Sky Garden

by Jenny Schwartz

  “Okay.” She knew he should have both hands for the road, but just for an instant, she clasped his hand and was reassured by his answering squeeze. She let him go.

  Turning into the street to the Horry Museum was the oddest sensation, as if she’d been away for years or as if this was a place she’d known only in dreams. She was home, and yet, she didn’t belong; an interloper who’d find no comfort, here.

  She stretched across to Nick as he double-parked, and kissed him.

  He was familiar and warm, hungry and distant. Conflicted.

  “Love you, handsome.” She caressed his stubbled jaw, a fleeting touch, and slipped out of the car.

  “Lanie!”

  Two cars and a cab beeped impatiently.

  The wrong place and too late for words. She waved, watching Nick drive away, aware that he in turn watched her in the rear vision mirror. The angle of his head was unmistakable.

  The car vanished around the corner, and she was alone on the street in cluttered Bloomsbury, with its upmarket, self-conscious Englishness, and a preoccupied tourist with a bulky camera, bumping her shoulder.

  Lanie sighed, unable to regret telling Nick she loved him, but cursing her timing. She entered the narrow laneway between the museum and its neighbor, and fumbled in her bag for the key to the outside staircase in the rear yard, got the padlock opened and eased in before locking it behind her. Then she climbed.

  Although it wasn’t actually raining on her, the clouds were low and gray overhead, and underfoot the iron steps were slick with wet. She regretted the high-heeled, expensive and impractical shoes she wore. The bars of the staircase gave way to open railing as she spiraled upwards, dizzy at seeing the receding ground through the gaps in the rises. It was a relief to reach the roof.

  She maneuvered carefully over the abutment of staircase to roof, and found herself facing the closed blinds of her flat. They looked incredibly unwelcoming. A few months ago, she’d kept the blinds open, but now with the roof garden, more visitors—volunteers and their friends—were taking the elevator to the roof to enjoy the summer, so for her own privacy, she’d closed all the blinds and curtains before going away.

  It gave the flat a sullen air, and meant that when she opened the door, not only did the staleness of an unoccupied dwelling envelop her, so, too, did darkness.

  “Welcome home,” she said ironically. The attempt at humor clunked. She dropped her bag just inside the door and began opening the windows; but, unable to stay in the small space, she abandoned the effort and walked outside.

  Despite the gray day and the chill of the wind sweeping over the roof, she stood and listened to the city. The noise of it, though muted, came up to her and engulfed her in loneliness.

  Head drooping, shoulders dropping, she began to cry.

  Lanie found it difficult to pick up the rhythms of life at the museum. The volunteers were sympathetic and supportive, but also distracted. Summer waned. People were stealing weekends away and doing final odd jobs at home, wanting to make the best of the weather. Some of her restlessness was the result of her own annoying sense of displacement. The scent of camphor made her nose itch. So many of Horry’s treasures had been rescued from mothballs and they carried the scent of their incarceration with them, giving the museum a fusty air.

  She missed Waterhill. She hadn’t expected to, hadn’t thought it possible to fall in love with a place so completely, especially under such sad circumstances, but she had. She missed the vastness of its rooms and the way its history lived and accommodated modern needs. She missed its beautiful setting and the peace of it, and the fact that the estate was a growing, living business that meant something to its people.

  She missed Nick.

  He hadn’t called her. Nor had he responded to her messages.

  The museum closed for the day and Lanie got out the vacuum cleaner and clambered up and down the step-ladder, vacuuming the heavy curtains in the drawing room and dining room and in the library. She got hot and sweaty, felt dirty and disgusting, and kept going.

  She’d phoned her mum the previous night, and her mum had advised giving Nick space.

  “He knows where you are.”

  But Lanie didn’t know where he was. Pride and loneliness fought. So far she’d resisted messaging Nelson for news of Nick, but it was a close contest. In a couple of days, she’d cave and phone Nelson if Nick didn’t respond to her.

  “Everyone grieves differently,” her mum had said.

  Lanie emptied the vacuum cleaner, coughed up a lung at the dust, and slammed the vacuum cleaner back into its cupboard. She needed a shower, and wouldn’t think of the shower she’d shared with Nick in his hotel room.

  A part-time gardener had been added to the museum’s staff, and she’d been in that day. So the roof garden looked tidy. Dead blooms had been removed, weeds—yes, on the roof, in pots and among the herbs and sedum—had been pulled, and the whole area swept and tidied.

  Lanie collapsed onto the bench seating. The air was muggy and still, a storm grumbling in the distance.

  Her mum had advised patience and hope. “For Nick, maybe it’s like losing his mum again. But now he has an adult’s insight into the situation. It’ll be harsh, but he has a chance to reset the pattern of his life, to understand his dad and forgive him.”

  If Nick had learned the power of love.

  She’d said she loved him. She’d said it impulsively and naturally. Then she’d watched him leave.

  Unfair. It was unfair of her to expect more from him. He had to deal with his demons.

  And, apparently, she had to deal with hers.

  Marshall hailed her from the next roof.

  Unwillingly, she walked across to him. The last thing she wanted was to be social. She was sweaty, grimy and unhappy. “How are you?”

  “Oh fine, fine. I saw you in the papers, tonight.”

  An acute, sideways glance that brought Lanie’s every instinct on alert.

  “Not the front page, but an article,” Marshall continued. “They got a photo of you standing between Nick and his dad. Someone connected your name to that bastard, Purvis. It took them long enough.”

  Four days. The Hollywood threesome scandal must have distracted the media.

  Lanie consciously controlled her actions, not giving away her inner chill by hugging her arms around herself. But she wanted to. “Was it bad?” She meant the article.

  “Depends.” There was no hurrying Marshall. “Depends who sees it.”

  She knew what he meant. Who he meant. The old terror shrouded her. She folded her arms. “Surely it would put him off, if anything. I had no idea Nick’s family was so important.” The Tawes weren’t simply an old family. They were connected to everyone and Chloe…Lanie had been shocked to learn how wealthy Chloe had been in her own right. “No one in their right mind would mess with the Taweses.”

  So what did that make her? She hadn’t simply messed with them. She’d tried to reconcile them.

  “Could be.” Marshall opened a feed bin. Corn rattled and the pigeons’ cooing warbled to a low thrumming demand. “Or it could be that with allies, you went from negligible threat to real one. I don’t like to worry you, Lanie. And it could be nothing, probably is nothing, but if you sense anything that feels wrong, call Ann.”

  The cobwebby net of sticky, hated suspense encased her, again.

  Lanie didn’t have to call Ann. The detective-inspector turned up in person the next morning, along with a front page newspaper article featuring Lanie and her identity as “the one that got away” from a serial killer.

  “I’ve seen it.” Lanie let Ann into the museum and led the way through to its kitchen. She had the electric kettle out and boiling, and made them both instant coffees. She’d been woken early with phone calls from her family. They’d been worried for her peace of mind. Knowing more than them, she worried for her safety. What if Marshall was right?

  She blew on her coffee. “This will push him, won’t it? Marshall said something yeste
rday. He said that having the backing of the Tawes family makes me more of a threat. If I knew anything and said anything, Nick has the power to make people listen. Even if I only suspected, even the vaguest hint could be acted on. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  For these last horrible days, she’d thought only of Nick.

  “We can’t know if this will have any effect at all,” Ann said dampeningly. She wore discreet make-up and a sensible trouser suit in dark blue. She could have been on her way to work as an accountant. Instead, she worked in one of the toughest crime squads; worked and was respected. Her dark eyes were tired, though. Haunted.

  “But you’re here.” Lanie pointed out the obvious.

  Ann was too busy to waste time on inessentials like denial. If she was visiting Lanie, then she saw a reason to cram it into an overcrowded day. “I just want you to stay alert. Stay calm. Don’t obsess. But if something feels wrong, call me.”

  The same advice that Marshall had given Lanie.

  Ann finished her coffee and Lanie let her out the kitchen door. She listened to Ann’s brisk footsteps fade down the laneway. Only then did she close and lock the door, refill the vase of anemones with fresh water, and climb the servants’ stairs to her first floor office. She still had half an hour before the museum opened in which she could respond to, and hopefully calm, her family’s concern.

  The click of the back door took her by surprise.

  She swung about, steadying herself with a hand on the walls either side of the narrow staircase, and looked down. “Rupa!”

  “Good morning, Lanie.” Rupa had finally used her key to the museum rather than entering as a visitor.

  Velma pushed in behind her.

  Lanie descended the stairs. “Is something wrong? You’re not scheduled for today.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with us.” Velma shook out her raincoat and hung it over a coat stand in the far, dark corner.

  “I saw the newspaper reports,” Rupa said softly. “I am so sorry that the media is…”

  “Muck-raking,” Velma contributed.

  “Yes. Being nasty and intrusive. I worried that they might bother you, here. So I called Velma and we will conduct the tours, today.”

  “Thank you,” Lanie whispered, near to tears at the unexpected kindness.

  “Go, go upstairs.” They shooed her off.

  Inside her office, with the door safely closed, Lanie checked her phone, but there were no messages from Nick. She tried to reassure herself.

  He probably hadn’t seen the media coverage that linked him to a notorious serial killer’s surviving victim. He wasn’t obsessed with keeping up with current affairs, and definitely not with gossip. Nor could he know of the threat she’d kept from him, so he wouldn’t see any need to worry about the media coverage even if he did see it.

  Yet for all her determined common sense, she wanted him to phone and reassure her. Alone in her office, with its restrained colors and a whimsical fox and cubs netsuke beside the laptop, she was fighting an irrational fear that disgust at her notoriety was keeping Nick silent and distant.

  It was ridiculous. She knew his issues were with his father and that he grieved for Chloe. She was being silly, making this about her.

  “Should I have told him the full truth?” She stood at the window and felt the chill of the glass against her palm. She felt edgy and hemmed in. She wanted to chase Nick down, wherever he was in the world.

  But when could she have confided that the serial killer had had an ally, one who might come after her? She was in deep with Nick, but they hadn’t been a couple for long. In their short time together, she hadn’t wanted to burden their relationship. She’d always been aware of his tendency to distance, his emotional wariness. Should she have trusted him with the secret?

  Would she be alone, now, if she had?

  Richard walked in just before lunch-time. Rupa knocked at Lanie’s office door and announced him.

  “Richard?” Less a greeting than a startled question, Lanie stood up behind her desk.

  “Good afternoon, Lanie. Do you have time for lunch with me?”

  “Yes. Of course.” She was glad that she’d slipped back into her 1950s costumes. They didn’t give her the comfort they once had, but at least the wine red suit could hold its own with Richard’s austere and expensive tailoring.

  He took her to lunch at his club.

  Nick knew he wasn’t behaving well, but knowing it and doing something about it were apparently totally different. Emotional overload had crashed his system. He’d spent half his life semi-detached from life. Boarding school, university, an international design business, he hadn’t stayed long anywhere, hadn’t tried to belong anywhere, not since his mum died.

  Now Chloe’s death had ripped open that old scar and he was dealing with his teenage grief as well as present issues.

  Issues like his dad.

  Nick gripped the roof railing hard. He’d been a teenager the last time he lived at Waterhill and observed Richard’s daily life. These last days at Waterhill, even with the stresses and strains of Chloe’s funeral, had revealed the demands of it; demands he hadn’t consciously seen before, but had fled, anyway. The demands and responsibilities that would be his one day, and his children’s.

  The idea of children tugged at his heart. Energy, innocence and desperate hope.

  The children of the Mexico City garden had welcomed him and Nelson back with a song and sympathy cards for him. Those cards were in his luggage. A hefty donation was in the school’s bank account. Children were why you built the future, and preserved the past.

  The crew had wrapped up filming in Mexico and flown straight to Morocco. The schedule wasn’t ideal by anyone’s standard. They were trying to make up time. Nelson had a new project under development, something sparked by his conversations in Mexico, something dangerous and crime-related that had him alert and eager in contrast to Nick’s moroseness.

  Nick was tired, angry and guilty. Most of his anger was self-directed. He hated people who wallowed in their emotions, and that’s what he was doing.

  Lanie’s messages carefully refrained from reproaching him or even asking anything of him. Yet he hadn’t answered any, only belatedly sent a text to let her know that he was in Morocco, in the seaside town of Essaouira.

  This rooftop garden had been Nelson’s choice to pad out the television program. There was nothing startling in the design or challenging in its installation. Nelson had had an eye for its visual appeal. This was the garden that didn’t need plants. It relied for effect on the careful positioning of furniture and statues, lighting and the view.

  Nick turned, putting his back to the railing, looking across the garden and trying to avoid eye contact with any of the too many people present.

  They were filming at night to capture what Nelson referred to as “the Arabian Nights vibe”. Lanterns, strategically placed, created pools of light and shadow, and framed the view across the port and the Mediterranean Sea. The water feature was the centerpiece, a fountain of reflected moonlight set in a massive, low blue bowl. The vivid blue was of the shade meant to repel the evil eye.

  It wasn’t working.

  Nick grimaced and forced himself into the melee.

  Nelson had invited journalists to this final filming in Morocco, and worse luck, some had accepted. Only, they weren’t interested in roof gardens or even in Nick.

  A journalist pounced. “So, how did you meet Lanie Briers?” The journalist had been introduced as a travel-writer, “fortunately” holidaying in Morocco. He had the most annoying Brummie accent.

  Or maybe it was his persistence that drove Nick mad? “I’m here to talk about the garden.”

  “What garden? Concrete and lights.” The journalist dismissed it.

  Nick’s fists clenched.

  Eyes wide, Nelson signaled to stay calm, even as he disengaged from conversation with a local journalist and prepared to dash to the rescue.

  “So.” The Brummie journalist affected
a man-to-man attitude. “Did Lanie’s terrible ordeal leave her with any hang ups? Are they affecting your relationship?”

  Nelson grabbed Nick’s arm and twisted it behind his back.

  Nick grunted, but the impulse to punch the obnoxious bastard was reined in.

  The journalist eyed their tussle. “What would you do if anyone threatened Lanie again?”

  Nelson released his grip and dusted off his hands. The message was clear: he disdained to protect idiots.

  Nick stood half a foot taller than the journalist. He made the most of that difference in size, and didn’t feel guilty about it. He invaded the smaller man’s space. “If anyone bothers Lanie, as much as sneezes in her direction, I’ll destroy them.”

  “Okay, mate.” Nelson snared the journalist in an apparently friendly headlock. “Let’s get you a drink.”

  “Actually.” The guy tried to shrug off Nelson.

  Good luck with that. Nelson had been on the school wrestling team—and he liked Lanie.

  Nick strode back to the edge of the roof and stood looking out across the port. Lights bobbed on the prow of boats and moonlight tipped the shallow waves in silver. He heard the party breaking up behind him, but didn’t look around. Doing the polite was beyond him.

  Finally, Nelson came and stood beside him.

  “I’ve got to go home,” Nick said.

  “To Lanie?” His friend’s voice was neutral.

  “Yes.”

  “About bloody time,” Nelson said. “She’s a brilliant girl. About time you showed some sense. You have a great life, Nick. Stop running away from it.”

  His response stopped Nick cold. He’d expected resistance, a reminder of schedules, and he’d been ready to tell his friend that it could all go to hell. What mattered was Lanie.

  Damn him. He hadn’t thought. He’d been so caught up in his own issues that he hadn’t considered Lanie’s courage. She had stood by him and his dad when she must have known what that would do for her privacy. Surviving her ordeal with the killer Purvis had made her a celebrity. She’d risked starting up the media craziness for him, and he’d abandoned her to it.