They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 16

At 12:01 on Sunday morning, the third day began in a dark kitchen with no running water and a dead woman's photograph beside a child's red crayon drawing. On the table under my cup of well water lay the envelope with the expensive handwriting that had promised the lane an end to things once the water and the power had stopped. Marco would not be the man who brought it. The morning the story broke, county deputies had taken him out of his warehouse parking lot in handcuffs directly in front of the Gazette's cameras, because a headline across the entire state made an arrest unavoidable even for a bought sheriff, and he was sitting in a holding cell awaiting arraignment. Whoever came down Hollyhock Lane after dawn would come straight from Victor Kane.

I did not sleep. I washed the garden dirt from my right hand in a basin of cold well water, checked the sling holding my left arm against my ribs, and drove back to the hospital before five.

Ray Dolan sat in a wooden chair beside the reception desk with his hat on his knee, awake and watching the elevator doors. Inside the recovery room, Noah was asleep on the vinyl bench along the wall, his red plastic dinosaur tucked against his chin under the gray blanket.

Sarah was awake. Her left shoulder was wrapped in thick white dressings, the arm immobilized in a canvas sling, and the fingers of her right hand were turning the strap of her nurse's watch round and round on the sheet.

"Hospital," she said quietly when I stopped beside the bed. "You look like you haven't sat down since Friday."

"I'll sit later," I said. I pulled the visitor's chair close to her right side so she would not have to turn her neck. "How is the pain?"

"Managed. Ray hasn't moved from that desk since midnight." Her eyes went to the sling on my chest, then up to my face. "The clock passed midnight, Elias. It's the third day."

"I know."

"They'll come at the houses next."

"Yes," I said. "I'm going to see him this morning. In daylight, in a room with witnesses."

Her fingers stopped on the watch strap. "Victor."

"Weeks ago I told Danny Cruz I'd go and see an old friend about a debt," I said, keeping my voice low so Noah would not stir. "He's having breakfast at the Lakeview Hotel at eight. His foundation gives out plaques on Sundays."

"Elias."

"I am leaving my shears in the truck, Sarah," I told her. "Just a tray of roses and an old tin cap."

I heard about the lane later from Mr. Chen, who filmed every minute of it from his front steps. Shortly after dawn, two county trucks and a yellow flatbed carrying a tracked excavator turned off the main road onto Hollyhock Lane, escorted by four sheriff's deputies in two cruisers. The lead deputy carried a clipboard holding an emergency condemnation order signed by Councilman Dwight Osgood, naming Mrs. Abernathy's burned lot and adjoining unsafe structures. The letter under my water glass had told the truth: after the water and the lights, it was the walls.

The street did not shout, and nobody threw a stone. They did what we had practiced in my kitchen. Every front door down the block stood wide open, and every porch lamp that ran off the Tran family's diesel generator blazed in the morning sun. Mr. Delgado stood by his gate in his forty-year-old wedding suit with his cherrywood cane and his red pencil, writing down the county license numbers and the badge numbers of the four deputies. Jenna Kowalski from the Gazette stood ankle-deep in the black ash of the burned foundation with a photographer beside her.

In the middle of that ash, directly in front of the excavator's iron blade, sat Mrs. Abernathy on a wooden kitchen chair borrowed from the Chens' front parlor. She wore her Sunday hat with the small feather, and she held her three tin biscuit boxes stacked across her knees.

When the lead deputy walked up the driveway with Osgood's paper held out, she looked up at him from under the feather.

"You'll have to lift me, and I'm eighty-one, and the young man is filming," Mrs. Abernathy said.

The deputy looked at the three biscuit boxes, then at Mr. Chen's tablet, then at the Gazette camera lens, and kept his hand off his belt.

I was not on the lane. By eight o'clock I had parked my pickup behind the kitchens of the Lakeview Hotel downtown, buttoned the cuffs of my good shirt with my right hand, and lifted a cedar flat of six potted rose starts out of the truck bed. With my left arm in the black sling, I balanced the wooden tray against my hip and walked through the service corridor into the Crystal Ballroom.

Twenty round tables of donors sat over grapefruit and coffee. Beneath a velvet banner reading KANE FAMILY FOUNDATION, Councilman Osgood was shaking hands with a woman in pearls.

Victor Kane sat at the center table below the stage, Mr. Webb one chair behind his left shoulder with a leather-bound ledger closed on his knee. I had not stood in a room with Victor in ten years. His hair was combed back and neat, his hands clean. He was tapping the edge of a printed program against his water glass when he saw me walking down the center carpet with dirt under my fingernails and a flat of nursery pots against my sling.

Two security men near the wall took a step forward. Victor raised two fingers, and they stopped.

I reached his table and set the wooden tray of rose starts directly between his silver coffee pot and the centerpiece of cut lilies. Soil spilled from the bottom of a plastic pot onto the white cloth. The donors at the table looked at my sling and my work boots.

I leaned down slightly so only Victor and Webb could hear me first.

"Seven was mine, Victor. Not days. Times. Mrs. Abernathy's porch swing. Three deeds. A rifle round where a boy's head had been. A school bus. Five men in my cabbages. The water and the lights. And a nurse in a parking garage. You've spent them."

A boy who swept out the hardware store and racked balls at Marco's pool hall on Saturdays had earned a dollar and a piece of chalk for writing that number above the bar while a plug timer I had clipped inside the alley meter box cut the screens for three seconds. Victor's eyes did not move from mine. He knew the list.

I reached into my coat pocket with my right hand, took out the metal screw cap from the five-gallon gasoline can the fire chief had pulled from Mrs. Abernathy's bushes, and set it on the white tablecloth beside his bread plate. In the center of the dented tin, stamped into the metal, was the crowned snake eating its own tail.

I raised my voice so every donor at the center table and Councilman Osgood at the edge of the stage could hear every word.

"Your family's mark, Mr. Kane. It came off a can that burned an eighty-one-year-old widow's porch. Your donors have never seen it. I thought they should."

A woman across the table in a pale blue suit leaned forward, staring at the stamped emblem on the blackened cap. The Kane Family Foundation printed lilies on its stationery and oak trees on its checks; the crowned snake lived only on lighters and five-gallon cans in the dark. Councilman Osgood's hand came off the stage railing.

"There's an excavator on my lane," I said, still loud enough for the tables around us. "Every camera on the street and a Gazette reporter are standing in the ash. Knock one wall down, and tomorrow your Foundation's name runs under a photograph of a dog cage."

Victor looked at the tin cap beside his plate, then around the ring of well-dressed faces watching him over their coffee cups. Nobody spoke. Not one of his guests reached for a napkin or a fork.

Victor smiled for the table, polite and unhurried, and picked up his telephone from the cloth. He touched the screen once and lifted it to his ear.

"Send them home," he said into the receiver.

In front of the clean money he cared about, he had backed down.

He looked up at me, and when he spoke again his voice dropped below the hum of the room, meant only for the space between us.

"You came out of the garden. That's all I wanted."

"No," I said. "You wanted me to come out as yours. I came out as the lane's."

I left the rose starts and the gasoline cap on his tablecloth and turned toward the ballroom doors. Before I had taken my second step, Victor spoke behind my back in the same quiet, conversational tone.

"Ask yourself who sold Marco your photograph, Elias. It wasn't me. I bought it. Someone in your own house wants you to kill me even more than I'd like you to try."