Garden of Evil (9 page)

As they sailed overhead, the clouds cast shadows which fled across the grass like the souls of people who were once loved, hurrying to go wherever they have to go, or wherever the wind takes them.

O
utside Jane Seabrook's house, Stone Canyon Avenue sloped steeply uphill, and the driveway leading up to 37109 was even steeper, so that Jim had to park his car at an awkward tilt, with its rear end protruding into the road, and he had to push his door open with his feet in order to climb out.

It was midday, and still breezy, with the clouds tumbling overhead like a speeded-up movie. He felt completely unreal as he climbed the steps that led up to the front porch. Ocher-colored dust blew up from the flowerbeds on either side, as if he were a spirit who caused whirlwinds wherever he walked.

The house was modest: a cream-painted two-story family home, with Spanish-style windows, and a heap of flowering pink bougainvillea hanging over the porch. As Jim reached the top of the steps, a small dog began to yap, and he heard a clear woman's voice call out, ‘Tessie – hush up, will you!'

He didn't recognize the voice. Are you supposed to recognize somebody's voice after eighteen years? He went up to the varnished oak front doors and rang the bell. He waited, biting his lower lip. He looked around. An old man in a frayed Panama hat was standing in his front yard on the opposite side of the road, staring at him suspiciously. Jim almost felt like giving him the finger.

The doors opened and there she was. No longer brunette, but blonde, with a shoulder-length bob, with bangs. But still the same hazel-colored eyes, and the slightly feline cheekbones, and the pink lips that looked as if she had just finished blowing somebody a kiss goodbye.

She was wearing a simple black linen dress, and a string of black beads around her neck, and a plain silver bracelet.

‘Hallo, Jane,' said Jim.

She gave him a tight, complicated smile. ‘You'd better come in,' she told him.

He followed her across a wide, cool hallway with a brown-tiled floor. On the left-hand wall hung a large mirror, with a brown wooden frame; and on the right-hand side hung a garish amateur oil painting of a lake, with disproportionately giant ducks flying over it.

They came out into a conservatory, with calico blinds drawn down to keep out the sun. It was furnished with brown wicker armchairs, and a glass-topped coffee table, and a variety of frondy potted palms. It smelled of dry heat, and plant fertilizer, but it also smelled of Jane. She was still wearing the same perfume, after all these years. Light, and flowery, with an underlying muskiness, although he had never known the name of it.

‘Can I get you something to drink?' she asked him.

‘I'm good, thanks.'

‘Please – why don't you sit down?'

He hesitated for a moment, and then he sat. She sat, too, with her knees tight together and her back very straight, although she ceaselessly fiddled with her bracelet.

‘I guess the police have been keeping you up to date,' said Jim. ‘They still can't work out how anybody could have done it. You know, up on the ceiling like that. Or why they would have wanted to.'

Jane said, ‘They told me that they found her clothes and her bag in the changing rooms. That's how they found out who she was.

Jim nodded. Detective Carroll had told
him
that, too.

‘They had washed her before I identified her,' Jane went on, ‘but they showed me a photograph of what she looked like when they found her, with all of that white paint all over face. You know, just in case it meant anything significant.'

‘And did it?'

‘I don't know, Jim. If it did, I can't imagine what. It made her look like a statue.'

‘Yes,' said Jim.

There was a very long pause between them, and then Jane said, ‘She was looking forward so much to seeing you. To getting to know you.'

‘Did she plan on telling me who she was?'

‘Eventually, yes. I think so.'

‘But not if I turned out to be some obnoxious bastard who smelled of liniment and always gave her bad marks?'

‘Now you're being unfair.'

‘Oh, I see. And it was fair of you to give birth to her without even letting me know?'

‘Jim, please. That was a long time ago. We were both a lot younger then.'

‘Yes,' said Jim. ‘I guess I should have stood up to your mother, shouldn't I? What a wimp I was.'

‘Oh, God, Jim, you weren't to blame. Nobody could
ever
stand up to my mother, not even my father.'

‘I thought she was hell-bent on you getting rid of it.' He paused, and then corrected himself. ‘Getting rid of
her
,
I mean. Of Bethany
.
'

Jane nodded. ‘She was at first, but she was a very twisted woman, my mother. I think she got more pleasure out of my keeping our baby, and you not knowing about it, than you believing that I had had an abortion.'

Jim shook his head in disbelief. ‘She hated me as much as that?'

‘It wasn't
you
she hated, Jim. It was
me
. She was jealous of me from the moment I was born. But she knew how much I loved you. And she knew that everything that hurt
you
hurt me just as much.'

‘Jesus. Where is she now? I should go round and tell her what a goddamned bitch she is.'

‘You can if you like. She's in the Union Cemetery in Brentwood, next to her own mother, who was even more of a bitch than she was. You want the plot number?'

‘So, what?' said Jim, after a while. He looked around the conservatory. ‘You married now?'

‘Yes. My married name's Edwards.'

‘Happy?'

‘That's a question you should never ask a married woman. You know that.'

‘Oh. OK. What was she like? Bethany?'

Jane's eyes began to glitter with tears, but she managed to smile. ‘Pretty. Very pretty. Very petite. She always had messy hair, just like you. She loved poetry and she loved music and she loved to dance.

‘You got some pictures?'

‘Of course. I'll give you some that you can take away with you. I have some new ones which were taken only a couple of weeks ago, at her church summer fair.'

‘She belonged to a church?'

Jane stood up and went across to a brown wicker bureau. She opened one of the top drawers and took out a folder of photographs. ‘I always brought her up to be God-fearing, Jim. We used to go to communion every Sunday and she would sing like a little angel. Lately, though, she found this new church, and she's being going two or three times a week. Well – she
was
going two or three times a week.'

She was silent for a few moments and Jim knew that she couldn't speak.

‘I know,' he said. ‘It's been a terrible shock for you.'

Jane handed him some photographs of a young girl in a long white muslin dress and flowers in her hair, dancing barefoot through an apple orchard. She wasn't just pretty, she was beautiful, and she looked so happy.

When he came to the third photograph, however, he saw a group of young people standing in the background, between the trees. They were all dressed in white, too, even the boys. He peered closer, and one of them looked distinctly familiar, even though his face was turned away from the camera.

He looked at the fourth photograph, and the fifth, and the sixth, and there he was – staring directly at the camera this time, with a shining smile on his face. It was Simon Silence.

Jim said to Jane, ‘What church is this? Did you ever visit it yourself?'

‘No,' said Jane. ‘Bethany said they had a chapel on Lookout Mountain Road, in Laurel Canyon, but they also had a country place near Bakersfield. That's where these pictures were taken.'

‘The Church of the Divine Conquest,' said Jim.

‘You
know
it?'

‘I've heard of it, let's put it that way.'

Jane frowned at him. ‘You don't think that what happened to Bethany had anything to with her church, do you? She always loved going there. It always seemed to give her such a buzz, you know? Such confidence. She always seemed to have so much more confidence than I ever did at her age. Especially with boys.'

‘The natural order of things,' said Jim. ‘Men and women, both equal.'

‘That is
so
strange,' Jane told him. She was standing against the muted sunlight with the folder of photographs in her hand. ‘That's exactly what Bethany always used to say, over and over. “The natural order of things.”'

After Detective Brennan and Detective Carroll had told Jim about Bethany, Dr Ehrlichman had told Jim that he could take the rest of the day off, but Jim didn't really see the point of that. What was he going to do, go home and drink five cans of Fat Tire Ale and talk to Tibbles about the meaning of life? And, what was even more painful, the meaning of death?

Before he left, Jim stood on the doorstep and said to Jane, ‘Maybe I can come around again sometime? We both have a whole lot catching-up to do, don't we?'

‘I don't think so,' said Jane. ‘But of course I'll send you an invitation to the funeral.'

‘Jane—'

‘No,' she said. ‘When you and I were together, that was one of the very best times of my life. But – it was also the worst. I don't want to relive it.'

She came up to him and wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly. He kissed her hair, and her forehead. That perfume, it brought it all back. From the opposite side of the road, the old man in the frayed Panama hat stared at them intently.
What's the matter, you nosey old fart
, thought Jim.
Don't you know what regret looks like
?

He gave Jane one more kiss, and then turned away and went down the steps and climbed into his car. He drove back to college feeling numb. He wondered if time travelers felt as numb as he did, after they had been back to stop Lincoln being assassinated, or to watch the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

He switched on the car radio and it was playing
Big Yellow Taxi
by Joni Mitchell. ‘
Don't it always seem to go,
' she was warbling, ‘
You don't know what you've got till it's gone
.' He switched it off again and drove in silence.

When he turned in through the gates of West Grove Community College, he saw the squad cars and the ambulance and the coroner's vans immediately, all of them clustered in the turning area outside of the main college buildings. There were two fire trucks, too. TV vans were parked all the way up the left-hand side of the driveway, and he passed knots of news reporters and technicians, talking and smoking and unraveling yards of black cable.

He drove slowly up to the top of the slope, until he reached a yellow wooden police barrier that had been set up across the driveway from one side to the other. A gingery sheriff's deputy approached him and he put down his window.

‘You have any business here, sir?'

Jim took his college ID badge out of his shirt pocket and showed it to him. ‘What's going on here?' he asked.

‘There's been an incident, sir. If you want to make your way to the parking lot and go directly inside. For the time being the students and faculty are confined to the interior of the premises.'

‘What's happened? Is it one of the students?'

‘There's been an incident, sir. Please make your way to the parking lot and go directly inside.'

‘What are you? A recording?'

The gingery deputy stared at him without blinking. ‘Please make your way—'

‘Yes, OK. I heard you. I'm going.'

He drove into the parking lot and parked in Royston Denman's space. As he climbed out of his car, he saw that there was a crowd of deputies and paramedics and firefighters gathered around the large cypress tree. Two of the firefighters were carrying an aluminum ladder on their shoulders, but at the moment it looked as though there was more discussion going on than action. Jim could see Detective Brennan and Detective Carroll, too, and for some reason they were talking to Father O'Flaherty, the college chaplain, who was nodding repeatedly so that his bald head reflected the sun like a heliograph message.

Nobody was looking. The gingery deputy was leaning over a bright green Volkswagen, repeating his message to one of the college lab assistants. Jim walked across the grass to where Detectives Brennan and Carroll were standing, and came up close behind them. They were too busy talking to Father O'Flaherty to notice him.

Shielding his eyes against the sun, he looked up into the cypress tree, with its grotesquely gnarled trunk and its wide-spreading branches. As he did so, he felt a cold, crawling sensation all the way down his spine.

High up in the tree, almost twenty feet up, where the branches began to divide from the trunk, a naked white figure was pinned, with its arms and its legs spread out. It was a young man, who had been painted all over with thick white paint, so that his hair stuck out in the same way that Bethany's had stuck out, when she was nailed to the ceiling of Special Class Two.

This young man, though, had been nailed to the cypress tree upside-down, head downward. All around him, four on each side, eight white cats had been nailed.

Pushing his way past Detectives Brennan and Carroll, Jim approached the tree and stared up at the young man with a growing feeling of dread. This had to be a symbol. Not only a symbol, but an omen. One young person nailed to a ceiling with eight cats around her might have been nothing more than some bizarre act of perversity. But here was a second, nailed up in almost exactly the same way.

Something supremely evil is on its way
, thought Jim.
Something more evil than
any of the ghosts or demons that I've ever come across before
. Almost all of the ghosts or demons that he had met before had been vengeful or wantonly destructive, but in their own selfish interest. Either they had wanted to punish people for what they had done to them while they were alive, or else they were trying to gain entrance into the world of the living from the world of the dead.