The Vines

by Christopher Rice

  When the phone rings and an unfamiliar number flashes on the screen, Blake is sure it’s Vernon, breaking their fifteen-year silence. He’s not sure what to feel: dread or relief? Will it be a good thing? The old man has never allowed the only other man who loved his son as much as he did to join him in his grief, and maybe there’s a reason for that. A good reason. But when he hits “Accept,” the voice on the other end isn’t his dead lover’s father, but something quaky and female.

  “Something’s wrong out here,” Nova Thomas says.

  “Is your dad OK?”

  “He’s gonna be . . . Listen, I know y’all had a fight and all, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “You need to talk to Caitlin.”

  “About what?” he asks, suddenly wary.

  “There was a party here last night . . .” He fights the urge to tell her he knows full well Caitlin’s birthday party is always held on the Saturday closest to her actual birthday, that he picked up a double shift last night to distract himself from the pain of not attending for the first time since they were kids. “And Troy . . .”

  They aren’t the best of friends, but Blake knows Nova Thomas well enough to know that she is strong-willed and intelligent and not prone to this kind of stammering and disjointed thinking. “Troy went into the gardening shed with some woman from the catering company”—Blake feels a surge of triumph at this terrible news, and then a wave of guilt—“but he didn’t come out. Just the girl did. And she was bloody and had an axe—”

  That’s when Blake sees the two men walking casually toward the automatic doors he just stepped through moments before. About the same height, one sporting a hairpiece, the other balding with pride. Their plain, mid-priced dress shirts are tucked so tightly into their khakis he wonders if they’ve laced the shirttails through the insides of their briefs. All the telltale signs are there, but it’s the forced-casual gait combined with the slow and steady pivoting of their necks that tells Blake who they are. There was a time in his life when he became intimately familiar with the look of homicide detectives, and he fears that another one is about to begin.

  “Are the police involved?”

  “Involved? You mean, like . . . with the axe?”

  “No, I mean, did you talk to them.”

  “Yeah. Baldy and Hairpiece. They were a real treat.”

  “They’re about to be mine.”

  “All right, well. Feel free to use my nicknames.”

  “Is he dead, Nova?” Blake asks. Just then, he sees one of the cops turn. He’s spotted Blake’s reflection in the automatic doors. “Troy, I mean. Did Caitlin . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Nova answers. “I don’t know what she did or what she didn’t do. But there’s something . . . He just . . .”

  “Gone . . . ,” Blake says, distracted by the two detectives who are now walking straight toward him, plastic half smiles on their deeply lined faces.

  “Just please . . . come see me when you can. There’s something else I gotta talk to you about.”

  “I’ll call you back,” he says to her, but she has already hung up on him, and the first detective has already mounted the curb and is extending his hand in greeting.

  9

  The detectives suggest Coulis, a little restaurant a block from the hospital that looks like a hole-in-the-wall but hosts long lines of customers every weekend who are willing to wait outside patiently for a plate of eggs Benedict with roast beef debris. And Blake knows it is well worth it. He also knows, though, that the place won’t be open for half an hour, so they settle on the drab hospital cafeteria.

  “I haven’t seen or spoken to Caitlin or Troy in six months,” Blake begins. And before they can ask him why, he says, “I had reason to believe Troy was screw—cheating. I made the mistake of telling her. Since then . . . radio silence.”

  Blake isn’t trying to impress the detectives exactly, but he would like them to know that he’s got experience with homicide interrogations, that they don’t need to bother with pleasantries. Or manipulative ploys. But they probably know this already. For a few months during his senior year of high school, Blake’s face was recognizable to most residents of southern Louisiana, including the detectives’ own Montrose Parish. The headlines didn’t mention him, of course. That distinction had gone to his early-morning visitor, Vernon Fuller: SON OF HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL COACH SLAIN IN APPARENT HATE CRIME. But Blake had been a featured player in the drama—the survivor.

  “So neither one’s been in touch since last night?” the bald detective asks.

  “What happened last night?”

  “This evidence you had,” Hairpiece diverts. “How exactly did you . . . uh . . . bring it to Miss Chaisson?”

  “I didn’t say I had evidence. I said I had reason to believe.”

  “That he was cheating on her?” Baldy asks.

  Blake nods. Nova’s nicknames for the men have proven so effective, Blake realizes he can’t remember the actual name of either detective.

  “Right. But . . . what was it that tipped you off?” Hairpiece continues. “I mean, was it e-mails? Some kind of Internet thing?”

  “I’ve got friends who work the casinos in Biloxi. A few of them came to me and said they saw Troy come in with different women and that it looked . . . more than friendly.”

  “So it was hearsay.”

  “The camera footage wasn’t.” The detectives both give him a blank stare, until he adds, “One of my friends works security at Belle Fleur.”

  “I see . . .”

  What? You thought a guy like me would only have friends who dressed the showgirls?

  “And so you showed her the footage?” Baldy continues.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “She didn’t ask to see it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she didn’t believe me.”

  “But there was footage . . .”

  “I didn’t tell her about it.”

  “I’m getting confused,” Hairpiece interjects, and his “confused” expression is so forced Blake has to work not to roll his eyes.

  “I told her what I had been told. She didn’t want to believe it, though, so I left it at that.”

  “And then you guys went radio silent for six months until last night . . .”

  “No. Not until last night. I still haven’t heard from her. Or Troy.”

  “Sorry. Just seemed like you were having a pretty important phone call when we walked up. Thought maybe she’d given you a—”

  “That was one of her employees. Calling to tell me what happened. They’re concerned for Caitlin, obviously.”

  “So what did she say happened?” Baldy asks, palms open, eyes wide. The guy must have a community theater background, Blake thinks. “We’d like to know as much as everyone else.”

  “Apparently Troy went into the gardening shed with some woman. Only the woman came out. She was covered in blood, carrying an axe. And there was no body in the shed.” He gave them a mirthless smile. “Sounds like y’all might have the world’s first axe-wielding illusionist on your hands.”

  He knows better than to ask them directly what the axe-wielding woman’s story is, but he doubts they would tell him under any circumstances. His suspicions are confirmed when Hairpiece says, “Wow. Someone doesn’t miss Troy Mangier.”

  “He’s only been gone . . . what? A few hours? He’ll probably turn up next to the river as soon as the sun’s all the way up. Hungover. Again.”

  “Or bled out from an axe wound.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Troy always manages to land on his feet. Or Caitlin’s back.”

  “So these friends of yours, the ones who work the casinos in Biloxi. They friends of Troy’s too?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “How’d they recognize him whe
n he turned up?”

  Blake curls his fingers around his Styrofoam coffee cup.

  “Maybe you told them to be on the lookout ’cause you had some suspicions?” the detective presses.

  Blake shrugs. “He was a gambler. With her money. She’d warned him about it. The women . . . those were a surprise to me.”

  “And Caitlin took his word over yours?”

  “No. No, she . . . she didn’t even bother to get his word first. She just dismissed me right on the spot and made all sorts of accusations.”

  “What kind of accusations?”

  “The desperate kind.” And she used John’s murder against me. And that was a rule between us—never use John’s murder against me. And yet she broke it because she couldn’t face the truth; she used it to hurt me to keep herself from being hurt.

  There was another reason the attack had caught him so off guard; he’d been braced for an attack of a different kind, a full-throttle version of the same half-assed accusation she’d always make whenever he became too protective or accused her of losing her head over some guy—that he didn’t want anyone coming in between him and his access to what she often referred to her as her incredible wealth, which became even more incredible after the plane crash that killed her parents.

  While the accusation was familiar, it was also absurd, and Blake would have been willing and able to defuse it in an instant, especially if he thought Caitlin’s marriage was at stake. After all, he was the one who had repeatedly turned down her father’s offer to give him long-term financial support if he took his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  Still, there was a small seed of truth to it. Over the years, Blake had taken great comfort in being a kind of adopted Chaisson, if not exactly a beneficiary. Without the Chaissons, he would have spent his teenage years alone, raised by vague memories of a mother who died when he was only four years old, a father who never managed to crawl out of the scotch bottle after losing his wife, and a passel of high-strung aunts from Dallas who popped in on a regular basis to make sure their brother hadn’t made a complete mess of things. Meanwhile, Blake spent most of the major holidays with Caitlin and her family, and that had been just fine. More than fine, actually.

  But he’d put himself through nursing school and paid his own rent while he did it. So he didn’t owe Caitlin money or the kind of soft-glove treatment she was accustomed to receiving from her cousins and her late father’s employees. He owed her the truth.

  They allow Blake a moment to sip his coffee, then Baldy says, “Must not have been easy.”

  “Which part?”

  “Making that kind of allegation against the cop who found your friend’s killers.”

  For a while, nobody speaks. Blake watches the hummingbirds dancing in the branches on the other side of the plate-glass window. A few tables away an older woman cries into a man’s shoulder, one hand still absently wrapped around her cup of tea in much the same way Blake is holding his cup of coffee. Blake recognizes them; their son was the overdose he treated sometime around 3:00 a.m. No telling how long that coma’s going to last.

  “John Fuller wasn’t my friend, Detective.”

  Both detectives look startled for the first time since they all sat down together. Not by the information itself, but by the bristling anger with which Blake delivers it.

  10

  Willie Thomas lives in a tiny clapboard house hemmed in by a small forest of banana trees sitting just on the other side of Spring House’s back property line. It is accessible by its own long private road, which means Blake can drop in on Nova without risking a run-in with Caitlin.

  He’s not quite ready for that.

  After five hours of fitful sleep, every nerve in his body is still demanding that he reach out to his old friend. But he’s known the woman for almost his entire life. Six months haven’t changed her, he’s sure. Any contact from him will be seen as an attempt to rub her nose in the sad truth about her husband, and that’s the last thing Blake wants, especially if something terrible has happened to Troy.

  So he vows to give her time. And space. Whatever that means. He doubts she’s still at Spring House anyway. Unless the police have some strange reason to keep her there, and nothing about the detectives’ questions that morning suggest they suspect Caitlin of anything other than having bad taste in men, he’s pretty sure she’s gone back to New Orleans.

  While not quite confirmation, there’s no sign of her on the drive out, no glimpse of her tiny gold BMW X5 whizzing past him along the levee’s gentle bends, and when he turns onto the mud-laced road that leads to Willie’s house, the only person he sees is Nova, hurriedly stomping out a cigarette and tossing it over the side of the front porch.

  “Really?” Blake asks her as soon as he steps from his Ford Escape.

  “It’s a clove cigarette,” she says with the condescension of someone who has just enough college under her belt to think she knows everything.

  “So what? Those are worse. And they don’t even have nicotine, so you won’t get a buzz.”

  She ignores this. “Caitlin went back to New Orleans.”

  “I figured. How’s your dad?”

  “Stitched up right. You want to check?”

  “Did he go to a hospital . . . or did you do it?”

  “You got me,” she says, hands up in mock surrender. “I fixed him up with some alcohol and a little blowtorch.”

  “That’s a really good school you’re going to up in Baton Rouge.”

  Her smile is weak. Instead of inviting him inside, she holds the screen door open behind her just long enough for him to keep it from snapping shut in his face.

  The tiny house is immaculate inside. He figures this is Nova’s doing. Blake is not a regular here, but the few times he’d stolen a peek through the front door, it was clear Willie kept the house much the same way he kept his shed—every practical item within plain sight and easy reach, no thought at all to aesthetics.

  Nova must also be responsible for the neat but prominent pile of textbooks placed on the kitchen counter. The featured title is Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century by Gwendolyn Hall, and it’s even angled slightly so as to be visible from her father’s easy chair. It doesn’t take Blake long to put together that the older and more educated Nova gets, the less comfortable she is with her father’s marginally paid, codependent position at Spring House. These textbooks on the history of their people have the feel of AA literature left in the house of a hard-drinking relative.

  “Iced tea?” Nova asks.

  “I’m good. Thanks. Your dad?”

  “Up at the shed. Cleaning up.”

  “Is that a good idea? It’s a crime scene, isn’t it?”

  Nova turns to face him, one arm resting atop the refrigerator door she’s just opened. “Crime scene techs went over it all night. Couldn’t find a drop of blood inside.”

  “What? How’d it get all over that woman then?”

  “Question of the day. And the next day. And the next . . .” She’s staring at him expectantly, but he can’t tell if she’s letting this information sink in, or if there’s something she wants him to do about it. It’s not a hot day out and the open refrigerator is blasting cold air all over her, but Nova doesn’t seem to give a damn.

  “Who was she?” Blake asks instead.

  “Some woman who worked with the caterer. Never saw her before.”

  “What’d she tell the police?”

  “Nothing. She was just rocking back and forth when they took her away. Shock, I guess.”

  “Did they arrest her?” It’s a trick question, sort of. The detective let slip that morning that the woman was still being held for questioning, which Blake took to mean detained. But Nova is being so evasive about what transpired here the night before, Blake hopes to draw her out a little by withholding s
ome information of his own.

  “For what?”

  “Well, they’ll have to test the blood, I’m sure. See if it was Troy’s, right?”

  “You know more about that kind of stuff than I do.”

  “Why’d you call me, Nova?” The question comes out more stridently than he means it to. But Nova Thomas is not usually this sullen and evasive, and her behavior is leaving him genuinely confused. And a little bit frustrated.

  “Let’s go see Daddy,” she says, and then she’s walking past him out the front door, Diet Coke in hand; she’s avoiding his eyes now like someone trying to work up her nerve.

  11

  They walk in silence along the cane field belonging to the neighboring farm.

  It is dusk and the tall, rustling stalks have rivers of deep orange snaking around their bases. When the plantation house and gardens come into view, it is the first time Blake has seen the place in half a year, and the nostalgia he feels in response startles and then overwhelms him, like a sharp poke in the side followed quickly by a passionate embrace from someone you’ve always lusted after.

  There’s the gazebo where he and Caitlin pricked their fingers and smeared the wounds together so they could become brother and sister for real. There’s the grand oak tree, its heavy branches kissing the soil on all sides of its massive trunk, the same tree Caitlin’s father hung a tire swing from for the two of them to play on as children. The idea that one of the tree’s low-hanging branches might have been used to lasso slaves for the whip didn’t occur to him until he was a junior in high school, and he wonders if it occurs to Nova now.

  The house itself had been a ruin for the first six years after Alexander Chaisson bought it, and the children were forbidden to go inside, lest they crash through rotten floorboards or get crushed by a falling section of the roof. So the sprawling grounds outside became their private kingdom, and the gazebo their temple. Now there are flagstone paths and manicured gardens covering the expanse where decaying cane stalks once stood like the last timbers of a war-ravaged village. And the gazebo, which once seemed to be composed of as much lichen as wood, is a clean white shock against a canopy of banana trees.