“You know,” Archer says abruptly, as Sterling gets the tools back in the SUV, “if you’re going to hide your head in the sand about the other cases, you should be grateful other people have studied them. The Bureau’s not up in arms just because someone sent you flowers. They have meaning.”
“No one’s sending me flowers,” I tell him, aware of Sterling’s watchful eye. “They’re delivering them to my door. If I didn’t think that meant something, I would never have mentioned them.”
They pull out of the drive a little after noon. Eddison isn’t going to be here until six or so, depending on traffic out of Denver, which gives me a lot of time and not enough schoolwork or focus to fill it.
Here’s the thing about purple-throated calla lilies: the second known victim, Zoraida Bourret, had them framing her head like the arch in a Mucha print. Her crossed hands kept a single lily clasped to her sternum.
Every victim has a flower, and it has a meaning, something that ties it to the girl in the killer’s mind. Two days before she died, Chavi wore a crown of silk chrysanthemums, and when I found her, there were real ones through her hair. Easter morning, when Zoraida helped corral her younger brothers and sisters for a family photo, she wore a single calla lily as a corsage on her white Easter dress.
I don’t know what the flowers mean to the bastard, but I do know that Eddison wouldn’t be so scared if any other families got deliveries like this. Whether this is a fan or the killer, it’s meant for me.
That’s something Archer in his I-studied-the-case-so-I-must-be-an-expert arrogance probably doesn’t get.
Eddison does; I can’t help but wonder if he’ll mention it.
I heat up a can of soup for lunch and pour it into a travel mug. A lady in Starbucks last week was telling her phone really loudly about the new stained-glass windows her church just put in and how beautiful they are. At the time, I didn’t particularly appreciate having to listen to the conversation; I might be a little good with it now. Investigating the windows sounds like a perfect way to fill these hours.
Jonquils followed by calla lilies. It’s hard to call something a sequence with only two entries on the list, but so far it follows the order of the murders, and it follows the order of the deliveries in San Diego. No one starts a pattern with the intent of abandoning it partway through; if something’s going to happen to me, it won’t be until the flowers run out. I’m safe enough for now, even in churches.
With my camera bag over one shoulder, I pull up the address on my phone and start walking, sipping every so often at the soup. I finish lunch before I reach the church, a yellow-faced monstrosity that cannot possibly be the right place. It’s one of those churches that sacrificed character for size, large and looming and more than a bit soulless. I’m not Christian—I’m not really anything—but growing up beside the little grey stone church in Boston gave me certain opinions of what the buildings ought to feel like.
There are windows in the building, tall and narrow and completely colorless. What the hell was that lady talking about then?
I stand for a bit in the parking lot, the temperature fairly comfortable in the midtwenties, and shit, what is wrong with me that I now find that comfortable?
“You lost, honey?” calls a woman leaning against a side door, pale smoke curling upward from the cigarette in one hand.
“Maybe,” I answer, walking up to her. “I heard someone talking about new windows, and—”
“Oh, that’s over in the chapel.” She waves her hand, accidentally trailing the smoke into my face. “Here, I’ll show you. One of the church founders got pissy when they put up the new building, so he bequeathed money that could only go into making a traditional chapel. He didn’t like the way the church was modernizing.”
The woman leads me through what can only be called a complex of buildings, all faced in that ugly yellow stone, but over the curve of the parking lot, and after a grassy stretch, there’s a little red-brick building tucked up against the woods, and holy hell, there’s probably as much glass as brick, if not more.
The woman smiles at me, or at my awestruck expression, and flaps her hand toward the door. “It’s unlocked, honey. Take as much time as you need.”
Setting the empty mug down on the front step, I pull out my camera and pace around the outside of the chapel. Most of the windows are bigger than I am, intricate and graceful without being cluttered. I’m used to churches where the pictures are either biblical scenes and figures or complete abstracts, but these are mostly nature based. One has mountains and clouds, stretching out into the distance. Another has swirls of white through a dozen shades of blue and green, the rush of water giving way to tall trees in the next window, and great bunches of flowers in the one after that.
Between the large windows, small rosettes maybe twice the size of my head are stacked vertically in threes, a little more traditional in the kaleidoscopes of color, the leading beautifully detailed. Even when I switch over to black and white, the richness of the colors still manages to shade in.
I’m not sure how many times I circle the building before collecting my mug and heading inside. There, where the sunlight spills colors across the floor, it’s a little more chaotic, the colors from the north and west windows all layering over each other and canceling each other in fragments of clean light. There are no chairs, no pews, just a quartet of velvet-cushioned kneelers made of dark wood.
Chavi would have both loved and hated this tiny chapel with its mess of color and light.
I find the strange angles, the ones where the dust glitters and dances and makes the light look tangible, the places where the colors pool on the stone in a way that forms new images recognizable only because we’re human and so very strange.
Eventually, I sit down on one of the kneeler-cushions, tilting my head back against the wood, and soak in that feeling that reminds me so much of Chavi’s quest to capture the light and color on paper. As much as it frustrated her, she would never have given up pursuing her own version of the Grail, because sometimes it’s the quest that holds the meaning, not the reward.
When I lean forward to nestle my camera back into its case, my pocket crinkles.
Oh, right, Inara’s letter. From a week ago. Somehow I completely forgot about it in all the fuss.
I should probably apologize for that.
Dear Priya,
Thanks for writing back; I have to admit, I feel a bit less like an idiot now. And less of an imposition.
Still flailing, though.
As much as the general public knows about the Garden, there’s so much more that they don’t. I have a feeling most of it’s going to come out in trial, and I already know some pieces are going to get very problematic reactions. The Gardener’s lawyers are trying to insist that I be brought up on charges. Being a runaway isn’t a crime, but using a false ID to work is, and if they could prove I stole cash from my grandmother’s house after she died, I’m sure they’d be on that, too.
I’m honestly surprised they haven’t tried to claim I murdered my Gran, as if a woman who did nothing but smoke and drink in front of the television couldn’t possibly drop dead without help.
And I get it, I really do. I’m a powerful witness. I’m articulate and not overtly emotional, and I can go a long way in speaking for the girls who aren’t here to do so themselves. Anything the defense can do to discredit me would help cast shadows on all of us.
Do you ever feel like pop culture has lied to you?
When I read articles or watch segments on the Garden and the investigation, Inara always comes off as calm and completely in control of herself. She doesn’t make abrupt turns in conversation, never gives interviewers a chance to be confused by what she’s saying.
I wonder if this is her being unguarded, giving up some of that control. Or maybe just setting it aside, letting herself rest until she needs it again.