The Vines

by Christopher Rice

  “OK, then . . . what?” Kyle asks again.

  “Doesn’t matter whether Mangier’s dead or alive. One person’s still around. And we need to know if she’s seen the tape.”

  “Or if she knows where it is,” Kyle says, nodding.

  “Caitlin Chaisson?” Scott Fauchier asks, astonished. “You actually think she’s part of this.”

  “What I think is that we need to watch her very fucking closely,” Simmons whispers. “That’s what I think.”

  “And how are we going to do that?” Kyle asks. And that’s when his old friend looks at him with a level stare. The up-lighting from the lantern at their feet transforms the man’s eyes into floating orbs guarding the entrance to deep, dark caverns in his skull.

  “Glad you asked, Austin.”

  14

  “It was just shock, I guess,” Caitlin says.

  “You didn’t take anything?”

  “There’s nothing to take, Blake. Check the medicine cabinet.”

  “Did Willie make you a drink after the detectives left?”

  “I can hold my liquor. I’m not fifteen anymore.”

  “But you did have a drink?” he presses.

  “Yes, one drink,” she says impatiently. “I’m not drunk, Blake.”

  “Anything weird to eat?”

  She just shakes her head.

  What he wants to ask, though, isn’t about weird food. No, he wants to talk to her about the weirdness of seeing a strange woman swinging an axe that may or may not have been splashed with her husband’s blood.

  But they haven’t gone there yet. They’ve been too busy playing out a similar version of this exchange over and over again, probably because the business of it distracts them from the strangeness of Caitlin’s sudden awakening.

  A trade . . .

  For a few minutes, he’d actually held her in his arms before he realized she wasn’t returning his embrace; her hands were pressed between their chests, and while she wasn’t trying to pull them free, she reacted to the pressure of him with drugged resignation, as if he were an inevitable confinement following a criminal act. Now he is seated beside the bed, and she’s staring vacantly at the ceiling. Blake is confident that if a long enough silence falls, the distance that grew between them over the past six months will once again seem as unavoidable as mortality.

  Caitlin has rearranged the throw pillows on the bed behind her, and if it wasn’t for her sporty outfit—a pressed polo shirt and skinny jeans—she would look like a princess greeting visitors from her deathbed. Her episode—whatever it was—has left her paler than usual, as well as glassy-eyed. A strange, uncharacteristic breathiness cloaks her every word.

  “What trade?” It’s the first time Blake has broached the topic of Caitlin’s strange announcement.

  There’s no sign of confusion in her level stare. Just a tense calculation that doesn’t match her next whisper: “What?”

  “When you woke up, you said, ‘A trade.’ What were you talking about?”

  Caitlin shrugs and shakes her head, but she’s broken eye contact too quickly.

  Is she embarrassed or frightened? He can’t tell.

  Suddenly she slides her legs to the floor and pads across the bedroom’s plush carpeting. She draws the master bedroom’s sliding double doors shut, one in each hand, stealing Blake’s view of her father’s old study across the hallway and the solarium just beyond.

  “The detectives, probably,” she finally answers. When she sees Blake’s bewildered stare, she says, “I don’t want the Bickmore kids staring into my bedroom.”

  It is a ludicrous statement, given the vast space between both houses, the preponderance of branches outside, and the distance between the bedroom and the solarium. But it seems the solarium is exactly where Caitlin still is. In her heart, at least, or her mind. Or in her strange, inexplicable dream.

  He struggles to remember Nova’s exact words. It was some kind of flower. And it was glowing and it was wrong.

  “Did you see her?” Blake asks.

  “Who?”

  “The woman . . . the one with the axe.”

  “Jane Percival. Yes. I saw her.”

  “You knew her?”

  “No. The detectives told me her name. I’d never seen her before in my life. Some friend of the caterer’s or something.”

  “I bet that was . . .”

  “What? You bet it was . . . what?”

  “Hard.”

  “It was. It was hard . . .” Caitlin sits on the opposite side of the bed, her back to him, but he can see her face in the mirrored vanity a few feet in front of her. He can see both of them in it, looking awkwardly posed like the angry couple in some stock photo you’d find above an article listing the “Top Ten Reasons Marriages Fail.”

  “She was pretty,” Caitlin whispers. “She’s still pretty.”

  And this is the part where Blake is supposed to say, You’re pretty too. And in response, Caitlin would turn to him, effect the grimace of a dying woman, and slur, Am I still pretty, Momma? Just like Angelina Jolie in that TV movie about the heroin-addicted model who died of AIDS, the movie that had rattled them both so badly when they’d watched it together in college they had no choice but to repeatedly mock its final, awful scene. But tonight this exchange, a convenient crutch they have always used to dismiss Caitlin’s deep sense of self-loathing, strikes him as profane. Just another form of petty violence Caitlin can inflict upon herself for not being as beautiful as her mother.

  These thoughts have taken him down a longer road than he intended to travel, and when Blake looks up, Caitlin meets his eyes in the mirror. There is a hard glint in her stare that sparks a bewildering surge of sexual attraction in him. Maybe because it is so uncharacteristically aggressive of her, so uncharacteristically masculine. He shakes his head, but can’t quite dismiss the thought that Caitlin—this Caitlin—may not be the same person as his best friend from just six months ago.

  When she speaks again, her voice has the hollowed-out quality of someone struggling to speak evenly through the breathlessness caused by fear. “He was fucking her. In the guest bathroom. Upstairs. The door was open and I could see him fucking her, and I . . . well, I guess I realized I don’t have your courage, Blake. Or your mouth. I couldn’t confront them, is what I mean. I just turned away and ran. And then . . .” Her tongue moistens her lips suddenly and quickly, an action that suggests her glaze-eyed stare is as substantial as a paper mask. “Then we all heard that little slut screaming, and then . . . Well, then it looked like there was more justice in the world than I previously thought.”

  Justice? He manages to keep this astonished question to himself, but the struggle must be written on his face, because Caitlin is studying him with sudden, animated intensity, and Blake realizes he is on the verge of failing an important test. Whatever he says next will determine her next move and the access she will grant to him until this whole thing is sorted out, to say nothing of his role in her life, if he’s to have one at all, after this bloody affair has come to an end. She has assumed, without reservation, that her husband is dead, and he’s confident that if she expressed this to the cops that morning as plainly as she just expressed it to him, they would still have her in holding.

  He chooses his next words as carefully as he would insert an IV in an infant. “Nova said she saw something in the shed, right before you went in.” Blake scans the room for anything matching Nova’s description of a strange flower that just isn’t quite right, but he only sees the vanity bedecked with perfume bottles, and the nightstands stacked with paperbacks and copies of New Orleans Magazine. The sumptuous bedroom is still fresh from the housekeeper’s last visit after Caitlin left for Spring House . . . but no flower.

  “She wasn’t sure what it was,” he says. “But she said she saw it on the floor of the shed, and whatever it was . . . it was glowing. She
thought it might be some kind of flower.” His delivery at this point is sloppy and abrupt, he knows. But it is the quickest way he can think of to mask his stunned reaction to Caitlin’s bloody definition of justice.

  “She was probably drinking along with the rest of the help.”

  “So . . . no idea what she’s talking about?”

  “None,” she says. “You’re here because of something Nova said?”

  “Of course not. I’m here because it’s . . . you.”

  She doesn’t turn to face him, but she is sitting upright, staring at him through the mirror, her hands clasped against her knees, her entire body braced as if she fears his next words might constitute a small, sharp strike to the center of her scalp.

  “Do you think I killed him?” she whispers.

  He wants to say, No. You couldn’t have. But that answer is too logical, and it will reveal how thoroughly he’s done his homework because of that very suspicion. Several witnesses placed her too far from the shed for her to have been involved in whatever took place inside. And he knows Jane Percival hasn’t said anything to implicate Caitlin, and that if she had, Caitlin would probably be in an interrogation room with her lawyer at this very moment. Indeed, Jane Percival has said nothing the detectives want anyone to hear; she remains in custody, and there’s no trace of her account in any of the increasing number of news reports about the bloody disappearance of a hero cop known for solving an infamous hate crime when he was just a Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy.

  “Of course not,” Blake says. It is not his most convincing delivery, the words weighted down by forethought. But it’s better than more hesitation, he figures.

  Caitlin doesn’t figure the same, because she says, “I appreciate you coming,” yet there’s anything but appreciation in her voice. It actually sounds like a dismissal.

  “You thought I wouldn’t?”

  “I’d like to be alone now,” she says, confirming his feelings, “if you don’t mind.”

  Even though it was the impression he got in the first place, he is still surprised by how wounded he is by his curt dismissal, meted out, it seems, because he has refused to rejoice in the prospect that Troy might have been murdered by the same woman he cheated on her with.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.” And she is done with him.

  “OK . . .”

  His only exit is through the double doors, and when he recalls the speed with which Caitlin inexplicably drew them shut just a few moments before, he springs into action. Too quickly, apparently, because Caitlin senses he’s got some agenda other than a hasty departure and begins calling out his name, her voice immediately shrill with fear.

  “Blake!” she shrieks by the time he’s passed through her father’s study and is standing on the threshold of the solarium.

  The flower isn’t glowing, but there is a wrongness to it that makes him hesitate. At first Blake thinks it might just be its placement, all by itself in a sundae glass in the middle of the wicker table. But he’s got plenty of experience not allowing a patient’s paranoid delusions to change his opinions of needles and scalpels, and at the moment, that’s exactly what Caitlin is—just another patient. And this is just a flower, he’s sure of it. He closes the distance between him and the sundae glass and picks up the stem as gently as he can, given how quickly he’s entered the solarium.

  “Blake! Don’t!”

  In what feels like the same instant, Caitlin pulls him backward by one shoulder and slaps him across the jaw. Like an afterthought, the flower’s stem slips from his right hand which has gone as slack as his jaw.

  The shock is as total and paralyzing as that moment years before when it became clear the patch of darkness racing across the levee’s crown toward the spot where he and John Fuller had been making out just seconds before was not, in fact, a trick of the eye, that it had arms and legs, that it was moving in a single direction with purpose, that it had a weapon.

  Caitlin’s slap seems to have unleashed a flood of adrenaline in her; she is bright-eyed and alive suddenly, after moving through what appeared to be a drugged fog, and once again a jolt goes through him, the odd attraction mixed with revulsion. And as the sting of her palm fades from his cheek like a muscle going lax, Blake confirms to himself what he had thought just moments ago: that while the woman standing a few feet away may have, at one point in time, been his closest friend in the world, she is now but a shadow of Caitlin Chaisson, a wavering reflection on moving water.

  But there’s no real comfort to this realization, just a cold vacancy inside that makes him dizzy. He is halfway down the front walk of her house when he hears her calling out to him. She’s standing on the front porch, and as some young and tender part of him opens to receive her apology, she extends one hand and opens her palm.

  “The key,” she says.

  He speaks before he measures his words, his sneakers slapping the brick walkway, and as he closes the distance between them, Caitlin doesn’t close her open hand or lower her extended arm, but her eyes widen in muted surprise.

  “You were the first one I remember seeing,” he is saying. “In the hospital room, when I came to. Before I could even remember what happened. Before they told me John was dead. You were there and you were holding my hand, and you were brushing my hair off of my forehead, and you were saying whatever you needed to say to keep me from going back there in my mind. That’s how I know you didn’t do it, Caitlin. Because you saw what murder does. You saw it in me every day for years. You can probably still see it if you look closely enough. Anyone can.”

  He’s so focused on her expression that he’s startled when her fingers graze his cheek. “Oh, Blake,” she whispers. “All you know is flesh and bone.”

  These words hurt him more than her slap did, and he’s not sure exactly why. When she plucks the key from his hand, he finds himself frozen in place and staring after her as the heavy front door drifts shut.

  Caitlin Chaisson has been changed inexplicably by a sudden event that currently lies outside his realm of understanding, and this realization gouges him more deeply than any false accusation she might have leveled against him in the past.

  15

  Halfway home, Blake pulls his smartphone from his pants pocket and manages to scroll to the number for one of the detectives who interviewed him that morning, all without taking his eyes off the street.

  He realizes, too late, he’s programmed the man’s name into his address book under “Baldy.” Who the hell will he ask for if the number connects him to dispatch?

  “Detective Granger,” Baldy answers.

  At least one of my problems is actually getting solved today.

  “This is Blake Henderson.”

  “Good evening, Blake Henderson.”

  “Forgive me for asking this, but I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could talk to Jane Percival?”

  “None whatsoever,” the detective answers flatly.

  “OK . . . Well, can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  The silence on the other end startles Blake. He knew it was an inappropriate request, but he didn’t expect the detective to be quite this offended.

  “Blake . . .”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Get to a TV or a computer or something.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see . . .” And then the detective hangs up with the speed of someone whose partner or boss or wife has just walked in on him talking to a mistress.

  A few minutes later, Blake is standing in front of the television in his apartment, watching the rebroadcast of the ten o’clock news on WWL. Watching Jane Percival’s bagged body being carried out of the Montrose Parish sheriff’s station by two medics who are bowing their heads as much as possible to avoid being captured by the cameras. This footage is juxtaposed with Glamour Shots of a strikingly pretty young woman with fine-boned features and huge, e
xpressive blue eyes, a woman for whom suicide would be a vague and mildly troubling abstraction. And yet she is dead by her own hand, and—as the reporter explains—the blood found on her clothes the night before when she was taken into custody is the same blood-type as that of Troy Mangier. So apparently, despite her manicured good looks and broad, innocent smile, she is capable of murder as well.

  A ruddy-faced, sputtering public information officer fills the screen, blinking nervously while he fields hostile questions from reporters about how long Jane Percival was questioned and how closely she was monitored and how she managed to get her hands on a piece of broken glass big enough to do herself in with. And Blake feels his hand reaching for the cell phone he dropped facedown on the coffee table in his mad rush to follow the detective’s final instruction.

  This time Detective Granger answers after the first ring.

  “That was very helpful,” Blake says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And unnecessary.”

  “Yeah, well . . . Are you a man of faith, Mr. Henderson?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “Because of what happened to you?”

  “I have faith in certain things. But . . . man of faith. It just sounds a little broad, to me, you know?”

  “You’re not friends with any reporters, are you?”

  “My experience is they don’t make very good friends.”

  “Uh-huh . . . And the friends you do have? Spent any time with them lately?”

  “Caitlin Chaisson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was with her earlier.”

  “So you’re going back out there?”

  “Spring House?”

  “Yes. Spring House.”

  “Sure . . .” I’ll let you think I’m headed there right now if you fess up and tell me what’s eating you, Detective.

  “If this gets back to me, I’ll deny it. Like standing on my momma’s grave deny it. And then I’ll find you and beat the shit out of you, get me?”