Bone Orchard (2 page)

Lazarus collected the pruned branches he’d cut earlier and began tossing them into the wheelbarrow as well. When he bent to pick up a limb that lay near the stone wall, a shadow fell across his arm.

He spoke without looking up.

“You’re trespassing.”

A thick-soled, tar black pair of size six Doc Martens boots swung down over the edge of the wall like pendulums.

Lazarus rubbed his back as he straightened. His eyes followed the stomp-worthy boots up to fishnet-clad thighs, a zip-front, pleated black mini-skirt and a ripped t-shirt. There was a lot of skin on display before him, and he knew damn well he was looking at trouble.

Christ, this one’s a chime away from jailbait.

The girl rummaged through an enormous bag and thrust a CD out at Lazarus. His own face, albeit a much younger version, sneered back from the cover along with four others. The name “Black Ryders” floated over them in gothic script.

“Four minutes,” Lazarus said matter-of-factly.

“Aww, come on. Do you know how hard it was to find you?”

Lazarus took the CD from her. Yes, in fact, he
did
know. She smiled dangerously and held out a Sharpie for him. He didn’t take it.

“The accent… American?”

“Canadian”

He handed back the CD.

“Do your parents know where you are?”

The girl scoffed. “They think I’m backpacking across Belgium right now.”

“Then perhaps that’s where you should be.”

He picked up the last branch, turned his back to her and walked away.

“Can I at least have your autograph?”

Lazarus ignored the request. He dropped the limb on top of the others in the wheelbarrow, the diseased canker staring back at him like the eye of a corpse.

“Can I use your bathroom? I gotta pee!”

He didn’t bat an eye. “Plenty of bushes on the way to the main road,” he said, heading off toward the house. She wasn’t the first and would hardly be the last. “Watch for the sinkhole.”

Lazarus pushed through the double-swinging butler’s pantry door into the upstairs kitchen carrying an egg and cress sandwich on a plate. He set it down on the counter, drew a chef’s knife from the block there and neatly sliced the sandwich into triangles. Lazarus didn’t cook often, but having a good set of German cutlery was less a luxury than a necessity in his mind. He could hardly be considered a spendthrift, but when he did spend, he entertained no shyness about it.

Leaning over the sink, he ate his sandwich and stared out the windows at the property. They offered no garden vantage here. The view instead was of a large, overgrown patch of croquet lawn and a wisteria-choked carriage house. Beyond that, the blue sky was beginning to bruise over with storm clouds, and Lazarus briefly contemplated waiting to see if a good downpour might save him the trouble of watering the new shrubbery.

In the end he thought better of it. He finished his sandwich, slotted the knife back into the block and headed for the garden, wondering how far the fan-girl and her Courtney Love boots would make it on the main road before the rains moved in and made her wish she’d never heard the name, “Lazarus Walker.”

The loppers found their peg in the potting shed, carbon-steel beak closed for the time being. Hanging among the other tools on the wall, they lost much of their menace and simply looked new. There were relatively modern spades and shovels, mattocks and forks alongside complex looking, turn-of-the-century tools with no discernable purpose other than to cultivate the nightmares of children.

Lazarus tipped the wheelbarrow and propped it in a corner near the axes, their blades dusted in fine rust. He rarely needed them, having never taken a single tree down on the property.
Instead, he grabbed a shovel and went to dig.

Where most people went wrong was digging too much. Backfilling a deep hole with loose soil only encouraged the roots to grow down. Digging a wide, shallow hole encouraged them to spread outward.

Lazarus had located the new hole just beyond the ginkgo, a semi-dwarf variety that, unlike most of the other trees in the double row, hadn’t been selected for its flowers or fruit, but purely for its foliage. The fan-shaped, emerald green leaves brought an elegant texture to the garden in spring and summer, then ripened to a brilliant gold in autumn. He’d heard that catching a ginkgo leaf as it fell to earth was good luck, but had been stunned
the previous fall
when he’d come out to the garden one afternoon and found its branches completely bare. The tree had dropped every last one of it leaves over the course of a single two-hour span. Ginkgo rain, it was called. So much for good luck.

Winded and thirsty from the excavation, Lazarus dragged his shovel toward the shed, but the guttural, piping call of a bird summoned his attention back to the house.

Grrrkkk
.

Lazarus looked up to the roofline and saw the sleek, tapered silhouette of a bird of prey near the ridge of the main wing. He walked toward the driveway for a better angle. With the bird’s distinct, pale grey head and the russet coloring of its body, there was no mistaking. It was a Red Kite.

Lazarus scowled and disappeared into the shed. It wasn’t that he disliked kites. They were, after all, quite handsome. But they were also scavengers, often of dead sheep, and Lazarus knew that if this one had parked itself on his roof, there was a good chance it was preparing for a carrion feast.

A raptor of the same family as harriers and buzzards, a kite has long wings and weak legs, so therefore spends a great deal of its time soaring. This bastard however, had decided to perch itself right on top of Lazarus Walker’s goddamned satellite dish.

In the study, he slid open the antique roll-top desk and sat down. It was a great, hulking piece pulled from a bank on the Isle of Man, joined of wide English oak slabs and heavy brass hardware. It may well have been more seaworthy than the ship that had ferried it across the Irish Sea to Blackpool. There were no fewer than thirty drawers, all of them empty. It housed only two things now: a laptop and an ashtray.

The study itself was a mahogany-paneled womb. Rolling ladders climbed to empty bookcases, the volumes once filling them hauled off decades ago. Dreadlocks of dust hung from a leaded glass chandelier over frayed Turkish rugs and brass-tacked leather sofas dulled and cracked from neglect. The veneer of a tremendous, stand-mounted globe peeled like onion skin beneath the watchful eye of the master himself, Lord Bentwicke, whose insipid portrait hung over the fireplace.

Lazarus couldn’t bear to call the place Bentwicke Manor. It made it sound as if he had a crooked todger, he thought. He powered up the laptop and browsed his email, but barely a minute passed before a yellow triangle emblazoned with a black exclamation point popped up.

You are not connected to the Internet. Check your connection and try again.

“On the dish. Yes, a kite… No, the
bird
, you idiot.”

Lazarus paced around the parlor, barking into a cordless phone. He passed a bay window that overlooked the garden and did a double-take.

A shadow.

He could have sworn he’d seen it shift near the stone wall. Probably the bird, swooping down to snatch up a vole, some warm little morsel to gobble down with afternoon tea. The grandfather clock struck four o’clock behind him, prodding him back to the conversation. Its startlingly loud, hundred-year-old tubular chime bellowed through the house and Lazarus strained to hear the voice on the other end of the receiver.

“Three weeks? Let me speak to your supervisor.”

He chewed a fingernail, staring at the clock’s dinner-plate pendulum and listening to the meaty tick-tock of its movement.

“Well, when will he be back?”

Lazarus winced and shot a glance down at his hand. His teeth had raked away enough skin to draw blood from the cuticle on his ring finger.

“Fine. No, I’ll do it myself.” He sucked on the bleeding finger. “And it better not void the bloody warranty!”

He punched the “end” key and banged the phone back into its charging base. Not quite as satisfying as slamming an old-fashioned, Bakelite handset into its cradle, but it was better than nothing.

Lazarus stormed out to the garden and squinted up at the roof. The damned kite was still up there on the dish, scratching the hell out of it with its talons.

“Shoo… Shoo!”

The bird cocked its head with mechanical precision.

Grrrkkk
.

Lazarus searched the ground at his feet and picked up a rock.

“Fuck off, you!” He reared back and hurled it, but the kite launched itself with a single flap of its great wings.

Dear God
, Lazarus thought with fleeting awe at the six-foot span. The rock whacked the satellite dish with the resounding clang of a soup pot and knocked it cockeyed.

“Bugger!”

The shorter step and tripod ladders were stored in the shed. As he had today, Lazarus used them often for the frequent pruning tasks the garden required, but they wouldn’t do for this. He remembered spotting something in the stable though, and marched off to investigate.

Without its former inhabitants there to claim seniority, it had become quite a catchall, but the smell of horses lingered, and probably would until the building fell. It was an earthy fusion of leather and musk, neatsfoot oil and sweet hay with the sour echoes of crushed apples. There were saddles and other tack, of course. Threadbare hunt caps and musty, scarlet coats draped over harvest buckets and bushel boxes, cinder barrels and cider presses.

What Lazarus was after however, was the apple-picking ladder. Tapered from its wide base to nearly a point at the top for stability, with weathered ash side rails and square oak rungs, it was perhaps, as old as the house itself. The ladder was so tall as to be almost silly-looking, six yards, maybe seven, he guessed. It was, in fact, twenty-two feet tall, and Lazarus quickly discovered that it was one heavy son-of-a-bitch.

Just tipping the thing up and leaning it against the house proved a task in itself, but he would not be beaten by a fucking
bird.

He climbed the creaking rungs with acute caution, each narrowing as he approached the roof until both hands barely fit side by side between the rails. The ladder was not quite tall enough, and Lazarus had to stretch to reach up and over the eaves. He felt the cold tingle of fear in his groin, but hoisted himself up onto the roof slates anyway, ignoring the stiff breeze and drizzle that had arrived. The late afternoon light was fading rapidly beneath the clouds, and he knew that if there was something worse than being up on a wet roof, it was being up on a wet roof in the dark. No time to hang about dawdling in indecision.

Thankfully, the roof pitch was not particularly steep on this part of the house, but it was certainly high enough to keep his heart thrumming in his chest like a double bass drum. He half crawled to the satellite dish and looked it over for damage. The kite’s talons hadn’t scratched it nearly as badly as he’d thought. In fact, he wondered what it
had
done that bollixed up the signal. He gingerly twisted the dish back toward its proper position to the south.

“Come on, you little bitch. Don’t break. Don’t break.”

On the ground below, a dark shape shot out from the tree line. Lazarus caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and whipped his head around, soles of his shoes slipping and squeaking on the wet slate. He grabbed the dish to steady himself.

What the hell was that?

He scooted over to the edge as quickly as he dared and scanned the grounds. Leaves rustled in the wind. Sheep bleated in the distance. Shadows shifted in the green, near-dusk light, and a chill crept up his spine, but he saw nothing.

CHAPTER 3

Lazarus picked up the cordless phone and clicked it on. He didn’t call the constable often, God knew he was the last person Lazarus wanted around, but once the novelty of having a rock star in their midst had paled, most of the locals had respected his privacy, and that included the police.

There was dead silence on the handset.

He punched a few random buttons and listened again. He shook the phone and returned it to his ear. Still nothing.

Christ, not this now, too.

He checked the charger base and jiggled the cord. A crunchy dial tone stuttered over the receiver then smoothed out. Lazarus breathed a sigh of relief and dialed.

“Constable McHenry? Lazarus Walker here. Any sightings of wildcats around the wood?” He stared out the window as the last embers of the day’s sunlight smoldered on the horizon.

“No, that won’t be necessary. Must be seeing things. Thanks.”

He hung up, feeling quite foolish, but somehow better for having made the call. Each year, there were hundreds of “phantom cat” reports all over the British countryside. Most were nonsense conjured up by over-active imaginations, but every five or ten years, one of these reports panned out with verifiable proof. There hadn’t been a true, indigenous wildcat sighting in Northern England in a century or more, he supposed. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t
possible.

He’d trek out to the back acreage in the morning and take a head count of the Leicester sheep. For the time being, he was tired. His brief affliction of the “heebie-jeebies” had passed, and a growling stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since the egg and cress sandwich that afternoon.