couldn’t begin to understand Evan Stroud. “You’re cruel.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you should know. I thought you would want to know.”