CHAPTER 4

JULIA OPENS THE FRENCH DOORS, letting in a wall of hot air that barely stirs the gauze curtains. She’s grateful for the chance to refocus. Settle herself for a moment. Outside, there’s a long, rectangular pool next to a gazebo shaded by ivy, several brick patio spaces separated by raised garden beds filled with tropical palms and flowers, classical balustrades. The orchard at the back of the property is still there, and the air does smell of orange blossoms. Ten degrees cooler, and it’d be paradise.

The wall is monstrous, though. The neighbors’ roofs barely peek over the edge; something oppressive, like a prison, about it. To keep something out, or to keep something in?

An even, sloping cement walkway leads down to the Victorian greenhouse; sunlight glints off the glass panels, making it hard for Julia to look at the structure without squinting.

“The water bill is astonishing,” says Aunt Liddy.

“I can imagine.” Julia takes her assigned position behind the wheelchair and pushes her great-aunt carefully through the doors.

“Occasionally they try to restrict my usage, but generous campaign contributions usually settle things quickly.” Aunt Liddy doesn’t bother to hide the note of pride in her voice.

It’s on the tip of Julia’s tongue to say, It must be nice to get away with corruption, but she thinks better of it. Instead she closes the doors behind them and says, “It must be hard to keep it up.”

“It is a constant battle. Los Angeles yearns to be a desert again, and perhaps one day we’ll lose the war effort and all have to emigrate north. I hope to be dead by then. Unlike Irene, I never missed Devon. I enjoy the sun. The heat.”

Julia pushes her great-aunt down the walkway toward the greenhouse. It’s almost two stories high, supported by an ornate, ironwork frame. A cupola at the top, with a lazily rotating rooster weather vane.

“I didn’t understand Irene’s fascination with plants. They seemed so benign, so placid. Beauty often is. What do you think of my garden?”

“It’s lovely.” She wonders why Aunt Liddy doesn’t have an electric wheelchair. Probably does. Everything has been thought through, carefully choreographed, even this walk. Something Julia can’t afford to forget.

“Yes, lovely. A very forgettable word—I’d hoped you might come up with something more interesting. It’s only lovely because it’s tamed. But the truth is, every garden is a war. Every plant a soldier, trying to perpetuate itself, vanquish the enemy. People think we have to preserve nature, like it’s a fragile blossom that won’t survive without our divine intervention. What we have to save is ourselves. Every living creature is ruthless, and vicious, and self-preserving, without a whit of sympathy.”

Julia wishes she would just get to the point. “Being a little overly anthropomorphic, don’t you think?”

“I’m being as clear and calculating as the wild tobacco plant,” Aunt Liddy says. “When it’s attacked by the hawkmoth larva, the plant releases volatile compounds into the air, signals insects that enjoy munching on hawkmoth larva where to find it. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s quite a strategic calculation for something regarded as barely more sentient than a rock. The eucalyptus uses chemicals to inhibit the growth of competing plants.”

“Are you saying it’s thinking?”

“Define thinking. I bet you can’t—no one can. Define communication. That wonderful smell of freshly cut grass, do you know what it really is?”

Play along, Julia. “No.”

“It’s the smell of grass screaming. A chemical distress signal. Who needs cell phones when you have chemistry at your disposal? In many ways, we are surprisingly less sophisticated than weeds.”

They finally reach the greenhouse. “Press the brake, there,” says Aunt Liddy, pointing to a lever by the wheel.

Julia pushes it with her foot, grateful for something to do. The door to the greenhouse is shaded by an arched ironwork portico. She knows that somewhere inside will be the place and the moment when Aunt Liddy tries to close the deal, probably toward the end of the tour. A grand finale. I just have to suffer through the pitch. The most important thing is to avoid looking eager or desperate herself. Among the wealthy, desperation is death.

“Irene sensed there was more to plants, their devious nature, long before it was substantiated by science. I thought she’d chosen a boring field. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Julia approaches the greenhouse. There’s a copper plaque to the right of the door, engraved. Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t. She can see Aunt Liddy’s reflection behind her in the glass—an intense expression, something like barely contained triumph touched with fury. A strange mix.

“So maybe it’s guilt,” her great-aunt says, “that I’ve created this. A way to appease her ghost. And my conscience.”

“Has it worked?”

“No, of course not. The dead never forgive. Or forget.”

Julia reaches for the door handle—

“Wait, my dear. Lift the plaque, otherwise you’ll set off the alarm.”

Julie does, and finds a numeric keypad beneath with a red, blinking light. Security for a greenhouse?

“Six-four-eight-seven-nine-two-one-eight-four-three,” says Aunt Liddy. “Be quick about it, this direct sun is trying.”

Julia asks Aunt Liddy to repeat the numbers and then enters them—there’s a beep, a click, and the light turns green. She cautiously opens the door wide, and finds another world.

Every inch inside is green: palms, ferns, and shrubs, tall trees covered with lichen, Spanish moss hanging from their branches, a pond with massive water lilies and purple lotus flowers, ivy creeping along and through the arching ironwork, a profusion of wildflowers, waist-high grasses, and colorful lilacs. Something wonderfully abandoned about it, like it all sprung up organically.

And then, for some unknown reason—was it a sound? A smell? Her entrance?—the air fills with green leaves. They flutter up toward the cupola—up—and collect like a flock of birds.

For a moment, it’s hard for Julia to breathe. She was supposed to be impressed, and, against her better instincts, she is.

Aunt Liddy rolls up behind her. “Oh, that’s not even the interesting part. Come, my dear, let’s be quick and close the door before we introduce them into the environment. Some are endangered, quite a few are toxic, and I can just imagine the ruckus from my neighbors if their cats ate them and started dying en masse. I’d never hear the end of it from the mayor.”

Julia steps aside and Aunt Liddy wheels herself in. Julia quickly shuts the greenhouse door behind her, hears a click and a beep. There’s a wide, even pathway of concrete that curves, serpentine, to the right and left, enough of the vegetation cut back to allow them through. The leaves settle back into the dense foliage, although a few swirl in their general direction.

“I’m going to ask you to push me again,” says Aunt Liddy, looking extraordinarily pleased at Julia’s reaction. “I can manage short spurts, but my deteriorating muscle strength is problematic for longer distances. Let’s go right.”

Julia swallows the obvious question, What are they?, and gets behind her great-aunt’s wheelchair, grateful for the privacy it will give her. One of the green leaves spirals down out of a nearby tree, lands on her shirt. It has eyes, six legs, antennae. Stares at her curiously.

“Katydids,” says Julia. “They’re just katydids.”

“So much for my big reveal. You’ll find other insects here, all invested deeply in camouflage. A very successful strategy for avoiding predators. The thing that hides itself in plain sight, that’s always the thing you have to watch out for.”

A meaning here she can’t quite fathom, but Julia gets the sense it will have something to do with whatever it is her great-aunt wants from her. The katydid climbs up her sleeve, settles onto her shoulder as she pushes Aunt Liddy. Going along for the ride.

“So, great-grand-niece, how do you think this garden differs from the one outside?”

Julia pushes Aunt Liddy past a cluster of orchids. “It feels more organic. Less designed. But that probably means every inch of it’s designed.”

“In more ways than one. Very good, I’ll add the two points back that I detracted when you called the outside landscape lovely. Every specimen you see here is perfect. Absolutely, utterly perfect, the best expression of its genome. Not a single chromosome flaw. Every plant here would win any horticulture contest. No question.”

“Is that why there’s an alarm?”

“Not entirely. Although this is a Garden of Eden even God himself would envy.”

Another katydid trills from the cover of a fern, and the one on her shoulder jumps away.

“I see you don’t struggle with self-doubt,” says Julia.

“It’s a futile exercise, my dear, best left to people under sixty.”

Julia smiles, in spite of herself. She’ll have to watch that, the other side of her great-aunt’s blade. Charm. Something Ethan had no deficit of either. In fact, she imagines they’d get along well. She pushes Aunt Liddy around the next corner. A raised flower bed on their right, filled with tropical succulents, red blooms with needlelike petals.

“Oh, here’s one of my favorites. Kahili flower,” says Aunt Liddy. “A kind of protea. The flowers and seedpods contain hydrogen cyanide. A compound that’s flammable and poisonous.”

“Lovely.”

“Now you’re being funny. Two bonus points. But I will say don’t touch anything without checking first.”

There she goes, testing again. Julia senses Aunt Liddy listening closely, trying to gauge if this scares her. She decides the best approach is dark humor.

“I wish I’d known you before my divorce.”

Aunt Liddy claps her hands. “Oh yes, we could have made short work of all that.” They approach a shrub with bell-like flowers. “Like you, I understand loss all too well. I sent my sister to an island in the South Pacific and all I got back was a trunk. By then Annabelle was gone, Mother was in the institution, and Father . . . well, Father was Father. And poor Irene . . . she had been struggling for years to recover from a personal tragedy. A devastating fire. Her husband and baby girl perished. She’d suffered from survivor’s guilt. I was so certain a change of scenery would do her good. I wish . . . Ah, it’s too late for wishes. I thought, before she left, that I’d known pain. I’d barely tasted it.”

Confiding invokes trust. A tactic Julia has used herself on more than one occasion, to get a source to reveal more than they were comfortable with. But inside the truth was always a subtle, manipulative idea, a push. Too late Julia had realized this worked on her as well. I’m a great disappointment to my father, Ethan had said the first time they met, at some kind of forgettable charity event she’d been pulled into at the last minute when the reporter assigned to cover it had gotten ill. Ethan had revealed a wound that night, one she’d eventually thought she could heal. It was a shock when, at their wedding reception, his father had offered a toast about how proud he’d always been of his son.

The path here twists again, revealing palms sprouting well over six feet, and the earthy smell of an old-growth forest.

“Irene was a fierce botanist,” Aunt Liddy continues. “I say fierce because you had to be, at the time, if you were a woman with scientific aspirations. I’d run across some intriguing reports about an island that was still untouched by Western scientists, and began to have delusions of grandeur. Finding my own personal Galapagos, discovering some new, revolutionary organism. And Irene desperately needed something else to occupy herself. I thought a complete change of scenery might do her some good. Oh my dear, do watch the hogweed.”

Julia pauses just inches from brushing against a flower she’d assumed was Queen Anne’s lace.

“Hogweed was brought over in the eighteen hundreds as an ornamental plant, if you can believe that. Its sap burns the skin and can even cause blindness.”

Something like a note of admiration in Aunt Liddy’s tone.

“Why didn’t you go with Irene?” Julia asks.

“Adventure is hard to come by when you’re confined to a wheelchair.”

Julia stops, surprised.

“Yes,” Aunt Liddy says. “Most people assume it’s the decrepitude of old age. I liked my horses on the spirited side when I was young, and paid a dear price for it. If the eugenics movement had taken off the way my father hoped, I probably would have been sent to a gas chamber myself.”

Julia doesn’t detect even the faintest hint of anger or resentment. “That’s harsh, don’t you think?”

Aunt Liddy shrugs. “I’m sure I was upset at the time, but now it’s like something that happened to a character in a novel I read long ago. If I didn’t have a few photos I don’t think I’d even be able to remember Father’s face. And when I die, it will all be gone anyway.”

“I’m sure people will build off your research,” Julia says.

“Thank you for your pity. It will be sad to me, if to no one else, when microbes eat all my ingenious chromosomes. Even this Eden here is destined for annihilation. The plants will die, or they’ll reproduce with other, imperfect specimens, and ruin all my work.”

The twists and turns have confused Julia’s sense of direction, although judging by the cupola, she guesses they’re almost halfway through.

“You could donate your research.”

“And let someone else take the credit? I think not. Plus . . . an opportunity has presented itself. One that might link my name with a discovery that lives on forever. I’m starting to like that word more and more. Forever.”

Julia smiles. “Isn’t that just another way to avoid—how did you put it—the complete annihilation of death?”

“Oh, you do have a reporter’s memory. I never said I’d overcome my own fears. Immortality has been, and always will be, the Holy Grail. Now stop here—there’s something I want to show you. A couple of things, actually.”

Julia does, next to a raised bed with a small, rather uninteresting flower that looks like a purple puffball with fernlike leaves. There’s a rusting metal stool under the bed.

“Have a seat so I can see you.”

And here we go. The ask will come soon.

Aunt Liddy pulls a battered, leather notebook out from underneath her blanket while Julia settles on the stool. “Here,” she says. “Take this. It was Irene’s. It’s hard for me to look at.”

Julia accepts the notebook. The cover is worn, the binding loose. A sheaf of letters in the front. She looks to Aunt Liddy for permission, which is granted with a nod. Gently, she opens it. April 3, 1939. It was a longer journey than I’d expected. . . . There’s a very good illustration in the side margin, a prop plane descending through cloud cover, a sharp mountain peak in the background.

“How did she die?” Julia asks.

“That’s what I’m hoping you will help me discover. You’ll see her version of events inscribed there, and tucked away in the back is a letter with a different version. A backhanded accusation of suicide. It doesn’t fit my sister. Something was . . . covered up.”

Julia continues to turn the pages. Sketches of plants and flowers, each labeled in beautiful cursive script. The illustrations are very detailed, down to the root structure and fine veins on the leaves. A number of plants there are no names for, just a question mark beneath. Something primeval about them. They remind her of the images in her college paleontology textbook, the fossil on one side, the artist’s rendering on the other. A lost world revealed.

“But if mental illness runs in the family . . . she really might have committed suicide.”

“It runs in my mother’s side of the family.” She looks pointedly at Julia.

An awkward pause. “Oh . . . she was your half sister,” says Julia.

“My father wasn’t a huge believer in morality. He thought that it was simply a lesser vehicle for social construct through tribalism, war, and politics. The greater vehicle was through the pure rationality of science, free from dogma, superstition, or emotion.”

Julia traces a finger along the edge of a page. “Doesn’t sound like a warm family to grow up in.”

“I didn’t notice. I suppose I’m very much like him in that way.”

Julia turns another page in the journal, trying to feign disinterest. There’s a sketch of a very basic tent, just a bamboo pole with fabric tied to a slightly raised platform.

“Well, I don’t know how I could possibly help,” says Julia. “I’m just a journalist. Was a journalist.”

“Exactly. You have a nose for when people aren’t telling the truth.”

“Maybe,” says Julia with an ironic smile. “Not always.”

“I did a little research on you myself. Your series on the use of toxic soil for park development in low-income neighborhoods was impressive. All I need is for you to connect with someone who is, mercifully, allowing me to disinter Irene and bury her in the family cemetery. Ask the right questions.”

Sounds a little too easy. “You just want me to call this person?”

“No, I want you to go there. To the island, Kapu.”

Julia almost starts to laugh, but she quickly realizes Aunt Liddy is serious. “Go there. This mysterious person doesn’t have a phone?”

“He—the Reverend—leads a small, isolated Christian colony. No interest in the corrupt trappings of modernity and all that.”

“Well, that’s even better. So you want me to go to an island I’ve never heard of, where your sister died under mysterious circumstances, and by the way there’s no phone service and a religious cult. Can’t see why I’d turn that down.”

“Don’t be so dramatic—they’re no more a cult than the Pennsylvania Dutch are. And to help support themselves, they run a small, and very exclusive, luxury eco-resort for those who can afford their outrageous prices and withstand a complete break from technology.”

“And why would any tourist want that?”

“The romance of ‘getting away from it all,’ and all that nonsense.”

Julia knows the type—in the days of Ethan, there were always one or two waifish women settled into a corner at a cocktail party, going on and on about their latest excursion to a place no one had heard of, where they earnestly gave up protein or gluten or electricity as some kind of purification rite, or tried their hand at coffee picking with locals, weaving baskets from palm fronds. Always within the thick, protective padding that wealth provided.

“I think I’d prefer the cult,” Julia says.

Aunt Liddy smiles thinly. “Of course, we’ll give you a satellite phone.”

“That’s really not my main issue. And . . . why me? Why not Bailey?”

“He won’t release her remains to anyone except a family member, in person. It took more than seventy years to get even this concession, and I . . . well, I am obviously in no condition to travel.”

“And I’m the only family you have left.”

Aunt Liddy places both hands in her lap, one over the other. It’s a prim, yet defensive gesture—she’s trying to hide how important this is to her, and failing.

It gives Julia the confidence to press. “Isn’t it sentimental to want to bury your sister? Didn’t you say sentimentality was . . . anathema?”

Her great-aunt slaps the armrest on her wheelchair. “Now you’re thinking like a Greer. Look through the journal until you find the red flower.”

Julia arches an eyebrow, but does as she’s told.

“She went to Paris, of course. Do you draw?”

“A little. Not well.” Finally Julia finds the red bloom. It too is labeled with a question mark, kupapa ‘u flower written underneath. The flower looks like a large orchid, with black dots leading into its center.

“She said this one smelled like a rotting corpse. That’s what kupapa ‘u means in Hawaiian, corpse. By the time the specimen arrived, it had no smell anymore, and had blackened into a thick pulp. But I planted it in the greenhouse anyway, thinking maybe the roots would sprout a new plant. They didn’t. A scientist gets used to failure, so I didn’t think much more about it.”

“That’s all very interesting,” says Julia, closing the journal. “But I don’t see what it has to do with Irene’s death.”

Aunt Liddy watches her for a moment. Appraising.

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. When they sent me Irene’s things, they also sent me a funeral keepsake, a brooch made out of her hair. An old-fashioned idea, making jewelry out of hair, or teeth, or the bone of a loved one. I compared a few strands to a sample of hair from a brush Irene had left behind. They did seem to match, although that didn’t prove much beyond the fact that she’d been there. So I carefully froze both samples. I was certain that one day we’d have processes that could reveal more than my primitive microscope.”

There’s no emotion as she says this, Julia notes. Not a single hint of sadness, or loss.

“As soon as we had the technology, I ran a genetic and chemical analysis of her hair, hoping to find what other factors were in play. There was a high level of neuromodulators in the sample taken from the brooch—puzzling, because they’re usually only present when there’s a neurological disorder. Which she didn’t suffer from, at least not when she left for Kapu.”

Julia knows she must listen very, very carefully to what Aunt Liddy says next, because everything else has been constructed to lead her to this moment.

“And then, not too long ago, six months, seven, I noticed a strange red bloom in the greenhouse. It gave off the smell of a rotting corpse. Excited, I found its match in Irene’s notebook, and immediately took a sample. The center released pollen when I touched it. Then I ran some tests. It wasn’t a flower at all—it was a fungus in disguise. The sample of Irene’s hair from the brooch and the fungus contained an identical gene. I ran the tests on her hair from the brush, pre-visit. No such gene was present. It’s possible there had been some kind of cross-contamination between the samples—it’s not unheard of. I would have taken a fresh sample from the flower, but that very night there was a break-in.”

Julia sits very, very still. She knows that every blink, every breath is being observed. “Someone took it.”

Aunt Liddy nods.

Not just a sentimental mission, then, to collect the remains of a dearly departed sister. Julia wonders what her mother exchanged for those braces, because she senses there is not a single cell of compassion in her great-aunt’s body. She is one hundred percent shark.

“Why is it so special?”

“I have theories only, and you’re better off not knowing too much. But if it wasn’t cross-contamination, well . . . let’s just say it’s the kind of discovery that could land one a Nobel Prize. And a much vaster fortune.”

There she is again, dangling the carrot of the grand potential inheritance. Julia chooses to ignore it. “Any idea who broke in?”

“Again, theories. We conducted a thorough security investigation after it was stolen. Discovered surveillance bugs in the house, malware on the computers—even the cell phones had been hacked. Not the efforts of an amateur.”

“So it’s that dangerous?”

A slight pause. “I will, of course, compensate you very well.”

Not an answer, a deflection.

“But if all you need is the flower, you could send someone with more expertise, a scientist at least. They could pretend to be a tourist.”

“I need the body and the flower. There was precious little DNA in the few follicles I was able to preserve. I need more. Even a partial skeleton would be nice.”

Even a partial skeleton would be nice. Julia can’t imagine a world where she’d ever say that about someone she’d loved. Maybe the Greer side of the family isn’t capable of love—maybe that’s the real reason her great-grandmother severed all ties.

If she wasn’t desperate, she would too.

Instead, Julia says nothing, trying to be completely inscrutable. She remembers Ethan in the car lot, after they’d gotten two grand off the sticker price of the Jaguar. A strained silence is always your best negotiation tool.

Her great-aunt rushes to fill it. “All the tourists have returned raving about how wonderful the unspoiled paradise is. But there may be some in the mix who, like you, are on a similar mission. How far they’d go is uncertain. You’d need to be careful. Discreet.” The tremor in her hand develops into a shake. “And think what a story it would be. I know a very powerful literary agent who’d be perfect. I’ve already planted some seeds and she’s intrigued, to say the least.”

So. There it is. Money, a career-launching story, and danger. But for Julia, her own safety is of little concern. The first few weeks after Evie was gone, she’d walked to the beach at dawn every morning, having suffered sleepless night after sleepless night. Toyed with the urge to enter the water, fully clothed. She imagined her skin underwater, pale as the moon, the feel of the current lifting her hair, bubbles percolating from her mouth, eyes open. Would she have had the will to keep walking as her lungs burned? Maybe. Maybe not. She just wanted to be subsumed by something else. To not be trapped in the prison of what had happened to her.

Eventually she’d realized, though, that Evie would be truly lost then, and Ethan would truly win. Not much of a reason to live, but enough.

Is she willing to risk the only thing she has left, though: her life?

But her great-aunt has all that money, more than enough to finally put her on even footing with Ethan.

And the best part—the very, very best part—is the son of a bitch will never see it coming.