The Vines by Christopher Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

floorboards or get crushed by a falling section of the roof. So the sprawling grounds outside became their private kingdom, and the gazebo their temple. Now there are flagstone paths and manicured gardens covering the expanse where decaying cane stalks once stood like the last timbers of a war-ravaged village. And the gazebo, which once seemed to be composed of as much lichen as wood, is a clean white shock against a canopy of banana trees.
    “Are they starting up tours again?” Blake asks.
    “Not for a week, Daddy says. Till all this dies down. You see any news crews on the way in?”
    “Nope. Just some cop cars.”
    “They’re searching an area close by for him. Least they were this morning. They think he might have stumbled a ways after she whacked him or something.”
    “But there’s no blood inside the shed?”
    He asks this again because he doesn’t believe her, and apparently his tone makes that clear because she stops walking and glares at him over one shoulder.
    She hasn’t just stopped to stare, though, Blake realizes. She wants him to notice what she’s standing beside. The fountain next to her is just a broad copper basin, one of the old sugar kettles that were part of the refining process. But the spigot has stopped running, and the basin is tipped so far to one side it’s emptied all of its water onto the flagstone path. Blake tries to imagine someone lifting it. But the job would be too much for just one man. It would be too much for several men, especially if they were drunk, which most of the guests last night most assuredly were.
    “Did the police do this?”
    “Nope,” Nova answers. “They didn’t do that either.”
    She points to a spot where a planter has spit several of its bricks onto the flagstones. And spit is the best word he can think of for it. His first guess is that the earth underneath shifted and settled; what was this land all around them but glorified swamp? But it can’t explain the force that propelled the bricks out onto the path. A few seconds of blinking, and Blake realizes the only probable explanation is some sudden upward pressure. A heaving of some sort from below, and that’s just . . .
    “Nova, run to my truck, see if my shovel’s—”
    Willie Thomas has just emerged from the shed, when he sees who is standing beside his daughter in the lengthening shadow of the main house. And in an instant Blake watches Willie transform from a harried, overworked yardman to a smiling, happy servant whose every reaction to a white person is stained by a childhood of forced integration. As always, it is a transformation that makes Willie’s only daughter bristle with a combination of anger and shame. Out come the huge, solicitous smile and the too-eager handshake, which Blake accepts because no matter how hard he tries to treat Willie Thomas as a peer, the man is determined to greet Blake from behind this protective mask of inauthentic good cheer.
    “How you doing, Mister Blake?”
    “I’m all right, Mister Willie. How you doing?”
    “Oh, we jes tryin’ to put things back together again, that’s all. Miss Caitlin went back to N’Awlins, so—”
    “I told him,” Nova says.
    “Well, that’s fine,” Willie says, but his emphatic nod can’t distract from the icy look he’s just given his only daughter. “This whole thing”—it takes some effort, but Willie puts the smile back on and focuses his attention on Blake—“this some misunderstandin’, that’s all. Mister Troy, he gonna come back soon. Five years married. I mean, they work through this. You see. They’s jes no sense in everybody gettin’ so worked up—”
    “He’s dead, Daddy.”
    Willie’s eyes flash with anger; he’s clearly been having this conversation with his daughter all day, and Blake wonders if the man agrees with her more than he’s letting on.
    “He’s dead,” Nova says again. “And we have no idea what killed him.”
    Before Blake can respond, Nova takes him by the arm and