Bitter Truth (24 page)

“When I was fifteen,” I said in amazed envy, “I wasn’t even experimenting with my own body.”

“Cut it out,” she said. “It’s not a joke. I shouldn’t be telling you.”

We lay in the bed for a while, quietly. Our legs were no longer touching.

“So what happened to you two?” I asked finally.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I still don’t know,” she said.

Somehow their secret was discovered. They never knew by whom or how, but they had no doubt. Someone had sneaked into the old Poole house and rummaged through their things. They could feel a chill when they were together, as if they were being watched. And then one night, when he was eighteen, Franklin disappeared. No one knew what had happened or where he had gone, he had simply vanished. A letter came for him from Princeton. Caroline opened it anxiously, recklessly; he had been accepted, but there was no one to tell. She searched for him, called all their friends, checked out all their places, found not a trace. And when he reappeared, finally, after months and months, reappeared without explanation, he was somehow different. Whatever had been wild about him was gone. The anger in him that she had loved so much had disappeared. And when she finally got him back to the Poole house and demanded he tell her where he had been, he sat her down and told her it was over. Forever. That though he loved her with everything in his soul they would spend the rest of their lives apart. She clutched hold of him and cried and begged to know what she had done but he wouldn’t answer. He just stood and left and never went back into the house and never slept with her again.

“And there was no explanation?”

“None.”

“Any ideas?”

“None. At first I thought he might have a disease that he didn’t want to spread to me, or that he might be gay. I announced our engagement publicly, a childish attempt to force him to change his mind, and he didn’t disabuse anyone of the notion, so the expectation remains in the family that we will be married, but he hasn’t touched me since. He can barely stand to look at me now. Franklin has other women, I know that. What I don’t know is why he’d rather be with them than with me. But desertion seems to be the pattern, doesn’t it? My father hides from me in his room, my one true love flees from me.”

“Do you regret anything now?”

“I regret everything now, but not that. It was the finest, purest time of my life. The last innocent period where I still believed in the myth that life was a thrilling adventure and everything was possible and there was true happiness to be found in this world.”

“What do you believe in now?”

She inhaled from her cigarette and let it out slowly.

“Nothing,” she said finally. And I believed her. It was in the dead look in her eyes, in the body piercing, as if to gore a great emptiness, in the tattoos, as if to scrawl onto her body some evidence of faith. It was in the way she drank in her situations, intently, the way she smoked, with the incessant dedication of a suicide, the way she held herself, like an actress searching in the wings for a line because she had none of her own. And most of all, it was in the way she screwed.

After she had clicked off into passivity I didn’t give up trying to bring her back. I kissed the flesh behind her ear and rubbed her crotch with my thigh and took hold of her hair. Though at Veritas I had been expecting something more, I wasn’t surprised this time when she left me alone in her bed with her body. But despite how I tried to revive her, she was gone, to someplace calm and innocent, to someplace full of youth and love, to someplace I could never follow, leaving me with only her flesh and my heightened desire. So what else was there to do? I caressed her pale flanks, indelibly marked in the green ink of her tattoos, sucked at her neck, dragged my tongue across the rough skin beneath her arms. Her mouth, newly rinsed with Scope, tasted as minty and new as a newly minted hundred-dollar bill and I grew ever more excited despite myself. To have sex with Caroline Shaw, I realized whilst astride her, was to peer into Rockefeller’s soul.

She lay there quietly for me, eyes open, saying not a word as I did what I willed with her. Her very passivity spurred me, her eyes staring at me, rich and blue, challenging. I straddled her and turned her around so those rich eyes were away from me and I entered her, pumping hard, pumping furiously, filled with anger at her stark passivity. And in the moment that I came, my teeth clenched in release, it was as if Mammon itself opened up its secrets to me and I started to grasp its dark power. It is utter emptiness, a vessel formed of nothing, filled with nothing, believing in nothing, an emptiness into which we are urged to pour our most essential truths. And what spurted out of me was not love nor compassion nor charity nor even need, what spurted out was all my wanting and my coveting, all my deep yearning for anything that anyone else might ever have, all my darkest ambitions for prestige and power and glory and ultimately what? Godhood? God help me. That was the next-to-worst part of screwing Caroline Shaw, the part that brought to light the ugliest shadows of my crippled soul.

The worst part was that I liked it.

“Do you think all that crap about Elisha Poole and my great-grandfather might have something to do with Jacqueline’s death?” asked Caroline.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Harrington seemed interested enough.”

“He did, didn’t he?” She took a drag from her cigarette. “I had a strange feeling in the restaurant when you and he were discussing this thing about Poole. It was more like a déjà vu than anything else, but I felt it. It was like there weren’t only three of us at the table anymore, there was someone else, sitting with us, casting a coldness over everything.”

“A ghost?”

“No, a presence, maybe just a memory. But it made me shiver.”

“Who? Your grandmother?”

“Someone else, someone strange to me. It was almost like my great-grandfather was there, listening to us talk about him. Is that weird?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was just a draft.”

“Whatever it was, it was really cold.” She took another drag and then stubbed out her cigarette right on the table’s surface. “I think it’s time I learned the truth about my family’s history. I think I want to know everything that happened, from the very beginning to what is left of us now. I want to know if it was always rotten or if there was a moment of brightness before it turned.”

“Conciliation, expiation, redemption,” I said.

“Yes, I want to know about that too. Especially the redemption.”

“You might not like what you find.”

“I don’t care. What could I ever learn that could make things worse for me?”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive, as long as you’ll do it with me.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want. You’ll see it through to the end, won’t you, Victor? You won’t desert me like every other man in my life, will you?”

Perhaps it was all part of the masculine ego rush that comes after hard sex, accentuated by the glimpse I had caught of the dark truths in my soul, but just then I didn’t feel like every other man. Just then I felt within me a strange and unique power, not only to do financial good for myself but to do good for Caroline, too. She had said before that she wanted to be saved; maybe the truths I would unearth in her family’s past could provide the first crucial steps toward her salvation. It was a maybe, only a maybe, but a maybe could warrant a hell of a lot. As a lawyer I had gotten pretty damn good at self-justification.

“I won’t desert you,” I said. “I’ll see it through.”

“So where do we start?”

“I have an idea, but you’ll think it crazy.”

“No I won’t.”

“Forget it,” I said. “It’s too wild.”

She turned over on her stomach and drew her fingers lightly across my chest. “What is it, Victor? Whatever it is, no matter how insane, we’ll do it, I promise.”

“Anything?”

“I promise.”

“Well, what I think we should do next,” I said, sitting up and looking straight into those rich, blue eyes, “is dig up your grandmother’s garden.”

29

T
HE VAST STRETCH of lawn within the iron gates of Veritas was a sea of blackness, the windows of the mansion were dark. I parked the car on the upsweep of the driveway so as not to wake anyone who might have been in the house. It was a pitchy night, the moon was new, and in the expanse of sky that spread over the estate the stars peered forth like a million frog eyes. Caroline led with the flashlight as we made our way quietly around the house and to the rear gardens. In my right hand was a shovel we had just purchased from Home Depot for $9.99, a long-handled discount jobber with a sharp blade of flawed steel ready to chip at the first pebble. In my left hand was a kerosene lantern I had dug out of my closet from among my camping gear. We had stopped at a gas station to fill it with unleaded but I had misjudged the process and had drenched my pants with gasoline. Along with the fear of self-combustion was the dry sour smell that followed me wherever I moved.

As we sneaked around the ballroom side of the house, I tripped over a stone and cracked my shin. I let out a short sharp cry. Caroline turned the beam of her light into my face.

“Shut up,” she whispered fiercely, a shadow behind the blob of light. “If you can’t be quiet we’ll just forget it.”

“I’ll be quiet,” I said quietly. I rubbed my shin. “I just fell. Get that light out of my face.” I pushed myself back to standing. “Let’s go.”

“This was a bad idea,” she said, her inquisitor’s light still blaring in my face. “We should forget it.”

“You said you wanted to dig into your family history,” I said. “That’s just what we’re doing. It’s your house. I don’t know why you’re so jittery.”

“You don’t understand my grandmother. She wanted her garden left alone and she was not one to be defied.”

“She’s dead, Caroline.”

“If there’s anyone with the power to control this world from her grave, it’s my grandmother.”

I was surprised to see how nervous Caroline had become. When I first mentioned the idea a few nights before she seemed amused by it, as if it were a prank as harmless as toilet-papering a house or leaving a burning bag of manure on a doorstep. But as I explained my reasons she grew more and more apprehensive. She was afraid Nat would find out, or her father, or her mother, or Consuelo. It was clear that for a woman who claimed she believed in nothing, she found much in the Reddman family to fear, including her dead grandmother. She had insisted she would only go along if we were silent and did our best to replace the torn-up garden, all of which I had agreed to.

“I’ll be quiet,” I said. “Just stay close, I don’t know the property as well as you do.”

Side by side now, we followed the distorted oval of light on the ground. It led us across a side porch, around the swampy pool, to the giant square of untrimmed hedges looming large and mysterious in the night.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“I’m sure,” I said, though in the presence of those living walls I was not so positive as I sounded. Maybe I was just catching some of Caroline’s fear, or maybe there was something inside those thorny walls that resonated at the low pitch of horror, but whatever it was, as I approached the secret garden I felt more and more uneasy about what we were about to do.

We moved around those great walls until we arrived at where the entrance to the maze should have been. In the flattening beam of the flashlight it was hard to see any gaps. There was an irregular dark line of an opening at one spot. I put down the lantern and stepped up to the uneven line. When I reached through I felt something bite my hand. I snatched it back and found a thorn embedded between my forefinger and thumb.

“Damn it,” I said as I yanked it out with my teeth. “These thorns are lethal. That’s not it.”

“Maybe over there,” she said.

She was pointing the light now at a ragged vertical line that looked just like the last ragged vertical line in which my hand had been attacked. I reached in again and this time felt nothing impeding my hand once I got past the first layer of scraping branches. I pulled out my hand and turned around to look at her. She was almost cringing. Behind us, like a huge black bird extending its wings, crouched Veritas. Not a light was on inside. I picked up the lantern, whispered vague encouragements to Caroline, and slipped through the narrow opening, feeling the scrape of the spiny leaves on my arms and neck. Caroline squeezed through right behind me.

In the darkness, the pathways seemed narrow and malevolent. I remembered how bright and fresh they had been when I entered in the daylight, how the birds had sung and the butterflies had danced, how the smell of wildflowers had suffused the atmosphere with a sweet freshness, but we were no longer in the daylight. The air was thick with moisture and smelled of rot, as if whatever had been infecting that dinosaur of a mansion seeped out from the stones and mortar and wood, under cover of darkness, to taint everything within its reach. We followed the pathways from one entrance to another, searching for our way through the maze. I wondered if this was how rats felt. I slashed the shovel into the ground as I walked, using it like a walking staff. Finally, after a few wrong turns and a few dead ends and a few moments of blind panic when there appeared to be no way out, we entered upon the very heart of Grandmother Shaw’s private garden.

Caroline didn’t go beyond the arched entranceway, halting there as if kept out by the type of invisible fence used to restrain dogs. From the entranceway she flicked the flashlight’s circle of light around the area. The statue of Aphrodite, struggling against hairy arms of vine, was to our right; the bench, its orange blossoms closed in the darkness, was to our left. The oval plot at the center that had been populated with violet lilies and pale yellow jewelweed when Grimes had visited was now overgrown with thick grasses that were strangling the few perennials that had survived.

I placed the lantern on the ground and kneeled before it. “Put the light here,” I said.

The circle of light jerked around the little garden and landed on the kerosene lantern. There was a tiny button on the side which, when I pulled, extended itself into a pump. I jacked the pump back and forth, priming the lantern. Then, when the pressure made the pumping difficult, I lit a match and turned a knob to the highest level and heard the sweet hiss of the pressurized fuel escaping. As I slipped the match under the glass windshield the inside of the lantern exploded into fire, which, after a few seconds, centered with a fury on the mantle. The white-hot flame blanched the scene for a moment before our eyes adjusted to the harsh light and long shadows.

I took the lantern and hung it from one of the arms of Aphrodite. Then I took the shovel, stepped through the weeds in the garden’s central, oval plot, and, right in the middle of the oval, jabbed the shovel deep into the earth. As I levered the shovel’s blade upward the roots of the weeds and flowers snapped and groaned until the shovel’s load of dirt and weed pulled free, revealing bare black earth beneath. I tossed what I had dug to the side and jabbed the shovel into the groaning earth once more.

It was not as crazy an idea as it sounds, digging up that garden. When Grimes, Jacqueline Shaw’s fiancé, had told me in the Irish Pub of his audience with Grandmother Shaw in that very same place, I had been left with the distinct impression that there was something hidden in the ground there. “Treasures are buried in this earth,” Grammy Shaw had said, “keepsakes, mementos of a better time. Everything of value we place here.” It had sounded figurative at best, but it had left me with an uneasy feeling, accentuated by her explanation of how, when the vapors of her gas plant burned, it was as if the spirits buried in that earth were igniting. On my first visit to that garden I had almost felt it beneath my feet, a presence of some sort, something dark and alive. And then Nat, the gardener, who seemed to know more than anyone else of the Reddman family’s secrets, Nat, trailing frogs like a twisted Pied Piper, Nat had come upon me in that overrun oval and told me that Grandmother Shaw was right to order that this place should remain untended and allowed to turn wild. “Sometimes what’s buried should remain buried,” he had said. “No good can come from digging up the dead.”

There were no shortage of suspects for Jacqueline Shaw’s murder. Peter Cressi had killed her, sure, and somehow I would make sure he paid the price, but, financially speaking, pinning the death only on Peter did nothing for me. There had to be someone who paid him to do it, who arranged for the roof and stairwell doors to be open as he slipped down and performed his UPS impersonation, someone with assets on which I could collect once I filed and won my civil suit. Was it the Church of the New Life, that bogus cult of rehashed New Age excretion that was scheduled to reap a cool five mil from Jacqueline’s death and tried to threaten me off the case? Or was it Eddie Shaw, pressured by the mob to pay up his debt, his arm shattered, his life threatened? He had been at the Cambium that afternoon, having flown in just for that purpose from North Carolina, looking for Jacqueline, so he had said, in perfect position to wedge the roof door open, to tape back the automatic lock on the stair shaft door, setting up Cressi’s murderous visit. How he must have howled when he found out there was no insurance money coming to him. Or maybe it was Bobby Shaw, the diffident sexually confused stutterer, whose life was devoted to increasing the value of his fortune, or Harrington, who also had access to Jacqueline’s building and was refusing marriage to a Reddman for some unknown reason.

There were enough suspects in the present to keep me busy, sure, but I wasn’t digging up Grandma Shaw’s garden just to find for Caroline the truths buried in her family’s history. Something strange was at work here, something old, something hidden deep within the story of the Reddmans. Everything seemed to center around that crazed relic, Grammy Shaw, with her twisted face and one good eye, controlling the destiny of her entire dysfunctional family. Grammy had brought Nat and Selma and Harrington into the clutches of the Reddman family; Grammy had diverted great sums of money into a secret trust for some unknown purpose; Grammy had decreed that the garden was to grow wild and be left untouched. I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever secret Grammy had been trying to hide she had buried in this garden. I could have respected her wishes, sure, the rich old hag with half a face, but protecting her secrets wasn’t going to get me any closer to my hard-earned share of her fortune. “No good can come from digging up the dead,” had said Nat, the gardener. But it wasn’t my dead.

I was three feet down when I heard the clang of my shovel against something hard and metallic. Behind me was a heap of dirt and ripped-out plants. The air was filled with the smell of old earth being turned. I had been digging out the heart of the little oval garden for almost an hour now, digging an area about eight feet long and four feet wide, trying to keep the floor of the pit level, like an archaeologist searching for pottery shards through strata of time. It was hard going, all except for one patch. I had stripped down to my tee shirt in the warm night. My hands slipped along the shiny surface of the new shovel’s handle and had started to blister, forcing me to grip the wooden shaft awkwardly, so as to keep the tender portions from continuing to rub. My muscles ached and my back was only a few strains from spasm. In my few breaks, Caroline had dug a bit, but without much enthusiasm or progress, so it was mainly up to me. Without a pickax, I was forced to chop at the dirt with the shovel to loosen the packed earth before I could scoop it up, all except for the one patch I mentioned before. It was a small area roughly in the middle of the garden where the dirt was softer. I thought about just digging there, but I didn’t want to miss anything, so I kept at the whole of the pit. Still, it was no surprise that, when I heard the clang of metal against metal, it came from the loosely packed center.

When I first heard the clang I wasn’t sure what it was, my blade had already sparked against a few rocks, but then I clanged again and Caroline let out a small gasp, and then another, one for each time I wracked my shovel against the metal. It didn’t take me long to figure out the rough rectangular dimensions of the object and to dig around it until my shovel could slip beneath and then to leverage it up out of the earth.

It was a box, a metal strongbox, dark, with rusted edges. There was a handle on the top, which I pulled, but it broke away quickly, weakened by rust and decay. I grabbed the box from beneath the sides and lifted. It was heavy and it smelled richly of old iron. When I gave it a tender shake I could feel its insides shift. The primary weight was the box itself, I could tell, for what had shifted inside had been relatively light. There was a lock integrated into the body of the metal and then another lock, an old rusted padlock, holding together two bars welded onto the top and the bottom. With the box in my arms, I stepped out of the pit and brought it to Caroline.

“You ever see this before?” I asked.

“No,” she said, backing away from it as if it were a cat. “Never.”

“I can’t believe there was something actually here.”

Staring, as if transfixed by the sight of that box, she said, “My grandmother put that there.”

“Looks like it.”

“Open it,” she said.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Knock it open,” she said. “Now.”

As I carefully laid the box on the ground I glanced up at her. She stared down at the box as if it were something alive that needed killing. I took a breath, raised the shovel, and slammed the edge into the lock. It held. I raised the shovel again and slammed it again, and then again, and each time the padlock jumped in its frame and then sat back again, whole and tightly shut. I went at it a few times more, waiting for the padlock to explode, but they don’t make things like they used to because they used to make them pretty damn well. The padlock held.

I swore as I swung futilely, the clangs of the shovel against the metal rising above the night calls of the crickets.

“You’re making too much noise,” she said.

I stopped, leaned over to gasp for air, turned my face to her. “You wanted me to open it. I don’t think asking it nicely to unlock itself is going to work.”