The Vines (18 page)

AFTER

The letter finds him in a small town in Arizona called Superior. A few months after he left New Orleans, a stray rock shattered the windshield of his motorcycle, and when he pushed it by both handlebars into the nearest auto body shop, he found himself surrounded by a ghost town cradled in a vast, dry valley, with a boarded-up main street he recognized from various films about the sad and lonely Southwest.

The bike is a Honda ST1300, new and easy to fix, and the Navajo who runs the auto body shop on the edge of town had no trouble getting the replacement parts right away. But within hours of arriving in Superior by accident, Blake was seduced by the stark solemnity of the place. After a few nights at the nearest motel, he looked into renting a trailer on the edge of Queen Creek. He believed, perhaps foolishly, Superior’s vast emptiness would give his nightmares enough space in which to roam so they wouldn’t crowd him come sunrise.

So far, he’s been right.

The website for the local chamber of commerce tries to make a big deal out of the town’s geographical location. Superior sits on a dividing line between Arizona’s three predominant landscapes: Sonoran Desert to the west, mineral-rich valleys and plateaus to the south, mountain ranges to the east. On the map he’s managed to draw in his mind after half a year of exploring the region on his bike, the eastern half of the state is covered in a giant
D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
sign, its letters dripping red ink. Because with mountains comes denser foliage, even in Arizona. Just the thought of a branch dangling in the air behind his neck causes him to shudder and ball his hands into fists.

He spends most evenings sipping Coronas on the back steps of his trailer and watching the sunset paint the jagged rock faces at the edge of town with deep shades of blood orange and merlot. These rocks and the surrounding arid landscape give him strength, he is sure of it. Enough strength to keep from being frightened of the rattlesnakes that often gather atop the rocks beside the creek. They are fellow confused travelers, that’s all, barraged with stimuli that must—to their limited senses, at least—seem supernatural in origin. And besides, the earth under Spring House confronted him with far more determined and calculating sources of fear than some sluggish reptile living out a monotonous ritual of feeding and slumber.

When the letter reaches his doorstep, Blake is not surprised; he uses fake IDs in most circumstances to avoid leaving a trace that could connect him to any of the rare but extraordinary events throughout the Southwest for which he and his shadow, his guardian angel—his
ghost
—are responsible. But the bike is still in his name. He’s left this one connection to his previous life in place so that his father’s sister might be able to track him down should her health fail as quickly as that of her siblings.

And then there’s Nova.

He isn’t familiar enough with her handwriting to know if she’s the one who wrote his name and address on the envelope. There is, however, a slight hint of her perfume, just strong enough to make him wonder if she scented the letter on purpose. A warning, perhaps. Or proof that she was truly responsible for whatever it contains.

Even though he has no presence online himself, Blake has used library computer labs to check in every now and then on the legal status of the Chaisson estate. Alexander Chaisson installed a combined clause in the trust allowing for transfer of ownership to a board made up of Caitlin’s cousins in the event of her disappearance or severe mental incapacitation. And the trust’s definition of a disappearance—four months without any verifiable communication between Caitlin and the trust—could be established in considerably less time than the seven years required for a declaration of death in the state of Louisiana.

If Caitlin’s cousins have balked at the idea of Spring House passing out of the trust and into the hands of the gardener’s only daughter, there was no mention of it in the press. Perhaps, like Willie, Caitlin’s relatives had always sensed menace lurking there.
Sideways, all through everything and waiting to be f
ed,
as Willie had put it.

Or perhaps they had no interest in inheriting the last place Caitlin’s husband was seen alive. One thing was for sure: Caitlin’s disappearance had enriched her family to a significant degree. In fact, while most other families would have spent their time at the police station demanding that their loved one be found, Caitlin’s family had spent that time at their lawyers’ offices arranging for the speedy transfer of her vast wealth.

In the fading light, Blake settles down onto the trailer’s back steps and tears open the envelope. But before he can bring himself to begin reading the cursive on the pages within, he thinks, once again, that perhaps it’s time to buy himself some folding chairs or maybe an outdoor chaise lounge of some kind—that maybe he really will stay here long enough to justify more than a trailer and the few sticks of furniture inside. And then he searches the property for any traces of Felix’s ghost.

He knows they are with him always, and as if to remind him of this, they will often appear right at the edges of his vision even when he has not called them, bright-blue fireflies flickering in and out of visible life in the blink of an eye. He has driven his bike down many desert roads beneath vast, deep domes of stars, believing himself to be utterly alone, only to have them appear on all sides of him like excited dolphins chasing a ship. Rarely does the face of Felix Delachaise appear in their swirl or swarm, and usually only in those moments when Blake orders them into violent service in defense of someone who needs it. But they are always there, always at his service—a weapon and a shield. Without their omnipresence, he would never have the courage to ride a motorcycle at all, not after witnessing the terrible aftermaths of over a hundred motorcycle accidents during his years working in emergency rooms. If their recent behavior is any indicator, they are perfectly capable of catching him before the asphalt does.

Felix
is capable, he corrects himself.

Blake summons them now, and they appear in a thickening, swirling column above the flowing creek, well out of sight of the road and the nearest neighbor thirty yards away. Their fierce blue light dapples the rushing, frothing water as the sun sinks deeper to the west and the edges of night begin their long trip across the dry valley floor. He can’t face the past alone, not the sweet smell of Nova’s perfume, not whatever request or news her letter might contain, and so he asks them to stay, luminous, swirling, and close, as he finally begins to read, and they obey his command without asking for a drop of his blood or a memory of his rage.

Dear Blake,

Daddy says I should give you your space, that you will come back in due time if that’s what is meant to be. So I will have to ask his forgiveness, as well as yours, for tracking you down in this way. But please know that I have no intention of telling others where you’re living. Along those lines, I ask you to destroy this letter as soon as you are finished reading it, as events here have forced . . . or maybe I should say allowed . . . us to return to lives that seem normal, at least on the surface. (That’s why I wrote it by hand, BTW. So nobody could steal a piece of my history if they stole my computer.)

To be honest, I expected more of a fight from Caitlin’s family, and it has saddened me in ways I never could have predicted to see how little love they have for her. I wonder, Blake, if you were perhaps the only person who ever truly loved her. But then I remember her parents and the attention they paid to her. It always seemed to me like love. But maybe that’s just because it came wrapped in such glittering packages.

I think about her a lot, Blake. I think about her because I wonder how much of her was truly inside that . . . thing that came at me across the garden. There is a part of me that wants to know if a desire for my death was truly a part of her and if it came out in its purest form because she had been separated from her body. My father tells me these are foolish things to wonder about. He says the thing that Caitlin became was no thing at all, and so it doesn’t matter. And maybe he’s right.

What matters is that I never got a chance to thank you before you left. I saw what you did. I saw you make a choice, a choice that saved my life, and possibly my father’s life and Allen’s life and Sam’s life. You could have hesitated. You could have tried to find out how much of Caitlin was still left, instead of saving my life the way you did. But you didn’t, and for that, I will be in debt to you always.

I hope you decide to come back. There are things Daddy didn’t see that night, things he doesn’t understand, things you and I saw together, and so I will always feel connected to you, even though you have been changed (literally) by everything that happened and maybe that means you won’t be able to live as normally (sort of) as we do. As we try to, I should say.

Spring House is mine now. I have a plan for it, but it is, in part, a plan that requires your approval. Here goes.

I would like to give part ownership of the house to the Lost Voices Project. I would like to put the slave quarters back and for there to be some sort of museum on the property, maybe something outside where the garden used to be. Something that shows the faces of the slaves who worked and died here. Something that shows all of history and not just the parts needed to rent the place out for weddings. But it doesn’t feel right to invite people I care about, people like Dr. Taylor, onto this property without warning her in some way. And by warning her I mean giving her some kind of sense of what happened here that night . . . because it might happen again. I’m not sure that’s a possibility, but I’m not sure it’s not a possibility either.

Things have been quiet since you left, so maybe the secrets in the soil here are exhausted. But I worry. I worry about bringing others to this place, allowing them to give their hearts to it, if there’s even the slightest chance that something like what we went through could happen again.

But our story is not mine alone to tell. I could always leave out the parts involving you, but still, it doesn’t feel right not to say something to you first, not to ask your permission.

Write me, Blake. Please write me and tell me if I should proceed. Please write me and tell me that you’re OK.

I trust that Felix Delachaise travels with you always, and I hope that he is truly under your command as you promised me he would be. If he is not, if you ever need help, you have a home at Spring House. You have a home with us always.

Your Friend,

Nova

PS, Speaking of miracles, we have taught Virginie how to read.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Gwendolyn Hall, the scholar mentioned several times in this novel, is a real person, and I’m honored she took the time to correspond with me while I was researching this novel. The Lost Voices Project, however, is fiction. That said, if it were to exist, it would rely heavily on the work Ms. Hall did to compile an extensive database of one hundred thousand enslaved Africans and African Americans.

For invaluable and penetrating reads of
The Vines
, I’m indebted to David Groff and David Pomerico, as well as my own creative support system: my mother, Anne Rice, and my best friend and cohost of
The Dinner Party Show
,
Eric Shaw Quinn.

The moment she read the manuscript, my agent, Lynn Nesbit, saw straight to the dark truth I tried to portray in this book. She also stuck with me during the various twists and turns on its exciting and sometimes suspenseful path toward publication.

I’m also blessed with excellent representation in the form of my attorney, Christine Cuddy, and my film and TV agent, Rich Green, at Resolution.

Along the way I received excellent counsel from my friends and colleagues Blake Crouch, Barry Eisler, Marcus Sakey, M.J. Rose, Liz Berry, and Gregg Hurwitz. (The always wise counsel of my best friend, Eric Shaw Quinn, is so pervasive throughout my life it almost doesn’t rate a mention. But he likes attention, so I’ll throw his name in one more time.) These fine folks all helped guide me toward new opportunities hiding amid new challenges.

The horror genre itself would still be a strange and forbidding world to me if it weren’t for the excellent friendship and guidance of Michael Rowe, himself a very talented practitioner of scary, scary stories.

I’m smitten with the resourceful and incredibly smart team at 47North and Amazon Publishing. My thanks to Jason Kirk for spearheading the editorial process (and helping me come up with synonyms for the word
slut
, a word this novel was apparently full of when I first turned it in) and to Daphne Durham, Katie Finch, and Daniel Slater for introducing me to the exciting new world of Amazon Publishing.

When I published my last novel,
The Heavens Rise
,
I left a very important person off of the acknowledgments page. Her name is Amy Loewy. She gave that novel a deep and thorough editorial read, and then I forgot to mention her. I bought her a nice dinner while I was in New Orleans, and I talked about her on Facebook a bunch, but still, I make it my business to give credit where credit is due. So
thank you, Amy. Thanks to you and Britton for everything.

After two years, The Dinner Party Show, the Internet radio program I started with my cohost, Eric Shaw Quinn, has continued to be a joy and a challenge, and I’m grateful for the team that makes it happen every weekend. That team includes my cohost, Eric Shaw Quinn (again, of course), Brandon Griffith, Benjamin Scuglia, Jasun Mark, and Brett Churnin. Thanks, guys, for making sure Eric and I are even louder than usual every Sunday evening at 8:00 p.m. EST, 5:00 p.m. PST. (And the website, in case you ever want to listen, is
www.thedinnerpartyshow.com
.) And if you aren’t one of our Party People, give us a listen (or a download) and see if we’re your cup of tea. We have fun and we don’t bite the first time you eat with us.