Bitter Truth (15 page)

I lay in the bed and shivered from the damp and thought about it all, not even realizing I was slipping into somebody else’s reverie, until I fell, eventually, into a dark, empty sleep. That it was dreamless was merciful, what with all I had been through and learned that night. I slept curled in a ball and stayed like that until I felt the scrape of teeth at the back of my neck.

I sprung awake and spun in the darkness, first this way, then that way, searching desperately for the rat. But it wasn’t a rat. I could only make out the outlines of a figure in my bed and I pulled myself away before I heard a throaty laugh and the soft silvery rustle of metal on metal and smelled the sweet smell of vermouth.

“Jesus dammit,” I said. “I thought you were passed out.”

“I revived,” said Caroline, in a glazed voice. “I didn’t know you’d be so jumpy.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I thought we should maintain our cover with a late-night rendezvous. There are always eyes open in this house.”

“We could have let our cover slide, I think. They’ll know soon enough, as soon as they talk to your fiancé. You didn’t tell me about you and Harrington. Another lie?”

“The love of my life,” she said. “And you’re right, they will tell him, of course, and he will tell them exactly who you are. I guess the jig is up.”

“Are you still drunk?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“You were pounding them down like an Australian frat boy.”

“I have a small problem sometimes. My therapist says I’m a situational alcoholic. It’s one of the many things we’re working on.”

“What situations specifically?”

“Family situations, like tonight.”

“I really can’t blame you, Caroline. This family of yours is the screwiest I’ve ever seen. It makes mine look like the Cleavers, and believe me, no one ever confused my mother and father with June and Ward. And besides their general weirdness, it seems each and every one of them has the damnedest desire to have sex with me.”

She gave a hearty laugh. “You said you wanted to meet them all, so I arranged it.”

“You arranged it?”

“I told them you were a polymorphously perverse sexual addict and hung like a horse.”

I let out a burst of embarrassed angst just as I heard the rustle of covers. I felt her palm land on my stomach and rub and then slip south, reaching under my boxers.

“Well maybe I overstated it a bit,” she said, “but it is mighty perky for this late at night.”

“Cut it out,” I said. I reached down to grab her wrist and brushed her breast accidentally, feeling something hard and cold against the back of my hand, something round, metallic. “You’re drunk and you’re a client. The ethical rules say I can’t get involved with a client.”

I tried to pull Caroline’s hand away but it stayed right where it was. She kissed my nose and cheek and then bit my upper lip. She didn’t bite it hard, not at all like Kendall turtle-snapping my ear, she bit it softly, tenderly, teasing it out from between her teeth as she pulled away.

“Am I?” she whispered in my ear.

“Are you what?”

“A client?”

I thought on it, how she took back her retainer and hadn’t yet signed the contingency fee contract and how our strange business relationship was not so easily described and as I thought on it she bit my lip, my lower lip this time, bit it the same way and teased it from between her teeth the same way and suddenly I didn’t want her hand to leave, just to move, which it did.

“I really don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said.

“Then don’t think.”

“Caroline, stop. Don’t I have any say in this?”

“Not until I sign your contract,” she breathed into my ear. “Until then I’m in control.”

She kissed me lightly and then scooted toward me on the bed, slipped close until our bellies rubbed and her grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross dug into my chest. The springs beneath us creaked loudly.

“They’ll hear.”

“Then be sure to be loud,” she said. “I don’t want them to miss a single groan.”

She kissed me again and dragged her tongue across my gums. I tasted her breath and whatever control had stubbornly remained suddenly shifted out from beneath me and I fell.

“You are going to save me, aren’t you?” she said.

It was phrased rhetorically, which was good, because I couldn’t have answered just then, still falling as I was, falling. I tasted her breath and it tasted sweet from the vermouth of her Manhattans and fresh, like a warm wind off a meadow, and full of mint.

No, not peppermint. Government.

18

B
REAKFAST WAS waiting in tarnished silver chafing dishes arrayed on a black marble sideboard in the Garden Room. Consuelo had met me at the base of the stairs and asked, without inflection, how my night had been before directing me to the morning’s regalement. I had been the last to rise that night and I was evidently the first to rise that morning and I had awakened alone.

The Garden Room was an exotic monstrosity, warm, humid, circular, with a grand Victorian glass dome, the panes of which were sallow and sooty and edged dark with fungus. Huge jungle plants, sporting leaves as big as torsos, stood among weedy stalks topped by tiny face-shaped blooms. Behind the jungle plants stooped pale-barked trees, gnarled and stunted. Meat-red flowers drooped from clumps of green sprouting from the crooks of tree trunks, the flowers’ dark mouths yawning in hunger. The place smelled as if fertilizer had been freshly laid in the huge granite pots. I wouldn’t have been surprised if General Sternwood had been there to greet me in his wheelchair, but he wasn’t, nobody was, except for two black cats locked in a large wrought-iron cage. When I approached, one cooed invitingly while another snarled before hurling itself right at me, slamming its face into the iron bars. I guessed they were playing good cat bad cat.

Sunlight glared through the dirty windows. The storm had passed that night just as Nat had predicted. In my suit and day-old shirt and socks and underwear I stepped to the food-laden sideboard. I was ravenous and all too ready to set to, despite the Garden Room’s offal smell. I took a plate and lifted the silver cover off the first of the warming trays.

Eggs, runny and wet like snot, with chips of black mixed in, either chunks of pepper or something else I didn’t want to guess at. In the next were potatoes, wet and hard, swimming in some sort of green-colored oil. In the next, French toast slices with the consistency of cardboard and a reservoir of syrup, slick with the prismatic surface of motor oil. In the last, white slabs of uncooked fat surrounding shivery pink slivers of trichinosis. I put my plate back and looked around for something to drink.

I examined six china cups before I found one crackfree and clean, released a splash of coffee from the urn, and found my way outside to the rear patio and a perfect spring morning. The sun was risen, the damp of the night before was lifting in sheets of fog, the air was filled with the fresh scent of newly soaked loam. A bird heckled. To my right, a large stone wing stretched perpendicular to the rest of the house, its windows covered with white sheets to keep out the sun. An old ballroom, I figured. A few of the windowpanes were cracked and it looked as if it hadn’t been balled in decades. As I examined it I took a sip of the coffee; it spilled into my empty stomach with an acidic hiss. I looked around and found a rusting white cast-iron chair and placed my cup and saucer onto its seat. Then I walked off into the rising fog to explore the grounds.

Behind the house, halfway down the backside of the hill, was a long rectangular pool, surrounded by what looked like a swamp. The water in the pool was a dark algae green and it appeared to be spring-fed because the water had risen in the storm to flow over the top of the pool, flooding the ground beside it. There was no cement or wooden platform around the pool for sunbathing or relaxing with a tall drink of lemonade, just the swamped grass.

I walked around the pool and headed still farther down, to a small pond almost at the base of the hill. This was the pond, I assumed, where Caroline’s grandfather had thrown his Distinguished Service Cross. Why had he ditched it? I wondered. Caroline had offhandedly promised that if I found out she’d sign my fee agreement and I intended to hold her to the promise. The pond was murky, overgrown with weeds and lily pads. As I approached, the ground grew quaggy beneath my shoes and a swarm of gnats flew into my face and hovered. I heard a sucking sound as I lifted my foot and I stopped walking and searched the water for any sign of life beneath its surface. Other than some water boatmen skimming over the top on their long legs, I saw nothing.

I moved around the pond until I reached a tree that had died and fallen into the edge of the water directly opposite the house, and it was by the tree that I noticed, with a small shock, a thousand eyes.

Frogs. The water around the branches of that tree teemed with them, hundreds and hundreds of them. They climbed one atop the other, forming layers of frogs, feet resting on heads, heads beneath bellies, all breathing their dangerous quiet breaths, their eyes open and staring, hundreds and hundreds of them, layers of them, piles of them, a plague of frogs. Slick green, the color lightening about their lower jaws, they were not large frogs, some still had tails and each of their bodies was no bigger than a thumb, but the eyes that stared at me were a malevolent yellow and they climbed one atop the other to get a better look at me, hundreds and hundreds of them, piles of them, slick green silent thumbs with eyes.

Above them, atop the hill, stood Veritas, broad-shouldered and arrogant even in its decrepitude, the mist still rising about it. I had the fanciful notion that each of the frogs was spawned by a sin transgressed by those who had once occupied that house. A thumb on the scale to cheat a customer, a thumb licked as money is counted falsely, a thumb in a competitor’s eye, a thumb atop a secretary’s breast, a thumb to cap a handshake to seal an agreement to cheat a partner of his fair share, a thumb jerked to the door to fire the sole support of a family of seven, a thumb rubbed gently across the subject’s lip at the end game of a seduction, a thumb that cocks the hammer of a shotgun or grasps the last nail to be driven through the lid of a coffin. Which of those frogs, I wondered, was sired by Claudius Reddman’s buyout of Elisha Poole before he introduced the pressure-flavored pickle that was to make him a rich and much-honored man? Which of those frogs was fathered by whichever sin it was that caused Caroline’s grandfather to toss away his decoration for exceptional gallantry? Which of those frogs was begot by Kingsley Shaw’s patricide? Which of those frogs was engendered by the murder of Jacqueline Shaw?

And which of those frogs, I also wondered, sprang to life as a result of my midnight fornication with a situationally drunken Caroline Shaw, youngest heir to the Reddman fortune? I had been fantasizing about screwing her all that night, admittedly, but sexual fantasies are the natural segues between my more practical thoughts, delirium over that secretary or that lawyer or that middle-aged judge wearing whatever she is wearing beneath that hot black robe, no more meaningful than the sluice of chemicals and flash of electricity in the brain that generated the imaginary idyll in the first place. There is no harm in fantasizing, no awkward moments after, no fluids to deal with, no vicious little microbes to wonder incessantly about, no ethical rules to consider. But what had started as a run-of-the-mill fantasy had twisted its way into reality and though I had not actively sought it, I had participated with a canine eagerness that seemed free and vibrant in the darkness of that bed but seemed now like nothing more than a crass exploitation of a young drunken women in a fragile emotional state for purposes of my own pleasure and enrichment. And it hadn’t even been any good.

I swung my leg at the pile of frogs and a handful jumped off to the right. I followed them with my gaze as they dived into the water and then lifted my eyes to see, in a secluded grove of trees, the ruin of a house. It was Victorian and gray, not the clean gray of a rehabbed bed and breakfast but the tired gray of weathered wood long neglected. The foundation had shifted and the building sagged with the sad weariness of a tragedy whose story no one remains alive to tell. Some of the windowpanes were shattered, others were boarded with plywood, itself weathered to gray, and the lower part of half the house was charred on the outside by some sort of brushfire. It must have been an old caretaker’s cottage, I figured, situated as it was so far down the hill from the main house.

While climbing back up to the main house my attention was drawn to a large bosky grove to the right of the pool. It looked to be untended and its setup completely haphazard but as I approached, I noticed a definite shapeliness about it. While each of the individual plants had a disordered look, the general shape had corners and lines, as if those bushes were once part of a wall of hedges that had long gone untrimmed. The plants were wild vicious things, the leaves spiked, the branches studded with a profusion of pale thorns, some more than an inch long. I walked around the grove until I saw a spot in the wall of green that was less dense than the rest and appeared to have been closed off only by the most recent growth. I looked left and right, spotted no one watching, glanced up at the porch, saw that still it was empty, and reached my hand into the opening. I pulled my hand back again, inspected it, and then stepped right on through.

I found myself on a pathway bright with sunlight and wildflowers. The grass was high and the pathway was narrow, with thorny branches thrusting like spears across the gap, but still there was plenty of room for me to walk after brushing away the errant stalks. I followed the pathway around a corner until I found an archway of green that led to another pathway. The flowers were random, full of lovely yellows and violets and a few lurid reds. Two birds serenaded one another in the morning light. A cardinal hopped from one bush to another. It smelled like a different world, all fresh and ecstatically fragrant, full of life, the very opposite of the must-ridden house or the mucky pond below.

I knew where I had sneaked myself into, of course. This was the maze of hedges and flowers that had been described to me by Grimes, the dentist, in his mournful soliloquy at the Irish Pub. He had described it as immaculately tended, but it had apparently not been touched in many many months, not since, I would guess, the death of Caroline’s sweet widowed grandmother, Faith Reddman Shaw, Grammy, who seemed to have a hand in many of the goings-on in that house. I followed the maze like a rat looking for cheese, ducking into almost completely covered entrances, under archways of branches, moving ever toward the middle, until I stepped, as cautiously as a heathen in a church, into the clearing Grimes had described so vividly.

The sun was brightest here and the plants had seemed to mutate into wild stalks of color. Flies fell upon my neck. The statue of Aphrodite was there, on her tiptoes, reaching up to the heavens, but now it appeared she was being held down by a thick hairy vine that cloaked the base of the statue and wrapped itself like an arm around her rear leg. The bench across from the statue was also covered with a vine, but this one sported bright orange flowers. Between the two was an oval covered with high grasses and stalks of weedy green not yet brought to flower. I stepped around the oval toward the statue, feeling some dark presence beneath my feet as I walked, and pushed away the handsized vine leaves covering the base until I could see the stone in which was deeply engraved the word “SHAW.”

I felt something on my foot and jerked it away suddenly, seeing a frog hop into the surrounding bushes. Another frog leaped by. I turned and saw two more come bounding like little flashes of light from the entrance arch and then a boot.

I backed away, almost ducking behind the statue, but before I could hide the boot’s owner came into view and smiled at me in an unsettling way from beneath a wide straw hat. “A little sightseeing, Mr. Carl?” cackled Nat.

“I didn’t mean to,” I stammered, backing away. “I wasn’t…”

“You’re allowed,” he said, and his smile warmed to genuine. The spot around his left eye glowed a lurid red. “It’s just a garden.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, trying to recover my breath.

“You should have seen it when it was tended. I spent half of each of my days maintaining it to Mrs. Shaw’s specifications. She was a demon for pruning. The elder Mrs. Shaw, I’m talking of now. Not a bloom out of place, not a weed. ‘Take off every shoot whose value is doubtful,’ she taught me, ‘and all you have left is beauty.’ It was a masterpiece. Yep. Some magazine wanted to do a spread, but she wouldn’t have strangers stomping through it with tripods and cameras.”

I looked around at the weeds and the vines pulling at the statue. “Why’d you let it go?”

“This is the way the elder Mrs. Shaw, she wanted it. ‘Just let it go when I die, Nat,’ she told me.” His voice took on a strange power as he imitated hers. “ ‘Let the earth take it back,’ she told me. So that’s what I’ve done.”

“It seems a shame.”

“That it does, yep. Every once in a while I come with my shears and get the urge to straighten it up, some. To prune. But the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was one who liked her orders carried out to the letter. It was the least I could do for her to honor her wishes. It was her place, you know. She’d been coming here ever since she was a girl. Built it up herself.”

“What was she like, Nat?”

“The elder Mrs. Shaw? Quite a woman, she was. Like a mother to me. Brought me here when I was still a boy and made sure I was taken care of ever since, almost like I was one of her own. She’s done more for me and mine then you’d ever imagine, Mr. Carl. Can’t say as she was the gentlest soul I’ve ever met.” He squatted down and pulled at a long piece of grass, wrapping it about his hand. “Nope, I could never say that. But deep in her heart she wanted to do good. N’aren’t too many like that.”

He stood and strolled over to the statue and kicked roughly at the base.

“She’s laying right there,” he said. “In some special urn of hers. Her ashes mixed up with her husband’s. I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Carl. She loved him more than she loved anything else on this good earth. That kind of love coming from a woman for a man, she’s got to have more than a little good in her.”

“How did he die, her husband?” I asked.

Nat’s blue eyes looked into mine and he smiled as if he knew that I knew the answer, though how he could I couldn’t know. “It was before my time. But I’ll say this, the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was probably right to let this place go. Sometimes what’s buried should remain buried. No good can come from digging up the dead. Come along, Mr. Carl, I’ll show you out. The way it is now, it sometimes gets tricky and you might end up here longer than you’d expect.”