The Garden of Happy Endings (38 page)

But he didn’t speak, not like Joaquin’s angel. “That’s another thing,” she said, pulling the leaves and flowers rosary out of her pocket as she sat down. “Joaquin gets an angel and I get nada? And you let Kiki be killed.” She rubbed the flat part of the leaf, feeling the tiny engravings of veins. “Not you, you, of course, but
You
. That You. I get that you need us to do your work, so why didn’t you just nudge me?”

It was the first time she’d been able to articulate that thought.
Elsa had been right there, not even a half mile from where Kiki was being tortured and raped. It haunted her. What had she been doing during the hours Kiki had prayed and cried and dreamed of rescue? Washing dishes, complaining that the pantry was a mess again, writing an email.

She bent her head.
Why not me?

The sun was surprisingly hot against the top of her head. It made her think of Spain, of childhood sunburns, of sitting in a field somewhere with Joaquin when they were barely teenagers, trying to best each other with stories of wounds and illnesses.

It made her sleepy, and she closed her eyes, letting the sunlight turn the back of her eyelids red.

And just like that, she fell sideways into the vastness. The bigness. The everythingness of meditation. All boundaries dissolved entirely and she was no longer contained by human arms and legs, but could swim between the molecules of everything, outward into sunlight and the liquid scent of roses hanging in the air and thorns and cat and galaxy and back through her own body, into the deep red muscles of her heart, the blue rivers of her veins, and then again outward, to all things in all universes here and all through time, everywhere. It was the opposite of fear, the absence of loss, the soft wave of time and history and love and—

She jerked herself back to real time. To the solid concrete bench beneath her, to the beads in her hand, so hot she yanked them off her wrist. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

The cat had emerged from under the roses and he blinked a smile at her, his tail switching over the earth. If he were a cat in a fairy tale, he would be San Roque come to life, or a messenger of the saint. Instead, he was only a stray cat, healthy and very much a flesh and blood being.

Who needed a home.

In sudden decision, she scooped him up and carried him, unresisting and purring loudly, back into the rectory. Joaquin was in his office, guarded by Mrs. Timothy, but Elsa waved a hand. “This
is important,” she said, and breezed by. The cat was so big he completely filled her arms, and his outstretched paws bounced.

Joaquin was doing paperwork and he looked up in surprise.

“San Roque is giving you a present. This is your cat.”

“He’s white!” Joaquin protested, indicating his black shirt and pants. “He’ll shed all over me.”

She nodded. “That’s why they invented lint rollers.” She put the cat down on the couch where parishioners often sat for counseling. He promptly lay down and curled his front paws under him, blinking up at Elsa. “You’re welcome,” she said.

“What are you doing, Elsa? I’ve never had a cat.”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly, looking at him. “We have to be the hands of God sometimes, don’t we? He needs a home and you need”—she broke off, then inclined her head and finished—“a companion.”

Joaquin swiveled around, his big hands flat on his thighs. “Is that true?”

The cat blinked.

Elsa laughed. “His name should be Buddha.”

Joaquin laughed, too. “Yeah. But we might have to come up with something else.” He looked at her. “Have you been in the courtyard all this time?”

“All this five minutes, you mean?”

“No,” he said with a quizzical smile and pointed at the clock. It had been nearly an hour since she’d left him.

“Huh,” she said.

“Were you—”

She held up a hand, touched her index finger to her lips.

He smiled.

A
lexa waited in the car, parked in the shade of an elm tree. She wore shorts and a T-shirt, her hair braided away from her face. “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you for an hour.”

“Sorry. I got distracted. Let’s go find Charlie and do some weeding.”

“You just let him run? Aren’t you afraid he’ll get hit by a car?”

“No. He stays in the garden. He likes to play with sticks and visit all the gardeners.”

As they headed into the fields, Elsa again saw summer taking hold. Vines crawled up trellises and flowers bloomed in borders. The earth had sprouted hair from every pore—verdant and fertile and exuberant.

A lot of gardeners were tending their plots, no doubt getting their chores done before the heat settled in. “Morning,” Elsa said to a middle-aged man wearing a hat to protect his face. He nodded in return.

“What’s the old guy doing?”

Elsa saw Joseph walking the perimeter with a rattle in his hand. The sound of his singing reached them easily in the still air, a low monotone in a language Elsa couldn’t identify. “He told me at lunch yesterday that the spirits have been warning him that bad things are coming. He’s singing to protect the land within from whatever it is.”

Alexa made a little face, but said nothing.

As they walked toward her and Tamsin’s plot, Elsa saw Deacon’s truck, but not the man himself. Charlie spied her and came dashing over, his muzzle dripping from a drink of water. “Come on, silly. Ew. Don’t get me all wet!” She opened the gate and waved Alexa into the garden.

She entered, and stood there, hands akimbo. “What should I do?”

Elsa gave her a pair of cotton gloves printed with rosebuds. “We need to weed.” She squatted and pointed out the crops. It was all growing vigorously, squashes spreading over the ground with their beautifully shaped hairy leaves, the corn shooting like rockets out of the earth. “We need to water, too,” she said, poking
the soil. “It’s not getting quite enough for these hot days. Start with the weeds and I’ll go get the hose.”

Alexa nodded, and squatted like a peasant, already pulling out the starts of sagebrush and goat heads. Noticing her niece’s pale pink skin, Elsa asked, “Did you put sunscreen on?”

She gave her aunt a pained look. “Will you stop treating me like I’m six?”

“Sorry.” She exited their plot and headed for the center pump, where hoses had been attached, long enough to reach most of the gardens.

As she connected a red hose, she spied Deacon helping Paris set stakes for her tomatoes and beans. She said something and he laughed, that rich low chuckle carrying easily, and Elsa flushed, thinking of the way she’d been awash with lust as she fried the chicken, fully expecting she’d have him in her bed before long.

Screwing the hose in tight, she turned the water on and stalked away, finding the end to drag into her plot.

He’d given the chicken away. Directing the water into the rows between the plants, she glanced over her shoulder. He had straightened and was looking at her without so much as a twinkle. After a moment, he raised a hand in greeting. Elsa returned it and put her attention back on the watering.

A little while later, he drove away in his blue truck, without even stopping by to say hello.

W
hen Tamsin got off work at two, it was raining, which somewhat complicated her plan to break into her house to steal the earrings and quilts. She didn’t want to park in the driveway; she had planned to use the alley, then carry the quilts out the back door. Few people in the neighborhood would be home in the middle of a weekday afternoon, but it was better to be careful.

However, the alley was clay, and muddy, and she didn’t want to track a bunch of mud through the house or risk ruining the quilts.

As she turned onto her street, she tried to decide where to park, and realized that her heart was racing with either nerves or excitement or both. She pulled over halfway down the block, behind the house, and peered at the street through the swish of the windshield wipers. Rain, swipe, clear, rain, swipe, clear. She didn’t have an umbrella. It wouldn’t hurt her to get wet, but she didn’t want the quilts to get damp. Surely there were still trash bags in the kitchen.

No one was around. It took two professional incomes to buy a house in this neighborhood. Unless you happened to be a crooked
hedge-fund manager, of course. Her blue Subaru was so ordinary it was practically invisible. Leaving it unlocked, she stepped out into the rain and dashed down the sidewalk toward her house. The mailman was coming up the street, so she ducked into the backyard quickly, entering her sacred space, closing the white picket gate behind her.

Oh, her garden! She stopped, stricken. The peonies had not been staked, and had fallen over, dying on the grass that was too long and going to seed. Dandelions starred the lawn, bright yellow and ridiculously healthy, and she had a vision of Scott attacking the plants with a spade, as if they were his worst enemy. It had always made her laugh, how virulently he hated the weeds, as if it were personal, as if they bloomed just to thwart him.

Surely no one would care if she came in and removed the peonies, the striped irises, the perennials upon which she had lavished a fortune in time and money? She could replant them at the church or at Elsa’s house. Somewhere she could still see them sometimes.

Rain dripped down her face. Another day. She headed for the window she’d left cracked and stood on the gas meter to reach it, trying to ease it up. The window moved without effort, but even standing on the meter, the reach was much higher than she’d expected. Grabbing on to the window ledge, she tried to pull herself up, but after a couple of minutes, she realized it was never going to happen. It was just too far to pull herself.

She jumped down. Her hair was dripping, and her shirt was stuck to her body, but she was here now, and by damn, those quilts belonged to her. Heavy padlocks covered the front and back doors, which were flanked with signs that screamed warnings from the feds saying the house was part of an investigation and trespassers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The full extent of the law
. What would that mean in this case? Surely it wouldn’t be much more than a ticket or a fine or something. Not that she had the money to pay a fine, of course.

Flinging her hair out of her eyes, she rounded the house and ducked behind a bank of lilacs that grew higher than her head. They offered a fence in the summertime, and cast green shadows into the dining room. Alexa had played magic castle along the house here, pretending an entrance into another world was hidden within the bushes.

A wooden door lay against the earth, an old coal slide. Tamsin yanked it by the ring, and it creaked open, the old wood protesting the movement. Spiders scurried away, leaving their long white webs floating in the air, and Tamsin shuddered, nearly dropping the door. She personally had never gone through this entrance, for just this reason. Spiders.

Could she do it now?

It wasn’t just spiders, it was black widows. Shy, giant spiders that had a virulent bite. She had never been bitten, nor had anyone she knew, and you didn’t die of it, anyway, just got really sick, and that wouldn’t even happen to her because she would know what was wrong—

Ugh. Staring down the concrete stairs, she saw that there were leaves and dust piled up, but no actual spiders on the stairs themselves. Rain soaked her ever more thoroughly, and she shivered in both dread and cold. Turning around, she broke off a branch full of leaves from the lilac bush and brushed away as many webs as she could see, then held it out in front of her like a sword, moving it back and forth as she rushed down the stairs before she could chicken out.

The basement was gloomy, but enough light shone through the door and the old glass windows with their chicken wire that she could make her way to the steps leading into the main house. Boxes and cast-off furniture sat in shadowy sorrow, but she ignored them all and ran up the stairs.

The door opened into the kitchen. It smelled stale, like something had rotted in the drains. Tamsin stopped at the bread box, slid open the secret drawer, and there were the earrings. Bezel-cut
diamonds in a platinum setting, each diamond at least a karat and a half. Maybe two. Enormous. Beautiful. Expensive. How had she forgotten about them?

The truth was, because she’d others at the time. Many of them.

Her hands shook as she admired them, thinking how much her life had changed since the day he’d given them to her. With a sudden, fierce wave of pain, she thought of Scott leaning out the window, thought of making love to him and then eating together later in bed, laughing when Scott spilled wine onto the pillows.

Had it all been a lie?

She looked at the diamonds in her palm, the sheer enormity of them. They had to be worth thirty or forty thousand dollars. Less on resale, of course.

She thought of the strange expression that had crossed his face that day, just that slight shadow that had made her worry.

He had known
.

If he had left her money or property or anything that could be construed as part of the joint estate, Tamsin might have been implicated in the scam. But he’d wanted her to have something. These earrings were an offering.