In an instant the intruder has disappeared around the back of the house, where, she assumes, he is trying to get a good look into the breakfast room. For several breathless minutes, she awaits the soft shatter of glass or the sound of tools prying at a lock. But the house is silent, save for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the upstairs hallway.
Blake has had years to make a copy of the key to her house. But something about this theory feels flawed, and so she finds herself padding swiftly into her bedroom, where there is a gun in her nightstand drawer. It’s Troy’s gun, but she knows how to use it.
She has pulled the gun from the drawer and unsnapped its holster when her iPhone vibrates softly on the nightstand. The text message is from Blake.
Jane Percival killed herself.
Caitlin is less stricken by the content of this message than she is by the realization that it’s highly doubtful Blake would have tapped it into his phone while trying to sneak into her darkened kitchen.
She raises the gun in both hands and starts for the hallway. More silence from the vast house. She returns to the solarium. She half expects the flower to recoil from the sight of the gun alone. They’re connected now, aren’t they? She and this strange dream-giving blossom. Its absence of a reaction disappoints her, a small but cold rejection after it graced her with its life-altering scent.
Below, the shadow darts past the pool, bound for the back fence. The apparent senselessness of this move infuriates her. She was oddly more comfortable with the idea of someone breaking in and trying to kill her. But now the intruder’s motives seem unknowable. Why make an escape over the back fence when he could just as easily sweep down the side of the house and over the decorative little wrought iron gate in front? If he’s a burglar, why did he bypass the cabana, which had things of real value inside?
Again he appears, this time on the other side of the pool. She can see he’s hunched over now, holding something in both hands. Some sort of hood or stocking cap covers his face and head. And he is fat, his movements hurried, but ungainly. There’s no bag or backpack, nothing in which to hide a cache of stolen goods. And now he appears to be headed for the garage.
The back fence, she thinks. What the hell was waiting for him at the back fence? Why did he hang out there for a good five to six minutes? What’s at the back fence other than a view of the house?
A view of the house… No bag for stolen goods. Pausing briefly at various points throughout her backyard, where there’s nothing of value to steal…
The police don’t work this way, not even in New Orleans. And as Caitlin turns it over and over in her head, she can think of only one explanation for the guy’s strange zigzag path through her property. He is after views. He is after angles.
He is planting cameras.
There is a purity to the rage that courses through her now. It is not the feeling she expects; it has nothing to do with having her privacy invaded. It has more to do with the realization that if someone other than law enforcement is placing her under surveillance now, there can only be one reason: Troy.
How many other deceits were woven through Troy’s infidelities? How many gambling debts or hidden bank accounts? As a freshman in college, she’d been stricken by a public-health notice in her dorm that assured all who read it that when a patient tested positive for one sexually transmitted disease, they were likely to test positive for another. Surely this was just as true when it came to diseases of character.
Before she has time to reconsider, Caitlin pulls the letter opener out from the stack of mail pinned beneath the magazines still sent every month to her dead mother. She presses the tip against the flesh of her palm, then gently presses upward until she feels a slight tug that tells her she’s cut the skin. Then she presses harder, until a thick vein of blood emerges from the center of her palm.
She expects the blossom waiting below to expand its petals, to raise its stamens with evident and undeniable thirst. But the flower does no such thing. Indeed, the first drop of blood hits the white petal and rolls off it like water on a Scotchgarded sofa cushion. The petal isn’t even stained. In a panic, she wonders if it’s a simple matter of volume, remembers the arterial flow she’d opened from one wrist the night before. There’s no way she can risk that again, not now, not here.
The pain in her palm becomes unbearable. She drops the letter opener and dives for the love seat, then brings a wad of tissues to her bleeding hand. They are soaked through in seconds, and she is left with the gun, and the oblivious blossom that lacks the same thirst as the vines that gave it life, the vines that snaked up through the floor of the gazebo and nursed from her mutilated wrist. It is a wholly different thing. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Whatever strange force animates them, these are living things, and like all plants, they possess various phases of thirst, growth, and bloom.
Below, the shadow now saunters through her backyard. The man—she’s reasonably sure it’s a man—looks back over one shoulder, lifts his arm, and waves in the direction of the back fence, and that’s when Caitlin’s suspicions about the guy’s intentions are finally confirmed. The yard, the back door, the garage—she’s confident all are now under surveillance. And the slow, arrogant swagger this bastard has acquired during his nighttime visit to her property fills her with fresh rage.
If the flower before her wasn’t equipped to come to her rescue, perhaps it was time to visit its source.
When she hears the tap tap tap against the glass next to her, she’s willing to believe that the stranger has floated up to the second story of the house and is rapping against the solarium walls with one fist, and she shoots to her feet, gun in one hand. But instead of a floating shadow, she finds herself looking at the streetlight on the corner through some kind of black gauze. But gauze isn’t the right word for it. More like cheesecloth that’s been pulled over the entire sheet of glass—only the gaps in it are shifting and rearranging.
Bugs. They’ve lined the outside of the glass wall with such intricacy and precision that it’s hard for her to see them as anything other than graceful, and so referring to them as bugs seems like an insult. There are so many of them, so densely packed, that she can’t tell what exact type they are, only that there is more than one kind. She has spent most of her life living in fear of palmetto bugs, what people refer to as the classic New Orleans cockroach. But if they’re among this strange legion, they’re too outnumbered to strike a primal chord of fear in her.
She places her free hand against the glass, even knocks a few times. No response from outside. Then she places the gun down and lifts up the sundae glass carefully in both hands, and as soon as the blossom’s giant white petals are a few inches from the glass, a great pulse moves through the swarm outside. The streetlight is blacked out completely as the lace pattern suddenly gathers into a solid cluster of rustling darkness, a black halo around the spot where the blossom is kissing the glass.
Caitlin’s laughter is a warm, rich thing, a mixture of arousal and delight as sensuous as the sounds Jane Percival was making in the upstairs bathroom at Spring House while Troy fingered her.