All he had to do was wait and Donna would come around. It sounded so logical, so easy, but nothing in his life had proven easy. And like everything else, it all turned sinister quickly.
* * *
• • •
In the beginning, Donna called him every day, sometimes more than once. He answered the phone for the first two weeks or so and then he let it go to voice mail. Those were just her ramblings, he could tell. I was wondering this, and I don’t know that, on and on she went. Then she began to ask for Penelope, asking him to relay messages to remind her of things, and that’s when he let the voice mailbox fill up and then changed his number. She’d get tired of this game soon enough, he thought.
Donna was in a state of flux, it seemed like, and soon she’d be ripe for the taking. That was the evil part of it, the way he caught himself using such phrases and he couldn’t believe the person he had become. He had never treated a woman with disdain, had never so much as raised his voice at a nurse or at Penelope, had always been a gentleman and had been proud of it.
But there was more. During those nightly wanderings through the house—he had taken to storing all possible seeds of memory in an upstairs guest room—he did get carried away.
The door of a sideboard wouldn’t open and instead of tugging at it and prying it open, in a surge of anger, he swiped vases and picture frames to the ground. He ripped the door off its hinges, pulled boxes of photographs out, took a nearby chair, and struck the sidebar once. There was this rush, this irresistible need to do damage and with the chairback—the legs had long come off and the seat lay on the ground—he beat away at the sidebar, at all those neatly organized things in Donna’s proper home. He stomped on them, then stood, staring wonderingly at them.
The photographs wouldn’t rip, which sent him into another kind of frenzy altogether. They slid out of his hands and he trampled on them but slipped as if on a patch of ice and he thought accelerant accelerant accelerant and burn burn burn this entire house down.
Pictures came to mind: his college days, the Greek mythology class he’d taken. After Troy was burned to the ground into nothing but blackened and partly melted buildings, the story was the gods were angry because the Greeks had shown such cruelty and therefore had to suffer great hardships before they reached home. The burning of Troy was mythology but nevertheless, Donna was his very own Troy, a city he longed to destroy, never to be rebuilt.
The Greeks couldn’t take Troy but through trickery. Donna was Troy and the house was Troy and everything ought to burn burn burn, and he feverishly searched for matches but couldn’t find any, no lighter either in any of the drawers he ripped open open open, sending corkscrews and ladles flying about, and then he found the fireplace lighter, the one with the long metal wand and he clicked clicked clicked it but it wouldn’t spit out a flame because it had been months since it had been used. Troy was taken with a Trojan horse but he had been sending Trojan horses for months to no avail and he was lost lost lost without knowing.
Lighter in hand, he caught himself just in time, but those moments happened more often, he could never tell when he’d go from weepy emotions to anger, to an all-out rage.
Later, in the light of day, he’d see what he had done to his home and he wondered how long he’d go on this way and he knew he’d have to sell the house and start all over but those royalty checks, all that patent money, it kept pouring in and he saw himself spending the rest of his life knocking this house to the ground until it went up in an inferno.
His legacy, Donna had called it, as if bricks and wood and pipes and tile were anything, that was just his doing, but his being was the patients he had wanted to operate on, all those cleft palates and burn and acid victims, something he’d never got around to. All those years he’d put those causes on the back burner, and there was always something in the way—a house renovation, a vacation, a new plastic surgery suite, you name it—and most of all, Donna had made sure he was busy. But that was over with now, here he was, his hands shaking and trembling and God help him but he knew he’d never again be able to put a scalpel on a body without it slipping.
His being was also Penelope, his only child, who he had found in the center of this house, the foyer. Doomed they had been from the start, doomed, all of them.
58
EDWARD
Edward Pryor stopped his car and pulled into the gravel by the side of the road. It was a Friday, dusk was looming but still an hour or so away. He exited the car and stood there. The orange blinking four-way flashers dashed about in well-timed intervals. Through a grove of trees he saw ocher lamppost lights down the road.
This was where he had dumped the woman’s body.
In the distance a heavy cloud rolled toward the area, wet and stormy. He shivered. A blue-black mass had been approaching southward, slowly but steadily. A cool, dry, high-pressure system shoved against the warm, moist air of the Gulf, and everyone had been talking about a Blue Norther fast approaching. It was announced on the radio, warning of temperatures about to drop thirty degrees within twenty minutes or less. No one knows the origin of the name, some say it’s because of the blue-black sky, some say the sky goes from blue to black and back to blue after the cold front passes, others say one’s skin turns blue from the cold.
Fuck if he knew.
He thought in curse words lately, as if some brute had slipped under his skin and taken over the entirety of his being. With his right hand he reached to check the half-Windsor knot but it was more a habit than anything else; there was no tie and he hadn’t even bothered to button his shirt.
The wind picked up, swooshed at him. His pores contracted, jerking at the muscles at the roots of his hairs, turning his skin into a layer of miniature bumps. He rolled down the sleeves of his white shirt, buttoned the cuffs, and slid on his coat. His skin settled, the woolen coat keeping the wind at bay. His arms underneath the coat like the skin of a freshly plucked goose, a blend of fear and disbelief and also the drop in temperature, or maybe just another one of those useless feral reactions that served no purpose.
Edward approached the spot where he had dumped the woman. As he had watched Dr. Price perform the autopsy, he had listened to him describe the collision and the injuries, yet Penelope’s involvement remained a puzzle.
And then there was information he had gathered from news reports: Rachel Dunlap, thirty-four, was a pharmaceutical sales rep, married, with two stepchildren. She suffered from asthma but had completed a half marathon just two months before she died. In the aftermath of her death, family and friends came together and talked about the best ways to honor her memory. They reflected on how Rachel was passionate about physical fitness and uplifted those new to long-distance running. A memorial fund was established in her honor.
Another report stated that the dispatcher received a call around 9:30 a.m. and that her body was found only a few yards in front of her vehicle, a Nissan, and the car itself was free of any damage yet void of her belongings, though some of them had been strewn about the accident scene. The car sat off by the side of the road on a bed of gravel, neatly parked and unlocked. It wasn’t quite a robbery, but it wasn’t just an accident either. It was up to the police to figure this out and so far they had been clueless. Not one news report mentioned the lack of blood, but there was always that one fact the police didn’t release and it was an open investigation after all.
He had cut out a picture of her from the paper that he carried with him. Her face had become familiar by then, the gentle swoop of the bridge of the nose, the defined jaw, her teeth supporting the lips just right. That woman. It was still hard for him to call her by her name, preferred to refer to her as that woman. Crumpling the paper into a ball, stuffing it into the coat pocket, he knew he had to throw it away. Suddenly it felt unnerving to hold on to the picture. What if something happened to him and they found it, then what? Would someone put two and two together?
On
foot he followed the road to the next bend. There was nothing but another bend around the corner, nothing to see there. He imagined how, in the dark, the woman might have parked and gotten out of her vehicle for one reason or another, Penelope had approached, unable to stop, unable to avoid her, the turn exposing her as an inattentive or inexperienced driver. Knowing Penelope, that was the likely conclusion to be drawn, but still, he was a scientist and not understanding the world wasn’t an option for him, uncertainty equal to torture.
He thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye but it was just a broken branch dangling off a tree. He took in the area. Another hour and the world would lose color and turn into shades of gray, but for now the orange flashes in the distance dashed about, dowsing the immediate perimeter in a tawny glow. Edward turned and walked in the other direction, past his car, past the park sign, and again there was a bend. He followed the curve, scanning the ground, though the road had been searched extensively, so he assumed, and Edward wasn’t really looking for anything specific but it never hurt to keep his eyes open.
Headlights in the distance illuminating the bend in the road. It was an SUV—he couldn’t make out the color, black or dark blue maybe—and it slowed down, then stopped. With a hum, the driver’s window descended. A man in his fifties leaned out.
“You got car trouble?” he asked.
“What?” Edward stood still, slightly slumped over.
“Something wrong with your car? You need a hand? A ride?”
His mind tumbled. Was this a random person or a detective? Had he been lying in wait past the shoulder, in a gravel verge underneath a tree, invisible from the road? Was he here to catch the criminal returning to the scene of the crime? Edward didn’t know if that was just a plot device on detective shows or if criminals really had an inclination to relive their handiwork.
“Your lights are flashing.”
This place, this bend in the road. All those trees, the brush, even the painted line in the middle of the road and the cracks in the asphalt of the parking lot were silent witnesses. He wanted to spill it all, just get it over with, but not one word came out of his mouth. He was frozen.
“Are you all right?” A pause, then the man nodded. He pinched his lips. “Just thought I’d ask.”
“Everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”
The window ascended and the car sped up and disappeared.
Edward buried his hands in his pockets, the crinkled sphere of paper unnerving as he enclosed it with his fist. He could’ve sworn he had just felt the temperature drop another ten degrees. Nothing was fine. Not a goddamn thing. The man probably was a detective—and what if he put two and two together? Penelope’s death, the autopsy he had attended, maybe he got wind of that somehow, that would be the end of it all.
Edward got in his car and got back on the highway, where he lowered the window just enough to fit the woman’s crumpled picture through the gap. The wind grabbed it and in the rearview mirror he watched as it bounced a few times before he lost sight of it. Twenty minutes later he drove down a long winding road leading to Shadow Garden. The Monterrey oaks turned sparse and at the end of the road appeared a building within a circle of jade-colored grass, almost like a moat defending its tenants against some unknown enemy.
* * *
• • •
The deep-red terra-cotta brick building was the crowning center of the expansive lawn, surrounded by a cast-iron fence common around public parks, the building’s border from the rest of the world was ten feet tall with intricate details of Victorian design. Even in the impending darkness he was aware of the comical appearance of it all as he considered the care it took to keep the place somewhere between formal English grounds and touches of whimsical cottage gardens. North Texas wasn’t arid by a long shot, but it was far from conducive to elaborate and needy greenery. He imagined a crew of men in orange vests with mowers and hedgers and trimmers descending upon the place, sprinklers dispersing thousands of gallons of water within seconds, three times a day, which was proof that the illusion of Shadow Garden was about man’s conquest over the elements, over nature.
Shadow Garden. Fuck. That’s exactly where Donna belonged.
He slowed the car to a crawl as he approached the entrance, stopping in front of the cast-iron gate surrounded by crape myrtles. He loved crape myrtles because they’d been a favorite of his mother’s, that’s how he remembered her, on a bench, underneath sprawling domed canopies.
He thought about her as he spent the next ten minutes sitting in the car going back and forth with an invisible voice. The gate guard demanded his name, appointment time, and the name of the person he had an appointment with. He went along with it, didn’t complain, and was mostly amused. During that time he called the number he had programmed into this phone, let it ring twice, and then hung up.
The guard’s voice informed him through the speaker to proceed to the arched main entrance for car service drop-off and pickup. He parked next to a man in a chauffeur’s uniform leaning against a black Buick, on his left a lime-green car with maid service decals.
From the central courtyard, a path led to the individual buildings and it was that walkway Edward took, past a fountain with a copper spigot. There was a certain stillness about the place, a memorial park for the rich where they hide from the rest of the world. He had an almost prophetic feeling then, saw the terra-cotta buildings not far removed from inevitable decay, withering blossoms drifting toward the dark earth, turning to sludge and slime.
Edward stood on the walkway and breathed in the dense air. It was like muddy water, thick and crisp at the same time. The lampposts gave off the faintest of lights, flickering about. They were so dim that they didn’t produce any shadows but rather an overall layer of illumination, as if everything was important in this moment, everything deserved equal brilliance.
A hefty gust of wind impaled his pores. There’d been another drop in temperature between the time he had left the park and when he arrived at Shadow Garden and he buttoned his coat and made his way toward the center of the courtyard.
As he approached the building called the Ridge, he suddenly realized he hadn’t seen a single soul about but the guards at the gate. Donna’s apartment was the first one on the ground floor. He knocked and the door opened. Marleen stood, impeccably dressed, her eyes darting past him, not as if she expected someone else, but as if she was nervous being seen with him.
“Mr. Pryor, how are you?” Marleen asked.
“I’m well, thank you,” he said but they both knew it was far from the truth.
“Mrs. Pryor is asleep.”
“I figured,” he said.
Edward handed Marleen a box. The flaps were open, within it a gaudy ceramic container. He held on to it because Marleen’s grasp wasn’t quite firm enough.
“Mr. Pryor, I don’t—”
“Marleen, please. I would never do anything to cause Donna any kind of—”
“I have always supported your efforts but I’m conflicted about this.”
“Please. We talked about this. I just need . . . I can’t . . . please just put it on the mantel,” he stuttered. “I have to go,” he added. The moment Marleen shut the door, he turned and walked away.
Edward sat on a nearby bench with a view of the building. The unit next to the ground floor was clearly inhabited; an elderly woman stood on the balcony. He wasn’t sure if he was watching her or she was watching him.
“Excuse me,” he said and approached her.
“Yes?” She squinted but made no attempt to use the glasses that dangled on a chain around her neck.
“Do you know the woman on the first floor next to you?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Who wants to know?” she asked and rolled up the top of a plastic bag she had rummaged through just then. Behind her, between an array of pots with plants and flowers of varying height, sat mor
e plastic bags.
“Do you know her?” he repeated.
He observed her upper body slightly pulling back. She switched on the overhead light and he got a better look at her. The woman was sixty, maybe older. Her gray bob was immaculate, and she wore discreet makeup. She had been attractive once upon a time, and there was something to be said about the good old aging-with-grace thing. He couldn’t imagine any scalpel making her more beautiful.
She looked him up and down, her eyes squinted, her lips pressed tight. “Am I required to give you an answer?” she said, then added, “I guess you can find out if you want to, right?”
“Do you know each other? Donna Pryor? Your neighbor?” He made his voice sound low and monotone, as if this was of no concern to him. “Do you ever talk to her?”
The woman pulled her shawl tighter.
“Did she tell you about her daughter?” he asked. “It’s quite a tragedy. Does she ever, you know, mention her?”
The woman took a step toward the patio door. Edward didn’t want her to just disappear into the building, and he scrambled for ways to prolong the conversation.
“I thought maybe you’d know something about her, being out here, with your flowers and everything.”
“I’m not out a lot. I couldn’t tell you anything.”
“Those hydrangeas there, I didn’t know they bloom this late in the year,” Edward said and pointed at the bushy pink heads.
“Depends on the variety. Some do, some don’t.”
“Well, they seem to be doing well.”
“A little care goes a long way,” she said.
“I saw them from all the way over there. How do you get them to grow so large?”
Shadow Garden Page 26