The Garden of Dead Dreams (23 page)

Etta heaved herself over the wall of the bin and lowered herself to the ground. Her sweater was nowhere to be seen, and the idea that she’d been counting on it to break her fall made her nauseous. She clutched the strap of her bag, and started toward the back door to the kitchen. Goose bumps rippled across her arms beneath her long-sleeve T-shirt, and her teeth began to chatter. Either the scent of the compost was lodged in her nose, or she was covered in it.

Etta rapped on the outside door to the kitchen, waited, and then pounded again. Her gaze flitted from the door to the trees behind her. Tears burned at her cheeks, but she kept pounding. What else could she do?

The door cracked then flew open. Etta inhaled. She’d never been so happy to see Candy’s fluff of blonde hair under her hair net or the bubbly words on the intern’s apron:
Some things are better rich: coffee, chocolate, and men.
Etta opened her mouth to speak then the back of her throat started to close. The flute, the gongs, the synthesizer. New Age music. Carl wasn’t there.

* * *

The chef’s quarters sat between the theater and the kitchen. He had an exterior door, which Etta hadn’t known was there until Candy pointed it out. But she’d heard his wind chimes before—a low, haunting sound she’d never placed. She stared at the door, and then wiped at the beads of water rolling down her face, and lifted her hand to knock.

The door swung open before Etta’s knuckles touched the wood.

Carl was looking down, zipping up his corduroy jacket. He glanced up and stepped backward. The corners of his mouth turned up then a coldness crossed over his eyes, and he looked past her

“Carl,” she whispered, but the clatter of the wind chimes swallowed her voice.

Carl stared past her for what felt like several minutes then stepped back and waved Etta inside. He closed the door behind her, and she melted into the warmth of the room. The walls were painted a rich terra-cotta color and covered with oversize paintings of desert landscapes: saguaros, red canyons, cracked soil, rock formations—all of them lit by track lights. Etta opened her mouth to ask who’d painted them, and then saw the easel set up next to his window, a half-finished desert scene propped against it.

Carl’s double bed was covered with a Native American blanket decorated with red and black diamonds. Across from it was a fireplace with a couple of acoustic guitars and a small stringed instrument Etta didn’t recognize propped in stands on the hearth

“Need some food?”

Etta snapped her gaze to Carl, stung by the flatness in his voice. “Your room . . .” she whispered. “It’s . . .” She’d always pictured Carl as the type to have few possessions—a bed and a desk, a couple of chairs. But his room looked like something out of a magazine. “Beautiful.”

“Been out here for awhile. Had a little time to decorate.” Carl put his hand on the doorknob. “I hate to end this little show and tell, but I’ve got to run.”

Etta tried to steady her voice. “I need a ride to Jackson.”

Carl stared at the door. “You get permission?”

Etta stared at him.

“You know the rules. You need permission from Hardin if you want to leave the grounds. And, here’s the thing, in the last five years, Hardin’s never given a student permission to leave the grounds.”

The tears broke loose, like a cap bursting off of an overheated radiator. Sobs sputtered from somewhere inside her, shuddering through her. “Fine, I’ll walk.” She stepped toward the door.

Carl blocked the door. “Jackson’s thirty-five miles away.”

“Excuse me,” Etta whispered.

He didn’t move. The pressure started to build again.

“If you won’t help me, let me go.”

Carl put his hand on her shoulder. “What in the devil’s gotten into you?”

“Let me go,” Etta’s words dissolved into tears.

“I can’t just leave. I gotta tell Hardin if I’m heading to Jackson. I gotta let Candy know she’ll need to make dinner.”

“No. No. No.” Etta backed up. “Don’t tell Hardin I was here,” Etta heard how hysterical she sounded, but she couldn’t control her voice. Her gaze flitted around the room. There was a door on the far side of the room. She’d seen it from the other side. In the back hallway to the theater, across from the stage-wing door. Etta swirled around and raced toward it, her shoes squeaking against the wood floor.

Carl’s hand descended on her shoulder when she was halfway across the room. “Jesus, Etta.” He pulled her around and draped his coat over her shoulders. His hands were shaking. “I’ll take you.”

* * *

Etta and Carl didn’t speak as Carl pulled the truck out of the garage, eased it along the narrow road, and wound through the trees to the front gate. Carl stopped there, pulled the emergency break, and reached behind the seat. He pulled out a crumpled blue rain parka, opened his door, and swung his long legs out of the truck, holding the parka over his head as he slid off the seat. The windshield wipers slid back and forth, with a swish.

Etta grabbed her bag off the floor, yanked the flap open, and pulled out the file folder: Lowther, Matthew Kenneth. She set it on the seat next to her and tried to stop her hands from trembling. The pages inside the folder were loose and Etta had to rest her hand on them to keep them from catching the blast of air from the heater vent.

The light was low, but Etta registered instantly what was on top: a medical report.
Paranoid Personality Disorder. Extremely aggravated. Obsessed with conspiracy . . .
She started to shake.

“It’s stuck.”

Etta snapped her gaze to the door. She hadn’t even noticed Carl opening it, even though he had to shout over the roar of the rain. “The combination won’t work. Happens sometimes when it rains a lot.”

Carl stared at her then slammed the door shut again, and pulled the parka over his head. He was a blue blur sprinting back toward the gate.

Etta glanced into her rear view mirror, but couldn’t make out anything except streaks of rain. Then she heard something she hadn’t said in more than a decade tumbling from her lips. “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven . . .” The words kept coming again and again, even as Carl climbed back into the truck.

He pulled on the emergency break, and the truck eased forward. They turned onto a wider gravel road.

“I’ve never seen anyone look as scared as you looked back there.”

“Is there another vehicle?” Etta asked even though she knew the answer.

Carl glanced at her. “There’s the van, of course, and Buchanan owned a 1959 Roadster and a 1963 Edsel truck. Both of them are still parked in a storage barn a ways from the lodge. I don’t reckon they’re going anywhere though.”

The van was a Chevy cargo van parked in the garage next to the truck, kept there only to drive the students to the academy and in the case of an emergency evacuation, since no one left the academy under normal circumstances. Etta could still hear Hardin’s voice echoing through the great room during orientation: “This is your year of solitude. Your Walden Pond. Most writers only dream about this kind of isolation.”

Now Etta was fleeing the most prestigious writing academy in the United States, not with a certificate or a half-dozen short stories to publish or the beginning of a serious novel as she’d envisioned, but as a fugitive.

“Please drive fast,” she whispered.

“I’m going just about as fast as I can go.”

The windshield wipers whirred as the truck drifted down the gravel road. Finally they turned onto the highway, gaining speed.

Etta nearly jumped when Carl spoke: “So, you going to tell me what’s going on?”

Carl spoke again after a few minutes. “My old man worshipped Townes Van Zandt. Saw him for the first time in 1973 at The Old Quarter in Houston. I didn’t see much of him ‘til after Townes drank himself to death. I thought Dad was such an asshole back then, but I get it more now, you know, following your dreams, even if your dreams are a wreck of an old musician.”

Etta realized that the radio was playing and maybe had been playing for awhile. The sad, crooning voice must be Townes Van Zandt, whoever that was. “Are you following your dreams?” Etta asked, more to fill the silence than anything else.

Carl didn’t speak for so long that Etta forgot she’d asked the question. The song ended and another began. “I might’ve dreamed about sitting this close to you once or twice.”

Etta felt the corners of her mouth turning up. She stared out her window.

“Course, you’re probably asking if my plan was to live in the middle of nowhere cooking meals for a bunch of pretentious snobs. I’ve been out here too long to think anyone comes here following anything. We’re all just running from things.”

Headlights blurred by, lighting the cavity of the truck. The windshield wipers glided back and forth. “Except for Olivia,” Etta murmured, glancing at the papers from Matthew Lowther’s file, surprised to see them scattered across the seat between them. She reached for one of the sheets, but her hand was shaking, and it slipped from her fingers. She inhaled, startled by the sensation of Carl’s warm hand covering hers.

“What’re you running from now?”

Etta couldn’t bring herself to look up.

“Fair enough, I’ll go first. My girlfriend died.”

Etta jerked her gaze up, meeting his for a minute until he stared out the windshield again. “Don’t go feeling sorry for me. We’d been broken up for a good six or seven years. She was even married to someone else—a middle-school teacher from Tulsa. They lived in Austin, and I’d moved up to Portland by then. Just opened my dream restaurant serving up Southwestern French fusion in the Alphabet District, if you can imagine anything more awful. I was working sixteen hour days, obsessing over the amount of time between courses, tearing into servers if they were three minutes behind schedule delivering a salad.” He laughed. “Had an actual breakdown once when a server crumbled a cork into a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar bottle of Pinot.

“I hadn’t talked to Brooke in years. Then I woke up one morning, got the worst call of my life, and she’s all I could think of. I went over every word that woman ever said to me. To this day, I wonder if that’s what seeing a ghost is. Not some apparition in the doorway, just not being able to forget someone, living with them every second of every day. It’s the worst kind of agony.”

Carl shifted the hand that was resting on top of Etta’s. “So how did you end up here?” Etta whispered.

“You know that short story Isabella Peña’s so hell-fire incensed about: ‘The Garden of my Summer.’ That was Brooke’s story. She wrote her master’s thesis on it. She was the type who couldn’t read a damn thing to herself. I swear, she read that story aloud so many times, I wanted to burn her
Norton’s Anthology
. By the time we broke up, I could’ve recited that story in my sleep.

“And this day comes when I know I’m never going to give enough of a shit about my restaurant to make it go, never goin’ to get all worked up about whether some rich guy has to wait a minute too long between a round of escargot chilé and a salad, never going to shed tears if a sea bass is too underdone or a filet comes out looking like charcoal. I see this job in the paper and come out here for an interview, thinking it might be nice to get out of the city for awhile. I walk the grounds to get a sense of the place and end up in that old cemetery. Damned if I don’t recognize it from that story. It was May. Everything was overgrown. The rhododendrons were blooming.

“I know it sounds crazy, but I just knew Brooke was trying to tell me something. She was good at that. Giving advice.”

Silence filled the truck, except for the voice of the radio deejay, so soft that Etta couldn’t make out his words. Etta shut her eyes and thought of the cemetery, the sunken graves and mossy headstones, and the overgrown path. “We need to go back.”

Carl fixed his gaze on her. “We’re just a couple miles out of Jackson.”

Etta glanced out her side mirror. A blur of yellow lights trailed behind them. “I need to go to that cemetery. I need to find Galen. ” Silence settled between them, and Etta wondered if Carl had heard her. “You know, Galen . . .”

“Yeah, I know. Why on Earth would you want to talk to him?”

Etta stared at the seat between them. “If I told you something terrible is going on, that Hardin and Opal Waters and Major Mills and possibly Jordan Waterhouse are in on it. That people have disappeared. Would you think I was crazy?”

Carl started to laugh, and then the sound died in the air. “You’re serious?”

“Olivia . . .”

“Christ. Please tell me this isn’t about Olivia.”

Etta clutched the door handle to stop her hand from trembling.

“Listen, I was the one who drove her to the hospital in Salem that night, and that girl wasn’t right. She was shrieking, kicking, yelling, crying. I’ve never seen anything like it. She scratched Hardin’s arm so bad it was bleeding. They had to sedate her just to get her in the truck.”

“Who? Who sedated her?”

“Mills. He’s trained as a medic.”

Etta gasped. “Is she still there? In Salem?”

Carl lifted his hand from hers and it started to shake. “I reckon her family would’ve moved her somewhere closer to home. Where’s she from?”

Etta rifled through her bag and pulled out her cell phone. Its bluish light lit up the truck, making it seem darker outside. Her pulse raced when she saw the two bars indicating service. She found Olivia’s number in her list of contacts and dialed. It rang five times and died. Etta dialed again then stared at her phone. What was Olivia’s aunt’s name? Didn’t she live in Syracuse? Or Rochester? Etta turned to Carl. “Where did you send her stuff?”

Carl reached for the gear shift. The truck was decelerating. “Hardin had me take it in a storage unit in Jackson. Said her family was planning to have it shipped.”

“I have to talk to Galen. Please turn around.”

“Jesus, you want to go hunting for a certified insane man in a cemetery in a storm. You really think I’m going to let you do that?”

The truck decelerated more. They passed a wooden sign lit from beneath by a spot light.
Welcome to Jackson, Population 4300.
Then they passed a gas station and a store and a couple of empty lots, deserted under the dim street lights.