“Detective Granger,” Baldy answers.
At least one of my problems is actually getting solved today.
“This is Blake Henderson.”
“Good evening, Blake Henderson.”
“Forgive me for asking this, but I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could talk to Jane Percival?”
“None whatsoever,” the detective answers flatly.
“OK… Well, can’t blame a guy for trying.”
The silence on the other end startles Blake. He knew it was an inappropriate request, but he didn’t expect the detective to be quite this offended.
“Blake…”
“Yes sir?”
“Get to a TV or a computer or something.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see…” And then the detective hangs up with the speed of someone whose partner or boss or wife has just walked in on him talking to a mistress.
A few minutes later, Blake is standing in front of the television in his apartment, watching the rebroadcast of the ten o’clock news on WWL. Watching Jane Percival’s bagged body being carried out of the Montrose Parish sheriff’s station by two medics who are bowing their heads as much as possible to avoid being captured by the cameras. This footage is juxtaposed with Glamour Shots of a strikingly pretty young woman with fine-boned features and huge, expressive blue eyes, a woman for whom suicide would be a vague and mildly troubling abstraction. And yet she is dead by her own hand, and—as the reporter explains—the blood found on her clothes the night before when she was taken into custody is the same blood-type as that of Troy Mangier. So apparently, despite her manicured good looks and broad, innocent smile, she is capable of murder as well.
A ruddy-faced, sputtering public information officer fills the screen, blinking nervously while he fields hostile questions from reporters about how long Jane Percival was questioned and how closely she was monitored and how she managed to get her hands on a piece of broken glass big enough to do herself in with. And Blake feels his hand reaching for the cell phone he dropped facedown on the coffee table in his mad rush to follow the detective’s final instruction.
This time Detective Granger answers after the first ring.
“That was very helpful,” Blake says.
“Uh-huh.”
“And unnecessary.”
“Yeah, well… Are you a man of faith, Mr. Henderson?”
“Not really. No.”
“Because of what happened to you?”
“I have faith in certain things. But… man of faith. It just sounds a little broad, to me, you know?”
“You’re not friends with any reporters, are you?”
“My experience is they don’t make very good friends.”
“Uh-huh… And the friends you do have? Spent any time with them lately?”
“Caitlin Chaisson?”
“Yeah.”
“I was with her earlier.”
“So you’re going back out there?”
“Spring House?”
“Yes. Spring House.”
“Sure…” I’ll let you think I’m headed there right now if you fess up and tell me what’s eating you, Detective.
“If this gets back to me, I’ll deny it. Like standing on my momma’s grave deny it. And then I’ll find you and beat the shit out of you, get me?”
“I got it.” Cop bluster. So typical—and such a waste of time. Just tell me!
“The vines…” Blake waits for the man to finish, but he’s been left with the ticking sound of his old refrigerator. He’s turned the volume on the TV down, but not too much, so that the news report on a fire at an apartment complex in Gert Town is a low murmur.
“Detective?”
“She said the vines did it. She said the vines are coming for us all.”
There is just enough sarcastic bite in the detective’s tone to suggest he’s repeating these words the way he might repeat the ravings of a homeless woman who accosted him on his way into his favorite watering hole. But he’s still repeating them, and that fact alone renders Blake speechless for a moment.
“Is that all she said?” Blake asks.
“Yep. Fifteen hours we held her… and that was the only thing she said the whole time. But she said it the whole time.”
Then Blake hears the dial tone, and he feels something deep within his bones that he can only describe as a shudder. It returns him to a childlike state of conviction that darkness itself is a substance with the power to rise up around the edges of any place and claim it with the sudden finality of a whale’s mouth closing over a drift of plankton.
More frightening to him than Caitlin’s slap earlier that evening, the phantom after-burn of which Blake can still feel across his jaw, is Granger’s willingness to share information pivotal to an unfolding PR nightmare for his department.
He was warning you, Blake realizes. That’s why he asked you if you were going back to Spring House anytime soon. He may not believe there’s something out there. But he believes Jane Percival believed it.
The detective was scared, and in Blake’s experience with cops, that meant he should be scared too.
Nova answers her cell phone right at the moment when Blake fears he’s about to get sent to her voice mail.
“Where are you?” he asks.
“Hello to you too,” she says.
“Where are you?” he repeats.
“Calm down, Blake. I’m in Baton Rouge.”
“School?”
“In the morning. Right now… research.”
“Research?”
“Yep.” But that’s all she says.
“Meet me in Gonzales. It’s halfway.”
“Now?”
“Jane Percival killed herself tonight. If you want to hear what she said before she did it, meet me in Gonzales. Then you can tell me about your research.”
“Gonzales… I’m not sure I like this game.”
“I’ll come to you if you want.” The way he says it, it is either a desperate concession or a veiled threat.
She apparently doesn’t want to risk it. “All right, all right. Gonzales it is. What, like, a… gas station?”
“There’s a Waffle House.”
“A Waffle House… I thought the gays liked to eat at nice places.”
“Commander’s Palace isn’t open this late, OK? So… Waffle House?”
“Yeah huh.”
Blake is about to hang up when a thought strikes him. “Nova. Where’s your father?”
“With my aunt in the Seventh Ward.”
“Good.”
16
Caitlin has returned to the solarium in darkness, where the blossom’s white petals are still visible in the branch-filtered glow from the streetlight on the nearby corner. The flower no longer gives off the loamy scent that knocked her out of her body and into a tortured fragment of Spring House’s secret history. But perhaps she’s standing too far away; perhaps if she leans in a little farther, its filaments will once more grow erect and more of its secrets will penetrate her fevered mind.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see a shadow dart down the side of the house below. Her first thought is that it must be Blake. That he’s come back to snatch the flower now that he thinks she’s asleep.
But if he’s going to break in, he’ll have to do it the messy, old-fashioned way. After he left, Caitlin tested the key to make sure he’d returned the right one, and then she’d cast the house in darkness with the press of a single master switch next to the back door. For a while, she’d sat on the stool just inside the foyer, listening to the clatter of passing streetcars and briefly paralyzed by the realization that her encounter with forces from beyond this world hadn’t rendered her immune to the guilt and remorse her old friend could stir in her by just cocking his head to one side. But just seeing his fingers close around the flower’s stem felt like a violation close to rape, and what choice did she have? When dark miracles suspend the rules you once lived by, you have no choice but to let your feelings be your guide, no matter how extreme they might seem to others.