She kept her gaze out the window. “What are you going to call it?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your book, Tim. What’s the title?”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Peter Lowry called me.”
Tim’s eyes went wide at this news: a lapse of professionalism on the part of his newfound benefactor. She looked straight at him now, fighting to keep her tone steady.
“When he stopped just short of threatening me, I told him what I’m going to tell you right now. I don’t know where Randall is. And you’re not going to find out. Peter Lowry can play the grieving father all he wants now that his son is dead. But something tells me that he’s not throwing money at this little project of yours just because he wants the world to forget that he was a drug addict who drove his only son away.”
Tim ducked the implication. “In all fairness, Peter Lowry should have a chance to set the record straight. He got raked over hotter coals than you did. His son gets butchered and the press has a field day with the drug-addict dad. And all those rumors about him molesting Jesse! Come on! The guy deserves to have his side of the story told.”
“And you?”
Tim shook his head at the supposed irrelevance of the question.
“I know Randall used you the worst, Tim. He slept with you because you were a reporter with access to the local paper. But you’re not going to get payback. Just let it go.”
The waitress arrived and Kathryn rose from her chair. “I’m not hungry. Thank you.”
“Kathryn?”
“Write your book, Tim. See if he comes back to reclaim the life he left. He’s free now. This is what he does best, remember?”
She slid her purse off the back of the chair. Tim glared at her. “Jesus. What is this? Friends till the bitter end? You want me to give up? Take your own advice.”
His words sliced at the correct nerve, and she paused for a moment, holding her purse to her chest and staring down at him through her sunglasses. The phrase that visited her often before sleep, in a voice that sounded like her own but wasn’t, escaped her before she could stop it.
“I knew him,” she whispered.
Tim furrowed his brow. Stirring to keep her composure, she turned away from the table.
“What?” Tim barked after her.
She waved good-bye over one shoulder.
As she turned Ken’s Mercury Mountaineer onto Victoria Street, the branches shed their spring blossoms onto the windy sidewalks. She eased her foot off the gas and watched the slow passage of Eric Eberman’s former house; the resurrected front lawn was lined with store-bought flowers, the windows clean sweeps of plate glass without flanking shutters.
The Elms rose in a green canopy at the end of the street.
She parked the car and fished the envelope out of the glove compartment. No return address. Her name and home address in San Francisco typed across the front. Her father had given it to her at graduation the day before, and she had forced herself to wait for some compromise between the right moment and the most private one to open it.
The Elms was harder to navigate when the trees weren’t stripped of their leaves by winter. She made her way to the sound of water splashing against rock, and came to the small, stone bridge passing over the drainpipe. Elm leaves caught the sunlight as she moved carefully along the bank. Inverness Creek flowed generously in eddies of black water funneled by its muddy walls. She found no spot in particular and took a seat, letting her legs dangle over the five-foot drop as she tore the envelope open.
A pearl had been affixed to an index-size note card with three strands of Scotch tape laid out in a protective cross. Glued right below was a white slip of paper cut from the page of a book, each sentence meticulously highlighted in yellow.
The pearl is the symbol of those souls who remain trapped within the mud of the material world. Imprisoned by their bodies and their flesh, they somehow manage to remain spiritually alive. Cathars referred to those souls as the living ones.
She read the words written in ink below.
Happy Graduation
Love, Randall
(because he’s the one who learned how)
After several minutes, she brought the card to her chest and held it to the place where the ache Randall had left behind throbbed most acutely—when she paused too long at a stoplight, or searched for sleep. She held it there until she was no longer stanching an open wound, just protecting a gift from the sudden gusts of wind that drove life skyward to the branches overhead.
Acknowledgments
TWO OPPOSING TEXTS ON THE WORK OF HlERONYMUS BOSCH PROVED critical in informing the fictional speculations of Dr. Eric Eberman. In Hieronymus Bosch: Between Heaven and Hell (Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1987), art history professor Walter Bosing makes a brief and compelling argument against the popular twentieth-century tendency to interpret Bosch’s work with modern-day psychology, which could not possibly have informed the painter’s medieval mindset. In The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch (Floris Books, 1995), Lynda Harris lays out an exhaustively researched argument that Bosch’s work was truly laced with codings of heresy that strongly indicate an artist who was influenced by heretical, primarily Catharistic, beliefs.
Eric Eberman’s speculations regarding the true nature of the Brethren of the Free Spirit are an imaginative leap on my part. The true origins of Bosch’s inspiration are subject to a seemingly endless debate. So far the debate has proved only that lovers of Bosch’s work are desperate to find some scholarly basis to their own, often visceral, reactions to it. As a result, many conclusions are informed as much by psychological longing as by hard research. This strange marriage informs the sometimes irresponsible interpretations of both Eric Eberman and Mitchell Seaver.
I am indebted to my father, Stan Rice, for helping to reacquaint me with the administrative mechanisms of a large university campus, and Dr. Mark Lerner, for assisting me in accurately representing Boston’s suburbs. Any errors are mine and not theirs.
Jonathan Burnham and David Groff shined light into the dark portions of my first draft. The entire team at Talk Miramax Books continues to astound me with their focus, accessibility and compassion; special thanks to Kristin Powers, Kathy Schneider, and Hilary “Fierce” Bass. My agent, Lynn Nesbit, deserves too many thanks for one page. Because The Snow Garden was written during a period of personal transition, I'm compelled to thank a special group of people who might not know how invaluable their support was: Brandy Pigeon, Sid Montz, Jeff Morrone, Brian Sibberell, Spencer Doody, Jay Marose and Julia DiGiovanni.
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