Garden of Darkness Read Free Page B

tooth,” Alastair said.
    Side by side they waded through dry, knee-deep weeds at the edge of the road. Alastair bent and picked up a soft yellow leaf and handed it to her. “Like the quaking aspen, except for the teeth.”
    The leaf was heart-shaped, edged with scalloped points. It didn’t seem right, like suddenly finding out butterflies had fangs.
    Stepping into the grove was like diving underwater. The temperature plunged, and Rachel’s ears felt plugged. Sounds she’d been unaware of until that moment were cut off.
    “A guy shows up in town just before dawn,” Alastair told her. “Hysterical. Said his wife had vanished.”
    Rachel was aware of the strength and life and vitality of the trees. They absorbed sound, sucking the resonance from Alastair’s voice, making it fall flat.
    The husband may have killed the wife and dumped her. Trees that bordered old highways were popular spots for the uninitiated. A first kill. Panic. Dump it the first place you find just to get rid of it. It was common. But if this was so common, why hadn’t Alastair waited for Becker?
    “So he brought me out here.” Alastair was a little breathless, walking and talking, plus carrying the additional weight of his belt and gun. Her dad used to complain about the equipment adding forty pounds, giving cops bad backs and bad knees.
    They walked for so long that Rachel began to think they should have reached the other side. Her head began to feel funny, and she had the strange notion that they were caught in some kind of loop. Things got weird when she hadn’t had her morning coffee, she tried to tell herself. But she knew better.
    This wasn’t Peoria.
    Rachel was about to ask the age-old question, “Are we there yet?” when the visual repetition of trees changed.
    As they moved closer, she made out a patch of solid beige that ended up being a police uniform worn by a young officer who looked familiar but whose name she couldn’t place. He was jittery. Some of the tension drained from his body, and his shoulders visibly relaxed when Rachel and Alastair got close enough to be recognized as the good guys.
    The grove would have been disquieting under normal circumstances, but to be left there alone to guard a dead body . . . Well, no wonder he was anxious.
    She spotted something on the ground, near the base of a tree. At first glance it looked like a hundred-pound skinned squirrel, but then she realized it was human.
    She had to turn away, a hand to her mouth.
    “We came out here and searched the entire area,” Alastair said. “This is all we found. No skin.” When she didn’t reply, he continued: “I’ve never seen anything like it, but I thought maybe you had. Since you used to live in L.A.”
    L.A. got a bad rap. L.A. had nothing on Tuonela and Old Tuonela. But Tuonelians had to always think there were worse places out there. It gave the residents something to feel good about.
    You think it’s bad here? Pshaw. You should live in California. Crazy shit happens there. Crazy shit, lemme tell ya.
    The young cop shifted in his beige uniform, hands resting on his belt, elbows out. “This is some crazy shit.”
    Rachel frowned. Had she spoken her thoughts out loud? Was he just agreeing? She looked at Alastair. He was staring down at the remains.
    Rachel had been a coroner a long time. She’d seen a lot of awful things; she’d seen a lot of weird, crazy shit. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
    Selfishly, she thought about the U-Haul truck with the African violet and Christmas cactus waiting to resume their journey to California. And she knew that wasn’t going to be happening anytime soon.

 
    Chapter Three
     
     
    We were a few miles from Tuonela when we spotted the flashing emergency lights just as our rented minivan crested the hill. I leaned forward from the backseat to get a better view and saw a cluster of vehicles and dark dots of people against a rural backdrop of dead grass, yellow leaves, and blue sky. Cop cars