Bone Orchard (15 page)

“Shh,” Lazarus whispered against her ear. “Sleep, my love.”

CHAPTER 17

Once Kitty was dead and sectioned, Lazarus methodically wrapped each piece in a plastic trash bag and secured it tight with tape. In total, there were fourteen parcels. The torso was the largest of course, but Lazarus didn’t care to section it further. It simply wasn’t worth the ensuing mess when it was so much easier to just dig a bigger hole.

Well, to be precise, in total there were
forty-two
packets. Fourteen each for Kitty, Sian and Dylan. Lazarus had never dismembered a male before, and had vacillated over whether fourteen or fifteen packets should be used. In the end he decided that, at least in Dylan’s case, a fifteenth packet really couldn’t be justified, and stayed with tradition. He stacked them all on the table in a sort of pyramid that resembled the seized contraband of a major drug bust. All that set the effect apart was the
thick-soled, tar black pair of size six Doc Martens boots that sat empty before it.

Lazarus packed up the protective suits to be burned, and bathed standing naked in the basement kitchen as he always did. Pouring buckets of water over his head and watching the blood wash away from his body and swirl down the very same floor drain that Kitty had tripped over nine hours ago.

Then he rinsed down the entire room, filling bucket after bucket from the rusty tap and scrubbing each surface with a healthy measure of Bartender’s Friend and bleach until he and his luminol were both satisfied with the results.

After a proper, scalding shower upstairs, Lazarus finally poured himself a Glenfiddich and built a fire in the parlor to warm himself. There was a chill he couldn’t shake, a numbness in his toes and fingertips that kept him shivering. Probably from the damned stun gun.

He’d brought in the clothes he’d worn that evening and once the fire had reached a suitable roar, he tossed in the tee shirt with the red ring on the shoulder from Kitty’s perfect little white teeth. He tossed in the jeans, and it was not without a stitch of regret that he did so.

“Note to self. Mustn’t wear my favorite jeans next time a visitor stops in.”

He picked up the double-hooked fireplace poker and jabbed at the clothes to keep them from falling through the grate.

“What a waste.”

Taking a seat on the floor at the hearth, Lazarus scooped up the scattered IDs and passports.  He flipped through, reflections of flames licking the faces of the young women whose photos graced them. One by one, he tossed them back into the metal box, each bringing a memory, and a smile, to his face.

Last in the stack was a Canadian driver’s license. It was a plain but pretty girl whose face sparked no memory because Lazarus had only known her after her the wildfires of life had forced a rebirth upon her. There was something behind her eyes, though. Something familiar. Something dark. Mysterious.

Damaged.

Lazarus looked down at the name. Lacey Van Winkle.

“What do you know,” he chuckled. “You
were
one of mine.”

He tossed the driver’s license into the box, then Kitty’s passport on top. Standing up, he walked to the dusty curtains and threw them open, allowing a few rosy beams of dawn light into the room. He looked down at his wrist but the clunky watch was not there. The grandfather clock lay in sad repose on the parquet floor, and with no small effort, Lazarus was able to right it. He slipped the metal box back into the case and swung the glassless door shut.

The spade-tipped hands still showed eleven o’clock, the hour of its great collapse. Kitty had felled it like some giant beanstalk. Christ, Lazarus thought, it certainly had spilled its magic beans, hadn’t it? He undocked his iPhone from the Krell and finally found the time.

5:19 A.M.

He felt a bit like Ebineezer Scrooge, having survived the night with his own three bloody ghosts and living to turn the leaf on a new life this morning. Yes, perhaps a new leaf was exactly what he needed.

After the sun came up, he trekked out to the back acreage with his iPhone in search of a signal. The morning was chilly and damp with a low-hanging fog, but the sun began to burn it off slowly as he climbed the long, easy hill. Even so, he couldn’t see much yet as he walked. He could
hear
plenty, however. The world was teeming with sound: the moaning of sheep already grazing the grassland sward, the rapid-fire knocking of a Great Spotted Woodpecker on some long-dead and rotting apple tree, the fire-blistered voice of Dovie Walker, his long-dead mother, sawing inside his head. Perhaps when he got back to the house he would crank up the Marshall and blast the infernal screech of that witch back to hell where it belonged. 

Lazarus held his phone up and out in front of him as he meandered with a goal but no destination. After fifteen minutes of aimless roaming, he found himself back on the road and suddenly two bars popped up on his screen.

“Thank God.”

He almost soiled himself when a car shot out of the fog and nearly clipped him, shattering the rural tranquility with a needlessly long bleat of its horn. Hand trembling, he dialed the only number he knew from memory.

“Hello? Yes, I need a delivery. That’s right… a tree.”

Lazarus whistled as he pushed his wobbling wheelbarrow through the garden to the hole he’d dug yesterday. He set the barrow down, piled high with tightly wrapped body parts, and stretched. He cracked his back and let his gaze ride out through the two rows of trees, the spine of the garden.

“Ladies,” he spoke aloud to them, “you have some new members. Please treat them well.”

He began tossing body parts into the hole. “I gave a lot of thought to this,” he continued. “If Kitty were a tree… what kind of tree would she be?”

Her “Fuck the World” skull bag went into the hole next along with the binder. “Cherry? Nah. Pear? Don’t think so.”

Lazarus dumped the charred remains of their clothing in. Ashes billowed up and he waved them away. “Perhaps I should branch away from fruit trees. Get it? Branch?” He dusted off his hands. “Yeah, that was pretty bad. I’ve settled on plum. Dark and luscious. Suits you, I think.”

The familiar heavy crush of truck tires on gravel pulled his attention from the grave momentarily. “Sorry you’ve got to share with Dylan and Sian, darling. But at least you’ll have company.”

He dumped the remaining parcels for the time being and pushed the wheelbarrow back out to the house where he set it down at the edge of the circular drive.
The snout-nosed delivery truck from McGregor’s Nursery was just pulling up, and Lazarus immediately recognized the driver. It was the piss-artist himself, Clive Collins. He hoped the recognition would be one-way.

Clive hopped down from the cab to greet Lazarus and recoiled at the sight of his battered face. “Jesus! What happened to you?”

“I forgot that you shouldn’t cut a tree limb while standing under it,” Lazarus lied.

Clive winced. “Ow.”

“Don’t have to tell me.”

Clive headed for the back of the truck.

“Dylan usually brings my deliveries,” Lazarus fished. “Where is he today?”

“Think he decided to take the day off.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll tell him you asked after him. Don’t mention I said this, but he quite looks up to you. Talks about you all the time.”

Clive helped Lazarus slide a small tree into the barrow.

“Not in a stalker sort of way,” he continued. “Mentor-like you could say.”

Lazarus rubbed his lower back. “I’m flattered.”

“Yeah, well don’t tell him I said it.”

Lazarus smiled. “My lips are sealed.”

Clive stared at him for a second, as if a fleeting moment of recognition had buzzed through the empty bong he called a skull. But if it had, it was only fleeting, and then again, maybe Clive was merely star-struck himself.

“You don’t need help with that?” he asked.

“Nah, I got it.”

Clive nodded and hopped back into the truck. He cranked the engine and hung his arm out the open window, drumming the door skin twice with his hand as he pulled away. “Rock on, mate.”

Lazarus stood silently in front of the crumbling manor house, wondering just how long it could remain his sanctuary. “I will,” he told its ghosts. 

Then he wheeled the barrow back to the garden, finished burying the three dead bodies waiting for him there, and went inside for an egg and cress sandwich before planting the new plum tree that would mark their communal grave. 

CHAPTER 18

Lazarus always thought of a garden as a living clock. Its Westminster quarters were the seasons and their progression geared on year after year with satisfying predictability. It was an instrument of perpetual motion and its pendulum was the sun.

The manor house would remain his sanctuary for a great many years as it turned out. Timing, of course, was everything. Both the clock and the garden would protect their secrets, for Lazarus did not own them. He was merely their caretaker.

By the time autumn breezed in, the palette of the countryside was ablaze with yellows and vermillion, copper and bronze. The orchard was in full swing, and Lazarus was hauling overflowed harvest baskets to the root cellar. 

He endlessly cleared fallen leaves from the garden path with a wide bamboo rake. Some he would compost, others he would burn. There was something about the aroma of burning leaves that brought him peace. It was incense in the temple of his garden.

On those crisp autumn days, Lazarus would perch his old Hacker Herald transistor radio on the windowsill of the garden shed. Truth be told, he really preferred how it sounded to the sixty-thousand-dollar Krell in the parlor.

Jesus, I really am getting old,
he thought. He’d be forty next year. Those years certainly hadn’t been lackluster. Half his life had been spent suppressing his rage and half spent flooding the world with it, but one facet remained constant; Lazarus Walker buried things.

Iron Butterfly’s psychedelic “Fields of the Sun” grooved over the radio behind him as the rake swept through the papery leaves. It was a song he hadn’t heard in years. Lazarus was grateful they’d spared him “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” He hated having a song stuck in his head, and once you heard “Gadda” you’d be hearing it the rest of the day.  

A disc jockey’s voice droned in over the outro of the song, a practice which curried no favor with Lazarus, but this was a glorious day, and he couldn’t remember when his mind had last felt this clear.

“Quick news update,” the deejay went on, “Authorities are still searching for Dylan Daly, a local man who went missing three months ago. Daly is wanted in connection with the disappearance of his girlfriend and a Canadian tourist.”

A punk guitar chord ripped through the Herald’s speaker and the deejay rode in on its coattails. “Police still have few leads on the case and a fifteen-thousand pound reward is now being offered for any information leading to Daly’s capture. On a happier note, here’s Frame the Same with ‘Dark Thoughts.’”

Constable McHenry had been out to see him eight times over the past three months. He didn’t know, of course, that Lazarus was
literally
the last person to see Dylan alive, but it was no secret he’d been out to the manor that day. He’d returned to the nursery, made a few more deliveries and punched out as he always did, a bit excited about something remembered Arthur McGregor, but not particularly “homicidal” so far as he could recall. It had now been five weeks since the constable had paid a call. Like those visits from police investigating the Manchester fire that burned Dovie Walker alive while she slept all those years ago, their intensity had begun like a crashing set of waves then receded back into the sea. Lazarus was always a dead end. He was, after all, vigilant.

He set his rake down and walked up the garden path toward the great, gnarled Worcester Pearmain. Tiny by contrast, Kitty’s plum tree, a Denniston’s Superb, was simply thriving. In fact, he was confident that next year it might even bear fruit fit for eating. He smiled as he approached it, and a golden, fan-shaped Ginkgo leaf spiraled laterally across the path before him. Lazarus reacted with admirable dexterity, thrusting his arm out and gently closing his fist around the leaf, catching it in mid-air. Maybe he wasn’t getting so old after all.

That’s good luck,
he thought as his slipped the leaf into the breast pocket of his twill work shirt. He looked up and saw a flawless apple. It hung heavy on a low branch of the Worcester Pearmain, and wore a crown of green blushed with crimson flames from beneath as if dipped in blood. It was at its peak of ripeness, and for Lazarus, its beauty was beyond words. He was about to take a step toward it when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

Lazarus turned his head just far enough to glean an impression. It was a girl. Seventeen at most, head to toe in black. She cowered by the stone wall, almost a shadow herself.

“You’re trespassing,” he said. “I’ll give you to the count of five, but then I’m phoning the police.”