Vivyan
The address belonged to a greenhouse.
I found it at dusk on Thursday, at the end of a rutted county road, a long low shed of cloudy plastic sheeting on a rusting frame, with a single yellow bulb burning over the door. A dog barked somewhere out of sight. The air smelled of wet soil and green growth and, under that, something faintly bitter, like the memory of medicine.
I had parked a quarter mile back and walked the rest, the way a person does when they want to be able to say they never came.
The lean man in the canvas jacket met me at the door. He didn't say hello. He only looked at my empty hands and my plain gray coat and nodded, once, as though I'd passed some small test, and held the flap aside.
Inside it was warm and thick and dim, rows of potted plants lit by a string of
