Wayne of Gotham (5 page)

Mother enjoyed planning the lawn parties more than all other events; she said the desired result was inevitable if the event was properly arranged. She never could think in the house … she always had to go somewhere she could clear her mind … clear her soul …

Bruce turned down the slope, away from the lawn just visible through the trees. He had not thought of his mother's garden in more than a decade. Dead and rotting leaves from unnumbered seasons obscured the old path.

Bruce stopped, cocking his head to one side.

The wall was almost completely obscured by tall brush and vines, still full of foliage despite the lateness of the year. He might have missed it altogether except for the fact that the doorway had been completely cleared of brush. The door was weathered and showed only the slightest vestiges of the emerald paint his mother had chosen for it so long ago, but it was free of any debris.

He had half wondered if the succession of gardeners down the long years had forgotten its existence, as he had. It would seem the garden had been tended after all.

“
If you need to think something through, Bruce,” Martha Wayne said, “you had best find someplace pleasant
.”

Bruce reached for the keys in his jacket, pulling out a large, tarnished padlock key and stepping to the door.

The lock was open … the door slightly ajar.

Bruce froze, his senses heightened.

“Ting-a-ling-a-ling-tum, ting-tum, ting-tum …”

Singing. Someone is singing in my mother's garden.

“Ting-a-ling-tum, ting-tum-tae …”

I know that song … I remember that song.

Bruce put the key slowly back in his jacket pocket. He reached forward with his left hand, pressing it against the door gently and testing its resistance. It moved with surprising ease, the hinges only popping twice as the door swung open before him.

The garden was dead. The roses had gone wild and died during the succession of winters without care. Their gnarled limbs reached up like claws from the edges of the footpaths, which were covered in dead leaves decomposing into dirt. The prize lilacs his mother had been so proud of now reached up menacingly over the walls. The garden had gone native, weeds choking and obscuring the careful planning that now lay buried and barely recognizable.

The gazebo was still there. Its wood was rotting and one side of the roof had collapsed, charred, it seemed, from either a lightning strike or a flaming branch falling from one of the surrounding trees, which may have been struck during a storm. The stone benches around the gazebo's inner perimeter were still standing.

A woman sat with her back toward the door.

Bruce set his teeth.

The woman's hair was a platinum blond.

Her hair was a platinum blonde. She had always adored Kim Novak, changing her own dark hair to imitate Novak's look.
She wore a camel-hair coat with a high collar turned up at the back.

He could still hear his voice when he said it. “Martha, that coat looks stunning on you!” She never wore another coat after that …

“Ting-a-ling-a-ling-tum, ting-tum, ting-tum …”

Hand mother a baby and she would break into that song. She sang that to me as early as I can …

The woman swayed back and forth on the bench, her voice listlessly murmuring the lyrics. “Ting-a-ling-tum, ting-tum-tae …”

Mother in the garden … Mother in the garden to think …

Bruce lunged forward. He crossed the dead garden in five quick strides, reaching for the woman even as he passed between the cracking posts of the gazebo. He grabbed the woman by her coat, hauling her to her feet in front of him.

“Who are you?” he shouted into her face. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Her skin startled Bruce at first. Her face was a creamy alabaster that registered in his mind as being almost ghostlike in its pale complexion. She may have been in her mid-thirties, yet her face had a quality of timeless beauty that made placing her age difficult. Her eyes were large and gray, but as he looked into them they were unfocused and slightly dilated. Her nose had a slight upturn with an almost imperceptible dimple at the end, and her eyebrows had been carefully plucked. Her hair was long but pulled back into a tight bun. She was beautiful and elegant, but in a way that was completely out of fashion with the times.

“Please,” she said. “Help me. Help me find Bruce.”

“What?”

“You're hurting me—”

“Yes, I am. Who are you?”

“I don't—please, help me find him.”

“Help you find who?”

Her eyes suddenly focused on him with a bright intensity. “Bruce!”

She knows me? I've never met this woman before.

“I told you, I have to find Bruce,” she continued glancing around her. “Please, he's lost … he's lost and he's frightened and I have to bring him home. Whoever you are, can you help me?”

More than you know … I hope.
Bruce relaxed his grip on her shoulders slightly. “You don't know who I am?”

“Well, how could I?” she said indignantly. “We just met!”

An identity … an alias … who shall I be today
?

“I'm Gerald Grayson … I'm the gamekeeper here.”

She looked around as if for the first time. “Here … Where am I?”

“You don't know?”

She flushed slightly. “No, I … I really don't know how I got here.”

“Well, here is somewhere you're not supposed to be—you're trespassing,” Bruce said, letting go of her shoulders and hooking his thumbs through the loops of his jeans. “Old ‘Hermit Wayne' wouldn't appreciate you coming in unannounced.”

“Bruce, you mean,” she said, as though the word tasted odd on her tongue. “I … I need to find him. Warn him.”

“I see him now and then,” Bruce said with a shrug. “I could get your message to him.”

Her smile was slightly wry. “Thank you, but … could you just show me the way out?”

Bruce considered for a moment how she possibly could have gotten in. The number of alarm and surveillance systems in place, not just on the perimeter but within the grounds, including seismic sensors, should have made it impossible for anyone to pass around the estate unnoticed. Indeed, while Bruce had engineered the system himself, he had more recently come to feel he was a prisoner in a cage of his own design. The once comforting thought of being able to track anyone on the grounds had eroded over time, until Bruce felt he was constantly being watched by Alfred.

Things had been slowly changing between them in recent years. Alfred's elevation in title and position within the company had been necessary but strained the tightrope balance of their relationship. Bruce had begun to feel vaguely unsettled in Alfred's presence, like the hair standing up at the nape of one's neck for no discernable reason. Alfred was deferential and efficient as always, but now there was something irritating about the uncanny perfection of his former butler's service to him that made Bruce want some space in his life where Alfred could not reach—something the security of the Manor, the grounds, and even the caverns under it could not afford him.

But Bruce's jacket had something in its lining that would facilitate the solution: a low-yield bypass transmitter sewn in just for such occasions. If he wanted to wander the grounds without Alfred knowing where he was, he had to be a ghost to his own surveillance systems. As long as this woman stayed within five feet of him, he should be able to get her off the grounds without tripping any of the multiple alarms.

And maybe then he could discover how she managed to get
into
here in the first place.

“If I may escort you,” Bruce said, extending his crooked arm.

She smiled as she slipped her elegant, long hand through his arm. “My knight in shining armor.”

Hardly shining, lady.

“So you're a gamekeeper?” she said as they strolled out of the walled garden and further down the slope. She arched her right eyebrow even further. “Do they still have those, Mr. Grayson?”

With his left hand in his pocket, he fingered the invitation card.

The card mystery … now the woman mystery. I wanted to come to the garden to … why did I come to the garden? Why didn't I stay in the cave where it was safe and dark? Why did I have to come into the light
?

“
They
do,” he replied. “Here they do. And you still haven't told me your name.”

“Richter,” she said turning her head away slightly as she spoke. “Amanda Richter.”

Means nothing. New to me. File it for reference later.

“Well, Ms. Richter, I'll see you to the servants' gatehouse,” Bruce said. “It's at the bottom of the hill, and we can call for a cab from the guard's room there.”

“Won't the guard mind us intruding on him there?” she asked.

“No guard,” Bruce smiled. They had already passed over more than a hundred different automated alarm and intruder-response systems. “Still, I wouldn't advise you coming back for another try over the fence.”

“Is
that
how I got in?” Amanda asked. “Climbed over the fence in my designer jacket and tailored suit?”

“Well, if you did,” Bruce nodded, “I'm sorry I wasn't there to see it. Here is the gatehouse.”

They were at the base of the enormous slope of the back lawn. The twelve-foot-tall stone fence emerged from the woods to their left and extended across the back of the property and into the woods on the far side of the lawn. The line was broken only by the gatehouse and the wide iron gate next to it, thwarting the road that wound up the edge of the woods toward the manor, which was nearly two miles distant at the top of the rise to the north.

If Amanda heard the door unlock at their approach, she didn't show it.

Bruce showed her through the gatehouse and out the other side. He placed the call for the cab and then stepped out to where she was standing next to the road.

“They say they'll be here in about ten minutes,” Bruce said. “Must be a gathering of the upper-crust somewhere in Bristol tonight if the cabs are that close.”

Amanda nodded, then turned her gray eyes on him. “I really must see Bruce, Mr. Grayson.”

“Call me Gerry,” Bruce corrected.

“Gerry, then. Isn't there any way that I—”

“Well, you can ask,” Bruce said.

Remember to flash your charming smile. It's been such a long time.

Bruce leaned against the gatehouse, folded his arms, and nodded toward the intercom mounted next to the gate.

Amanda gave him a “thanks for nothing” smile and stepped up to the intercom. She jabbed the button with a long, elegant finger.

“Yes?”

Alfred sounds upset. He's probably wondering why he didn't get any proximity alarms at her approach.

“I am here to see Bruce Wayne,” Amanda said.

Bruce raised his eyebrows and nodded approvingly.

“Mr. Wayne is not taking callers,” Alfred's tinlike voice replied from the box.

“I have a message for him—a very important message,” Amanda said.

“I shall be delighted to take the message, madam,” Alfred responded. “Whom may I say the message is from?”

“It is from me. Amanda Richter.”

The metal box went silent for a moment.

That's not like Alfred. Reporters and writers trying to make their mark approach him every day, and usually a lot more creatively than this.

“Could you give that name again?” Alfred said at last.

“Yes. I'm Amanda Richter.”

Silence again? Did I hear stress in Alfred's voice
?

“Miss Richter, please stay where you are,” Alfred said. “I'll be down directly.”

Bruce continued to smile, but there was definitely something wrong. Alfred had strict orders never to greet anyone on the property nor allow them in unless they had been cleared by him personally. There were no exceptions.

“It looks like you won't be needing that cab after all,” Bruce said.

“I suppose not, Mr. Grayson,” Amanda said.

“Oh, and I shouldn't have let you out through the gatehouse,” Bruce added. “If that butler catches me here, there'll be hell to pay. I could lose my job.”

“I promise not to say a thing,” Amanda nodded.

“Thanks,” Bruce replied. “It's been a pleasure, Amanda.”

“Thank you, Gerry.”

Bruce turned and stepped back through the gatehouse with studied casualness. He stepped back on to the grounds out the other side, registering the sound of the locks on the doors snapping closed automatically behind him. Amanda was now properly locked outside his domain, though he still did not know how she had managed to get
into
the grounds in the first place.

Moreover, there was the question of Alfred.

Alfred had been with him from the beginning. Every relationship has its strains. He and Alfred had been through it all together for as long as Bruce could remember. Sometimes it was easy and sometimes it was hard. Of late, the warm relationship between the retainer and his master had cooled somewhat and the silences between them had lengthened. Even so, Bruce believed Alfred Pennyworth had been steadfastly honest in his service.

But now Alfred was reacting contrary to Bruce's direct orders because of a woman he obviously knew—one who somehow had managed to slip undetected onto the grounds.

“
They are all just pieces to the puzzle, Bruce,” Mother said so often. “Just put together the ones that make sense and the rest will follow in time …”

Bruce moved quickly back toward the ravine. He could hear the motor of the Bentley approaching from the Manor, no doubt with Alfred behind the wheel, and wanted to be out of sight before it arrived.

B
ruce settled down into the massive chair in front of his research console. The air in the Batcave felt oppressive now compared with the morning outside, but it was also familiar and somehow comforting after the strange encounter he had on the grounds.