“And just what the hell does that mean?”
The smile disappears. Inara’s thumb rubs against the sad dragon. After a moment, she straightens and looks the woman in the eye. “It means you’re too real for her to handle yet. The past two days have been too much. We’ve spent so long living in someone else’s terrible fantasy that we don’t know how to be real anymore. It’ll come, in time, but your real is very . . .” She glances at the knot of aides and staff members hovering a respectful distance away. “Very public,” she says finally. “If you can get rid of the entourage, maybe it’ll be easier for her.”
“We’re just trying to get to the bottom of this.”
“Isn’t that the FBI’s job?”
The senator stares at her. “She’s my daughter. I’m not just going to sit by and watch—”
“Like every other parent?”
Victor winces again.
“You stand for the law, Senator. Sometimes that means standing back to let it work.”
Eddison spins to hit the call button for the elevator again. Victor can see his shoulders shaking.
But Inara isn’t done yet. “Sometimes it means being mother or senator, not both. I think she’d like to see her mother, but with what she’s been through, the adjustments she’ll have to make, I don’t think she can handle the senator. Now, if you’ll please excuse us, we need to check in on Ravenna and the others.” The elevator dings and she steps through as soon as the doors open. Ramirez and Eddison join her.
Victor waves them up. The senator may be speechless for the moment, but that never seems to last long.
And it doesn’t. “I’ve been informed that that woman, Lorraine, was complicit in what was done to my daughter. I promise you, Agent, if I hear even the slightest hint that that girl is part of this, I will bring the full weight—”
“Senator. Let us do our job. If you want to know what happened to your daughter, if you want to get to the truth, you have to let us do our job.” He reaches out to touch her elbow. “I have a daughter only a little younger than Patrice. I promise you, this is not something I take lightly. They are incredibly strong young women who have been through hell, and I will honor them by giving them my best, but you have to take a step away.”
“Could you?” she asks shrewdly.
“I hope I never find out.”
“God help you, Agent, if this blows up in your face.”
Victor watches her walk away, then hits the Up button. As he waits for the elevator, he can see her rejoin her knot of people, giving orders and asking questions, her younger staff members scrambling to respond. The older ones are steadier, less overwhelmed.
He rides up to the fourth floor and steps out into a noticeable hush, so different from the crammed and frantic lobby. The others have waited for him. A cluster of doctors and nurses talk at the nurses’ station, but the presence of armed guards at the doors keeps the volume down.
One of the nurses waves at Ramirez. “Need to talk to the girls again?”
“We have someone else who needs to see them.” She points to the girl and the nurse follows her gesture with an easy smile.
“Ah, yes, I remember you. How are your hands doing?”
She holds them up for the nurse’s inspection.
“The stitches are clean, and there’s no swelling,” she murmurs. “That’s a good thing. Are you picking at the scabs from the smaller wounds?”
“A little?”
“Well, don’t do it anymore. You want these to heal. Let’s get some bandages on these just in case.”
Within minutes, her hands are once against wrapped in gauze that’s carefully taped around her fingers to allow for some mobility. As long as the nurse has her stationary anyway, she does a quick check of the smaller injuries on her side and arm.
“You look good, sweetie,” the woman concludes, one hand on her shoulder. “Agent, you can take her now.”
The girl salutes, making the nurse wave her off with a smile.
As they come to the first of the doors, Inara takes a slow breath, pulling the little blue dragon back out for comfort. “I can’t guess what the dynamic is going to be,” she confesses.
Victor pats her shoulder. “Go and find out.”
The local officer standing guard awkwardly shifts his weight. “They’re all two doors down.”
“All?” Eddison asks sharply.
“They insisted.”
“They being the traumatized young women?”
“Yes, sir.” He pulls off his hat to scratch at his flyaway blond hair. “One of them taught me a few phrases I’ve never heard even on drug busts.”
“Probably Bliss,” murmurs the girl. Rather than argue with the man, she simply walks down another two doors, followed belatedly by the trio of agents, and nods to the officer at that post. “May I go in?”
He glances to the agents, who all nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
Though individual words and voices are indistinct, they can hear the sound of conversation through the wall. It stops as soon as the door swings open, then peaks when the inhabitants of the room see the girl.
“Maya!” A black and white bare-assed blur flies across the room and into the girl’s arms. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Hello, Bliss.” Patting the smaller girl’s messy black curls, she looks around the room. Somehow the two-bed room has four beds in it. All of the walking wounded are clustered on the beds of the more seriously injured, holding hands or sitting with arms around shoulders or waists. A few of the braver parents sit on hard chairs beside the beds, but most of them are clustered against the far wall talking amongst themselves while still keeping an eye on their daughters.
Victor leans against the wall with a smile, watching the smallest shadow creep between two of the beds to work her way between the two young women. It’s a joy to see the girl’s gentle smile, how tightly she holds the child against her.
“Hello, Keely. I met your parents.”
“I think I hurt them,” whispers Keely, but Inara shakes her head.
“They’re just scared. Be patient with them, and be patient with yourself.”
Victor and his partners hover near the door for nearly an hour, watching the young women laugh and toss jokes and insults back and forth, as they comfort the occasional breakdown or tears. Despite her obvious distaste for it, the girl allows herself to be introduced to the parents. She listens to them patiently as they tell her all about their searches for their daughters, how they never gave up hope, and the only sign of her cynicism is the cocked eyebrow that sends Danelle into giggles strong enough to set off her heart monitor.
Ravenna he can identify—she looks like a younger version of her mother—and he watches their short conversation intently, wishing he could hear any of it. The senator’s daughter has bandages wrapped around most of one leg. Ravenna’s the dancer, he remembers. As Inara gently touches the bandages, he wonders how this will affect that.
He can name some of the other Butterflies from her stories. For others he has to listen for the names they toss around, try to pin them to their owners. With the exception of Keely, never renamed, none of them use their original names. It’s still the names from the Garden on their tongues, on their minds, and he can see the parents cringe every time. Inara said that sometimes it was easier to forget; for the first time, he wonders if any of them did. Or perhaps she’s right, and they’re not ready for this to be real yet.
It’s tempting to stay there longer, to bask in the sight to push back some of the horrors of the past few days, but Victor can’t relax into it completely. There’s more she has to see, and more she has yet to tell them.
More they need to know.
He lifts his wrist to check his watch and immediately Inara’s eyes are on him, a question that doesn’t need words. He nods. She sighs, closing her eyes for a moment to collect herself, then starts the process of reassuring everyone she’ll be back. She’s almost back to the door when Bliss catches her hand.
> “How much have you told them?” she asks bluntly.
“Most of what’s important.”
“And what have they told you?”
“Avery’s dead. The Gardener is likely to survive to stand trial.”
“So we’ll all have to talk.”
“It’s time, and look at it this way: maybe the FBI will be easier to tell than your parents.”
Bliss grimaces.
“Her parents are on their way,” Ramirez whispers to Victor, “flying over the Atlantic from her father’s new teaching position in Paris. It’s hard to tell whether they gave up looking for her, or if they simply had to do what was best for the children they still had.”
From her expression, it’s clear Bliss isn’t inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
With a last hug for Keely, Inara leaves the room with Victor and Eddison; Ramirez remains behind to talk with the parents. They pass a string of empty rooms with guards at the doors, all the rooms the girls are supposed to be in but aren’t, then a run of unoccupied rooms that form a buffer between the girls and the rooms at the far end of the hall, with their own guards.
When they stop, Eddison glances in the door’s small window and shoots his partner a curious look. Victor simply nods. “I’ll wait out here,” the younger man says.
Victor opens the door, ushers the girl through, and closes it carefully behind them.
The man on the bed is hooked into an unbelievable array of machines, all beeping softly with their own sounds and rhythms. A nasal cannula feeds oxygen into his system, but an intubation kit stands nearby for the very real possibility of being needed. Dressings obscure much of what the blanket doesn’t cover, some of them bandages, some of them glistening salves and synthetic materials to draw the heat out of the burns and prevent infection. The burns extend to one side of his scalp, a bubbling mess of discolored, blistered skin.
The girl stares at him with wide eyes, her feet rooted barely a yard inside the room.
“His name is Geoffrey MacIntosh,” Victor tells her gently. “He isn’t the Gardener anymore. He has a name and a host of disfiguring injuries, and he isn’t the god of the Garden anymore. He never will be again. His name is Geoffrey MacIntosh, and he’ll be brought to trial for everything he’s done. This man cannot hurt you anymore.”
“What about Eleanor? His wife?” she whispers.
“She’s in the next room so they can monitor her heart; she collapsed at the house. As far as we can tell, she never knew about any of this.”
“And Lorraine?”
“A few doors down. She’s being questioned to determine the extent to which she can be charged for her part in all of this. There will be a number of psychological evaluations before that’s decided.”
He can see the name take shape on her lips, but she doesn’t ask. She sinks down into one of the hard chairs against the wall, leaning forward against her knees to study the unconscious man in the hospital bed. “None of us had ever seen him so angry,” she says in a tiny voice. “Not even for all the harm that Avery caused. He was furious.”
He offers her his hand and tries to hide his surprise when she actually takes it, the gauze rubbing against his skin.
“None of us had ever seen him like that.”
The three of them stood at the far end of the Garden, closest to the door, and the Gardener had clearly flipped his shit. He was screaming at Desmond, and there was Avery, looking smug as hell. I guess he figured his father wasn’t too upset about Keely anymore.
Rather than move closer, I inspected what I could see of the Garden. There had been people there, that much was clear. Boot prints were visible in the sand and some of the plants were trampled. Someone had even left a gum wrapper on the stream bank. Had the officers just been incurious? Had the Gardener given them an explanation that made sense?
“The dimensions,” whispered Bliss. “If he brought down all the walls, they may not have realized there were hallways. There are tracks on both sides of the main doorway.”
So maybe they had looked, and just couldn’t find us.
Desmond had actually made the call.
My heart hurt because I wanted to be proud of him, but really, all I could think was it’s about fucking time. Knowing we were kidnapped, violated, murdered, and displayed wasn’t enough, but at least the raped and brutalized twelve-year-old finally was.
“This is wrong!” he cried when his father finally took a breath. “Taking them is wrong, keeping them is wrong, and killing them is wrong!”
“That is not your decision to make!”
“Yes, it is! Because it’s against the law!”
His father slapped him so hard he stumbled back and fell. “This is my home, and my garden. Here, I am the law, and you went against that.”
Laughing like a little boy at Christmas, Avery disappeared and came back only moments later with a bamboo cane, probably the same one that had been used on him the day before. Seriously, a cane. Who the fuck canes their grown children? Actually, who canes their children at any age? But Avery handed the cane to his father and tackled his younger brother, tearing at his clothing until his back and part of his ass were bare.
“This is for your own good, Desmond,” the Gardener said as he rolled up his sleeves. Desmond struggled, but Avery tucked him into a headlock.
With Keely’s face pressed to my stomach so she couldn’t see, we stood and watched as the Gardener beat his son with the cane. It left bright red marks that quickly swelled into welts and Avery, the sick fuck, cheered with every impact. Desmond continued to struggle but didn’t cry out, despite how much it had to hurt. The Gardener counted them out, and after twenty blows, he tossed the bamboo away from him.
Avery’s cheers stopped. “That’s it?” he demanded. “You gave me that many for branding the bitch!”
I pressed a hand against my hip and felt the thick scar tissue left from that brand. Were twenty blows of a cane equivalent?
“Avery, stay out of this.”
“No! He could have put us both in prison, on death row even, and you let him off with twenty?” He dropped his brother to the sandy path and got back to his feet. “He nearly destroyed everything you’ve been working toward for thirty years. He turned his back on what it means to be your son. He turned his back on you!”
“Avery, I told you—”
Avery pulled something from the back of his belt, and suddenly it didn’t matter what his father had told him. Avery had the room.
A gun will do that.
“You gave him everything!” he yelled, pointing the gun at his brother. “Your precious Desmond, who never did a thing to help you stock the Garden, and you were so damn proud of him. ‘The Butterflies like him.’ ‘He doesn’t hurt them.’ ‘He understands them better.’ Who gives a shit? I’m your son too, your firstborn. I’m the one you’re supposed to be proud of.”
His father held his hands up, staring at the gun. “Avery, I was always proud of you—”
“No, you were scared of me. Even I know the difference in that, Father.”
“Avery, please put the gun down. There’s no place for that here.”
“There’s no place for that here,” he echoed with a sneer. “That’s what you’ve always said about anything I wanted!”
With a deep, pained groan, Desmond rolled onto his back and propped himself up on his elbows.
The gun went off.
Desmond fell back to the path with a cry, blood blooming across the breast of his tattered shirt. The Gardener lurched forward with a sob and the gun went off again, and the Gardener fell to his knees, clutching his side.
I thrust Keely at Danelle and shoved them both down behind a boulder. “Stay here,” I hissed.
Bliss grabbed my hand. “Is he worth it?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “But he did call.”
With a sad shake of her head, she let go, and I raced forward from the clutch of girls. I was almost to Desmond when Avery grabbed me by the hair and
yanked me off my feet.
“And here’s the bitch herself, the little queen of the Garden.” He pistol-whipped me so hard my ears rang, and part of the gun sliced my cheek with the impact. Dropping the gun, he kicked me onto my knees and fumbled at his belt. “Well I’m the king of the Garden now, so you’d better learn to show me some respect.”
“You put that near my mouth and I’ll bite it off,” I snarled, and from behind the boulder, Bliss cheered.
He hit me again, and again, and raised his hand to do it once more when Nazira’s voice stopped him.
“I can hear sirens!”
I couldn’t hear anything but the bells going off inside my skull, but some of the other girls said they could hear them too. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to distract him or if the sirens were real.
Avery dropped me and ran through the Garden to take the path up the cliff to see for himself. I crawled to Desmond, who was trying to keep pressure on his chest with one hand. I moved his hands away and did it myself, his blood warm and sticky as it pumped against my palm. “Please don’t die,” I whispered.
He weakly squeezed my hand, but otherwise didn’t try to answer.
The Gardener groaned and pulled himself to his son’s other side. “Desmond? Desmond, answer me!”
The pale green eyes—his father’s eyes—fluttered open. “The only way to protect them from him is to let them go,” he panted. Sweat beaded his face. “He’ll kill them all, and they’ll be in pain at every moment.”
“Just stay awake, Desmond,” his father pleaded. “We’ll get you to the hospital and we’ll figure this out. Maya, keep pressure on it!”
I hadn’t stopped.
But now I could hear the sirens.
Avery jumped and swore atop the cliff, and the girls raced forward to surround us, probably figuring the Gardener and Desmond were a safer bet than Avery-off-the-deep-end. Even Lorraine was clustered with us, and no one tried to brush her away. Bliss picked up the gun with shaking hands, but she kept her eyes trained on Avery.
And the sirens got louder.
“I can’t figure out why they came back,” she whispers, clutching his hand for dear life. “They didn’t find anything the first time, right? Or the Gardener wouldn’t have lifted the walls.”
The Butterfly Garden Page 25