The Vines (10 page)

21

There was a brief period in the more recent history of Spring House when Caitlin’s mother entertained the idea that she would do some of its gardening herself, and the tools she purchased for this endeavor—and even used on perhaps two or three different
occasions—are
still in a gleaming red box inside the gardening shed, right where she left them years before.

Caitlin carries the box, along with a flashlight—the biggest and brightest she can find—to the gazebo, taking the long route through the middle of the gardens so as to give her pursuer time to catch up. She doubts she will hear his car approach, although he (she assumes it’s a he) doesn’t strike her as the most professional of night stalkers, as evidenced by his own arrogant over-the-shoulder wave to his own planted camera. Still, she has one goal and one goal only. To get him to visit the gazebo. Alone.

She sinks to her knees and runs her hands across the floorboards. They are cracked and jostled in places, but the damage isn’t as severe as she had thought. It seems as if the vines didn’t punch through them like a fist but instead somehow managed to flatten themselves in between the cracks, as snakes and rats do when they’re trying to fit inside walls.

They won’t need to do that this time.

She grabs a small gardening shovel and wedges its sharp tip into one of the thin cracks. After a couple seconds of prying, she’s pulled free a half-foot section of floorboard. She recoils instinctively, half expecting to uncover a swirling portal to the spirit world. What lies below, however, is glistening and densely coiled and appears to be very much of this earth. These growths appear fetal when compared to the vines that nursed from her wrist; they lack blossoms and leaves, and their general shape and enmeshed pattern remind her of old illustrated versions of
Jack and the Beanstalk
.

She spends the next twenty minutes removing as many floorboards as have been jostled loose by the previous night’s eruption. She tries, with each move, to strike a balance between the speed of a furtive late-night burial and the time her pursuer might need to catch up with her. It isn’t critical that he see her every move, just the final act, which includes removing several magazines she found in her trunk—now wrapped inside an old T-shirt—and placing them down under the floorboards of the gazebo as if they were an item of great and secret import.

She has set the bundle atop the coiled vines and is about to retreat altogether, when she realizes her next few moves might require a little test. She runs three fingers down the side of one of the slick vines. It reacts to her touch with a leisurely, serpentine slide that makes a moist, fleshy sound.

Still connected
,
she thinks.
Still . . . mine?

There’s only one way to be sure.

She takes the shiny, barely used pruning shears from the toolbox and presses its handle until the blades open wide enough for her to drag one sharp edge across her left palm. The resulting wound doesn’t bleed as much as her wound the night before, but it’s enough. The first fat red droplets to hit the vine below are absorbed immediately, soundlessly, like water evaporating in a time-lapsed film. And then, as Caitlin holds her dripping palm out over the small shadowed cavern, the tip of one vine is lifting up into the air like a charmed cobra, and this time, because she is present and fully conscious, a delirious laughter overtakes her as she watches it twine gently around her bleeding palm, covering the wound, drinking from her silently and without effort. Her breasts are smashed against the gazebo’s floor, her hair draping her face, several locks of it blinding her right eye, but she fears any adjustment will disrupt this magical marriage of earth and blood.

When it is done, it is done. It untwines from her hand, and once again a flowing wound has been miraculously reduced to a vague rosy scar; this vine has the power both to drink and to heal, it seems. And then it is drifting back down to its former resting place. The night before, it took off in immediate pursuit of her husband, the man whose terrible betrayal was freshly seared into her soul, but now it lies motionless. Waiting? If so, then for what? Perhaps because her pursuer is not yet within her immediate vicinity. Maybe as soon as he gets close, as close as Troy and his little whore were to her the night before as they hurried off to the gardening shed . . .

She replaces the floorboards as carefully as she can, taking care to leave one conspicuously loose. She turns on the gazebo’s single lightbulb before heading back to the main house.

As she circulates through the mansion’s silent hallways—killing the lights, pausing to undress in front of the bedroom window, giving the appearance that she is retiring for the night—the gun is either in her right hand or within reach the entire time.

Once Spring House is in darkness, she stands in one corner of the master bedroom window, the four-poster canopied bed throwing a monstrous shadow on the wall beside her. She waits, listening to familiar ticking sounds of a great house cooling in the late hours of a night in the Deep South.

When her new friend appears, a low, lumbering shadow moving through the gardens toward the gazebo, Caitlin has to stifle a laugh. It’s as satisfying a moment as the gas station attendant’s terrified expression. Still, she gains control, reminds herself that she has work to do.

She grips the edge of the window frame, gazes down upon her intruder as he moves toward the gazebo, and tries to summon the same hatred, the same rage she felt when she watched her husband and his little slut rushing through the same garden.

The problem, though, is that the hate is nothing like she felt (
feels
) when she thinks about Troy and Jane.
What has this man done to you? Really? I mean, except hop your fence and plant cameras in your yard? Does he really deserve the same fate as Troy?

These thoughts, and the cold fingers of regret they press against her strained heart, have distracted her from the silence outside. Indeed, she can only hear her own rasping breaths. No screams from the gazebo, and the guy’s still down on his knees, mimicking her earlier pose almost exactly, pulling up loose floorboards. The vines that slithered at just the hint of her touch, the vines she just fed for a second time, have not responded to her mental command.

She feels instantly, violently humbled, and is shocked to feel a hot sheen of tears in her eyes. But then a part of her leans into this feeling. She was moving too quickly. That’s it. She doesn’t even know who this man is, and she was so desperate to test the new powers available to her that she rushed into this with too much thoughtless hunger.

Magazines,
she realizes suddenly, the word exploding in her mind like a bright flare.
He’ll know it’s a trap now. I couldn’t think of anything better than magazines. And why should I have? I thought he’d be dead by now. Why isn’t it working? What’s different from last time?
This new question reminds her of the one that glued her to the windowsill a few moments before:
What has
this
man done to you?
And as she turns that question over in her head, she can feel it shift just a bit, the emphasis changing.
What has this man done to
you
?

A voice that sounds surprisingly like her dead husband’s answers.

Not enough, sweetheart. Apparently not enough.

In a few seconds, her strange hooded intruder will realize he walked into a trap. He will know that he is alone with a frail young woman who has been playing tricks with his mind. Vines or no vines, Caitlin cannot have this, cannot be thought of as weak any longer, and so now she is running—out of the room, down the stairs, and through the front door—gun raised in one hand as if it has the power to part the shadows before her.

She creeps up on him silently. “Take it off!”

The guy doesn’t move. He’s found something down in the vines, and for a delirious instant she thinks one of them has snagged him, but he isn’t struggling, he’s digging. The magazines she laid as a trap have been tossed aside onto the floorboards next to him. “Stop!” she yells again, and this time his hands go up, while he stands straight and backs up at the same time.

“Stop moving and take off the hood.”

Gone are the hot tears of embarrassment. She is proud of the authoritative tone of her voice, at least, if not the wobbly aim with which she holds the tiny pistol on her intruder’s back.

But he’s still backing up.

“I said
stop
mo—”

He spins and lunges at her in the same instant, his arms out. She sees the glint of something in his right hand and before she can process whether or not it’s a weapon, she fires, and in the muzzle flash she watches her husband’s blood-encrusted gold watch tumble from the intruder’s hand and fall to the earth at her feet.

Just like the man she has shot.

22

“He’s not here, Nova.” It’s the fifth time Blake has said it, but Nova keeps searching the little house as if her father might be cowering in the few inches between the wall and the back of the sofa or curled up inside the tiny kitchen pantry.

“Maybe he’s been and gone?” Blake offers.

But Nova just shakes her head and keeps up her futile search, and Blake is sure she isn’t as frightened for her father’s well-being as she is furious he broke his promise.
Which might be the reason he’s not answering his phone,
he thinks. After their conversation a few hours before and the events of the past twenty-four hours, everything seems possible, none of it good. Willie ignoring his daughter’s wrath is the best of the scenarios Blake can conjure.

On their way in, they bypassed the plantation house and its grounds, taking instead the gravel road right to Willie’s miniature house. Which means it’s not the only place left to look.

“Nova. His truck isn’t here. He’s
not
here.”

“Maybe he parked up at the main house?”

“Which he never does.”

“No . . . but if Caitlin asked him to, he would. Come on!”

A few moments later he’s running after her up the same path they took earlier that afternoon, only now the cane field belonging to the neighboring farm is a curtain of shifting shadows beside them, the sounds of its rustling stalks easily mistaken for the careful footfalls of a predator sizing up its prey.

Blake sees the gazebo first and reaches out a hand to stop Nova. The grounds are shadow-filled and so is the soaring plantation house. But the single lightbulb inside the gazebo is on, making it look like the tip of a boat dock on a dark, expansive lake. From this distance away, he can see some of the floorboards are missing, and what appear to be several magazines strewn across the dirt.

When he starts for the gazebo, Nova lets out a small sound of protest and reaches out a hand to stop him, but he takes it in his and starts leading them across the garden. She follows, silenced by his determination that they stick together. He can feel her trembling slightly through her hand.

“What the
hell
?” Nova whispers as they peer down through the gazebo’s missing floor. And Blake is surprised that despite her willingness to believe, Nova is more thunderstruck by the sight of the slick and impossibly large growths coiled below than he is. Maybe it’s some kind of denial mechanism, but Blake is fixated on the traces of recent human behavior all around them: the deliberately removed floorboards, the discarded red toolbox, the swirl of some sort of gold fabric wrapped up in the vine coil.

When Blake gets down onto his knees next to the hole, Nova hisses fiercely, grabbing for his shoulder, but he brushes her hand aside and braces himself against the edge of the opening with one hand while reaching down into the miniature pit with the other. As soon as his fingertips touch the strange band of gold, he can tell it’s made of fabric. The thick, slick vines barely protest as he pulls it free of their coil.

Nova goes silent, her hands rising to her mouth as Blake extracts the soaked and tattered necktie. He lifts it up toward the light overhead so they can both get a good look at it.

It feels to Blake as if the simple act of holding this discovery aloft is required to draw the implications of the scene before them into a coherent picture. The vines—if that’s what they are—are too thick and large and fresh-looking to have recently been disturbed by a human burial. And why would anyone just shove this once-shiny gold necktie down into their moist lair? And could a human hand have forced it to entwine with them so efficiently?

“Was this . . . ?”

“He was wearing it last night,” Nova whispers through her fingers. “Troy. He was . . . That was his . . .”

The eruption of music from the main house and Nova’s scream seem to come in the same instant. The song now rattling the windows of the parlor is upbeat and cheerful, and Blake can’t process the jarring transition at first. It feels like he’s just rolled out of bed to find himself standing on a busy New York sidewalk. But the lyrics are familiar enough to send a spear of anxiety through his sternum.

The same Faith Hill song John Fuller would play when he called Blake late at night, when he was afraid whispering sweet nothings into the phone would be overheard by his parents, and so he let the music do the talking for him by turning the volume most of the way down and pressing the receiver’s mouthpiece right up to the stereo. Only a few people on earth knew John used to do that for him; Caitlin was one of them. And she is standing on the back porch now, a shadow silhouetted by a few dim lights she’s just turned on in the parlor behind her. He can’t see her expression through the shadows, but it looks like she’s waiting to see if they’ve noticed her.

“Caitlin . . . ,” he calls out to her, and a few seconds later, she’s moving toward them.

When she’s within a few yards of the gazebo, she says, “You should go, Nova.”

“Where’s my dad?” Nova demands.

“Not here. Seriously. You should go.”

“We ne—no. We need to talk,” Nova says. But her words are shaky, and the glances she’s casting between Blake and Caitlin’s approaching shadow suggest that she’d like nothing more than to take off running. “We need to talk about what’s going on here. I’m not letting my daddy come back here, unless I
know
what—”

“I know you hate me, Nova. I know you always have. I know it never seemed like enough, the things I did for your father. For your family—”

“For
us
?” she asks, angry at the insinuation. “What the hell are you—
where is my father?
”

“—but trust me. I’m trying to protect you here. I am. Truly.”

“There’s nothing you
can
protect me from,
Miss
Caitlin.”

“Really? Want me to tell you what we did to those three boys who cornered you that day you were walking home from school? The ones that touched you even after you begged them to stop?”

Nova is visibly stunned, lips hanging open like a grouper’s as she seems to mentally reach for the memory while recoiling from it in the same instant.

“Sure, you’re a big girl now with a lot of opinions and college professors filling your head with all kinds of fantasies about how things are. About how they should be. But it wasn’t your father who walked those boys to the parish line and told them what would happen to them if they ever came back to Montrose Parish. It was
mine
. And he had friends with cop cars. So believe me when I tell you my family’s done more for you than you’ll ever know. And believe me when I tell you it’s time for you to leave.”

“What about me?” Blake asks, taking a few steps forward, hoping to see the expression on Caitlin’s face. No such luck. But he
can
see the outline of the pistol she’s holding in her right hand. “Why do I get to stay?”

Caitlin doesn’t answer, and the weight of her consideration sits over them all. Blake hears Nova’s sharp intake of breath, senses the start of a diatribe. “She’s got a gun, Nova,” he whispers. But apparently not quietly enough, because the next thing Caitlin says is, “I’ve got a lot more than a gun, honey.”

There’s that hard edge again. What had she said to him then?
All you know is flesh and bone.
It’s not just hard; it’s confident, knowing, self-satisfied . . . three things Caitlin has never been in her entire life.

“Fine. Come inside,” Caitlin finally says. “Both of you. Come inside and meet the man who really killed John Fuller.”