The Wishing Garden (37 page)

He walked them out. Emma stood stiffly between Savannah and Harry, curling her shoulders in when they got too close. Melinda was talking about a new literacy project she was starting up in Danville. She opened a white box and took out a brownie. “Come on, Emma. Chocolate always helps.”

Emma looked at her like she was crazy.

“We’ll ship your things later,” Harry said when they reached his car. “Your mother and I have already decided you’re going straight to the airport.”

Savannah stepped up to Emma, but the girl raised an arm to ward her off. Savannah froze, then tucked her hands into fists against her stomach.

“It’s for the best,” she said, but she was crying. “Time heals everything.”

Emma jerked back, as if she couldn’t have said anything worse. She got into the backseat and slammed the door.

“Have a safe trip!” Savannah called after the car. “Harry, call me when you get …” She let the rest
drop; the car had already turned the corner. There were tears all down her cheeks, and a sound Cal did not want to hear winding up at the back of her throat.

“Savannah,” he said.

She let out the cry, and he ran his fingers through his hair. He looked anywhere but at her.

“She’ll come back to you,” he said, but he wasn’t sure if she even heard.

She stared at the last place she’d seen her daughter, then wrapped her arms around herself tight. When one of those bold summer breezes dove down the collar of her dress, she turned her back on it. This was the kind of day that got tourists calling their bosses back east and saying they were never coming back, but Cal was actually thinking about moving to Miami. There, the crime rate was so phenomenal, a man couldn’t get personal about any of it.

He turned to go, then thought better of it. “Now that this is over, you and Jake might want to head out. Fast.”

Savannah stopped crying for a moment and jerked her head up, but he wasn’t going to say more than that. He kept his silence all day, until he got off duty and found Jake in Teton’s Bar, still apparently unwarned. Jake was at the usual back table, scaring the local gang members into whispers. Cal sat down in the chair opposite him. They didn’t talk for forty minutes, just halfheartedly watched a Diamondbacks game on the satellite TV.

The part Cal hadn’t told Savannah about was Bethany Appleton, the woman who had come into the office yesterday. She had been watching one of those local tabloid shows when they aired a story about the body found in Wawani Lake, and the mystery that ensued. She had walked right into Cal’s office and ruined an already horrible day.

“I was camping in Mesquite Cove that night,” she’d said. “Not fifty yards from where that man docked the boat. I might not have paid much attention if my boyfriend hadn’t just left for beer. I mean, I was all alone there, and then this really tall, really spooky-looking guy comes off the boat with a suitcase and a rifle on his arm. He could have been a serial killer, right? So I was watching him real closely.”

“Could you identify him now? It was fifteen years ago.”

“I could identify him, all right. It’s the kind of thing that sticks in your brain. He’d left the light on in the boat and I could see his face, all that black hair. He was bleeding from his left hand. Later, after he’d gone, I checked the beach. There was blood all over it.”

“Why didn’t you say something back then?”

“I was a kid. Sixteen. Who’d have believed me? And what was there to say? I didn’t see anyone get hurt. No one said anything on the news. If there had been mention of a murder, I would have come forward. But now … well, now it looks like you guys need some help.”

“And the tabloids pay real well for a story like that.”

She fidgeted a second, then leaned back and shrugged. “Yeah, well, that too. But that doesn’t mean I’m lying. I’ve just got a daughter to support is all. And I saw him. I could solve your case for you right this second.”

Cal had stood up slowly, aching all the way down to his toes. He had led the woman to a conference room and taken her statement himself, something he rarely did. Then he filed it in his private cabinet.

He was going to retire, goddammit. He was done with people’s private violence, done with warring families
and spite. He was going to spend his life savings on a Winnebago and eat beef to his heart’s discontent. But not before he led one more man to safety.

Cal looked at Jake’s hands on the table, the scar beneath his knuckles he’d never tried to hide. “I told Savannah you two might want to head on out tomorrow morning. Tonight, if you can swing it. Take a tour of the country. Maybe head up to Canada.”

Jake didn’t take his eyes from the television, but the muscles along his shoulders tensed. Finally, he grabbed his beer and drained it.

“A woman’s come forward,” Cal went on. “She was camping the night Roy Pillandro disappeared. Says she got a good look at someone who stepped off that boat with a rifle and a bloody hand.”

Jake stretched out the fingers of his left hand. “Well.”

“We’ll have to set up a lineup,” Cal said. “I can hold it off for a week, maybe two.” He fished into his pocket and took out a cigarette.

“When’s your retirement?” Jake asked.

“The second that woman says it wasn’t you.”

Jake smiled, but not the way Cal wanted him to. Not the smile of a man who was going to do everything he could to save himself.

“I thought I could go with her,” Jake said. “But even if this thing with Emma hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been able to leave. You just get to a point where you can’t run anymore. You get sick of hating yourself.”

Cal lit his cigarette. He had expected as much. Some men just aren’t comfortable unless their heart is broken, unless they’re paying for justifiable acts with their life. Cal put his hand on his shoulder, then got to his feet.

“Lois is waiting for me,” he said. “See, she’s got
this strange idea she has to take care of me. Cooks sensible meals and keeps them warm until I come home, no matter what time that is. Sometimes we don’t say a word. We just sit there. But she never goes to sleep unless I’m in bed beside her.”

Jake looked up. “I’m aware of what I’m giving up.”

“I can’t do any more, Jake.”

“I know that. You’ve done more than I ever expected.”

Cal paid for his beer. He squeezed Jake’s shoulder once more before he left the bar.

Savannah sat on the bench in Jake’s garden. The sky was bursting at the seams, glittering with blue meteoroids. All week, the news had been filled with the drama of the collision of Athens Fire and Taurus, two asteroids a mere one hundred thousand miles from Earth, a near miss. But this near miss wasn’t harmless; in fact, it was full of potentially lethal fallout debris. Hour after hour, the newscasters talked of nothing but the rubble headed for Earth. They showed simulated meteorite hits, possible death rates, and the next-to-nothing chance a piece of rock and iron scrap could wipe out life on Earth. Then when real damage started occurring, they couldn’t believe their luck. They sent live crews to every city in the southwestern United States, where the hits were centered.

A ten-foot wide rock had crashed through the eighteenth floor of the Bank of America building in Phoenix, narrowly missing four loan officers. In Amarillo, a whole stable of racehorses had been taken out by a pummeling of six-inch debris. Here, though, the only evidence of anything remarkable was the meteor dust that got into everything. It clung like blue ash to hair and hamburgers and the cleats of tennis
shoes. It disoriented the robins, who mistook the ground for sky and kept barreling into it, knocking themselves out.

Meteor dust felt like ice melt, and at the cabin, it had brought autumn on early. A week into August, the aspens hugging Switchback Creek were gold at the edges. The chipmunks no longer stopped to chatter, but ran around ceaselessly, gathering blue-dusted acorns. Tonight, Savannah wrapped a shawl around her burgundy dress, and put on the first of her winter hats, a furry fedora.

Jake drove up at midnight. He’d been at Teton’s Bar all night, but when he got out slowly and steadily, she knew he’d stopped at two beers. She tucked her head against his carving of Superstition Mountain, which he’d stained with henna. He had whittled away at the arms and legs, carving in wrists and ankles. Pretty soon, if her father kept avoiding him, the bench would mean more to him than it did to Doug.

He walked over and sat beside her. He smelled of beer and cigarette smoke, but beneath that, always, of his mountain. She put her hand over his.

“Cal said we ought to leave tomorrow,” she said, and then he squeezed her hand. She looked past the meteor shower to the north and spotted the only red star. It was distant and faint, overshadowed by meteoroids.

“Savannah—”

“You’re not coming.”

He dropped her hand. “They’re going to find me soon. I won’t put you through that.”

She stood up. It really didn’t matter what he thought he could put her through, but how much she was willing to stand. She was jittery, and had been for days. She had to get out of the path of those asteroids. She couldn’t live in a place where all anyone talked
about was their chance of death by debris. If she wasn’t optimistic about the future, then all her fortune-telling turned to threats.

She hadn’t been breathing right all summer. Oxygen stopped just short of her lungs. The atmosphere up here was obviously too thin for clear thinking because she wasn’t even sure if the tears in her eyes were from relief or regret or meteor dust. She only knew somewhere along the line she’d lost her smooth gypsy voice, and now even her simplest words cracked with emotion. Now just looking at the people she loved hurt.

“Now that Harry’s got Emma,” she began, then couldn’t go on. The words numbed the corners of her tongue. She wrapped her shawl tight around her. “I don’t want you to come anyway, if you’re only going to leave.”

He stood up beside her, but she could see he was not going to argue. He thought himself a hermit, a man running from his past, but that was not it at all. He’d simply been waiting for his past to catch up to him. He’d been waiting to turn himself in.

She heard a whizzing sound and ducked, thinking a piece of asteroid was falling from the sky. But it was only a pine cone bouncing off the eaves.

“I think we should just say goodbye now.” She was surprised her voice didn’t break, surprised that Harry had been right all those years ago. It was simply stunning that she could love someone this much and still be able to leave him.

Jake stared at her. He could be as still as one of his pine trees when he wanted to. He could not reveal a thing.

“All right then.” He walked down the path to his workshop, then shut the door tightly behind him.

Savannah breathed in and out quickly. Her
mother had been spooking her all these years with talk of the terrible things that could happen, all the people she could potentially lose. But that was not the worst. The worst was being able to stand all the losses. The worst was the way a broken heart still beat.

She walked inside, where she left no note, only the Hierophant on the kitchen counter. It was hard to tell who needed to be forgiven; probably they both did. She tossed all her decks except the positive Voyager into the garbage. From now on, she would only work with a deck whose bad cards were opportunities for redemption.

She tiptoed up the stairs to the loft. Her parents were sleeping soundly, her father tucked against her mother’s back. Savannah leaned over and kissed first her mother’s cheek, then her father’s. Doug’s eyelids fluttered, and she jumped back into the shadows. She held her breath until he was still again, until she could get out of there without saying one more goodbye.

She took Jake’s suitcases out of her car and put them on the porch. She was long past crying. She was going to miss him every day of her life, and that was just the way it would be. But at least she was going where the sky wasn’t falling. At least she wouldn’t be afraid to look up.

She got in the car and started the engine. She really didn’t expect him to come after her, but when he didn’t, she yanked off her bracelets. She tossed them one by one out the car window, leaving a trail she knew he would not follow. She reached the highway by two; by dawn, she was well on her way to San Francisco, where all the things she couldn’t bear to see were hidden in fog.

*  *  *

As soon as Cheryl Pillandro heard about the lineup, she got a leave of absence from Dillard’s. Maggie Dawson insisted she stay at the Sage Street house, and Cheryl stopped there only long enough to change into the clothes she’d bought at a thrift shop. Torn jeans, red halter top, knee-high black boots, clothes she might have owned fifteen years ago. Roy’s kind of clothes. She looked like white trash, like a middle-aged woman suffering from delusions of youth and garish beauty, and that was exactly how she wanted it. She wanted a man to look her in the eye and think her capable of all kinds of foolishness.

She arrived at the sheriff’s office half an hour later, and raised havoc until a deputy showed her into Cal Bentley’s office. He was seated beside his desk, digging into a supersized bottle of Advil.

“Sorry, Chief,” the deputy said. “This is Cheryl Pillandro. Jake Grey’s mother. She wouldn’t—”

“It’s all right,” Cal said. “She can stay.”

Cheryl waited until the deputy left, then took a deep breath and marched to Cal Bentley’s chair. His eyes widened; probably he thought she was going to make a pass at him, but all she did was bend over, so he could see the blue scar along the back of her neck.

“Steak knife,” she said. She put her foot on his chair and rolled up the jeans. “Golf club.” She held out the arm Roy had broken. “Brute force.”

She walked around the desk and sat down. She’d been sweating on the way over, but now she was cool as ice. This was the first time in fifteen years she hadn’t hated herself, and she drew out the next words, so she could make the moment last.

“Roy Pillandro was a son of a bitch,” she went on. “And I killed him.”

Cal sat back in his chair. He tapped out three more Advils and swallowed them without water. He
stood up and walked to the door to lock it. Then he turned around.