The Whisper Garden

by David Harris Griffith

  “They’d have to pay me not to. And it wouldn’t be cheap.”

  She gave him a long kiss and stepped through the door into the night.

  Monday February 10th

  6:00 a.m.

  At six o’clock the alarm went off and Sarah sprang out of bed. It hurt, but she did it. She knew that if she made herself hop out of bed as soon as the alarm went off, she would be able to keep herself moving, but if she hit snooze even once, she’d be likely to sleep until it was time to go to class, or later. Sarah didn’t like mornings, but she felt like she could control her time during them. Some days she got up to do homework, today she was getting up to work out.

  Since she wanted to act, she believed it was important to stay in shape. As one of her instructors had put it, a fit person can act like a slob, but a couch potato can’t act like a fit person. She started with a couple of yoga sun salutes. Reaching high, trying to touch her ceiling, then bending over and touching the floor, then stepping back into a push-up position, then arching her back to try to see the ceiling, then pushing her butt up in the air, then stepping her feet up next to her hands, and then doing it again. She did ten repetitions, and then she got dressed. Running shorts, a sports bra and running shoes.

  One quick trip to the bathroom and two dozen crunches on the floor later, she trotted down the stairs of her apartments and on to St. Charles Avenue. Sarah thought it was crazy that some people drive to their running route. Her main priority was convenience; she liked to pretty much just walk out the door wherever she was and start running. If she turned left when she left her apartment, she would be heading toward the French Quarter. She turned right and ran down St. Charles toward the Garden District. She thought it was interesting that she had considered jogging in the Quarter, because the only reason she had to go there was Jeremy.

  As she ran she thought about Jeremy. Sarah had a kind of undefined tally system for rating guys, assigning points for good stuff, taking points away for bad. Jeremy got points for being sweet, but he lost points for not having a real job. She never actually gave number values to the points, but she always knew whether a guy was ahead or behind. Considering what she did for money, she thought it was a little hypocritical of her to judge Jeremy for his lack of a day job, but it was how she felt. While she was thinking about money, she decided that she couldn’t really blame him for spending all of his inheritance, since she would likely have done the same thing, but it still struck her as a little irresponsible.

  Her steps carried her along the grassy median around the streetcar line through the Garden District. The Garden District always felt to her like she had jogged into a small town somewhere: a rich small town, but a small town nonetheless. She knew it was a small town where she would not have always been welcome; her skin was a little too dark, her ancestry a little too mixed. In Creole terms, she would count as at least an octoroon (one eighth African blood), much more welcome across Canal Street in the French Quarter. Nevertheless, Sarah liked the Garden District.

  Some days she would make a loop and jog past Anne Rice’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the author, but trying not to feel like a silly fangirl. That loop also took her by one of Trent Reznor’s houses, but she never expected him to be home. Today she was just going for distance, down the road for twenty minutes and then straight back.

  Jeremy lost points for not knowing who she was talking about when she told him it sounded like he wanted to be Travis McGee, living his retirement while he was still young enough to enjoy it. He gained some points back for sounding interested in the books and he got major points for having a house full of books that he had actually read. He got points for not watching much TV. He got points for his explanation of why he didn’t watch TV: “If you thought you were going to die in a year, would you want to watch TV or do something real?”

  Her watch told her it was time to turn around, so she did. It was going to be a busy week; she had four big papers due. The way things were looking, she wasn’t even going to be able to find any time to earn any money as a statue, which sucked because taking Jeremy out had left her pretty broke. Oh well, she thought. A week of noodles never hurt anyone. Besides, it was worth it, especially since she kept thinking about him. It was a good sign that she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She gave him a few points for pleasantly spending time in her head.

  Back at her apartment, breakfast was a cup of yogurt with fruit and a piece of beef jerky. A quick hop through the shower, and she was almost ready to face a day of classes, or at least as ready as she was ever going to be. She got dressed and headed out the door.

  Monday February 10th

  10 a.m.

  Aldous was sitting on the grass near Jackson’s statue in Jackson Square. He had a great view of the cathedral and of Jackson’s horse’s butt. The only thing he was really looking at, though, was his laptop computer. He had business to play with. Money was just another game.

  Normally Aldous would have chosen to do business some place more private, but a comment that Dexter had made had stuck with him and bothered him. Dexter had said he was a creature of the night. Dexter was wrong, though Aldous carefully cultivated the gothic image of being the type of person who prowled at night, Aldous made it a point to be seen about the Quarter at all times of day. His persona was painstakingly crafted and he wanted a certain unpredictableness to be part of that image. So when the mood struck him to make some money on the stock market, he decided to do it in a conspicuous place. Not so conspicuous that anyone could look freely over his shoulder, but visible enough that someone might notice him out and about.

  On the ground next to him were an address book and a King James Bible. Combined, they held all his passwords. He didn’t really need the written records, he normally had excellent recall. But there had been a several-week period when he was living in Memphis when he simply couldn’t remember any of his passwords. They had eventually come back to him, but it had scared and frustrated him. So he had set up a coded backup for his memory. Some of the numbers in his address book pointed to some passages from the Bible, and those passages contained his passwords.

  Aldous didn’t really care about money. At one point, back in his New York days, he had used it as a way of keeping score in the great game of life. Now he was living by a different set of rules, with a different scoring system, and money didn’t matter all that much to him. But it did make his life more convenient. And he did still enjoy the feeling of winning when things went his way.

  Aldous logged on to a Caribbean bank’s website. It was convenient that someone had an unsecured wireless network set up that he could use to access the web from the park. It amused him to be using a stranger’s internet access. No matter what he was doing, it was always more fun if he could be breaking a rule (or a law) or two. He was going through a stranger’s IP address. He could do anything, and it couldn’t be traced to him. It would be traced to whoever was stupid enough to leave their network unsecured.

  Once on the bank’s website, he entered a series of passwords. Soon he was looking at his balance. This account held a little over ten million dollars. He wired a hundred thousand to a stateside corporate bank account. In truth, he was the corporation, but it was less notable for a corporation to be receiving a hundred thousand dollars than an individual. He would hate to draw legal attention as a suspected terrorist or drug dealer.

  From there he transferred ten thousand to one of his online brokerage accounts, and made arrangements to have the rest of the money deposited into the same account in monthly installments of ten thousand dollars. At tax time he would report those transfers as salary. He enjoyed breaking laws, but the games he was playing these days didn’t involve cheating the IRS.

  He logged off the bank, and on to the brokerage account. It was time for some research. He started by running a stock screen. He was in a small cap sort of mood. In a few minutes he had a list of a few dozen small companies that didn’t have muc
h debt, had good earning growth, and a lot of volatility. Then he eliminated all the companies that were not near their twelve-month low prices. He was left with ten companies.

  His assumption was that these companies were either about to tank, or bounce back. He spent some time reading up on the companies until he found one that he felt had been unfairly hammered by the market. He placed an order for that stock.

  That bit of business done, he shut down his computer.

  As he was closing the cover on his computer, he noticed Jeremy walking by. He said, “Hello.”

  Jeremy stopped and returned the greeting, then asked what Aldous was up to.

  Aldous replied “I’ve been moving my vast fortunes around on the web.” He loved telling the truth when nobody would believe it.

  “Maybe I should have let you manage my money while I still had some.”

  The implication that Jeremy was out of money intrigued Aldous; he knew the kid was living well. He made a note to himself to try to find out the source of Jeremy’s money. “You wouldn’t want that, I would have found a way to keep it all for myself.” It was, of course, the truth.

  They both laughed, though there was a strained quality to it. Jeremy was nervous. Aldous always made Jeremy nervous, though he couldn’t explain why. Jeremy noticed Aldous’ Bible and said, “I didn’t realize you were religious.”

  Aldous replied, “I have a very personal relationship with God … and there is wealth in this book.”

  Monday February 10th

  10:00 p.m.

  The solar plexus is a cluster of nerves located just behind the point of the breastbone. It controls breathing. A blow to the solar plexus, such as the one Brent had just received, interferes with breathing – Brent had just had the wind knocked out of him. A blow to the solar plexus is intensely painful, possibly even more so than a blow of the same force to the groin.

  Brent tried to inhale, but could only bring in a trickle of air – his breath making a pathetic two-toned wheeze. He raised his hands to try to protect himself from further assault, but his attacker seized one hand and spun. Brent felt movement as he was thrown onto the bed next to Julie, his lover, but did not have the experience to understand that he was having judo used against him. As he splashed onto the bed, Brent had the odd thought that the spray of Julie’s blood was pretty.

  When he had agreed to this vacation with Julie, Brent’s biggest fear was that somehow someone would see them together and word would get back to their spouses, or worse, the school board. Julie was Brent’s secretary, and their affair could lead to them both being fired. That had seemed like a big worry until Brent had come back to the bed and breakfast with a bag of bottles of booze. Brent and Julie had been planning on going out, and wanted to start with a good buzz.

  Brent had known something was wrong the moment he had entered the room. The room hadn’t smelled right, but he couldn’t place the scent. Julie was lying on the bed, fully covered, and that didn’t seem right either. She should have been getting dressed. He called her name and she didn’t respond.

  Brent put the bag of booze down and nudged Julie’s leg. She didn’t move, but a crimson stain formed where he had touched the bedspread. Wordless, breathless, he pulled the cover back from Julie.

  Her body was covered in blood. The bed was covered in blood. Blood was the smell he hadn’t been able to place when he had entered the room. But it wasn’t the sight of blood that started Brent down the path to mindless screaming – it was the fact that Julie’s head was separated from her body by a gap of at least three inches.

  Brent drew a huge breath, but before he could scream, a strong hand pulled on his shoulder, turning him, and a fist found his solar plexus. His attacker was clad in black latex from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. The only skin visible was around his mouth and eyes, giving him the appearance of a warped and sinister minstrel singer.

  After he landed on the bed, his assailant’s mouth covered his mouth and nose, and there was a new sharp pain in his chest, and then Brent knew no more.

  Thursday February 13th

  10:00 p.m.

  It was a whim. Beer was involved in the decision, as was maybe a little desperation, but it was basically a whim that put Samantha, Jessica and Amber in a car at one in the morning in Richmond Kentucky on Valentine’s Day.

  Thursday night the girls had gone out drinking. Richmond was a good town for that. Playboy magazine had once ranked it as one of the top ten college party towns in the United States, and ever since then the students had been trying hard to keep that reputation. Some students had even chosen the school because of that reputation. At EKU, a lot of students liked starting their weekends early, on Thursdays (or sometimes Wednesdays, or even Tuesdays). But Jessica, Samantha and Amber hadn’t chosen to start their weekend early, they had chosen to go out on Thursday the thirteenth because they didn’t feel like facing the really depressing bar scene on Valentine’s Day. Especially a Valentine’s Day that fell on a weekend.

  In their minds there were few things more depressing than the thought of being in a bar without a date on Valentine’s Day. There is a certain desperation to going out on Valentine’s Day – almost an obligation to go home with someone else desperate, and yet there were few things less attractive than a desperate guy. (Being with a date in a bar on Valentine’s Day would also be on the depressing list. Who would want to be in a bar on a night you should be out being wined and dined at a fine restaurant?)

  But once they were out on Thursday, somehow it was starting to feel even more desperate to be avoiding the desperation.

  It was Amber’s idea to go to Mardi Gras. She said it before she had even thought about it, but just saying it was all it took. As soon as they heard the idea, everyone wanted to go. There was more discussion, but it was really just an odd dance where everyone thought they were convincing everyone else, even though their minds were already made up.

  Amber had been once before, but had been too young to enjoy it on an adult level. She had a lot of fun, but now understood how much her parents had shielded her from. Now she wanted to see what she had missed then. Everyone else had always wanted to go, and nobody had any tests or papers for at least a week. Amber explained that Tuesday was the big day, but things would be really heating up over the weekend, so it wouldn’t really matter if they missed it. They declared that their girls’ night out was becoming their girls’ road-trip weekend. In the end, the only real decision was which car to take.

  Jessica’s Cavalier was the biggest, so they settled on that. After making a big show of ‘synchronising their watches’ (really just checking the time) and declaring that Operation Gras Invasion was a go, they gave themselves an hour to go home and pack. All things considered, the two hours it actually took was not bad. They fell into Jessica’s car at one in the morning, with nowhere near military precision. When they finally hit the road, the car was a jumble of pillows, blankets, clothes, Samantha’s forensics textbooks, Jessica’s criminology textbooks, and Amber’s psychology textbooks. Each of them shared the thought that skipping a day of class wouldn’t be too bad if they spent a couple of hours studying.

  The books were buried for the duration of the trip on the floorboards of the back seat before four thirty a.m. when they took their first rest stop.

  Friday February 14th

  9:00 a.m.

  Sarah stopped at a liquor store on her way into the French Quarter. She liked paying her debts promptly, and she liked rewarding prompt service. She knew that it had been plain dumb luck that had let her meet Jeremy. She knew that she had drawn his attention before their encounter with the drunk. She knew that Marie Laveau was a pile of dust and maybe a few chunks of bone. She knew these things, but still felt less than sure of them. She had made a bargain, even though it was with someone she knew couldn’t bargain. Dead people can’t play matchmaker for the living, not even dead voodoo queens.

&nbs
p; Even though she thought the whole thing was ridiculous, she felt like she owed the old, dead voodoo queen a debt. She felt silly for feeling that way, but the only way she could think of to get over the feeling that she should pay her debt to Marie and get on with enjoying her time with Jeremy was to go ahead and pay it.

  Once in the store she realized that other than liquor she had no idea what she was planning to buy. Rum seemed like a good, traditional choice, but which brand? Admiral Jack caught her eye … it was the same brand that someone had left the week before when Sarah had asked her favor. It felt like the right choice, and since she was being silly and superstitious anyway, she decided to go with her feeling.

  The cemetery is part city and part maze and, much to her embarrassment, Sarah made a wrong turn. Not that the cemetery is big enough to stay lost for long if you use your brain … walk in one direction till you hit the wall, then follow the wall until you find your bearings.

  Sarah wandered by the huge tomb that became famous in the movie Easy Rider. That scene had offended the church so much that it was the last movie the church allowed to be shot in this cemetery. She had heard that the tomb was now used as a tool storage shed. She didn’t know if she believed that rumor, but she also wasn’t about to open the door to find out.

  Eventually she found herself at Marie’s tomb. A tourist was taking a picture of a ceramic lizard planter, which someone had left as an offering. The planter was bright and colorful, though not in a particularly pleasant way. The tourist was apparently looking for something more than a snapshot; he kept changing angles and distances. One minute he was standing next to the tomb, then he was lying down in front of it, then he was as far back as he could get from it. Sarah wondered if it would be possible to get an aesthetically pleasing picture of the somewhat hideous planter.