Garden of Evil Page 7

  He hesitated for a moment, and then he sat. She sat, too, with her knees tight together and her back very straight, although she ceaselessly fiddled with her bracelet.

  ‘I guess the police have been keeping you up to date,’ said Jim. ‘They still can’t work out how anybody could have done it. You know, up on the ceiling like that. Or why they would have wanted to.’

  Jane said, ‘They told me that they found her clothes and her bag in the changing rooms. That’s how they found out who she was.

  Jim nodded. Detective Carroll had told him that, too.

  ‘They had washed her before I identified her,’ Jane went on, ‘but they showed me a photograph of what she looked like when they found her, with all of that white paint all over face. You know, just in case it meant anything significant.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jim. If it did, I can’t imagine what. It made her look like a statue.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim.

  There was a very long pause between them, and then Jane said, ‘She was looking forward so much to seeing you. To getting to know you.’

  ‘Did she plan on telling me who she was?’

  ‘Eventually, yes. I think so.’

  ‘But not if I turned out to be some obnoxious bastard who smelled of liniment and always gave her bad marks?’

  ‘Now you’re being unfair.’

  ‘Oh, I see. And it was fair of you to give birth to her without even letting me know?’

  ‘Jim, please. That was a long time ago. We were both a lot younger then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim. ‘I guess I should have stood up to your mother, shouldn’t I? What a wimp I was.’

  ‘Oh, God, Jim, you weren’t to blame. Nobody could ever stand up to my mother, not even my father.’

  ‘I thought she was hell-bent on you getting rid of it.’ He paused, and then corrected himself. ‘Getting rid of her, I mean. Of Bethany.’

  Jane nodded. ‘She was at first, but she was a very twisted woman, my mother. I think she got more pleasure out of my keeping our baby, and you not knowing about it, than you believing that I had had an abortion.’

  Jim shook his head in disbelief. ‘She hated me as much as that?’

  ‘It wasn’t you she hated, Jim. It was me. She was jealous of me from the moment I was born. But she knew how much I loved you. And she knew that everything that hurt you hurt me just as much.’

  ‘Jesus. Where is she now? I should go round and tell her what a goddamned bitch she is.’

  ‘You can if you like. She’s in the Union Cemetery in Brentwood, next to her own mother, who was even more of a bitch than she was. You want the plot number?’

  ‘So, what?’ said Jim, after a while. He looked around the conservatory. ‘You married now?’

  ‘Yes. My married name’s Edwards.’

  ‘Happy?’

  ‘That’s a question you should never ask a married woman. You know that.’

  ‘Oh. OK. What was she like? Bethany?’

  Jane’s eyes began to glitter with tears, but she managed to smile. ‘Pretty. Very pretty. Very petite. She always had messy hair, just like you. She loved poetry and she loved music and she loved to dance.

  ‘You got some pictures?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll give you some that you can take away with you. I have some new ones which were taken only a couple of weeks ago, at her church summer fair.’

  ‘She belonged to a church?’

  Jane stood up and went across to a brown wicker bureau. She opened one of the top drawers and took out a folder of photographs. ‘I always brought her up to be God-fearing, Jim. We used to go to communion every Sunday and she would sing like a little angel. Lately, though, she found this new church, and she’s being going two or three times a week. Well – she was going two or three times a week.’

  She was silent for a few moments and Jim knew that she couldn’t speak.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s been a terrible shock for you.’

  Jane handed him some photographs of a young girl in a long white muslin dress and flowers in her hair, dancing barefoot through an apple orchard. She wasn’t just pretty, she was beautiful, and she looked so happy.

  When he came to the third photograph, however, he saw a group of young people standing in the background, between the trees. They were all dressed in white, too, even the boys. He peered closer, and one of them looked distinctly familiar, even though his face was turned away from the camera.

  He looked at the fourth photograph, and the fifth, and the sixth, and there he was – staring directly at the camera this time, with a shining smile on his face. It was Simon Silence.

  Jim said to Jane, ‘What church is this? Did you ever visit it yourself?’

  ‘No,’ said Jane. ‘Bethany said they had a chapel on Lookout Mountain Road, in Laurel Canyon, but they also had a country place near Bakersfield. That’s where these pictures were taken.’

  ‘The Church of the Divine Conquest,’ said Jim.

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it, let’s put it that way.’

  Jane frowned at him. ‘You don’t think that what happened to Bethany had anything to with her church, do you? She always loved going there. It always seemed to give her such a buzz, you know? Such confidence. She always seemed to have so much more confidence than I ever did at her age. Especially with boys.’

  ‘The natural order of things,’ said Jim. ‘Men and women, both equal.’

  ‘That is so strange,’ Jane told him. She was standing against the muted sunlight with the folder of photographs in her hand. ‘That’s exactly what Bethany always used to say, over and over. “The natural order of things.”’

  After Detective Brennan and Detective Carroll had told Jim about Bethany, Dr Ehrlichman had told Jim that he could take the rest of the day off, but Jim didn’t really see the point of that. What was he going to do, go home and drink five cans of Fat Tire Ale and talk to Tibbles about the meaning of life? And, what was even more painful, the meaning of death?

  Before he left, Jim stood on the doorstep and said to Jane, ‘Maybe I can come around again sometime? We both have a whole lot catching-up to do, don’t we?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jane. ‘But of course I’ll send you an invitation to the funeral.’

  ‘Jane—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘When you and I were together, that was one of the very best times of my life. But – it was also the worst. I don’t want to relive it.’

  She came up to him and wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly. He kissed her hair, and her forehead. That perfume, it brought it all back. From the opposite side of the road, the old man in the frayed Panama hat stared at them intently. What’s the matter, you nosey old fart, thought Jim. Don’t you know what regret looks like?

  He gave Jane one more kiss, and then turned away and went down the steps and climbed into his car. He drove back to college feeling numb. He wondered if time travelers felt as numb as he did, after they had been back to stop Lincoln being assassinated, or to watch the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

  He switched on the car radio and it was playing Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell. ‘Don’t it always seem to go,’ she was warbling, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ He switched it off again and drove in silence.

  When he turned in through the gates of West Grove Community College, he saw the squad cars and the ambulance and the coroner’s vans immediately, all of them clustered in the turning area outside of the main college buildings. There were two fire trucks, too. TV vans were parked all the way up the left-hand side of the driveway, and he passed knots of news reporters and technicians, talking and smoking and unraveling yards of black cable.

  He drove slowly up to the top of the slope, until he reached a yellow wooden police barrier that had been set up across the driveway from one side to the other. A gingery sheriff’s deputy approached him and he put down his window.

  ‘Yo
u have any business here, sir?’

  Jim took his college ID badge out of his shirt pocket and showed it to him. ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s been an incident, sir. If you want to make your way to the parking lot and go directly inside. For the time being the students and faculty are confined to the interior of the premises.’

  ‘What’s happened? Is it one of the students?’

  ‘There’s been an incident, sir. Please make your way to the parking lot and go directly inside.’

  ‘What are you? A recording?’

  The gingery deputy stared at him without blinking. ‘Please make your way—’

  ‘Yes, OK. I heard you. I’m going.’

  He drove into the parking lot and parked in Royston Denman’s space. As he climbed out of his car, he saw that there was a crowd of deputies and paramedics and firefighters gathered around the large cypress tree. Two of the firefighters were carrying an aluminum ladder on their shoulders, but at the moment it looked as though there was more discussion going on than action. Jim could see Detective Brennan and Detective Carroll, too, and for some reason they were talking to Father O’Flaherty, the college chaplain, who was nodding repeatedly so that his bald head reflected the sun like a heliograph message.

  Nobody was looking. The gingery deputy was leaning over a bright green Volkswagen, repeating his message to one of the college lab assistants. Jim walked across the grass to where Detectives Brennan and Carroll were standing, and came up close behind them. They were too busy talking to Father O’Flaherty to notice him.

  Shielding his eyes against the sun, he looked up into the cypress tree, with its grotesquely gnarled trunk and its wide-spreading branches. As he did so, he felt a cold, crawling sensation all the way down his spine.

  High up in the tree, almost twenty feet up, where the branches began to divide from the trunk, a naked white figure was pinned, with its arms and its legs spread out. It was a young man, who had been painted all over with thick white paint, so that his hair stuck out in the same way that Bethany’s had stuck out, when she was nailed to the ceiling of Special Class Two.

  This young man, though, had been nailed to the cypress tree upside-down, head downward. All around him, four on each side, eight white cats had been nailed.

  Pushing his way past Detectives Brennan and Carroll, Jim approached the tree and stared up at the young man with a growing feeling of dread. This had to be a symbol. Not only a symbol, but an omen. One young person nailed to a ceiling with eight cats around her might have been nothing more than some bizarre act of perversity. But here was a second, nailed up in almost exactly the same way.

  Something supremely evil is on its way, thought Jim. Something more evil than any of the ghosts or demons that I’ve ever come across before. Almost all of the ghosts or demons that he had met before had been vengeful or wantonly destructive, but in their own selfish interest. Either they had wanted to punish people for what they had done to them while they were alive, or else they were trying to gain entrance into the world of the living from the world of the dead.

  But Jim had the strongest intuition that this was very different. He couldn’t yet understand why, but what was happening here felt a thousand times more powerful, and a thousand times more frightening, because this was a warning that life as we know it was soon going to come to an end. These young people were a countdown. Two so far. How many more would be nailed up to ceilings or trees to warn of the coming catastrophe? And what would happen when it finally arrived?

  Jim couldn’t help thinking of Summer’s nightmare. ‘I dreamed that I was standing in line with all of these hundreds of people and it was all dark all around us. Up ahead, though, I could see this orange light, like a bonfire? And it was hot, too, like a bonfire. Well, more like a furnace.’

  He was still standing there when a hand was clapped on his shoulder.

  ‘Mr Rook! You shouldn’t be here!’

  He turned around. ‘I think this is the one place that I should be, Detective.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And why is that, exactly? Can you see something here that the rest of us can’t see?’

  ‘No, detective, I can’t. But I can feel something. This isn’t the work of some weirdo, or some gang of weirdos. This wasn’t done by some serial killer with a penchant for white paint and Persian cats.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ asked Detective Brennan.

  ‘Meaning that these killings aren’t an end in themselves. They’re a warning of something very much worse to come.’

  ‘Now, why would anybody who was going to do something very much worse than this feel the need to warn us about it? After all, you never know, we might be clever enough to work out what it is that he’s warning us about, and stop him before he can carry it out. We didn’t get any warnings, did we, about the World Trade Towers? If we had, we might have been able to catch the bastards before they did what they did.’

  He paused, and sniffed, and then he said, ‘Besides, what the hell could be worse than this?’

  Jim silently recalled what the man standing in line had said to Summer in her dream: He said, ‘We have to be here. It’s the end.’ So I said, ‘The end of what?’ And he said, ‘It’s the end of all of us. It’s arrived.’

  Meanwhile, Detective Brennan said, ‘’Preciate it if you’d return to your classroom for now, Mr Rook. Detective Carroll and me, we’ll come up to see you later. Meanwhile, we have to get this poor young guy down from the tree, and try to find out who he is.’

  Jim was tempted to tell him about Bethany’s membership of the Church of the Divine Conquest, but he decided against it for now. He wanted to find out more about Simon Silence and the Reverend John Silence before he did so. The church’s beliefs seemed to be somewhat unusual – all this talk of Lilith in the Garden of Eden, and her equality to Adam – but there were plenty of other churches with beliefs that were ten times wackier than that.

  He looked up at the whitewashed body nailed to the tree. The young man’s mouth was partly open, and a thin string of blood was dangling from it, just like Bethany’s. Jim couldn’t imagine what they both must have suffered before they died.

  ‘OK, Detective,’ he said, ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

  Detective Carroll looked at him sharply before he left and said, ‘You are feeling OK, Mr Rook?’

  ‘Sure. Just a little shaken, that’s all.’

  ‘Did you go visit Bethany’s mother?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You know what L.P. Hartley said, Detective. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”’

  ‘OK,’ said Detective Carroll. It was obvious from the look on her face that she didn’t have a clue who L.P. Hartley was, or what Jim had meant to tell her, but she grasped his arm and gave him a squeeze of reassurance, and that was more than he could have asked for.

  Jim went upstairs to Art Studio Four. As he climbed the stairs, he passed Sheila Colefax coming down – dressed, as usual, in a high-necked blouse and a black pencil skirt.

  ‘Jim,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d left for the day. I’m so glad I bumped into you.’

  ‘What is it, Sheila? I’m kind of tied up right now.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it can wait. But I was wondering if you’d like to come to a concert with me.’

  Jim stared at her. ‘Sheila – do you know what’s happening outside? Do you know why the whole place is crawling with cops and paramedics and firefighters and media?’

  Sheila looked confused. ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Well, please, do me a favor and ask me some other time, would you?’

  ‘Oh. All right,’ she said. She still looked confused.

  Jim carried on climbing the stairs.

  ‘It’s only a folk concert,’ she called after him. ‘The Woolspinners. It’s just that I have two tickets and my friend can’t come.’

  But Jim was already out of sight. He walked along the corridor until he reached
Art Studio Four and opened the door.

  Usually, when Special Class Two was left alone, they would be playing classroom basketball or listening to hip-hop music or playing poker or polishing their nails. This afternoon, though, the class was almost completely silent. All of his students were sitting at their places, writing.

  Simon Silence stood up as Jim came in. ‘I didn’t know if you were coming back today, sir.’

  ‘Yes, well, I decided I would. You’ve lost enough time already this semester, and it hasn’t even begun.’

  DaJon Johnson stuck up his hand. ‘What’s happening out there, man – I mean sir? All those po-lice cars and fire trucks and stuff. I axed one of the other teachers but all she said was that nobody had told her squat.’

  ‘I have no idea what’s going on, either,’ said Jim. ‘All I know is that there’s been some kind of an incident and we have to stay inside until the police say it’s OK for us to leave.’

  Jim didn’t like to lie to his students, but he didn’t want to upset them, either, before he knew more about the young man’s body nailed to the tree. He looked around and said, ‘What’s everybody writing?’

  Simon Silence gave Jim a challenging smile. ‘I set them all a short essay, sir. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘You set them an essay?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Only half a page. “My Idea of Paradise.”’

  ‘Oh. I see. OK, then. You might as well carry on. The results might be . . . well, interesting, to say the least.’

  He paced up and down the classroom. He had never seen any Special Class Two writing with such concentration, even if Jesmeka Watson did seem to be rubbing out what she had written almost as fast as she was writing it, and the table around her was covered in thousands of gray eraser crumbs.

  As he walked back toward his desk for a second time, he noticed that Kyle Baxter was missing – Dictionary Dude, as he had already nicknamed him, for his own benefit.

  Kyle Baxter was missing, but on the table where he had been sitting this morning lay a pair of spectacles, with a grubby lump of Band-Aid holding them together.

  EIGHT

  Jim sorted through his briefcase and found a letter that he had received last week from his mother in Mill Valley. He folded the envelope like a paper glove to pick up Kyle Baxter’s spectacles from the bench.