The Red Garden (20 page)

I was no one. Nothing. A handyman, a jack of all trades

Winner at none. But I was the one who fell in love with you
.

I never told you why I was there
.

My car had broken down
.

I left it in a ditch
.

The sunlight was blinding. I couldn’t even see you at first, only
your outline against the trees
.

But it was enough
.

These are the things I would have said to you as I held you closer
,

As I told you to run
,

Making certain to speak in a language

You didn’t understand
.

She went inside and folded the second poem into the box with the first. She moved a stack of sweaters in front of it, but it didn’t matter. She knew it was there.

T
HE WEDDING WAS
on a Sunday, at the Hightop Inn. The next week Kate’s mother died. Kate and Henry decided to stay on. They moved in with Aunt Hannah, who was undone by the loss of her beloved sister. Kate took a job at the high school, teaching French, and Henry joined a law firm in Lenox. Sometimes Kate felt that they rattled around the old house. Everything seemed empty. But she got used to it. People welcomed them to town and were glad to have Kate back among them. One night Kate and Henry met a group of their friends at the Jack Straw Bar
and Grill. They were nearly through with their meal when Kate spied Cal Jacob at the bar. He was a grown man now, one with a drinking problem. Although she hadn’t seen him for years, Kate went to say hello. She still thought of him as nine years old.

“I’m so sorry about Lucy,” she said.

There weren’t many murders in the county, certainly not in their town. For everyone who’d known Lucy Jacob, the loss still stung, but Cal was nonchalant.

“Yeah. Thanks.” Cal made it clear she should drop the topic. He didn’t talk about his sister. He was a man with a swagger, one who indulged in petty crime and thought the world owed him something. “Let me buy you a drink. Come on, sit down with us.”

Cal was accompanied by some of his no-good friends from Albany, one of whom, a thin dark man with hooded eyes, looked Kate up and down.

“Do you mind?” Kate said, offended by his indecent gaze. She felt undressed in some way.

“I wouldn’t mind at all.” Cal’s friend snickered and all the men laughed. He grabbed her arm, which would later leave a mark on her creamy skin. “Let’s go out to the parking lot and do it right now.”

Kate pulled away. “I just wanted to say hello,” she said. “Clearly a mistake.” She went back to her table, rattled. “What’s happened to Cal?” she asked.

One of their friends, Leo Mott, was on the Blackwell police force. “He’s a bad apple,” Leo said. “His buddies are worse.”

“I think it’s my fault,” Kate said to her husband as they walked home that night.

“Your fault?” Henry laughed.

“I was his camp counselor and he disappeared into the woods on my watch. I should have kept a closer eye on him.”

“But he didn’t disappear. You found him,” Henry reminded her. He’d heard the story before, or at least that part of it.

Kate and Henry held hands, but as they walked through town everything looked odd to Kate, the way things do in a dream, or in any place where you know you don’t belong.

Y
EAR IN AND
year out, Kate left baskets on Route 17. She went at least once a month. She packed warm sweaters, novels, notebooks, coffee, chocolates, packets of nails, wire. Items she thought he might need or desire. Her aunt Hannah went with her sometimes, for the exercise. She never questioned why they were taking a basket into the forest. Once Kate had said, “It’s for lost travelers.” Hannah didn’t ask for any further explanation. She was fairly certain it was for that man her sister had believed existed the summer when Kate seemed so changed.

I
T WAS
A
UGUST
when it happened, the month when she’d first met him. She packed up tomatoes, lettuce, a copy of
Great Expectations
, a few issues of
Life
magazine. The air was amber, the way it was in late August. Kate and her aunt took their time. Hannah had changed since Kate’s mother had died; she didn’t often go out socially, and her one enjoyment was her walks with her niece. It was a perfect day. Cars passed by occasionally, but Kate and her aunt paid them no mind. One car pulled off to the side of the road into a scenic overlook. From there you could see all of the valley below. The town of Blackwell looked like a child’s toy.

Kate and her aunt had gone past the overlook on the side of the road when a man came up behind them. He was running, slinking through the trees. He had the speed of a whirlwind. He hit Hannah so hard that she sank down immediately and rolled into the weeds. It happened so fast Kate didn’t understand. She hadn’t seen him yet. She wondered if there had been an earthquake or if her aunt had had a sudden heart attack. She dropped down to her knees to try to stop her aunt from drifting any farther downhill, and that was when he hit her, too. Once she was down, the stranger grabbed Kate by her hair and dragged her farther into the woods. She was on her stomach, trying to get away, clawing at the ground. There was blood running from her scalp, and she could feel its heat. He got on top of her, pushing her face into the dirt so she couldn’t move while he fucked her. He tore at her clothes so they were half off. He was strong and maddened. He told her he would kill her if she made a sound, so she did what he said, thinking he would let them live. She caught a glimpse of him. He seemed familiar but no one she knew. He was rough with her even when she promised she wouldn’t fight him. He wanted to hurt her. Then she remembered. Cal’s friend at the bar.

She let her mind leave her body. She imagined she was walking through the woods. She was far away and soon it would be over. When he was done, he didn’t keep his word. She should have expected as much. He told her she was a whore who deserved to die. He hit her again with a rock, harder. She felt a flash of white-hot pain. She went under, then came back. She decided to pretend she was gone so he would think she was dead and leave them be.

She thought he would go back to his car, make his getaway,
but that was not his intention. He scrambled up to the ditch where Hannah was unconscious, limp and forsaken in the dirt. That was when Kate knew she couldn’t pretend to be dead. She pulled her clothes on and took up the bloody rock. She pounced on him while he was leaning over her aunt, talking to her even though she couldn’t hear, telling Hannah he was going to do to her what he’d done to Lucy and to Kate, but he would break her neck first so she’d continue to be quiet. Kate hit him hard. She could feel the strike through the bones of her arm. He jerked forward as if he was going to turn to her, so she hit him again. She kept hitting him. By the time she was finished he wasn’t moving anymore.

Kate sat back on her heels and tried to catch her breath. Blood flecked the ground. It pooled beneath the leaves. She pulled herself together and scurried over to her aunt. She put her ear to Hannah’s back. She thought she could hear her aunt breathing, but she wasn’t sure. She took off. Inside something cut through her like glass. Kate ran across the road and up the hill. She felt as if she was broken and if she stopped for an instant she would fall into pieces.

Matthew was there when she got to his house, stunned by her appearance. She didn’t have to say much for him to understand. He went with her back down the mountain, across the road. He knelt beside Hannah and took her pulse. He had a medical book and knew what he was supposed to do. He breathed into Hannah’s mouth and pushed on her chest. At last she took a gasping breath. He said he thought she had a concussion and maybe some broken bones. He lifted her in his arms and stood there on the side of the road.

“What are you doing?” Kate asked.

“I’ll carry her home. Then you’ll call the hospital. You’ll say someone broke in to your house and hurt you both. Then he ran away.”

“I killed him,” Kate said, astonished by her own actions.

“No,” Matthew told her. “He disappeared. He came into your house and you don’t know what happened to him. I’ll come back and get rid of him later.”

The light was fading when they reached Blackwell. They went the back way, through the orchard. No one saw them. Kate had imagined being with Matthew in town a thousand times, bringing him home, but not like this. They hurried through the yard, up the porch, into the house. Kate was sobbing, but she didn’t know it. Matthew took Hannah into her bedroom. When he came back into the parlor, Kate told him he had to leave. People would think the wrong thing if they saw him. He said he would, but he didn’t make a move to go.

Kate realized then that she felt so filthy she had to take a shower and change her clothes. She knew she wasn’t supposed to clean up before she called the police, but she couldn’t stand the stranger’s touch on her. She undressed in the kitchen, crying, and Matthew folded her ruined clothes into a paper bag. She stood in the shower and wept, her forehead against the tiles, hot water falling over her shoulders and her head.

Matthew was sitting in a chair in the parlor when she came out wearing a blue dress, her long red hair wet. He knew he had to go, yet hadn’t.

“I just wanted to know what it was like to sit here and wait for you,” he said.

She sat in his lap and kissed him. She felt undone and crazy. The world was nothing like she’d imagined it would be. She
would have left her life right then, traded it in completely, if he had asked her to. Instead, he went out the back door. He left town the way he’d come, through the orchard. There was barely any light by then, but some boys out playing baseball thought they spied a monster and they all took off, running for home.

When he returned to the woods, he dragged the man’s body into the forest with him. He covered his tracks. He took the body to the bear’s cave and hid it beneath a heap of branches. The old bear’s skeleton was in there and Matthew kept one of the bear’s teeth for luck. He could guess what people in town would think. He set fire to his shed that night. He packed up only the belongings he would need and watched the rest of it burn.

He took the car that had been parked in the scenic overlook. It was a better specimen than the one he’d arrived in, with four new tires. Cal’s friend had left the keys in the ignition for a quick getaway. When Matthew opened the glove compartment, he found Lucy Jacob’s hair ribbon, a token her killer had kept. Before he left, he buried the ribbon in the woods. He didn’t drive through town on his way out of Blackwell. That would have been too much for him. Instead, he went north, toward New York State, where he supposed he’d come from. He avoided Albany, which meant nothing to him and had never been home, but some months later he did venture into a small town near Saratoga, where he went into the post office, ignoring the stares of the clerks behind the counter, and bought stamps for an envelope addressed to Blackwell.

When the letter arrived, Kate didn’t open it until she was in the woods. She went off alone, as solitary as she had been ever since she’d met him. It was bear season, November, when the
bears were most active, preparing for winter. After the incident on the road, a band of Blackwell teenagers found the charred remains of Matthew’s shed. They carted their findings down to the police station. There were some books, along with pots and pans, the remnants of clothes, pieces of what looked like a handcrafted table and chairs. People were stunned. There had indeed been a monster up on Hightop, although now he was clearly gone. Everyone assumed he was responsible for the attacks in the woods. Lucy Jacob’s parents were relieved they could have some sort of closure in the matter of their daughter’s death. Cal even accepted some cash from a journalist in exchange for telling his sister’s story. Kate ran into him once, in the AtoZ Market.

“I guess you were right,” she said to Cal. “There are monsters.”

He’d been so intent on looking for them, he’d brought one to town in the form of his so-called friend, a man who had disappeared, whose car Matthew abandoned when he reached Saranac Lake, from where he made the rest of his way on foot.

Kate sat in a clearing. She was certain they would be growing worried at home. They would be standing at the door wondering why she went off walking when the woods were clearly dangerous. She opened the letter only to find it wasn’t a letter at all. It was the first poem her beloved had written, on the evening after Cal Jacob wandered off the road into bear territory, when he first knew what they were to each other and she didn’t want to know.

It was a decision before it was a question
.

That was the way things happened in the human world
.

In our world, a leaf falls one day and we know it’s time
.

We feel our hearts slowing down
.

We try to fight it with cold water, bee stings, fresh kills
.

But the leaf has fallen, the water doesn’t rouse us
.

When we sleep we dream more than any other creatures
.

We dream of entirely different lives
.

We are men and women
.