The Vines (4 page)

9

The detectives suggest Coulis, a little restaurant a block from the hospital that looks like a hole-in-the-wall but hosts long lines of customers every weekend who are willing to wait outside patiently for a plate of eggs Benedict with roast beef debris. And Blake knows it is well worth it. He also knows, though, that the place won’t be open for half an hour, so they settle on the drab hospital cafeteria.

“I haven’t seen or spoken to Caitlin or Troy in six months,” Blake begins. And before they can ask him why, he says, “I had reason to believe Troy was screw—cheating. I made the mistake of telling her. Since then . . . radio silence.”

Blake isn’t trying to impress the detectives exactly, but he would like them to know that he’s got experience with homicide interrogations, that they don’t need to bother with pleasantries. Or manipulative ploys. But they probably know this already. For a few months during his senior year of high school, Blake’s face was recognizable to most residents of southern Louisiana, including the detectives’ own Montrose Parish. The headlines didn’t mention him, of course. That distinction had gone to his early-morning visitor, Vernon Fuller:
S
ON OF
H
IGH
S
CHOOL
F
OOTBALL
C
OACH
S
LAIN IN
A
PPARENT
H
ATE
C
RIME
. But Blake had been a featured player in the drama—the survivor.

“So neither one’s been in touch since last night?” the bald detective asks.

“What happened last night?”

“This evidence you had,” Hairpiece diverts. “How exactly did you . . . uh . . .
bring
it to Miss Chaisson?”

“I didn’t say I had evidence. I said I had reason to believe.”

“That he was cheating on her?” Baldy asks.

Blake nods. Nova’s nicknames for the men have proven so effective, Blake realizes he can’t remember the actual name of either detective.

“Right. But . . . what was it that tipped you off?” Hairpiece continues. “I mean, was it e-mails? Some kind of Internet thing?”

“I’ve got friends who work the casinos in Biloxi. A few of them came to me and said they saw Troy come in with different women and that it looked . . . more than friendly.”

“So it was hearsay.”

“The camera footage wasn’t.” The detectives both give him a blank stare, until he adds, “One of my friends works security at Belle Fleur.”

“I see . . .”

What? You thought a guy like me would only have friends who dressed the showgirls?

“And so you showed her the footage?” Baldy continues.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“She didn’t ask to see it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because she didn’t believe me.”

“But there was footage . . .”

“I didn’t tell her about it.”

“I’m getting confused,” Hairpiece interjects, and his “confused” expression is so forced Blake has to work not to roll his eyes.

“I told her what I had been told. She didn’t want to believe it, though, so I left it at that.”

“And then you guys went radio silent for six months until last night . . .”

“No. Not until last night. I still haven’t heard from her. Or Troy.”

“Sorry. Just seemed like you were having a pretty important phone call when we walked up. Thought maybe she’d given
you a—”

“That was one of her employees. Calling to tell me what happened. They’re concerned for Caitlin, obviously.”

“So what did she say happened?” Baldy asks, palms open, eyes wide.
The guy must have a community theater background,
Blake thinks. “We’d like to know as much as everyone else.”

“Apparently Troy went into the gardening shed with some woman. Only the woman came out. She was covered in blood, carrying an axe. And there was no body in the shed.” He gave them a mirthless smile. “Sounds like y’all might have the world’s first axe-wielding illusionist on your hands.”

He knows better than to ask them directly what the axe-wielding woman’s story is, but he doubts they would tell him under any circumstances. His suspicions are confirmed when Hairpiece says, “Wow.
Someone
doesn’t miss Troy Mangier.”

“He’s only been gone . . . what? A few hours? He’ll probably turn up next to the river as soon as the sun’s all the way up. Hungover. Again.”

“Or bled out from an axe wound.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Troy always manages to land on his feet. Or Caitlin’s back.”

“So these friends of yours, the ones who work the casinos in Biloxi. They friends of Troy’s too?”

“Not really. No.”

“How’d they recognize him when he turned up?”

Blake curls his fingers around his Styrofoam coffee cup.

“Maybe you told them to be on the lookout ’cause you had some suspicions?” the detective presses.

Blake shrugs. “He was a gambler. With her money. She’d warned him about it. The women . . . those were a surprise to me.”

“And Caitlin took his word over yours?”

“
No.
No, she . . . she didn’t even bother to get his word first. She just dismissed me right on the spot and made all sorts of accusations.”

“What kind of accusations?”

“The desperate kind.”
And she used John’s murder against me. And that was a rule between us—never use John’s murder against me. And yet she broke it because she couldn’t face the truth; she used it to
hurt
me to keep herself from being hurt.

There was another reason the attack had caught him so off guard; he’d been braced for an attack of a different kind, a full-throttle version of the same half-assed accusation she’d always make whenever he became too protective or accused her of losing her head over some guy—that he didn’t want anyone coming in between him and his access to what she often referred to her as her
incredible wealth
, which became even more incredible after the plane crash that killed her parents.

While the accusation was familiar, it was also absurd, and Blake would have been willing and able to defuse it in an instant, especially if he thought Caitlin’s marriage was at stake. After all, he was the one who had repeatedly turned down her father’s offer to give him long-term financial support if he took his daughter’s hand in marriage.

Still, there was a small seed of truth to it. Over the years, Blake had taken great comfort in being a kind of adopted Chaisson, if not exactly a beneficiary. Without the Chaissons, he would have spent his teenage years alone, raised by vague memories of a mother who died when he was only four years old, a father who never managed to crawl out of the scotch bottle after losing his wife, and a passel of high-strung aunts from Dallas who popped in on a regular basis to make sure their brother hadn’t made a complete mess of things. Meanwhile, Blake spent most of the major holidays with Caitlin and her family, and that had been just fine. More than fine, actually.

But he’d put himself through nursing school and paid his own rent while he did it. So he didn’t owe Caitlin money or the kind of soft-glove treatment she was accustomed to receiving from her cousins and her late father’s employees. He owed her the truth.

They allow Blake a moment to sip his coffee, then Baldy says, “Must not have been easy.”

“Which part?”

“Making that kind of allegation against the cop who found your friend’s killers.”

For a while, nobody speaks. Blake watches the hummingbirds dancing in the branches on the other side of the plate-glass window. A few tables away an older woman cries into a man’s shoulder, one hand still absently wrapped around her cup of tea in much the same way Blake is holding his cup of coffee. Blake recognizes them; their son was the overdose he treated sometime around 3:00 a.m. No telling how long that coma’s going to last.

“John Fuller wasn’t my
friend
,
Detective.”

Both detectives look startled for the first time since they all sat down together. Not by the information itself, but by the bristling anger with which Blake delivers it.

10

Willie Thomas lives in a tiny clapboard house hemmed in by a small forest of banana trees sitting just on the other side of Spring House’s back property line. It is accessible by its own long private road, which means Blake can drop in on Nova without risking a run-in with Caitlin.

He’s not quite ready for that.

After five hours of fitful sleep, every nerve in his body is still demanding that he reach out to his old friend. But he’s known the woman for almost his entire life. Six months haven’t changed her, he’s sure. Any contact from him will be seen as an attempt to rub her nose in the sad truth about her husband, and that’s the last thing Blake wants, especially if something terrible has happened to Troy.

So he vows to give her time. And space. Whatever that means. He doubts she’s still at Spring House anyway. Unless the police have some strange reason to keep her there, and nothing about the detectives’ questions that morning suggest they suspect Caitlin of anything other than having bad taste in men, he’s pretty sure she’s gone back to New Orleans.

While not quite confirmation, there’s no sign of her on the drive out, no glimpse of her tiny gold BMW X5 whizzing past him along the levee’s gentle bends, and when he turns onto the mud-laced road that leads to Willie’s house, the only person he sees is Nova, hurriedly stomping out a cigarette and tossing it over the side of the front porch.

“Really?” Blake asks her as soon as he steps from his Ford Escape.

“It’s a clove cigarette,” she says with the condescension of someone who has just enough college under her belt to think she knows everything.

“So what? Those are worse. And they don’t even have nicotine, so you won’t get a buzz.”

She ignores this. “Caitlin went back to New Orleans.”

“I figured. How’s your dad?”

“Stitched up right. You want to check?”

“Did he go to a hospital . . . or did you do it?”

“You got me,” she says, hands up in mock surrender. “I fixed him up with some alcohol and a little blowtorch.”

“That’s a really good school you’re going to up in Baton Rouge.”

Her smile is weak. Instead of inviting him inside, she holds the screen door open behind her just long enough for him to keep it from snapping shut in his face.

The tiny house is immaculate inside. He figures this is Nova’s doing. Blake is not a regular here, but the few times he’d stolen a peek through the front door, it was clear Willie kept the house much the same way he kept his shed—every practical item within plain sight and easy reach, no thought at all to aesthetics.

Nova must also be responsible for the neat but prominent pile of textbooks placed on the kitchen counter. The featured title is
Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century
by Gwendolyn Hall, and it’s even angled slightly so as to be visible from her father’s easy chair. It doesn’t take Blake long to put together that the older and more educated Nova gets, the less comfortable she is with her father’s marginally paid, codependent position at Spring House. These textbooks on the history of their people have the feel of AA literature left in the house of a hard-drinking relative.

“Iced tea?” Nova asks.

“I’m good. Thanks. Your dad?”

“Up at the shed. Cleaning up.”

“Is that a good idea? It’s a crime scene, isn’t it?”

Nova turns to face him, one arm resting atop the refrigerator door she’s just opened. “Crime scene techs went over it all night. Couldn’t find a drop of blood inside.”

“What? How’d it get all over that woman then?”

“Question of the day. And the next day. And the next . . .” She’s staring at him expectantly, but he can’t tell if she’s letting this information sink in, or if there’s something she wants him to do about it. It’s not a hot day out and the open refrigerator is blasting cold air all over her, but Nova doesn’t seem to give a damn.

“Who was she?” Blake asks instead.

“Some woman who worked with the caterer. Never saw her before.”

“What’d she tell the police?”

“Nothing. She was just rocking back and forth when they took her away. Shock, I guess.”

“Did they arrest her?” It’s a trick question, sort of. The detective let slip that morning that the woman was still being held for questioning, which Blake took to mean
detained
.
But Nova is being so evasive about what transpired here the night before, Blake hopes to draw her out a little by withholding some information of his own.

“For what?”

“Well, they’ll have to test the blood, I’m sure. See if it was Troy’s, right?”

“You know more about that kind of stuff than I do.”

“Why’d you call me, Nova?” The question comes out more stridently than he means it to. But Nova Thomas is not usually this sullen and evasive, and her behavior is leaving him genuinely confused. And a little bit frustrated.

“Let’s go see Daddy,” she says, and then she’s walking past him out the front door, Diet Coke in hand; she’s avoiding his eyes now like someone trying to work up her nerve.

11

They walk in silence along the cane field belonging to the neighboring farm.

It is dusk and the tall, rustling stalks have rivers of deep orange snaking around their bases. When the plantation house and gardens come into view, it is the first time Blake has seen the place in half a year, and the nostalgia he feels in response startles and then overwhelms him, like a sharp poke in the side followed quickly by a passionate embrace from someone you’ve always lusted after.

There’s the gazebo where he and Caitlin pricked their fingers and smeared the wounds together so they could become brother and sister for real. There’s the grand oak tree, its heavy branches kissing the soil on all sides of its massive trunk, the same tree Caitlin’s father hung a tire swing from for the two of them to play on as children. The idea that one of the tree’s low-hanging branches might have been used to lasso slaves for the whip didn’t occur to him until he was a junior in high school, and he wonders if it occurs to Nova now.

The house itself had been a ruin for the first six years after Alexander Chaisson bought it, and the children were forbidden to go inside, lest they crash through rotten floorboards or get crushed by a falling section of the roof. So the sprawling grounds outside became their private kingdom, and the gazebo their temple. Now there are flagstone paths and manicured gardens covering the expanse where decaying cane stalks once stood like the last timbers of a war-ravaged village. And the gazebo, which once seemed to be composed of as much lichen as wood, is a clean white shock against a canopy of banana trees.

“Are they starting up tours again?” Blake asks.

“Not for a week, Daddy says. Till all this dies down. You see any news crews on the way in?”

“Nope. Just some cop cars.”

“They’re searching an area close by for him. Least they were this morning. They think he might have stumbled a ways after she whacked him or something.”

“But there’s no blood inside the shed?”

He asks this again because he doesn’t believe her, and apparently his tone makes that clear because she stops walking and glares at him over one shoulder.

She hasn’t just stopped to stare, though, Blake realizes. She wants him to notice what she’s standing beside. The fountain next to her is just a broad copper basin, one of the old sugar kettles that were part of the refining process. But the spigot has stopped running, and the basin is tipped so far to one side it’s emptied all of its water onto the flagstone path. Blake tries to imagine someone lifting it. But the job would be too much for just one man. It would be too much for several men, especially if they were drunk, which most of the guests last night most assuredly were.

“Did the police do this?”

“Nope,” Nova answers. “They didn’t do that either.”

She points to a spot where a planter has spit several of its bricks onto the flagstones. And
spit
is the best word he can think of for it. His first guess is that the earth underneath shifted and settled; what was this land all around them but glorified swamp? But it can’t explain the force that propelled the bricks out onto the path. A few seconds of blinking, and Blake realizes the only probable explanation is some sudden upward pressure. A heaving of some sort from below, and that’s just . . .

“Nova, run to my truck, see if my shovel’s—”

Willie Thomas has just emerged from the shed, when he sees who is standing beside his daughter in the lengthening shadow of the main house. And in an instant Blake watches Willie transform from a harried, overworked yardman to a smiling, happy servant whose every reaction to a white person is stained by a childhood of forced integration. As always, it is a transformation that makes Willie’s only daughter bristle with a combination of anger and shame. Out come the huge, solicitous smile and the too-eager handshake, which Blake accepts because no matter how hard he tries to treat Willie Thomas as a peer, the man is determined to greet Blake from behind this protective mask of inauthentic good cheer.

“How you doing, Mister Blake?”

“I’m all right,
Mister
Willie. How you doing?”

“Oh, we jes tryin’ to put things back together again, that’s all. Miss Caitlin went back to N’Awlins, so—”

“I told him,” Nova says.

“Well, that’s fine,” Willie says, but his emphatic nod can’t distract from the icy look he’s just given his only daughter. “This whole thing”—it takes some effort, but Willie puts the smile back on and focuses his attention on Blake—“this some misunderstandin’, that’s all. Mister Troy, he gonna come back soon. Five years married. I mean, they work through this. You see. They’s jes no sense in everybody gettin’ so worked up—”

“He’s dead, Daddy.”

Willie’s eyes flash with anger; he’s clearly been having this conversation with his daughter all day, and Blake wonders if the man agrees with her more than he’s letting on.

“He’s dead,” Nova says again. “And we have no idea what killed him.”

Before Blake can respond, Nova takes him by the arm and guides him toward the shed. “Come on,” she says.

“Nova!”
Willie calls after them. But his daughter is undeterred, and by the time she’s pushed open the door to the shed, Blake feels Willie right behind them, breathless with anxiety.

Despite what Nova has told him, Blake is expecting a slaughterhouse inside. And so he is astonished by the cleanliness and orderliness before him. The only thing strange he sees is the set of indentations in the dirt floor. It helps that Nova has walked right up to them and has positioned the toe of her right sneaker next to the largest one. They have the appearance of rat holes, but the little dirt and debris piles you’d expect to find next to them are gone (although they were probably swept away by Willie’s broom).

“Mower did that, Nova!” Willie cries.

“Lawn mower’s been at our place for weeks. It was leaking gas all over, and Caitlin said she could smell it from the house.”

“Something else then. I don’t know.”

“Rats?” Blake asks. He’s standing right next to Nova now, and they are both studying the holes in the floor. There are five of them in all, and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern or order to their spacing. And the dirt here is drier than most other parts of the property, which is why Willie chose this spot for the shed, so there should be some cracking or other evidence of the violence it would have taken to punch these holes. But there isn’t.

“No evidence of digging,” Nova says.

“You didn’t sweep it away?” Blake asks Willie.

The man shakes his head and throws up his hands. “Mister Troy and that woman, they had some kinda crazy fight, and he stumbled outta here drunk as a skunk. Reason they can’t find him is ’cause he’s
not dead
. Now y’all come on outta here so I can—”

“That woman had so much blood on her it looked like she’d stuck a pig. And she would have cut you down with that axe if I hadn’t stopped her.”

“She was drunk.”

“She was
terrifie
d
!
”

“Wait,” Blake manages. “Everybody just . . . wait a minute. Are you saying there was something in here with them?” The silence startles Blake more than an affirmative response would. “So . . . you think something
punched
these holes down into the—”

“Not down,” Nova says firmly.
“Up!”

“Nova. What the . . .” It is the best Blake can manage, but the condescension ripples through even these basic, incomplete words. What is she saying? Some sort of animal punched up through a solid dirt floor and . . . what?
Ate
Troy Mangier, including the clothes on his back? It’s a preposterous suggestion. The holes might be big enough for a snake or a rat, but nothing big enough to consume a fully grown man in an instant. But these thoughts aren’t enough to keep a vein of heat from traveling up his right leg when he absently shifted his foot over one of the largest holes while Nova and her father were shouting back and forth at each other.

“Mister Blake doesn’t need to be bothered with all your foolishness.”

“I don’t work for
Mister
Blake and you don’t either, and he is here of his own accord, Daddy. And I know damn well you’re not gonna tell him what you’ve been telling me about this place for years, so I’ll just go ahead right now and—”

“Nova!”

“Tell him, Daddy. Tell him about the flowers, the ones we can’t find in any book, the ones that don’t die no matter how much poison you pour all over ’em . . . No? OK. Well, then I’ll tell him about what
I’ve
seen. I’ll tell him about the one you put in a pot on our porch, and then the next day it was gone. Not dead. Not withered.
Gone.
”

“Somebody picked that flower, Nova,” Willie says, but he’s resting one shoulder against the door frame, his glazed eyes studying the sunset as if it might be his last. It isn’t resignation coming off Willie Thomas; it’s defeat. Nova isn’t lying; she is spilling secrets Willie has tried to keep for years.

“It’s a private road, Daddy.”

“What are you saying?” Blake asks. “You’re saying the
flower . . .
walked
away?”

“I’m saying something’s not right in the ground here. We’ve all seen it—Daddy, me, the other staff—and we’ve all taught ourselves how to
un
see it. We’re just like everybody else . . .”

“How’s that?” Blake asks.

“So busy looking for ghosts in the attic, we never think to look in the ground.”

Without so much as a sigh, Willie is gone, and for a few seconds, Blake and Nova listen to his footsteps crunching the ground outside the shed.

Blake feels a sharp pinch of sadness when he sees the expression on Nova’s face: lips pursed and trembling slightly, glazed eyes focused on the floor. It is then that Blake sees the courage it took for Nova to make these insane statements, that despite her bluster and her anger, she believes every word of what she’s said, and she is terrified . . . and now her father has abandoned her to Blake’s skepticism.

He decides to be objective—as a nurse, it doesn’t help in the ER to just make assumptions. As far as he can tell, Nova is not a drunk; she doesn’t smell of weed. Her first few years of college have not produced the kind of wild tales of rebellion or self-destructive behavior that were common among most of Blake’s friends when he was her age. And despite Nova’s simmering resentment toward her, Caitlin used to update Blake on Nova’s progress at LSU with a great sense of pride tinged with self-congratulatory noblesse oblige. Sleeplessness and the shock of watching her father almost get decapitated might be to blame for Nova’s anger, but not the extent of her—he stops short of marking them as delusions, but honestly, what else could they be?

And where are the telltale marks of addiction and mental deterioration worn by so many of the raving lunatics Blake sees wheeled into his ER on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis? He doesn’t see them, so he scours his memories of Spring House for any lost or buried recollection of walking flowers or strangely crawling vines. He finds nothing, but he also admits that his contact with the soil here is not as intimate as Willie’s or Nova’s, two people he has never known to tell a lie. If there
is
some strange, possibly supernatural secret to this place, it will be found in their memories, not his.

When he opens up his own memories, he sees himself as a child running the grounds fearlessly, convinced that he and Caitlin traveled beneath some bubble of adult protection that followed them everywhere. But the older he got, the more he came to fear jungles of shadows and open fields that seemed to lead to infinite darkness. The killing blow to his delusion of youthful invincibility was delivered by two assailants who attacked him and John Fuller one night during their senior year of high school. But truth be told, it was already dying before that awful night, and so for the past decade his experiences of Spring House have been confined to its parlors and guest bedrooms, not its gardens.

“I saw something . . . ,” Nova finally says.

“What?”

“I knocked the woman down before she could kill Daddy. Then Caitlin was right behind me, and she opened the door to the shed. There was no sign of Troy. No sign at all. But there was something else . . . I don’t know what it was, but it was low to the ground. About
there
”—she extends her foot until the toe of her sneaker is hovering above the spot in question—“and it was glowing.”

“Glowing?”

“Yes. Glowing. Like one of those light sticks you get in emergency kits. Only it was different colors.”

“What did the police say about it?”

“They never saw it. I don’t know what she did with it.”

“Caitlin, you mean . . .?”

Nova nods.

“What was it, Nova?”

She looks into his eyes for the first time in several minutes. “It was some kinda flower,” she whispers. “And it was where her husband should have been. And everything about it was just . . .
wrong
.”

Blake nods, more out of habit than agreement, then looks to the holes in the floor as if they might interject with a logical explanation of themselves.

“You don’t believe me,” Nova says. “Fine. I don’t care. Here’s the thing, though. We’re
gone
. You hear me? We’re gone and we’re not coming back until you find out what that thing was.”

“Does your dad know you’re leaving?”

“Check the truck. His bag is packed.”

“Jesus. Fine . . . But
me
? What do you expect me to do?”

“You’re her best friend,” she says, as if that is all the explanation necessary.

“I
was
her best friend. Six months ago. You think she’s going to tell me anything right now?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s not like she replaced you. No one else has the patience for her, I guess.”

“Nova, if I call her right now about anything, especially
this
”—Blake stutters a bit when he realizes
this
includes crazy talk of walking, glow-in-the-dark plants—“she’ll just think I’m trying to rub her nose in it.”