The Vines

by Christopher Rice

“I got it.” Cop bluster. So typical—and such a waste of time. Just tell me!

  “The vines . . .” Blake waits for the man to finish, but he’s been left with the ticking sound of his old refrigerator. He’s turned the volume on the TV down, but not too much, so that the news report on a fire at an apartment complex in Gert Town is a low murmur.

  “Detective?”

  “She said the vines did it. She said the vines are coming for us all.”

  There is just enough sarcastic bite in the detective’s tone to suggest he’s repeating these words the way he might repeat the ravings of a homeless woman who accosted him on his way into his favorite watering hole. But he’s still repeating them, and that fact alone renders Blake speechless for a moment.

  “Is that all she said?” Blake asks.

  “Yep. Fifteen hours we held her . . . and that was the only thing she said the whole time. But she said it the whole time.”

  Then Blake hears the dial tone, and he feels something deep within his bones that he can only describe as a shudder. It returns him to a childlike state of conviction that darkness itself is a substance with the power to rise up around the edges of any place and claim it with the sudden finality of a whale’s mouth closing over a drift of plankton.

  More frightening to him than Caitlin’s slap earlier that evening, the phantom after-burn of which Blake can still feel across his jaw, is Granger’s willingness to share information pivotal to an unfolding PR nightmare for his department.

  He was warning you, Blake realizes. That’s why he asked you if you were going back to Spring House anytime soon. He may not believe there’s something out there. But he believes Jane Percival believed it.

  The detective was scared, and in Blake’s experience with cops, that meant he should be scared too.

  Nova answers her cell phone right at the moment when Blake fears he’s about to get sent to her voice mail.

  “Where are you?” he asks.

  “Hello to you too,” she says.

  “Where are you?” he repeats.

  “Calm down, Blake. I’m in Baton Rouge.”

  “School?”

  “In the morning. Right now . . . research.”

  “Research?”

  “Yep.” But that’s all she says.

  “Meet me in Gonzales. It’s halfway.”

  “Now?”

  “Jane Percival killed herself tonight. If you want to hear what she said before she did it, meet me in Gonzales. Then you can tell me about your research.”

  “Gonzales . . . I’m not sure I like this game.”

  “I’ll come to you if you want.” The way he says it, it is either a desperate concession or a veiled threat.

  She apparently doesn’t want to risk it. “All right, all right. Gonzales it is. What, like, a . . . gas station?”

  “There’s a Waffle House.”

  “A Waffle House . . . I thought the gays liked to eat at nice places.”

  “Commander’s Palace isn’t open this late, OK? So . . . Waffle House?”

  “Yeah huh.”

  Blake is about to hang up when a thought strikes him. “Nova. Where’s your father?”

  “With my aunt in the Seventh Ward.”

  “Good.”

  16

  Caitlin has returned to the solarium in darkness, where the blossom’s white petals are still visible in the branch-filtered glow from the streetlight on the nearby corner. The flower no longer gives off the loamy scent that knocked her out of her body and into a tortured fragment of Spring House’s secret history. But perhaps she’s standing too far away; perhaps if she leans in a little farther, its filaments will once more grow erect and more of its secrets will penetrate her fevered mind.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she can see a shadow dart down the side of the house below. Her first thought is that it must be Blake. That he’s come back to snatch the flower now that he thinks she’s asleep.

  But if he’s going to break in, he’ll have to do it the messy, old-fashioned way. After he left, Caitlin tested the key to make sure he’d returned the right one, and then she’d cast the house in darkness with the press of a single master switch next to the back door. For a while, she’d sat on the stool just inside the foyer, listening to the clatter of passing streetcars and briefly paralyzed by the realization that her encounter with forces from beyond this world hadn’t rendered her immune to the guilt and remorse her old friend could stir in her by just cocking his head to one side. But just seeing his fingers close around the flower’s stem felt like a violation close to rape, and what choice did she have? When dark miracles suspend the rules you once lived by, you have no choice but to let your feelings be your guide, no matter how extreme they might seem to others.

  In an instant the intruder has disappeared around the back of the house, where, she assumes, he is trying to get a good look into the breakfast room. For several breathless minutes, she awaits the soft shatter of glass or the sound of tools prying at a lock. But the house is silent, save for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the upstairs hallway.

  Blake has had years to make a copy of the key to her house. But something about this theory feels flawed, and so she finds herself padding swiftly into her bedroom, where there is a gun in her nightstand drawer. It’s Troy’s gun, but she knows how to use it.

  She has pulled the gun from the drawer and unsnapped its holster when her iPhone vibrates softly on the nightstand. The text message is from Blake.

  Jane Percival killed herself.

  Caitlin is less stricken by the content of this message than she is by the realization that it’s highly doubtful Blake would have tapped it into his phone while trying to sneak into her darkened kitchen.

  She raises the gun in both hands and starts for the hallway. More silence from the vast house. She returns to the solarium. She half expects the flower to recoil from the sight of the gun alone. They’re connected now, aren’t they? She and this strange dream-giving blossom. Its absence of a reaction disappoints her, a small but cold rejection after it graced her with its life-altering scent.

  Below, the shadow darts past the pool, bound for the back fence. The apparent senselessness of this move infuriates her. She was oddly more comfortable with the idea of someone breaking in and trying to kill her. But now the intruder’s motives seem unknowable. Why make an escape over the back fence when he could just as easily sweep down the side of the house and over the decorative little wrought iron gate in front? If he’s a burglar, why did he bypass the cabana, which had things of real value inside?

  Again he appears, this time on the other side of the pool. She can see he’s hunched over now, holding something in both hands. Some sort of hood or stocking cap covers his face and head. And he is fat, his movements hurried, but ungainly. There’s no bag or backpack, nothing in which to hide a cache of stolen goods. And now he appears to be headed for the garage.

  The back fence, she thinks. What the hell was waiting for him at the back fence? Why did he hang out there for a good five to six minutes? What’s at the back fence other than a view of the house?

  A view of the house . . . No bag for stolen goods. Pausing briefly at various points throughout her backyard, where there’s nothing of value to steal . . .

  The police don’t work this way, not even in New Orleans. And as Caitlin turns it over and over in her head, she can think of only one explanation for the guy’s strange zigzag path through her property. He is after views. He is after angles.

  He is planting cameras.

  There is a purity to the rage that courses through her now. It is not the feeling she expects; it has nothing to do with having her privacy invaded. It has more to do with the realization that if someone other than law enforcement is placing her under surveillance now, there can only be one reason: Troy.

  How many other deceits were woven thr
ough Troy’s infidelities? How many gambling debts or hidden bank accounts? As a freshman in college, she’d been stricken by a public-health notice in her dorm that assured all who read it that when a patient tested positive for one sexually transmitted disease, they were likely to test positive for another. Surely this was just as true when it came to diseases of character.

  Before she has time to reconsider, Caitlin pulls the letter opener out from the stack of mail pinned beneath the magazines still sent every month to her dead mother. She presses the tip against the flesh of her palm, then gently presses upward until she feels a slight tug that tells her she’s cut the skin. Then she presses harder, until a thick vein of blood emerges from the center of her palm.

  She expects the blossom waiting below to expand its petals, to raise its stamens with evident and undeniable thirst. But the flower does no such thing. Indeed, the first drop of blood hits the white petal and rolls off it like water on a Scotchgarded sofa cushion. The petal isn’t even stained. In a panic, she wonders if it’s a simple matter of volume, remembers the arterial flow she’d opened from one wrist the night before. There’s no way she can risk that again, not now, not here.

  The pain in her palm becomes unbearable. She drops the letter opener and dives for the love seat, then brings a wad of tissues to her bleeding hand. They are soaked through in seconds, and she is left with the gun, and the oblivious blossom that lacks the same thirst as the vines that gave it life, the vines that snaked up through the floor of the gazebo and nursed from her mutilated wrist. It is a wholly different thing. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Whatever strange force animates them, these are living things, and like all plants, they possess various phases of thirst, growth, and bloom.

  Below, the shadow now saunters through her backyard. The man—she’s reasonably sure it’s a man—looks back over one shoulder, lifts his arm, and waves in the direction of the back fence, and that’s when Caitlin’s suspicions about the guy’s intentions are finally confirmed. The yard, the back door, the garage—she’s confident all are now under surveillance. And the slow, arrogant swagger this bastard has acquired during his nighttime visit to her property fills her with fresh rage.

  If the flower before her wasn’t equipped to come to her rescue, perhaps it was time to visit its source.

  When she hears the tap tap tap against the glass next to her, she’s willing to believe that the stranger has floated up to the second story of the house and is rapping against the solarium walls with one fist, and she shoots to her feet, gun in one hand. But instead of a floating shadow, she finds herself looking at the streetlight on the corner through some kind of black gauze. But gauze isn’t the right word for it. More like cheesecloth that’s been pulled over the entire sheet of glass—only the gaps in it are shifting and rearranging.

  Bugs. They’ve lined the outside of the glass wall with such intricacy and precision that it’s hard for her to see them as anything other than graceful, and so referring to them as bugs seems like an insult. There are so many of them, so densely packed, that she can’t tell what exact type they are, only that there is more than one kind. She has spent most of her life living in fear of palmetto bugs, what people refer to as the classic New Orleans cockroach. But if they’re among this strange legion, they’re too outnumbered to strike a primal chord of fear in her.

  She places her free hand against the glass, even knocks a few times. No response from outside. Then she places the gun down and lifts up the sundae glass carefully in both hands, and as soon as the blossom’s giant white petals are a few inches from the glass, a great pulse moves through the swarm outside. The streetlight is blacked out completely as the lace pattern suddenly gathers into a solid cluster of rustling darkness, a black halo around the spot where the blossom is kissing the glass.

  Caitlin’s laughter is a warm, rich thing, a mixture of arousal and delight as sensuous as the sounds Jane Percival was making in the upstairs bathroom at Spring House while Troy fingered her.

  She sets the sundae glass down on the end table right next to the window, and the swarm pulses again. The borders shift, but it holds its general shape even as it moves several inches down the glass to be closer to the flower.

  It occurs to Caitlin that just a few days ago, this sight might have horrified her—this sight should horrify her—but now her cheek is resting against the glass, her fingers tapping gently in time to the sounds of more and more insects pelting the thickening blanket of cicadas, flies, moths, and palmetto bugs. Now Caitlin feels embraced by hidden forces laced through soil and sky. And she feels comfortable leaving the blossom behind as she returns to the patch of Spring House that gave birth to it. If the insects assembled on the other side of the glass are not her protectors, there’s a good chance they will act as guardians to the flower that drew them out of branches, gutters, and nests. At the very least, there should be enough of them by the time she gets back to completely hide the solarium from view.

  17

  “She’s leaving,” Scott Fauchier says. “He’s gonna follow her.”

  “Ask him about the bugs,” Kyle Austin says.

  “The what?”

  “The bugs. Look!”

  Kyle points to the giant computer monitor on Scott’s desk, and suddenly Scott is bending over so close to him Kyle can smell the bergamot in his cologne.

  Scott’s loft-style apartment is inside an old brick school building on Magazine Street, a few blocks from the Mississippi. The furniture is all glass and steel, the carpets a dull shade of gray that looks like it wants to turn into a deeper, richer color. Everything about the place screams Miami coke dealer, and when Scott offered him something to settle his nerves, Kyle was surprised he didn’t have anything stronger than Grey Goose. There are pictures of grown-up Scott everywhere—usually with a buffed-up, ponytailed little trainer on his arm—but the way the two of them have been lounging in front of the computer for most of the night, waiting for Mike to set up the wireless cameras, has made Kyle feel like a teenager all over again. The thought gives him a warm fuzzy feeling and he actually smiles, before he remembers he and Scott had sort-of murdered someone when they were seventeen, and that was the only reason they were hanging out at all. That’s what guilt truly is, Scott realizes, a fishhook’s tug on the third or fourth minute of every happy moment.

  “You see ’em?” Kyle asks. His finger is hovering several inches from the spot where what looks like a swarm of moths are dancing in and out of the streetlight’s exaggerated green glow around one corner of the second-floor solarium.

  “Fuckin’ bugs, I don’t know,” Scott says. “What are we? Her exterminator?”

  But Scott lifts the prepaid cell phone Mike bought for them earlier that night to his ear and repeats the question. He listens for a few seconds, then says, “He’s gone. Says he didn’t see any bugs. Can we stay focused on what’s important?”

  “OK,” Kyle says, holding back his anger. “Tell me again . . . what’s important?”

  Instead of answering—your wife, my line of health clubs, my endless succession of well-muscled girlfriends—Scott pads across the expansive apartment toward the bottle of Grey Goose sitting on the kitchen counter.

  18

  Nova’s battered Honda Civic is parked outside of the Waffle House between two pickup trucks. The car’s back window is a bubbled mess of lamination film, and the LSU bumper sticker is mud-lashed and frayed at the edges.

  Before he passes through the front door, Blake spots her sitting at the counter alone, slumped over a spread of papers and file folders. The portly waitress refilling her iced-tea glass has wide eyes and pencil-thin eyebrows that give her an expression of restrained panic even as she greets Blake with a casual nod.

  When Nova looks up at his approach, Blake sees the tense set to her mouth, the way her right hand has curled into a claw atop the papers she was just reading. He wonders if she was willing to make the forty-minute drive
here from Baton Rouge because she doesn’t expect to sleep anytime soon.

  For a while they just sit next to each other on their respective stools as trucks lumber by outside, bound for the I-10 on-ramp. Blake wonders if moving to one of the empty booths nearby would strike Nova as too intimate, too forced.

  “I know why you hate her,” he finally says.

  “Caitlin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t hate her.”

  Nova is collecting the pages in front of her, arranging them in a neat pile as if she planned to shove them into the purple backpack at her feet but then remembered they were part of the information-sharing deal she made with Blake earlier that night.

  “Fine. I know why you’re mad at her.”

  She gives him a blank stare, as if there’s nothing she likes less than having her mind read by white boys.

  “I remember . . . It was last year, right after her parents were killed. Your dad said something to me about how he was putting the money together for his own landscaping business . . . ” Nova looks away suddenly. He’s scored a direct hit. “He said he and his brother were going to team up, maybe try for a bank loan. Then I never heard anything about it again. Caitlin . . . She killed it, didn’t she?”

  “She offered him the house.”

  “So . . . kind of a fair trade.”

  “A trade? How? He lives there, but he doesn’t own it. And she pays him less now ’cause of it. He’s got no insurance, and now has to ask her every time he goes to see a doctor. It embarrasses him. He won’t let her see it, of course, but it does. He . . . he could have started something of his own, you know? Something with his name on it. But the minute she gets wind of it, she starts screaming and crying like she’s about to lose her parents all over again. Like he’s her daddy and not . . .” Mine. The word, unsaid, hangs in the air between them like a cloud of cigarette smoke. “All so she didn’t have to hire a new yardman.”

  “He’s more than a yardman.”