40
Sam’s teeth were rattled after fifteen minutes on Jennifer’s ATV, bouncing over ruts and fallen branches on the logging road. The two women ducked to pass beneath low-hanging boughs as Jennifer steered around the last bend and pulled behind the red barn.
They both climbed off the ATV and leaned around the corner to see if there were any cars parked in front of the Victorian house. Sam didn’t see any.
“Are there other places to park?” Sam asked in a low voice.
“No,” Jennifer said. “I don’t think anyone is here, but we should still be careful. These people are all about secrets and hiding.”
Sam nodded. She stood very still, listening for voices and looking for any movement in the house’s windows. If anyone would be expected to know about the people involved with the hospital and garden center, it would be Jennifer.
But Sam trusted her instincts, that Lincoln and the others would assume that she had run for her life and would never come back.
So she inched around the corner of the barn, made sure the coast was clear, and bolted straight up the porch steps to the front door of the house. Jennifer was right behind her.
Sam tried the knob, but it was locked. She thought back to how Lincoln had called his father because he couldn’t get in.
“Here,” Jennifer said, and Sam turned around to see her holding up a single key. “I have the master.”
“To the garden center?” Sam asked.
“To both properties,” Jennifer said.
Sam watched her insert the key into the front door of Enchanted Petals and wondered how a low-level person at Maynard-King would gain access to the entire domain. Again, she felt a stab of doubt. Could Jennifer be leading her into a trap? She stayed back when Jennifer stepped into the house.
“What’s the matter?” Jennifer asked, holding the door open.
“Why do you have a master key?” Sam asked.
“I stole it,” Jennifer said.
“From where?”
“The guardhouse. See, Sam, you’re not the only one who has to hide. Once they figure out the key is missing and check the security footage, they’ll be after me too. So we’re in this together, okay?”
“I just can’t figure out why you decided to help me,” Sam said. “To put yourself at risk this way.”
“It’s not just for you,” Jennifer said. “I wanted to save myself and get the hell away from there. Like I told you, I’ll die before I help them with the new girls. I’ll die before I become one of them. Are you going to trust me or not?”
“I will,” Sam said after a few seconds. “It’s not every day I feel like I’ve got a target on my back. It makes me nervous, Jennifer. Sorry.”
“I get it,” Jennifer said.
“I’m assuming there’s a phone,” Sam said, thinking of how the number of the Yellow Pages ad had rung here.
“Yes, but it’s connected to the hospital line. If we use it, they’ll know.”
They walked inside and shut the door behind them.
Sam looked around and saw that the house was decorated more like a private men’s club than a garden center.
The foyer was paneled with dark wood, with rustic balusters on stairs leading to the second floor, a chandelier made of interlocking deer antlers, and landscape paintings in gold frames with discreet bronze lights highlighting the art.
“Are you sure they sell flowers here?” Sam asked.
“In the shop next door. I told you—this is where 1740 meets. It’s their clubhouse,” Jennifer said.
The floors were covered with Oriental rugs in muted colors.
As they walked through the rooms, Sam saw reading nooks, window seats, Tiffany lamps on Craftsman-style tables beside burgundy leather armchairs, and more art.
Sam recognized several of the paintings; she had seen them at her aunt’s art gallery, and she knew that Crispin Adams had bought them.
There were antlers everywhere and other objects that made Sam shiver: one entire wall covered with animal skulls, each displayed on its own shelf; a corner cupboard filled with tiny fetishes of animals, all carved from stone; another cupboard filled with archaeological statues and artifacts; and a small dollhouse filled with dolls holding knives.
Sam crouched in front of the dollhouse, looking through the windows.
“Nice, right?” Jennifer asked.
“This looks real, I mean as if a child actually played with it,” Sam said. “Someone made curtains for the windows and braided rugs for the floors. Look at the little coloring book . . . there are crayon marks on the open page.”
“Take it out,” Jennifer said. “Someone signed her initials on the back.”
Sam didn’t reach inside; she didn’t want to touch anything. She peered more carefully at the tiny knives and saw that they were cutout pieces of cardboard, the hilts colored with brown crayon, the blades colored silver.
“How do you know someone signed her initials?” Sam asked. “Have you spent a lot of time in this house?”
“I’ve been here before,” Jennifer said. “We all have, for the parties. But that’s not how I know about the signature. Go ahead, look.”
Sam wasn’t sure why she felt so reluctant to put her hand inside the dollhouse. It felt as if she was reaching into something evil. When she took the tiny coloring book out, she turned it over and saw the crudely written letters.
“JS,” Sam read out loud.
“Jennifer Stewart,” Jennifer said. “That’s me. I wrote those initials when I made the coloring book. I cut tiny squares of paper and sewed them together—like a real book binding.”
“When did you make it, Jennifer?” Sam asked.
“When I was six,” Jennifer said, staring at the book.
“Was this your dollhouse?” Sam asked.
“Yes. They let me bring it with me to the hospital,” Jennifer said.
Sam stared at her. “Have you been at Maynard-King since you were six?”
“Not continuously,” Jennifer said. “I’ve been in and out.”
“So even though you’re working there now, are you still a patient?” Sam asked.
“They want me to be,” Jennifer said. “They would keep me sick forever if they had their way.”
“Why?” Sam asked. “Is it for the money?”
“No, it’s one therapist in particular. When I was fourteen, I was assigned to her.
She used to tell me stories about her family, and she made it sound so perfect, like the family I wish I’d had.
I couldn’t wait until it was time to see her each day.
And I’d go into her office, and she had postcards of mountains on a bulletin board.
She told me she had climbed every one of them. ”
Sam listened; as Jennifer talked, she almost seemed to fall into a trance.
“I saw her all that year, and then the next, and the next. She made me feel as if I was part of her family. I loved her, just as if she were my mother, a good mother—and she told me she loved me, too, like a daughter. She made me feel safe. It got so I would rather be here, near her, than out in the world.”
“Didn’t you want to go home?” Sam asked.
“How do you define home?” Jennifer asked. “My mother killed my stepfather. It wasn’t exactly a healthy environment.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sam said. “How old were you?”
“Six,” Jennifer said. “That’s when I came here. I saw my mother do it, but I couldn’t remember the details. They got buried in my brain. To this day, I know more from what other people have told me than what’s in my actual memory.”
“That must be so traumatic. No wonder you had to go to a hospital.”
“Yes, lucky me. Maynard-King. I really have that therapist to thank—the one I told you about. The thing is, she started off with my mother—evaluating her, after she was arrested. When she realized that my mother wasn’t getting out of prison anytime soon, she found a way to help me—she took me out of the group home and brought me here. ”
“Do you still see her?” Sam asked.
“Sort of,” Jennifer said. “But you know, it’s not the same.”
“Why?”
“All that I-love-you stopped when I wouldn’t do what she wanted. She got angry instead. She would act cold to me, and it hurt a lot. I’d cry, and she’d reel me back, telling me she loved me again. And I’d go along with her for a while, and the pattern would go on and on.”
“What did she want you to do?” Sam asked.
“She was grooming me,” Jennifer said. “Raising me for 1740.”
“That’s horrible,” Sam said.
“Yes, it is. She found a lot of troubled girls through working at the jail—either inmates or their daughters or victims. I was one of the youngest. She’d get us admitted to Maynard-King and then cull through us and decide which of us could be trained to make the men happy.”
“The men?”
“Yes. Whoever can make it into the club.”
“This club?” Sam asked. “Here?”
Jennifer nodded. “Where do you think the name came from? Enchanted Petals? It’s because we are all flowers, and we’re supposed to open our petals to the men. Let our petals just drop to the floor.”
“Like dead roses,” Sam said.
“Oh, they wouldn’t like that,” Jennifer said. “They actually think they’re romantic. That we like what they’re doing. We’re supposed to pretend.”
“Jennifer, I think I understand why you put all these knives in the dollhouse,” Sam asked, feeling sick from what she was hearing.
“So that the dolls could protect themselves,” Jennifer said. “And each other. So when bad people came after them, they could fight back.”
Sam nodded, feeling sad for a little girl who had to think that way, in terms of weapons and attack, defense and protection.
“How long has 1740 been here?” Sam asked. “Did it start at the hospital or here at this house?”
“It goes back to the Civil War,” Jennifer said.
“Crispin Adams’s family owned all of this property—hundreds of acres.
Trafficking women has been around forever.
His ancestors were doing it back when this house was built—when Abraham Lincoln was president.
Crispin is very proud of that fact. Apparently, the supply of women in this part of Rhode Island wasn’t enough for the demand, so a few generations later, Cantwell Adams—head of the family at the time—split the land and endowed an asylum. That’s what they called it back then.”
“Maynard-King,” Sam said.
“Yes.”
“Are there Maynards and Kings in the family tree?” Sam asked.
“Nope. ‘Maynard’ was the last name of Cantwell’s favorite girl. Dorothy Maynard. She was just a young woman who worked here. Somewhere along the line she was taught to read, and her favorite story was Beauty and the Beast.”
“That’s how 1740 started?” Sam said. “Because of Dorothy loving the book?”
“Yes.”
“And the name King?”
“Legend has it that Cantwell was incredibly ugly. But Dorothy’s love—which is what they all call what they make us do—made him feel like a king.
He wanted that for all his friends. So all the crazy girls who came to the hospital were turned into flowers who lost their petals.
And Cantwell became so obsessed with Beauty and the Beast, he named his club for the year it was written. ”
“What happened to Dorothy?” Sam asked.
“The same thing that happens to all flowers,” Jennifer said. “They wilt, then die, then get thrown away.”