The Vines (6 page)

The kitchen and breakfast room have soaring paned windows that reveal the shadowed darkness within. With both hands he lifts the edge of a ceramic planter that once housed geraniums but is now filled with a multicolored arrangement of glass beads. His strength is considerable—it has been for years, thanks to an hour at the gym almost every day since John Fuller’s murder, pressing and punching away memories of his killers. But the planter is heavy, and in the few seconds he has to risk using one of his hands to steal the spare key out from under it, the thing almost crashes back to the flagstones—and his fingers.

But he snatches the spare key up in one hand just in time. Then he’s inside the house, not stopping to hit light switches, racing past the giant mural that covers one wall of the front hallway—Spring House in its glory, beneath a Maxfield Parrish sky of piled-high, purple-fringed clouds so detailed and luminescent that when they were seven, Caitlin was able to convince him you could see them moving if you looked closely enough.

Even as he races up the stairs, it strikes him how there is almost no evidence of Caitlin’s husband anywhere to be seen. And it’s not like she’s had time to get rid of it. No, this is how the house has always been ever since Caitlin inherited it. It never felt to him like Troy was one of its rightful owners, more like a spirit that took up quiet residence in one corner of its master bedroom. And that presence hasn’t lingered, even so shortly after his disappearance. But something else does, and it urges him onward, toward Caitlin.

He finds her on the floor of the solarium, facedown where he saw her fall, one arm pinned beneath her, the other twisted elbow-down. It’s not until he has his hands on her, is rolling her onto her back, that Blake realizes she is shaking. Quivering, as if from a small but sustained electrical charge.

A seizure is his first guess, but none of the other telltale signs are there. The jerking isn’t violent enough for it to be grand mal, and the timeline is all wrong; after this many minutes, she would be in the clonic phase, her arms and legs jerking sporadically, her facial muscles twitching to a different rhythm. He has seen plenty of seizures over the years, and the physical fits were more irregular than the steady full-body quiver that is turning Caitlin Chaisson into Jell-O.

He scans her for any further physical injuries, and aside from some light, rosy scars on her wrists—they look like day-old scratches left by plants—he can’t find any. So he picks her up in both arms and carries her toward the bedroom, convinced the answer will be found in her medicine cabinet.

Her vitals are fine, her lips puffing as if she’s trying to whisper something. The choked whispers sound creepy, but they also mean she isn’t in danger of swallowing her tongue, so Blake chooses to see them as a comfort.

Caitlin has dabbled in various antidepressants over the years, but she’s never been one for tranquilizers or painkillers, or any of the other highly addictive prescriptions people gobble like candy these days. The ones that might cause this kind of reaction.

He risks leaving her side for a second and scans the bathroom. But it looks untouched. The medicine cabinet doesn’t have a fingerprint on it. He opens it anyway, and as the mirrored door swings open, it reveals Caitlin sitting upright on the bed, staring right at him with a glaze-eyed expression that says she does not find his sudden presence in her bedroom to be a surprise.

“A trade,” she whispers.

13

“So . . . who did it?”

The three men have been standing inside the ruins of Fort Polk for a few minutes before Kyle Austin decides to break the silence between them. But the joke—if it could be called that—goes over like one of those old Lucky Dog stands in a hurricane, and then the three of them are armored in silence again.

Wind ripples across the still, swampy waters surrounding the decimated fort where they’ve chosen to meet for the first time in five years, and the crumbling brick walls give way to a night sky laced with low, fast-moving clouds. They’re all staring down at the electric lantern on the dirt floor between them. Scott Fauchier brought the thing, and he’s tried moving it around a few times but it’s no use—every possible angle makes them look like Halloween ghouls.

“Not funny,” Scott finally says. “Think about it. We’ve got no motive.”

“Says who?” Mike Simmons asks, and Kyle marvels at how the man’s solid teenage brawn has given way to layers of fat that rival Paul Prudhomme’s. Suddenly he’s imagining Simmons, former football team captain, barking orders at people while he zips around the carpeted offices of his little daddy-financed brokerage firm on one of those fat-people scooters, and he has to bury a laugh in the side of one fist.

Scott Fauchier, on the other hand, is just as tanned and pretty as he ever was, and he still has a tendency to bat his long golden eyelashes at the rest of them like a cheerleader in search of a date to homecoming. The three men haven’t spoken much of their own volition, not since Troy Mangier tightened the noose around them when they were teenagers. But Fauchier’s pretty mug has been impossible to miss. He’s the poster boy for his own line of health clubs, which means he startles the hell out of Kyle at least once a week by popping up on the sidewall of a bus stop on Veterans Boulevard, shirtless and beaming and holding a folded jump rope over one shoulder as if it were hitched to a wagon full of old tires he was dragging without breaking a sweat.

“We stopped,” Scott says. “The whole thing . . . he called it off as soon as he became Mrs. Chaisson. I mean, unless he made
you
guys keep paying. But the last time I—”

“You know, she’s actually a pretty nice lady,” Kyle interjects.

“Shut up, dude,” Simmons growls. “Seriously.”

“No, really. Katie was one of her maids when she was queen of Rex, and said she didn’t let any of it go to her head. Said she was real sweet to every—”

“Will you
shut up
,
Kyle?” Scott Fauchier says in a pleading tone that makes him sound like a teenager again.

But Kyle has already clamped his mouth shut. Not because of Scott’s whiny request, but because just mentioning his wife’s name in this secret spot feels like a dark violation. Like leaving her photograph up on the nightstand while boning a hooker in their bed. Which is not something he’s ever done specifically, but he’s done plenty else in his life. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here in the hot, windy dark, one of three former high school heroes turned bitter, drunken slaves to their guilt.

When Scott Fauchier nervously licks his full lips, Kyle is seized by a jarring, nightmarish image inspired by a faggy prank e-mail one of his nurses sent him once, only now big fat Mike Simmons is the whip-toting, leather-clad freak in the bondage hood and full-lipped Scott Fauchier is the hairless, jockstrap-clad piece of oiled-up flesh, hog-tied at his combat boots. Amazing how badly the e-mail had gotten to him that day—he’d practically fired poor Lenny Jorgensen for sending it, which scared Lenny half to death. They sent joke e-mails around his veterinary practice all the time, mostly Photoshop jobs of Michelle Obama done up like some big-titted African villager. But never any kind of gay shit.

Never anything that made Kyle see John Fuller tied to the foot of that electrical tower again.

“Bitch is out of her mind,” Fauchier continues. “That kinda money, it drives a person crazy. Just ask Simmons.”

“Or lick my balls,” Simmons snaps.

“No, seriously. I heard Henderson finally cut the cord and she’s been like a shut-in ever since . . .”

Scott Fauchier realizes his mistake too late. He broke a cardinal rule; he said Blake Henderson’s name aloud.

Now all three of them are remembering the way the kid sobbed and begged, not for his life but for John Fuller’s. They’re remembering how after they put the two men atop the concrete foot of one of the electrical towers and tied them back-to-back on either side of one of the tower’s spindly metal legs, Blake Henderson started shaking his wrists violently. They’re remembering how at first they thought he was trying to get free, and then they realized he was trying to shake life back into Fuller, who’d gone stone-cold after Simmons delivered the first, too-strong (un-
fucking
-necessary, if you asked Kyle Austin) blow from a lead pipe that was just supposed to be for show.

“My point is, it’s been done, fellas,” Scott says, his voice rendered a ragged near whisper by the force of memory. “It’s been done for years. He didn’t need our money anymore. Last payment
was . . .
when?”

“Five years, for me,” Kyle says, even though he’d rather keep quiet now and watch the other guys slug it out, which has always been his way.

“Me too,” Simmons grumbles.

“And me three,” Scott whines. “So seriously . . . can we go now?”

“Yeah. That’s it. We should just go,” says Simmons, the one who had called them together, the man who, if you asked Kyle Austin, was ultimately responsible for everything going straight to hell that night. “The man who’s got video of us leaving the scene of John Fuller’s murder is either missing or dead, and we’ve got no idea who else has seen the film or where any of the copies are. But you’re right, Fauchier. We should just take a fuckin’
wait-and-see
approach. Just let the chips fall—”

“All right, man. Chill. I didn’t—”

“—where they fucking may. Or maybe we could just all act like the fucking feather from
Forrest Gump
, you know? Just drifting here and there and seeing which way the wind takes us.”

“He’s got a good point, though,” Kyle says.

“Really? ’Cause I haven’t fucking heard it.”

“Five years, Simmons.”

“And he could have started it right up again at any time. That greasy fuck had pussy up and down the Gulf Coast. It was just a matter of time before he got his dick snagged in one and Chaisson kicked him to the curb. This wasn’t
fixed
,
gentlemen. This wasn’t
resolved
. We were never off the hook even after he stopped making us pay, and don’t either of you forget it. Acting like we were . . . well, it’s a little fucking reckless.”

“Fine,” Kyle relents. “Then what do we do?”

“Wait and see if Mangier was actually murdered?” Fauchier tries, feeling like it’s his job to calm Simmons, given that it was his rush to get out of there that made him blow in the first place. “How’s that sound?”

“Like shit,” Simmons mutters. “That’s how it sounds.”

“OK, then . . . what?” Kyle asks again.

“Doesn’t matter whether Mangier’s dead or alive. One person’s still around. And we need to know if she’s seen the tape.”

“Or if she knows where it is,” Kyle says, nodding.

“Caitlin Chaisson?” Scott Fauchier asks, astonished. “You actually think she’s part of this.”

“What I think is that we need to watch her very fucking closely,” Simmons whispers. “That’s what I think.”

“And how are we going to do that?” Kyle asks. And that’s when his old friend looks at him with a level stare. The up-lighting from the lantern at their feet transforms the man’s eyes into floating orbs guarding the entrance to deep, dark caverns in his skull.

“Glad you asked, Austin.”

14

“It was just shock, I guess,” Caitlin says.

“You didn’t take anything?”

“There’s nothing to take, Blake. Check the medicine cabinet.”

“Did Willie make you a drink after the detectives left?”

“I can hold my liquor. I’m not fifteen anymore.”

“But you did have a drink?” he presses.

“Yes, one drink,” she says impatiently. “I’m not drunk, Blake.”

“Anything weird to eat?”

She just shakes her head.

What he wants to ask, though, isn’t about weird food. No, he wants to talk to her about the weirdness of seeing a strange woman swinging an axe that may or may not have been splashed with her husband’s blood.

But they haven’t gone there yet. They’ve been too busy playing out a similar version of this exchange over and over again, probably because the business of it distracts them from the strangeness of Caitlin’s sudden awakening.

A trade . . .

For a few minutes, he’d actually held her in his arms before he realized she wasn’t returning his embrace; her hands were pressed between their chests, and while she wasn’t trying to pull them free, she reacted to the pressure of him with drugged resignation, as if he were an inevitable confinement following a criminal act. Now he is seated beside the bed, and she’s staring vacantly at the ceiling. Blake is confident that if a long enough silence falls, the distance that grew between them over the past six months will once again seem as unavoidable as mortality.

Caitlin has rearranged the throw pillows on the bed behind her, and if it wasn’t for her sporty outfit—a pressed polo shirt and skinny jeans—she would look like a princess greeting visitors from her deathbed. Her episode—whatever it was—has left her paler than usual, as well as glassy-eyed. A strange, uncharacteristic breathiness cloaks her every word.

“What trade?” It’s the first time Blake has broached the topic of Caitlin’s strange announcement.

There’s no sign of confusion in her level stare. Just a tense calculation that doesn’t match her next whisper: “What?”

“When you woke up, you said, ‘A trade.’ What were you talking about?”

Caitlin shrugs and shakes her head, but she’s broken eye contact too quickly.

Is she embarrassed or frightened? He can’t tell.

Suddenly she slides her legs to the floor and pads across the bedroom’s plush carpeting. She draws the master bedroom’s sliding double doors shut, one in each hand, stealing Blake’s view of her father’s old study across the hallway and the solarium just beyond.

“The detectives, probably,” she finally answers. When she sees Blake’s bewildered stare, she says, “I don’t want the Bickmore kids staring into my bedroom.”

It is a ludicrous statement, given the vast space between both houses, the preponderance of branches outside, and the distance between the bedroom and the solarium. But it seems the solarium is exactly where Caitlin still is. In her heart, at least, or her mind. Or in her strange, inexplicable dream.

He struggles to remember Nova’s exact words. It was some kind of flower. And it was glowing and it was wrong.

“Did you see her?” Blake asks.

“Who?”

“The woman . . . the one with the axe.”

“Jane Percival. Yes. I saw her.”

“You knew her?”

“No. The detectives told me her name. I’d never seen her before in my life. Some friend of the caterer’s or something.”

“I bet that was . . .”

“What? You bet it was . . .
what
?”

“Hard.”

“It was. It was hard . . .” Caitlin sits on the opposite side of the bed, her back to him, but he can see her face in the mirrored vanity a few feet in front of her. He can see both of them in it, looking awkwardly posed like the angry couple in some stock photo you’d find above an article listing the “Top Ten Reasons Marriages Fail.”

“She was pretty,” Caitlin whispers. “She’s still pretty.”

And this is the part where Blake is supposed to say,
You’re pretty too.
And in response, Caitlin would turn to him, effect the grimace of a dying woman, and slur,
Am I still pretty, Momma?
Just like Angelina Jolie in that TV movie about the heroin-addicted model who died of AIDS, the movie that had rattled them both so badly when they’d watched it together in college they had no choice but to repeatedly mock its final, awful scene. But tonight this exchange, a convenient crutch they have always used to dismiss Caitlin’s deep sense of self-loathing, strikes him as profane. Just another form of petty violence Caitlin can inflict upon herself for not being as beautiful as her mother.

These thoughts have taken him down a longer road than he intended to travel, and when Blake looks up, Caitlin meets his eyes in the mirror. There is a hard glint in her stare that sparks a bewildering surge of sexual attraction in him. Maybe because it is so uncharacteristically aggressive of her, so uncharacteristically
masculine
. He shakes his head, but can’t quite dismiss the thought that Caitlin—
this
Caitlin—may not be the same person as his best friend from just six months ago.

When she speaks again, her voice has the hollowed-out quality of someone struggling to speak evenly through the breathlessness caused by fear. “He was fucking her. In the guest bathroom. Upstairs. The door was open and I could see him fucking her, and
I . . .
well, I guess I realized I don’t have your courage, Blake. Or your mouth. I couldn’t confront them, is what I mean. I just turned away and ran. And then . . .” Her tongue moistens her lips suddenly and quickly, an action that suggests her glaze-eyed stare is as substantial as a paper mask. “Then we all heard that little slut screaming, and
then . . .
Well, then it looked like there was more justice in the world than I previously thought.”

Justice?
He manages to keep this astonished question to himself, but the struggle must be written on his face, because Caitlin is studying him with sudden, animated intensity, and Blake realizes he is on the verge of failing an important test. Whatever he says next will determine her next move and the access she will grant to him until this whole thing is sorted out, to say nothing of his role in her life, if he’s to have one at all, after this bloody affair has come to an end. She has assumed, without reservation, that her husband is dead, and he’s confident that if she expressed this to the cops that morning as plainly as she just expressed it to him, they would still have her in holding.

He chooses his next words as carefully as he would insert an IV in an infant. “Nova said she saw something in the shed, right before you went in.” Blake scans the room for anything matching Nova’s description of a strange flower that just isn’t quite right, but he only sees the vanity bedecked with perfume bottles, and the nightstands stacked with paperbacks and copies of
New Orleans Magazine
. The sumptuous bedroom is still fresh from the housekeeper’s last visit after Caitlin left for Spring House . . . but no flower.

“She wasn’t sure what it was,” he says. “But she said she saw it on the floor of the shed, and whatever it was . . . it was glowing. She thought it might be some kind of flower.” His delivery at this point is sloppy and abrupt, he knows. But it is the quickest way he can think of to mask his stunned reaction to Caitlin’s bloody definition of justice.

“She was probably drinking along with the rest of the
help
.”

“So . . . no idea what she’s talking about?”

“None,” she says. “You’re here because of something Nova said?”

“Of course not. I’m here because it’s . . .
you
.”

She doesn’t turn to face him, but she is sitting upright, staring at him through the mirror, her hands clasped against her knees, her entire body braced as if she fears his next words might constitute a small, sharp strike to the center of her scalp.

“Do you think I killed him?” she whispers.

He wants to say,
No. You couldn’t have.
But that answer is too logical, and it will reveal how thoroughly he’s done his homework because of that very suspicion. Several witnesses placed her too far from the shed for her to have been involved in whatever took place inside. And he knows Jane Percival hasn’t said anything to implicate Caitlin, and that if she had, Caitlin would probably be in an interrogation room with her lawyer at this very moment. Indeed, Jane Percival has said nothing the detectives want
anyone
to hear; she remains in custody, and there’s no trace of her account in any of the increasing number of news reports about the bloody disappearance of a hero cop known for solving an infamous hate crime when he was just a Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy.

“Of course not,” Blake says. It is not his most convincing delivery, the words weighted down by forethought. But it’s better than more hesitation, he figures.

Caitlin doesn’t figure the same, because she says, “I appreciate you coming,” yet there’s anything but appreciation in her voice. It actually sounds like a dismissal.

“You thought I wouldn’t?”

“I’d like to be alone now,” she says, confirming his feelings, “if you don’t mind.”

Even though it was the impression he got in the first place, he is still surprised by how wounded he is by his curt dismissal, meted out, it seems, because he has refused to rejoice in the prospect that Troy might have been murdered by the same woman he cheated on her with.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.” And she is done with him.

“OK . . .”

His only exit is through the double doors, and when he recalls the speed with which Caitlin inexplicably drew them shut just a few moments before, he springs into action. Too quickly, apparently, because Caitlin senses he’s got some agenda other than a hasty departure and begins calling out his name, her voice immediately shrill with fear.

“Blake!”
she shrieks by the time he’s passed through her father’s study and is standing on the threshold of the solarium.

The flower isn’t glowing, but there is a wrongness to it that makes him hesitate. At first Blake thinks it might just be its placement, all by itself in a sundae glass in the middle of the wicker table. But he’s got plenty of experience not allowing a patient’s paranoid delusions to change his opinions of needles and scalpels, and at the moment, that’s exactly what Caitlin is—just another patient. And this is just a flower, he’s sure of it. He closes the distance between him and the sundae glass and picks up the stem as gently as he can, given how quickly he’s entered the solarium.

“Blake! Don’t!”

In what feels like the same instant, Caitlin pulls him backward by one shoulder and slaps him across the jaw. Like an afterthought, the flower’s stem slips from his right hand which has gone as slack as his jaw.

The shock is as total and paralyzing as that moment years before when it became clear the patch of darkness racing across the levee’s crown toward the spot where he and John Fuller had been making out just seconds before was not, in fact, a trick of the eye, that it had arms and legs, that it was moving in a single direction with purpose, that it had a weapon.

Caitlin’s slap seems to have unleashed a flood of adrenaline in her; she is bright-eyed and alive suddenly, after moving through what appeared to be a drugged fog, and once again a jolt goes through him, the odd attraction mixed with revulsion. And as the sting of her palm fades from his cheek like a muscle going lax, Blake confirms to himself what he had thought just moments ago: that while the woman standing a few feet away may have, at one point in time, been his closest friend in the world, she is now but a shadow of Caitlin Chaisson, a wavering reflection on moving water.

But there’s no real comfort to this realization, just a cold vacancy inside that makes him dizzy. He is halfway down the front walk of her house when he hears her calling out to him. She’s standing on the front porch, and as some young and tender part of him opens to receive her apology, she extends one hand and opens her palm.

“The key,” she says.

He speaks before he measures his words, his sneakers slapping the brick walkway, and as he closes the distance between them, Caitlin doesn’t close her open hand or lower her extended arm, but her eyes widen in muted surprise.

“You were the first one I remember seeing,” he is saying. “In the hospital room, when I came to. Before I could even remember what happened. Before they told me John was dead. You were there and you were holding my hand, and you were brushing my hair off of my forehead, and you were saying whatever you needed to say to keep me from going back there in my mind. That’s how I know you didn’t do it, Caitlin. Because you saw what murder does. You saw it in me every day for years. You can probably still see it if you look closely enough. Anyone can.”

He’s so focused on her expression that he’s startled when her fingers graze his cheek. “Oh, Blake,” she whispers. “All you know is flesh and bone.”

These words hurt him more than her slap did, and he’s not sure exactly why. When she plucks the key from his hand, he finds himself frozen in place and staring after her as the heavy front door drifts shut.

Caitlin Chaisson has been changed inexplicably by a sudden event that currently lies outside his realm of understanding, and this realization gouges him more deeply than any false accusation she might have leveled against him in the past.