Chapter 27 #2
When I arrived, my nerves were worse than they’d been during the confrontation with my mother.
I’d been keeping tabs on the news and knew that Jasper hadn’t been charged with anything yet, but I didn’t know where he was.
I couldn’t handle running into him; I couldn’t.
I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him.
I had a thousand questions for him, but I didn’t think I really wanted the answers to any of them.
A heavyset cop with a pointy, reddish-brown beard met me in the driveway and introduced himself as some deputy something-or-other. I was too worried and filled with nerves to listen very closely.
He guided me around the back of the house to the conservatory. Heavy mud tracks from machinery had destroyed the manicured grass that led to the outside door of the garden.
“Just point to whatever is on the endangered list that you think is still alive, ma’am,” he instructed, opening the door for me.
“Still alive,” I muttered, my mouth dropping wide in horror as I stepped inside the large glass structure.
“Sorry about everything. The machines had to dig up pretty much all of it to see if there was any more evidence,” he added.
My hands covered my mouth as I stepped inside, and the sights and smells hit me like a two-by-four to the head.
“I should have warned you. It reeks in here. They aren’t sure what’s causing it,” he said, squinting his eyes as the scent of decay lingered thick in the air.
“It’s the corpse flower. It smells like rotting flesh when it blooms,” I mumbled, moving farther into the mess.
A gasp filled my lungs. The corpse flower had been dug up and tossed to the side, where bits and pieces of the already expired purple-red bloom lay torn and limp in a pile of discarded dirt and rocks.
I moved to climb the messy dirt bed to go to it, but the officer stopped me, gripping ahold of my arm.
“I’m sorry, you can’t touch anything until we’re finished here. Just point, please. Should be at least another few days,” he said.
The rare, spectacular bloom of the corpse flower, which only showed every seven to ten years, had gone unappreciated and unseen, and was now lying forgotten in a heap of dirt.
It was the most devastating, tragic symbolism of life I’d ever seen; next to it was a large, deep hole where Hester’s body had been hidden.
I spun slowly, the images blurring in my head, as I tried to take in the view of trampled, smashed dirt. Nothing was salvageable. Nothing. Even the pavers on the paths had been dug up and tossed in a pile—on top of the shadow ferns and thousand-dollar black-and-white tuxedo pothos.
Every bed had been dug up and discarded, destroyed and murdered, the plants broken, smashed, and dead. When I first came into the conservatory, it had been wild with life. Though forgotten and untamed, it had thrived in its dormancy. It was salvageable.
This was a wasteland.
My months of excruciating back and body pain had been for nothing. The pots of propagations against the wall were all brown and dead with a lack of care for their barely established new roots. My eyes stung. Everything was dead or destroyed.
I had just lost my job at Pinehurst Botanical Gardens.
I struggled to breathe, even though I was panting and heaving. The tears began to fall. The last thing I wanted to do was lose control of myself inside of this manor, but the more I tried to stop them, the more my throat made a loud gasping noise.
“You okay? Mrs.…?”
Everything blurred and spun, and worst of all, I was going to cry in front of these men.
The cop pushed open the doors to the manor and sat me down against the wall of the hallway, letting the lightly perfumed air of the hallway calm me.
“Mrs.…, uh, just try to breathe. I’m going to get you some water, okay? Wait right here,” he said, hurrying off down the hallway as I hyperventilated.
When my breathing finally began to calm, I looked inside the conservatory’s glass doors again, unable to believe the state of it. Suddenly my heart leaped into my throat.
Staring back at me from the other side of the glass was the beautiful, moon-colored face of Hester, standing in all her ethereal grace. Wet lines of silvery tears streamed down her own face; she looked sadder than ever.
I scrambled to my feet. Why was she still here? I’d found her body. She was supposed to be happy and resting in peace now. I didn’t understand. Why was she not resting in peace?
Her dark, flowing waves of midnight hair moved as she shook her head no as if in answer to my question.
“No,” I answered out loud. “I helped you.” My voice fell. I couldn’t bear the thought that not only had all those weeks and weeks of labor in the conservatory been destroyed, leaving me without a job, but it had all been destroyed for nothing; I hadn’t even helped Hester when I thought that I had.
I hurriedly backed away from her, needing to separate myself from her haunting presence and another glimpse at the wreckage of the conservatory. I needed to get away from here.
“Elaina,” a familiar voice spoke.
Shaken, I looked up to see Jasper’s father, Darius, looking lost and disheveled in front of me. His shirt was buttoned at an odd angle, and something about him seemed more off than usual.
“Eliza,” I corrected.
“Yes, forgive me. Have you seen Jasper? I lost something.” An odd absence in his eyes as he spoke made me uneasy. Why was he here? Had he managed to get ownership of the manor? All of the furnishings I could see looked to be the same.
Something uneasy prickled me about his presence, telling me he wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Is Jasper home?” I asked, looking around absently and wondering where the cop helping me had gone.
“Help me look for him, will you? I have to tell him something,” he asked earnestly, still looking a little out of it.
I agreed with hesitation and followed as he took the steps up to the second level.
“Does anyone know you’re here?” I asked gently.
“Yes, I think,” he answered absently as he walked down the hall, peeking his head in each door before moving on to the next.
An uneasy feeling pulled at me as I continued to walk farther into the depths of the mansion with him. Something in my chest urged me to not leave him alone. As we turned the corner, taking the stairs to the third floor, something red caught in my vision, moving behind me.
Hester.
I knew it was her. I could feel her presence behind me as I followed her husband up the stairs, the faint, soapy aldehyde scent of Chanel No. 5 following along with us.
I couldn’t take it anymore in the hallway and looked back at her, needing to see which expression she held.
Frozen in fear by her sudden closeness, her sad, apologetic eyes met with mine.
She reached out, moving as if she didn’t really want to, gripped my face, and used her fingers to pry my mouth open until it hurt.
I tried to turn and run, but my legs didn’t work.
Terror gripped me as the ghost roughly pressed her cold, slender fingers into my mouth and down my throat before removing them and fading to nothing before my eyes.
I keeled over, hacking a deep, low intense cough. With my legs suddenly working, I kicked myself away from where she had been, even though she was already gone. What the fuck? Did she just try to choke me?
“That cough,” Darius said as he poked his head out of a door and was suddenly at my side helping me up.
“Come sit down.” He ushered me into a seat inside the room he had stepped out from.
“I haven’t heard a cough like that since Hester,” he said with faraway eyes as he moved to open the balcony doors, letting in a cool and welcome breeze.
As the cool air hit my clammy forehead, my eyes landed on him with curiosity. My voice rasped painfully as I spoke. “Hester used to cough?”
He nodded, looking off at a spot on the wall. “Before we knew she was sick.”
My breath caught in my chest. “Hester was sick?”
Darius nodded again. “Do you know where my son is? I need to tell him something before it’s too late.”
I glanced at the door, wishing desperately that anyone else would be in this room with me.
But I plowed on regardless. “Why did you write fake letters to Jasper from Hester?” My chest rose and fell with shallow breaths as our eyes locked.
Concern deepened as I saw things were missing from his eyes that should be there.
“You know about the letters?” he asked, though he didn’t actually sound surprised.
I nodded apprehensively. “Hester hated roses. It was in all her gardening notes. She even went so far as to write little poems about her dislike of them. I thought it was odd that a Gothic garden wouldn’t have a single rose. It was because she hated them, vehemently.”
I waited for him to connect the dots, but instead, he squinted at me.
“The wax seal on every letter from you and Hester was a rose. She never would have used a flower she hated to send her love to Jasper.”
He smiled, though it didn’t hit his eyes, and looked down at his feet. “I should’ve paid more attention to her and Jasper, instead of working as much as I did. I suppose then I would’ve listened enough to know the flowers she hated.”
“Why did you fake the letters?” I asked nervously.
There was movement outside the door, but I didn’t dare look in case Darius turned and saw it too. I needed him to keep talking. Tension crackled across the tops of my arms, causing the hairs to stand tall.
He let out a sigh. “My biggest regret in life was leaving Jasper and being unable to be here for him. The letters were my only way of making sure his mother and I were still parents to him,” he said softly. “As much as we could be.”
My eyes shifted to the door, but I didn’t move my head. Jasper held a finger to his mouth and disappeared on the side of the doorway, letting me know he was out there but keeping his distance.
“Why didn’t you come back?” I asked after making certain Darius hadn’t seen Jasper.