The Garden of Dead Dreams (28 page)

“She’s right. No one needs to get hurt.” Hardin took a step forward, his eyes flitting from Reed and Etta to Opal. “Why don’t both of you put the weapons down.” His voice cracked.

“Edwin,” Opal barked. Her handgun was still aimed at Etta’s chest.

Petra twisted her head, her gaze meeting Etta’s for a minute before darting back to Opal. Etta’s legs began to tremble. In that second, Petra had looked nearly as terrified as she was. “Your own reputation is the only thing you would murder for, and everyone knows you seduced Vincent and swindled him into naming you his beneficiary, so you wouldn’t be flinging that dainty little pistol around over that. Please say this isn’t about that preppy Waterhouse boy. Sleeping with him may get you on the editorial board of his dad’s magazine. Who am I kidding, you’ll probably own
The Drinking Gourd
before you’re finished. But tell me you wouldn’t kill someone over that half wit. What? What is it, Edwin?”

Etta tried to swallow. Lines were growing blurry, the ground becoming less firm. Opal Waters was the only other person in the world—her gray eyes, the pistol clutched in her slender white fingers. Etta struggled to inhale.

Poppy’s voice brought everything back into focus, the words vaulting into the silence. They were familiar, although it took Etta a few moments to place them.

Then for the first time, she heard the wind in the trees, a low whooshing, and the leaves clinking together like wind chimes. The putrid smell of the autumn forest wafted to her—damp fir and cedar needles, fallen leaves, and decay.

And she heard her own voice repeating Poppy: “It is impermanence that gives the monotony of breathing its radiance.”

Etta dropped to her knees beside Poppy and thrust her hand into the undergrowth. Her hand struck something solid and slimy. She yanked at the ground, uprooted a sapling, and tore at a fern. Her heart stopped then came hammering back into her chest. When she glanced up, she was surprised to see Poppy still beside her, sitting back on her heels. She helped Etta hold the brush away from the polished granite. It said only the words Poppy had just spoken aloud:
It is impermanence that gives the monotony of breathing its radiance.

A plaque? An unmarked grave? Etta ran her fingers over the words, and other words flooded to her.
Your friendship was like the sun on my face at the end of a long, cold winter.
Etta stared into Poppy’s blue eyes. “Is Sakura buried here?”

Etta winced. The feel of the icy metal against her skull was unmistakable. Then Opal’s voice was just behind her, above her. “Where’s the manuscript?”

Manuscript? The word sent electricity zinging up Etta’s spine.

“I don’t know,” Etta whispered.

“Don’t entice me, Opal. Remove the gun from Loretta’s neck, or I’ll blow your sidekick’s groin into mincemeat then I’ll shoot you. I’d be doing the literary world a favor, extinguishing one of its minxes while she’s just sashaying past her prime.” Petra cackled. “Not the jeune fille of a Lucretia Davidson or Sylvia Plath, I suppose, but still with a few years of potential left.”

A whimper pierced the air. Hardin choked out a plea for Opal to drop the gun.

Then silence. A gust of wind set off a tumble of leaves, and a bird let out a chick-a-dee-dee-dee in the trees. Etta’s pulse writhed through her chest. Then as quickly as it appeared, the steel barrel was no longer pressed into the base of her skull, and she fell forward, gasping for breath.

“Reed. Take the gun.” Petra barked.

“Don’t even think about it,” Opal retorted.

Etta glanced over her shoulder, and pain shot through her neck and back. She froze. Poppy was crawling headfirst into the rhododendron bush.

“What are you doing?” Etta hissed.

Poppy jerked, and her ponytail snagged on a branch. She wrenched her arm around to untangle it. “I see something,” she mouthed.

“Opal.” Hardin’s voice was tight as though through gritted teeth.

“Stop whining,” Opal said. “She won’t shoot you. She’s not even that crazy.”

“Funny, that’s exactly what my father told his campaign manager. Those exact words,” Petra laughed again. “Except in his case, he didn’t think I was ‘even that crazy’ enough to ruin my own father’s career. He doesn’t make assumptions about my sanity anymore.”

“Please . . .” Hardin’s voice trailed off. Etta realized Petra probably wasn’t merely aiming the gun at Hardin; the barrel was almost certainly jammed into his flesh.

“When they give me what they came here for, this will all be settled,” Opal said.

Hardin let out another groan, so guttural that Etta squeezed her eyes shut. What was Petra doing to him?

“I’ll shoot him. I’ll revel in it. Give Reed the gun.”

“Please.” Hardin moaned.

“No.” Opal’s voice was staccato. “They’ll close us down. They’ll take everything.”

The gun roared. Etta’s hands shot up to her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut. Flashes of white light sparked against her eye lids. When she dropped her hands from her ears, it was so silent that she was sure she’d descended back into the tinny muffled world of deafness again. Then Hardin’s voice rang out: “Please . . .” It dissolved. “We don’t know . . .”

“Yes we do.” Opal cut him off. “You think they let the Rosenbergs go back to their freelance work? Did they slap Alger Hiss on the wrist and tell him to hurry back to his peace work with the Carnegie endowment?”

Etta tried to follow Opal’s strange, high-pitched verbiage and make sense of what she was saying.

Then coldness descended over Etta. The Rosenbergs. Alger Hiss. The were spies. Traitors. She remembered Galen’s snarl:
It’s something they’re dead serious about keeping in the ground.

What had Opal just said?
They somehow miss that he wasn’t who everyone thought he was.

The realization felt like a tornado churning through her. She thought of the photo in the library book of the Black Dragon Society meeting, the American ex-patriot named Peter Morrison. There was no Peter Morrison. It was Vincent Buchanan.

Vincent Buchanan had ties to Japan’s notorious ultranationalist secret societies. Vincent Buchanan spied for the Japanese.

Matthew Lowther was at the Buchanan Academy to out America’s greatest patriot as a traitor. Etta braced herself against the wave of dizziness that surged through her.

The snow azalea shook. Etta craned her head and let all of the air out of her lungs when she saw Poppy, her cheeks flushed, her eyes glistening, slithering beneath the branches with only one hand on the ground. She clenched something to her chest with the other. Etta stretched forward. Poppy dropped the object on the ground and pushed it forward with her free hand, prodding it until it was within Etta’s reach.

Was it a tool box? Etta dragged the object from beneath the bush. The rusted tin box certainly looked like a tool box, except it was smaller than most toolboxes. A tackle box perhaps? Too fancy. A floral pattern had once decorated the sides, although now the red, green, and white design was barely visible beneath the dirt and rust. The hinged lid was ornately molded with a small oval handle on the top, entirely corroded by rust. Etta lifted the box. It felt weightless.

“It’s like a little room in there.” Poppy whispered. “This was by itself in the clearing, half-buried”

Etta gasped and nearly lost her grip on the box. Were Sakura’s ashes inside? No. It was too light. Then again, how heavy were ashes?

“Give it to me,” Opal said. “And I won’t tell anyone you spent a half-decade penning housewife smut.”

Petra let out a gravelly laugh. “Reed. Take the gun.”

Behind her, Opal let out an angry sigh. Etta twisted her head to shoot a glance at her. But she could only see Reed. He was trembling so much that for a moment Etta didn’t see the pistol clutched in his pale hands. She followed the barrel of the gun to Opal. The poet’s face was frozen, her arms folded across her chest. A few feet behind her, the director was pale and shaking, Petra’s rifle still jammed into his crotch.

“It won’t open,” Poppy said, tugging at the latch on the box.

“Don’t just stand there, Edwin. Take the box from them. Get the fucking manuscript,” Opal shrieked.

“Manuscript?” Petra readjusted the rifle. Hardin responded with a groan. “What in hell kind of manuscript is Opal risking your testicles for?”

The latch was corroded with rust, and it wasn’t budging. Poppy found a stick, and jammed it between the latch and the box, jimmying the fastening up.

Poppy pried the lid open with a crackling pop. “It’s empty. There’s nothing here.” Poppy tipped the box so everyone could see the empty rusted tin box.

“Then where is it?” Opal’s voice was shrill. “Where’s the fucking manuscript?”

“What manuscript? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Etta made her way around a crumbling headstone and pushed the box toward Opal. The poet didn’t reach for it. She just stared at Etta with her icy gray gaze.

Petra let the rifle drop from the director’s groin and moved toward Etta.

“How’d you know to come?” Etta asked.

“I hadn’t seen Vincent’s fucked up kid for almost thirty years,” Petra said. “Then he comes knocking on my door at midnight.” Galen must have driven Carl’s truck to the lodge after Etta and Carl left with the major.

“I need the truck.” Etta stared into Petra’s dark eyes. “I’ll call the police in Jackson.”

Petra glanced at Hardin and Opal before she released a manicured hand from the rifle and thrust it into the pocket of her fitted wool pantsuit. She produced the Texas-shaped key ring Etta had seen clutched in Carl’s hand so many times. Carl must have slipped the key to Galen the night before when the major wasn’t looking. Etta reached for it and folded it into her palm. “You sent two men to my cabin. They’re not FBI agents, are they?”

Petra laughed. “They work at the Highlander, a dive in Jackson. They make a decent Tangueray and tonic for a backwater. Let’s just say, the boys owed me a favor.”

Etta didn’t even want to ask Petra whose Glocks “the boys” were armed with. She smiled at the memoirist and began picking through the undergrowth.

Etta halted when she finally spotted the gate and glimpsed the sunlight glinting across the windshield of the truck just beyond it. The effect of the light as it rippled across the glass made it look as though someone was sitting in the driver’s seat. But Etta blinked, and no one was there. The faint scent of gasoline hung in the air with the damp fir needles.

Etta glanced over her shoulder. Everywhere she looked, plants ate away at the past. She dropped her gaze to the rusted box gripped in her left hand. Galen was wrong: Matthew Lowther hadn’t left a manuscript buried in the cemetery for Robert North to find. He’d left his roommate something else—a box, an empty tin box.

* * *

Etta pulled over outside of Jackson at the first spot where her phone indicated cellular reception, dialed 911, and gave the operator directions to the cemetery. Her next stop was a Shell Station off Interstate Five in Salem, where she bought a bag of pretzels, a chicken-salad sandwich, a frosted snack cake, and a map of Portland. She sat in the truck and devoured most of the convenience-store sustenance, and then watched cars pull up to the gas pumps as she dialed the phone.

She first talked to a reference assistant at the main branch of the Multnomah County Library, who put her on hold for several minutes then transferred her to a brusque reference librarian. He explained that while someone might ordinarily be able to glance at some old city directories for Etta, the reference desk was understaffed on Sunday afternoons. He suggested that Etta try the research library at the Oregon Historical Society. The Oregon Historical Society library was closed on Sunday afternoon, but the baritone voice on the answering system announced that the Society’s museum was open. Etta dialed the number.

The volunteer who answered the phone at the Oregon Historical Society museum sounded close to ninety. She asked Etta to repeat her question three times. Each time, she responded with a long murmur. Etta was about to thank her and hang up, and then the woman exclaimed that she had a dear friend named Peggy, who was a volunteer docent at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center. Peggy led tours through the Japanese American Historical Plaza, and the volunteer was sure Peggy would be thrilled to talk to Etta about “the Japanese.”

Etta wasn’t so sure, but she dialed Peggy’s number. Peggy had a chirpy British accent. She called Etta “lovey” and she did seem excited at the opportunity to talk about Portland’s Japantown.

Peggy suggested Etta park at Union Station. “It’s a short walk,” she chirped. “And be sure to visit the Chinese Gardens while you’re in the neighborhood. It’s splendid, just splendid, especially in the rain.”

The next morning Etta pulled into a parking spot in front of Union Station and glanced up at the clock tower. It was nearly ten. It was only six blocks from Union Station to the corner of Northwest Fourth and Davis, but Etta would have been soaked by the time she reached the edge of the parking lot if it wasn’t for her new black umbrella. She’d found the Gap Outlet store at the Woodburn Outlet Mall between Salem and Portland. The sales clerks glared at Etta as she trudged around the store in Carl’s coat, Violet’s muddy socks, and her filthy running shoes, but it had been worth it.

She’d stood in the motel shower for more than an hour the night before, and this morning she’d pulled on a brand new pair of black slacks, a button-down shirt, and a black rain coat. Then she cleaned out her courier bag and transferred everything to the black shoulder bag she’d grabbed from beside the Gap counter. Etta had hardly recognized herself in the bathroom mirror. She’d lost at least fifteen pounds and her hair was longer than it had been in years, curling below her shoulders.

As the light changed on Irving, Etta clutched the strap of her bag and the plastic bag she’d carefully wrapped the tin box in, and continued on, stopping only once under an awning to pull the rusted box out, open the lid, and glance inside at the label. It was faded and hard to read. Etta wasn’t sure if it was an old label or a stamp, but the type was still clearly legible: Tanaka Grocery. Selling Asian goods since 1917.