Blue Lily, Lily Blue (23 page)

hen Colin Greenmantle went out onto the porch of the historic farmhouse and looked down at the field below, he discovered a herd of cows standing

far away and two young men standing very close.
It was, in fact, Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch.
He looked down at them.
They looked up.
Neither party said anything. Both of the boys were

unsettling — Adam Parrish, in particular, had a curious face. Not as in, he was a curious person. But rather that there was something peculiar about his facial features. He was an alien, handsome specimen of this western Virginia species; featherboned, hollow-cheeked, eyebrows fair and barely visible. He was feral and raw-boned by way of those Civil War portraits.
Brother fought brother while their farms ran to ruins —

And Ronan Lynch looked like Niall Lynch, which was to say, he looked like an asshole.
Oh, youth.
So Greenmantle broke the ice. He called down, “Are you turning in your exercises?”
They continued standing there, looking like a pair of horror movie twins, one dark, one light.
Adam Parrish smiled a little; it took two years off his age in a second. He had teeth on both his top and bottom jaw. “I know what you are.”
This was interesting. “And what am I?”
“Don’t you know?” Adam Parrish asked it with bland insouciance.
Greenmantle narrowed his eyes. “Are we playing a game, Mr. Parrish?”
“Possibly.”
Games, at least, were one of Greenmantle’s specialties. He leaned against the railing. “In that case, I know what you are, too.”
Ronan Lynch handed Adam Parrish an oversized, bulging manila envelope.
“Oh, I don’t think you do,” Adam replied.
Greenmantle disliked the fearlessness in his face. It was not even fearlessness: It was a lack of expression entirely. He wondered what was in the envelope.
Confessions of a Teen Sociopath.
He said, “Do you know what keeps poor people down, Mr. Parrish? It’s not a lack of income. It’s a poverty of imagination. The trailer park dreams of the suburbs, and the suburbs dreams of the city, the city dreams of the stars, so on and so forth. The poor can imagine the throne, but not being kingly. Poverty of imagination. But you — you are a cuckoo who sneaks into this nest. You are Mr. Adam Parrish, of twenty-one Antietam Lane, Henrietta, Virginia, and you have a good imagination, but you are a pretender nonetheless.”
The kid was good. The skin around his eyes tightened only a tiny bit when Greenmantle read off the trailer park’s address.
“And it would be so easy to hurl you to the ground from this tree,” Greenmantle said, in case he wasn’t nervous yet. “You would long for those days in your trailer park.”
Adam Parrish looked at him. Greenmantle realized all at once that he was unsettling in the same way that Piper had been when he caught her looking in the mirror.
Adam turned the bulging envelope around so that Greenmantle could see that it was seeping something red-brown, which was never a good sign. He said, “If you’re not out of Henrietta by Friday, everything in that envelope comes true
.
”
Ronan Lynch smiled, then, too, and it was a weapon.
They left the envelope there.
“Piper!” Greenmantle called after they had gone. But she didn’t answer. It was impossible to know if she was there, but in a trance, or if she was gone, hunting for the thing that she heard humming in mirrors.
This place. This damn place. They could have it.
He climbed down the stairs, finally, and managed to find a door that led outside. He opened the envelope. The seeping was from a rotting, severed hand. It was small. A child’s hand. Beneath it was a sealed plastic bag, smeared with gore, containing paperwork and photographs.
Individually, they were distasteful.
Collectively, they were damning.
The envelope contents told a story of Colin Greenmantle, intellectual mass murderer and habitual pervert. It provided evidence of where the bodies, and parts of bodies, could be found. There were screenshots of condemning texts and cell phone photos — and when Greenmantle swiped up his real phone, he discovered that, somehow, they actually were on his phone in all their gruesome glory. There were letters, homemade DVDs, photographs, a mountain of evidence.
None of it was true.
All of it had been dreamed up.
But it didn’t matter. It
looked
true. Truer than the truth.
The Greywaren was real, and those two boys had it, but it didn’t matter, because they were untouchable, and they knew it.
Damn youth.
On the very bottom of the stack of filth was a single piece of paper with handwriting so similar to Niall Lynch’s that it could only belong to his son.
It said,
Qui facit per alium facit per se.
Greenmantle knew the proverb.
He who does a thing by the agency of another does it himself.

kay, we’re going,” Greenmantle said. “Family emergency. Back to Boston. Pack your things. Call your friends. You’re off the hook for that book club book.” Piper was getting her purse. “No, I’m going out with the men.”

“The men!”
“Yes,” Piper said, “Does that horrible Gray Man drive a white car? One of those boy racer cars. You know, with the big wing on the back. It’s supposed to demonstrate what a big member the driver has? Because I feel like one of those has been following me. I mean, ha, more than usual, because please.” She flipped her hair.
“I don’t want to talk about the Gray Man,” Greenmantle said. “I want to talk about your luggage.”
“I’m not packing. I think I’ve found something,” Piper said.
Greenmantle showed her the envelope.
She was not as impressed as he had been. She said, “Oh, please. If I find what I think I’m finding, making that go away will be children’s play. No pun intended. Oh, that was distasteful.” She laughed. “Okay, I’m out.”
With
the men
. Greenmantle got up. “I’ll come with you. I’ll convince you to come back with me along the way.”
There was no chance Piper was finding something to counteract that envelope. The only thing Piper could find was fad exercise classes and hairless dogs.
“Whatever. Put on some boots.”
Piper’s destination for that night involved meeting up with two thugs Greenmantle had hired. Actually, they were not as thuggish as Greenmantle would have expected. One of the men was named Morris, and a problem with alimony had driven him to a life of crime. The other seemed to be named Beast, and — well, actually, he was exactly as thuggish as Greenmantle had expected.
They both treated Piper as if she knew what she was talking about.
“Show me what you got,” Piper said to them.
Morris and Beast led them to a run-down farm just as the sun set. Even in the car lights, it was easy to tell that the farmhouse had seen better days. The porch sagged. Someone had tried to improve it by planting a cheery row of flowers in front.
Beast and Morris led them past the farmhouse and through a field. They had all kinds of equipment. Piper had all kinds of equipment. Greenmantle had boots. He felt like a fourth wheel on a vehicle that was not, in fact, meant to have four wheels.
He looked over his shoulder to make sure that the Gray Man, ever standing over his shoulder, was not, in fact, standing just over it.
“I’m not experienced with practical crime,” Greenmantle said as they walked across the field, “but shouldn’t we have parked the cars someplace more clandestine?” He added, “Sneakier?” for Beast.
“No one lives there,” grunted Beast. Greenmantle was both horrified and impressed by the subsonic nature of his voice.
Morris, considerably more cultured-sounding, added, “We were here earlier, checking it out.”
The two men — thugs — the thug and Morris — brought them to a stone building. Greenmantle thought it didn’t have a roof, but then after a second, his eyes adjusted and he saw that it was a stone tower extending up into the night. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought it was a ruin at first. He wasn’t sure why a tower like this would exist in the middle of redneck Virginia, either, but it was interesting at least, and he liked interesting.
“The cave’s in here,” said Morris. There was a padlock on the door, but it had already been busted open, presumably by Beast’s molars.
“And this cave seems to match the description I gave you?” Piper asked.
“Why do you have a description of a cave?” Greenmantle asked.
“Shut up before you hurt yourself,” she told him kindly.
“Yeah,” Morris said. “I didn’t see any doors like you described, but we didn’t go very far in.” He pushed open the door as Beast turned on a massive spotlight.
It illuminated an enormous man sitting at the cave entrance. He had a shotgun lying across his knees.
“I’M TELLING YOU NOW THAT THIS CAVE IS CURSED,” the man told them. “AND I THINK YOU BEST GO NOW. SHORT WAY’S ACROSS THE FIELD.”
Piper looked at Morris and Beast. “Was this guy here the last time you came in?”
“No, ma’am,” replied Morris. “Sir, we’re headed into that cave, easy way or hard way. Right?”
This was with a glance to Piper.
“Right,” she replied. “Thanks for the warning, though.”
The man’s enormous brow furrowed. “THERE’S THINGS IN THERE YOU SHOULDN’T DISTURB.”
Greenmantle, wary of this man identifying him later on, took a tactful step back into the shadows to hide his face.
He backed directly into someone’s chest.
“Colin,” the Gray Man said. “I’m disappointed. Didn’t you read the envelope?”
“Oh, for the love of the saints,” Greenmantle wailed. “This was not my idea.”
“You,”
Piper said.
“Yes,” the Gray Man agreed. He was, strangely enough, as well equipped as Piper, as if he, too, had been about to head into a cave. “Mr. Dittley, how are you?”
“WELL ENOUGH.”
The Gray Man said, “It’s time for the rest of you to leave.”
“No, you know what?” Piper demanded. “I am beyond tired of you showing up and throwing your weight around. I was here first, and I had plans. Men, do man things.”
Greenmantle hadn’t the faintest idea of what that meant, but Morris and Beast headed immediately for the Gray Man as Dittley rose to his feet.
The Gray Man dispatched the Beast to either the grave or the infirmary in a disappointing two seconds. It was Morris who turned out to be a better match. They fought quietly, all bruised breaths and sighed punches, as Jesse Dittley put his gun down and held Greenmantle’s wrists like a petulant child.
“Everybody drop everything,” Piper said.
She was pointing a gun at the Gray Man’s head. A silvery one. Greenmantle still didn’t think it looked as dangerous as the black ones, but the others clearly did. The Gray Man narrowed his eyes, but released Morris.
She looked pretty smug about it. To the Gray Man, she said, “Yeah, how does it feel? Great? Remember when you put one of these to my head? Yeah. An asshole thing to do.”
The Gray Man’s expression didn’t change. It was possible he had no fear-face.
“Where did you get that?” Greenmantle asked his wife. “Did you get me one?”
Piper looked at him witheringly and jerked her chin. “You get that one.”
She meant Jesse Dittley’s shotgun, which he’d put down to hold Greenmantle at bay. It occurred to Greenmantle how pointless a virtue mercy was. If Jesse Dittley had just shot Greenmantle earlier, Greenmantle would not be holding his shotgun now.
Greenmantle pointed the shotgun at Jesse Dittley’s chest. He disliked all of this profoundly. He did not like to do things himself. He liked to hire people to do things for him. He liked to keep his fingerprints to himself. He did not like prison.
He blamed Piper for everything.
“Out of the way,” he said, then wished he’d thought of something catchier.
“I CAN’T LET YOU DO THAT.”
Greenmantle looked at Jesse Dittley. He could not believe they allowed humans to grow so tall. “You’re really making this a bigger deal than it needs to be.”
Jesse Dittley just shook his head, very slowly.
“Stand down!” Greenmantle tried. In the movies, this worked instantly. You pointed a gun at someone, they scurried out of your way. They didn’t just stand there looking at it.
Jesse Dittley said, “THIS IS NOT YOUR CAVE.”
Piper shot him.
Three times, fast, black spots appearing on his shirt and head.
By the time they looked back at her, she already had pointed her gun back at the Gray Man.
Greenmantle could not believe how unbelievably dead the giant man was. He was so very, very dead, and punctured. There were holes in him. Greenmantle couldn’t stop looking at the holes. They probably went all the way through him.
“Piper,” he said. “You just shot that man.”
“No one else was doing anything, seriously. All of this dick slinging!” Piper said. To the Gray Man, she said, “Drag him into the cave.”
“No,” the Gray Man said.
“No?” She had her shooting-people face on — which was to say, the face that she wore all the time.
“Oh, don’t shoot him,” Greenmantle said. His pulse was feeling rather jittery. All he could think about was how much more plausible the documents in that envelope were going to look when paired with the events of this evening. Didn’t Piper know that crime was supposed to involve painstaking planning and cleanup? It wasn’t the shooting that was hard, it was the getting away with it.
“I’m not going to move any bodies without gloves,” the Gray Man said in a chilly voice, demonstrating clearly why he had been good at this. “I would not have shot him without gloves, either. Prints and gunpowder residue are stupid ways to end up in prison.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Piper said. “Morris? You’re wearing gloves. Drag that dude and let’s get going.”
“What about
him
?” Morris asked, looking at the Gray Man.
“Tie him up. We’ll bring him with. Colin, why are you just standing there?”
“Actually,” Greenmantle said, “I think I’m going to sit this one out.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
Not only was he not kidding, he was considering vomiting. He should have stayed single. He should have stayed in Boston. He should have been single in Boston. He was part of the way toward the door; he kind of wanted to be sure that he had a bit of cover in case she got pissed and decided to shoot him, too. “I’m just going to. . . head back. Don’t get me wrong, I think you look fantastic with the gun, but . . .”
“This is just. So. Typical. You always say, ‘We’re going to do this together, you and me,’ and then who ends up always doing it? Me, while you go start some other new project. Fine. Go on back. Don’t expect me to hurry back after you, though.”
He met the Gray Man’s eyes. The Gray Man was in the process of having his hands tied behind him by Morris. Efficiently, with a zip tie.
The Gray Man looked at Jesse Dittley’s body and closed his eyes for a second. Unbelievably, he looked angry, so he must have possessed emotions after all.
Greenmantle hesitated.
“Piss or get off the pot,” Piper snapped.
“Just go, Colin,” the Gray Man said. “You would have spared us both a lot of trouble if you’d never come.”
Greenmantle took the opportunity to go. He got lost heading back across the field — he had such a shit sense of direction — but once in the car, he knew the way. Away. All directions were away.