sixteen

Lapeer County, September

A downpour began Thursday night—a heavy, constant flow of water from sluggish clouds. The next morning it was still coming down at the same steady rate, now peppered with lightning and thunder. I couldn’t work outside in the garden, which was okay by me. Every muscle screamed for rest.

Nora and I were playing gin at the kitchen table when a flash of light and a crack of thunder got me thinking of power outages and flashlights and flooded basements—all those things that were exciting as a child and irritating as an adult.

“Do you lose power much out here?”

“On occasion.”

“Where do you keep a flashlight?”

“I have one by my bed, and there are candles in the drawers above the table linens.”

“Yes, I’ve seen those.”

Nora looked up from her cards. “Been snooping around?”

My breath stopped. “What?”

She smiled. “I don’t mind. I’m not hiding anything.”

I thought of the locked trunk and the locked room and had to stop myself from snickering out loud. “I was looking for matches,” I said, though I already knew where they were. “I thought I’d burn up that weed pile.”

“You’ll find the matches in the kitchen, in the drawer by the phone. But I don’t think you’ll be burning anything out there anytime soon with all this rain.”

The card game continued until I’d lost track of the number of times Nora had won. Finally she went to her sewing room and I tried to distract myself with reading. I was getting stir-crazy in this house in the middle of nowhere. Back in Detroit, I sometimes went a dozen places in a day. I didn’t have to think about how to fill downtime because there was no downtime. All I did was work.

I felt more urgently than ever that I needed to bring up the camera and the photos, get the story, and get the heck out of here and back to Detroit. What was I waiting for anyway? Mr. Rich had probably blown the whole thing out of proportion. I should just call him and tell him I was ready for the photos.

As I drifted off to sleep that night, I resolved to do just that.

I woke Saturday morning to an emptiness. It took a moment for me to realize that it was the lack of the constant drum of rain on the roof. Outside the air was cool and wet and invigorating. The plants in the garden looked greener than they had two days ago and showed signs of new growth. A glance at the bare dirt I had left when I pulled out the weeds revealed a sprinkling of seedlings that I would need to eradicate.

I retrieved my spade and turned the earth to smother this newest generation of weeds. Deprived of light, the unwanted growth would soon die off. That’s what the books said, anyway. But if I didn’t fill those spots in with good plants and some mulch, the weeds would take advantage of the empty space and fill it up themselves. A trip to the nearest garden center seemed in order. If nothing else, it would get me out of this house.

“That would be lovely!” was Nora’s response to my suggested outing. “We’ll go grocery shopping as well. We’re starting to run low on most everything.”

I hadn’t driven in a week, and I guess hadn’t really missed that aspect of Detroit life. No traffic jams. No long red lights. No angry honking. No near misses with jaywalkers and cyclists. And I was getting less twitchy about not having internet access. I didn’t exactly miss hearing the constant beeps notifying me of texts and tweets and status updates. Out here it was just the ambling, quiet life of the country. A comfortable obscurity.

It wasn’t exactly thrilling—nothing like seeing my byline on the front page. But at least I felt needed. I was watching over someone. Someone who didn’t particularly want to be watched over. But still.

We pulled up to Perkins Nursery not long after they opened and had the place practically to ourselves. Once we had come within range of a cell tower, my phone had begun to buzz with activity. When Nora wandered off to browse, I flipped through the texts, notifications, and emails until I saw one from Desiree.

Before we’d been cut off by the sheer density of nothingness in the atmosphere of rural Lapeer County, she’d offered to follow up on a few leads I’d managed to scrounge up on Judge Sharpe. There was still a chance that I could salvage my reputation if I could prove he was hiding something nefarious about his service during the riots. Now my heart sank as I read the email she had sent a day earlier.

I know I promised to come through for you on this, but I’m just not sure there’s a real story here. He seems clean. Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam, lots of service to the community, no one seems to have anything bad to say about him. And there’s just nothing out there about him in particular in connection to the riots. All we have is a little info on where his unit was, but with the chaos of that week, who knows if he was ever where you think he was. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to back out. Jack is getting suspicious. Good luck with your aunt. Catch a lightning bug for me!

Desiree was a good researcher. Was it really possible that the reason we hadn’t found anything was that there wasn’t anything to find? But I was good too, and I had good instincts. The only reason I could think of for someone to avoid talking about a particular time in his life was that he was hiding something. There were a lot of people involved in those riots who did terrible things, assuming they wouldn’t have to answer to anyone for it. So far, most of them hadn’t.

I grabbed an oversized metal cart and shuffled off to drown my frustrations in herbs. The plants looked unhappy to still be in their little plastic pots this late in the summer. I filled up my cart with end-of-season deals and pushed thoughts of Judge Sharpe out of my mind. Instead I focused on how pleased my new plants would be when I gave them room to breathe in the great wide open and found myself smiling in spite of everything.

“Elizabeth, right?” said a voice from across the aisle.

I looked up to see a man watching me. His khaki pants and green polo shirt were soiled, and each hand gripped the edge of a large pot of some sort of evergreen shrub. His eyes were hazel, almost green, striking against his dark skin.

“Tyrese,” he said. “Remember? I met you at your aunt’s house.”

“Of course. I didn’t recognize you without your hat and sunglasses.”

He closed the space between us and looked at my cart. “Herb garden?”

“Yes. My aunt has me revamping hers. It’s the little fenced-in area near that big tree. I guess it’s been around since the nineteenth century, but it’s been neglected for a long time.”

He put down his pots and wiped his dirt-encrusted hands on his pants. “I never really took the time to look at it. What sort of plants are in there?”

I searched my memory. “Mint, dill, some roses—”

“What sort of roses?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea. There are no blooms on them now. And I guess I wouldn’t know even if there were.” I leaned in and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I don’t actually know what I’m doing.”

He laughed. “Would you mind if I took a look at them? I breed some of our roses here, and it’s always good to introduce heirloom stock into the mix, but it’s hard to find old varieties that are still viable. The roses you have may not be original to the garden, but I might get lucky and find something rare.”

“What would you do with it?”

“I could show you how to prune it and help it perform well—rejuvenate it a bit. Different types of roses require different care. And, if you were willing, I could take a few cuttings back with me. What do you think?”

“You’d have to ask Nora. It’s not my garden.”

I called Nora over and watched her closely as Tyrese explained his request. I was waiting for her to call him William so I could correct her. But she never called Tyrese anything at all.

“Certainly, you could come look at our roses. So long as it’s okay with Elizabeth. It’s her garden.”

“She said it was your garden.” He smiled at me as he said it.

“Oh, no. It’s Elizabeth’s garden.”

We worked out the details as Tyrese followed us to the checkout. At the car, he opened the passenger door for Nora and loaded the plants. He shut the trunk and turned to me. “I’m looking forward to coming out tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I said casually. “Should be fun.”

We stood there a moment, both of us nodding slightly and looking for the conversation’s natural end, which you only ever do when you are hoping the other person will prolong it.

“Okay, well . . . we’ll see you tomorrow then,” I finally said. I got in the car, wondering why Dana was so much better at these things than I was.

Tyrese shut my door for me and waved. From the rearview mirror I could see that he was still watching us when I made the turn onto the road to head home.

“He’s nice,” Nora said a little too innocently.

I gave her a look.

“What? He is.”

“Yes,” I agreed. He was nice.

Maybe I didn’t have to rush back to Detroit just yet.