The Wishing Garden (14 page)

She reached into her pocket for the pack of cigarettes she’d slipped out to buy. She had smoked years ago with Harry, then quit easily, much to the disgust of Harry, who needed hypnosis and four weeks of hysterical rages to accomplish the same feat. The trouble was, she could start up again as easily as she’d quit. Since she’d come to Prescott, she’d had cravings for menthol Virginia Slims.

She lit one and looked down the street. The neighbors still wouldn’t talk to her, Ben Hiller had called to say if she didn’t take down her sign, there would be legal action, and her last client, a twenty-year-old boy headed for boot camp, had laughed in her face.

“This is shit,” he’d said, after she’d laid out two Fours and three Queens and told him to be ready for deception by a woman.

She had lifted her chin. “That’s what the cards say.”

“Lady, you’re out of your mind. Look at me.” He’d stood up to his full height, six foot four, well over two hundred pounds. “Do I look like the kind of guy who gets duped? I’m going into the Navy, for Christ’s sake. They’re sending me to the Persian Gulf. I’m not going to see a woman for months.”

She had glanced down at the cards, and her head hurt a little. She couldn’t make out anything else.

When she’d left the house for a smoke, she had been figuring how quickly Taylor Baines would hire her back. She was thinking how nice it would feel to slip into her apartment on Nob Hill, stretch out in her bed, and sleep for hours. But then she’d looked up at her father’s window and had seen his silhouette in the chair, his baby skull. The truth was, love was a trap, and most people willingly walked into it. If her father had really been kind, he would have given her a reason to hate him. He would have known all she needed was a single excuse to walk away.

She heard an engine and looked down Sage Street. A truck turned the corner, then pulled up in front of the house. Jake Grey stepped out stiffly, and even though she sat in the dark of the curb, he came right for her. Savannah’s stomach tightened. She had no doubt that if she laid out the cards for herself now, she’d get a whole lot of Swords. The Swords ruled change; they weren’t necessarily bad, just impulsive, like teenagers or anyone falling in love. When they came up in droves, one crisis was often cured by the creation of another.

She narrowed her eyes. The man had hardly uttered two words to her in three weeks, but she’d felt him studying her.

“It’s a busy night,” she said. “Your assistant has already been here.”

“Eli?”

She said nothing more. He was a different man without his dogs. They did most of the talking. With all their barking and yelping, they had probably given him the illusion, all these years, that he was making normal conversation.

He made no move to come down to her level, so she stood up. That did little good; he was nearly a foot
taller. She didn’t like the looks of him, not one bit, so she blew smoke straight into his eyes.

“Stop trying to scare people,” she said.

“I don’t try. I just do.”

“Well, you don’t scare me.”

He smiled a little, she thought, although it was hard to tell with his beard. “I’m just here to get my tools. Left some of my chisels.”

“My God. Tragedy.” She had no idea why she was feeling so mean, except that the air was still and thick enough to trap a woman whole. She dropped her cigarette and stomped it out, while Jake just stood there.

“So go,” she said. Still, he just stood, and she started to feel uneasy. There was no moon, and suddenly the streetlamps went out. She gasped, though she’d known this was by Ben Hiller’s order. All streetlights were set to turn off at one
A.M.
, to save electricity. In this kind of darkness, Jake Grey was all shadows. He did look like a psycho.

“You know,” she said, “some people have enough to worry about without running into someone like you. You could shave your beard. You could show a little enthusiasm for the human species. You could say hello every now and then. It wouldn’t kill you.”

She poked him in the chest, then snatched back her hand. He was hard as concrete. He took a step toward her. “You’re right,” he said softly. “Hello, Savannah.”

He walked across the street and disappeared into the garden. He returned in a moment, chisels in hands, and held them up. In the darkness, they glittered like knives. He got into his truck and turned over the engine. In less than a minute, he was gone.

Savannah stood on the sidewalk, listening to the distant rumble of his truck and the beating of her heart.

She hurried back across the street, already accustomed to the slight slope of the pavement, the variations in her father’s cobblestone walkway. She didn’t want to know why Eli had shown up tonight, but she was still going to pull a blanket up over Emma. In theory, a mother ought to trust her daughter, but she was still going to start locking the door.

 S
IX
 N
INE OF
C
UPS
, R
EVERSED
F
ALSE
F
REEDOM
 

S
hielded from the porch by a clematis-coated trellis, and sweltering beneath a blistering white sky, Jake could very well have been hallucinating the laughter. It came in staccato shock waves, then disintegrated into giggling. The mind played funny tricks, because it sounded very much like Maggie Dawson.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s see what you can do.”

There was the tinkling of ice cubes against glass, then the beeping of the cordless phone. In a moment, Emma’s voice rose up. “I’d like to place an order.”

Jake saturated a tenon joint with carpenter’s glue, then fit it in the mortise. He turned over the bench and set it down for the first time on three-inch thick legs. Doug had not specified an arm or leg design, and Jake wished he had. Because left to his own devices, Jake might very well carve in the point of an elbow and sculpt bracelets around slender wrists. He might taper
the legs and chisel feet into the bottom. If it got any hotter, he might paint the tips ruby red.

Every weekend and every evening, Savannah Dawson went straight to the garden. She hiked her skirt up around her hips and dug her bare feet into rich soil. Every few minutes, a note would sail down from the upstairs window, and she would pick it up.
Cut back the lily of the valley
, Doug Dawson would have written.
Use fish fertilizer on the chamomile, diluted to two tablespoons per gallon
. For a moment, Savannah would hide beneath the shade of whatever hat she was wearing and cradle the note as if it were the last healthy piece of her father. Then she would raise her face to the bedroom window and smile. She would pick up the pruners and go get it done.

Sasha followed her everywhere, out of her mind with devotion. By nightfall, her silver fur smelled of lemons and Juicy Fruit gum, and on the drive home Jake let her ride in the cab. He ignored fur heaps and ripped floor mats just to breathe in that unlikely mix of tang and sweetness.

“Twenty-four in turquoise blue,” Emma said. “Absolutely. Overnight them.”

Both Emma and Maggie laughed, then there was the tinkling of more ice. Jake stepped out around the trellis, and Maggie jerked her head up and eyed him suspiciously.

“How long have you been there?”

Both she and Emma were holding tall, frosted glasses of lemonade. Emma had on short shorts and a tank top; above her eyes were two striking curves of blue eye shadow. She was glaring at Jake, too.

“I was hoping I could get something to drink.”

Actually, he wasn’t the slightest bit thirsty, despite the heat, but he wouldn’t mind a little of what they were having. It was obviously making them giddy.
Emma turned her back on him and spoke into the phone.

“One more thing. The birdbath mailbox. Again in blue.” She listened, then looked at Maggie. “There’s a twenty-dollar additional shipping charge.”

“That’s outrageous. They’re bleeding me dry.”

“That’s all right,” Emma said into the phone. “Bill the Discover card.”

Maggie stood up. “I’ll get you a glass,” she told Jake, and went into the house.

Emma hung up the phone and turned back to him. She rolled the frosted glass along her forehead. “Grandma says you’re a psycho.”

Jake laughed as he walked across the patio and sat on the stoop beside her. He was impressed when she didn’t even flinch. They both heard Savannah from somewhere in the front garden, making up jingles. He wished she would just stop. Lately, he’d found himself mumbling refrains of “flowers blooming, sunshine’s looming,” until he was certain the ghost was laughing his guts out.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She checked him over from head to toe, then finally stared right in his eyes. “I think you’re in love with her.”

Jake went absolutely still. If he strained really hard, he could hear Sasha moaning in ecstasy whenever Savannah stroked her, which she did every few minutes. He was fairly certain he heard his own heart skipping.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

Emma snorted, then stood up. She walked to the trellis and ripped off whole branches of jackmanii clematis. She made a point to walk on the tender thyme between the flagstones, squashing them flat. She was out to ruin something, that much was obvious, and at
her age the real danger was that it would end up being herself.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t give a fuck, all right? But if you want my advice, don’t go anywhere near my mom. One day with her and you’ll feel like you’ve gorged yourself on too much cotton candy. She’s not real. You know what I’m saying? She can’t fall in love with you, because that would mean there’d be nights she’d stay up late worrying if you’d make it home all right. She’d have to cry herself to sleep every time you left without saying you loved her, and Mom’s not gonna do that. Not for a million bucks.”

Maggie came out with a glass of lemonade and set it down beside Jake. “Isn’t she something?” she whispered. “I tell you, I love that girl.”

Jake took the glass and stood up. All of a sudden he was parched. He downed the lemonade in one gulp, but it was sour, and it left him thirsty for more.

He whistled for his dogs and Sasha, as always, was the last to come. Jake waited by the truck until she trudged up next to him, her head down and pouting.

“For crying out loud,” he said, but he still let her sit in the cab. He was going to retreat to his mountain and not come down for a week. He was going to get away before Savannah cast a spell on him, too.

He was clear to his driveway before his lips lost their pucker from the sour lemonade. He took a deep breath of cool mountain air and held it in until it stung. He was just starting to feel better when he walked into his cabin and saw the locked gun cabinet standing wide open. The rifle had not been moved, but all of a sudden the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He whirled around, expecting to find an intruder behind him, but all he found was his old wallet, the one he’d tossed into the bottom of the cabinet
thirteen years ago, thrown open on the dining room table.

The dogs were outside howling, and he knew why. The ghost was out there blowing smoke in their eyes. He’d sidled up next to them and now they were on their backs, rubbing off something awful. The ghost was trying to drive them all crazy, and it was starting to work.

Jake walked across the room and picked up the moldy wallet. Amazingly, it still reeked of fish and stale water after all this time. The single credit card and laminated driver’s license were stuffed in the flap, along with a yellowed letter.

Even before he looked at the fireplace, he knew the key to the cabinet would still be hanging on the hook by the mantel, undisturbed. He knew, if he checked the cabinet for fingerprints, he would find only his own. He listened to his dogs howl, then he picked up the letter that his mother has forwarded him thirteen years ago.