The Roses of May (The Collector Trilogy Book 2) Page 2

  Starting a wide loop back home, I have to cross a seven-road intersection, half the roads one way only and all the signs pointing the wrong way. There isn’t a single car in sight on any of the seven roads. True, it’s only half past eleven in the morning, and most everyone is at work or school, but I get the feeling this intersection is braced only by those drivers filled with resignation at the inevitability of certain death and doom.

  I take pictures of everything anyway, even though they’ll mostly turn out crap on the phone, because taking pictures is just what I do. The world seems a little less frightening, somehow, if I can keep the camera lens between me and everything else. Mostly, though, I take pictures for Chavi, so she can see the things I see.

  Chavi’s been dead almost five years now.

  I still take pictures.

  Chavi’s death is how I met my FBI agents, and they are mine in an important way, Eddison and Mercedes and Vic. She should have been just another case to them, my big sister just another dead girl in a file, but they kept checking in on me after. Cards and emails and phone calls, and at some point I stopped resenting the reminders of Chavi’s murder, was grateful that as we moved from place to place, I had my strange group of friends in Quantico.

  I walk past a library that looks more like a cathedral, complete with stained glass and a bell tower, and a liquor store bookended by law offices specializing in DUIs. A little bit farther on, there’s a plaza anchored by an enormous twenty-four-hour gym on one end and an educational afterschool care facility on the other; between them are seven different types of fast food. Weirdly enough, I kind of like that, the contradiction and messiness, the awareness that our intentions tend to go fuck themselves and our vices are right there waiting.

  A much bigger plaza—two stories and with way more elaborate decoration than any outdoor shopping center should have—houses what has to be the nation’s fanciest Kroger. A sign outside advertises a Starbucks inside, but there’s another Starbucks in the plaza and one just across the street, and it’s supposed to be a joke but so, so isn’t.

  I should probably get lunch, but I try not to eat out on my own if I can help it. It’s not a health thing; give me takeout with Mum, and I am all for it. It’s the on-my-own bit. After a few years of trying to balance what my body needs against what my emotions insist I need, I’m still not great at it. Sometimes—mostly only on bad days, anymore—I still eat myself sick at the realization that Chavi isn’t here, she’s not here and it just hurts so fucking much in a way that doesn’t make any sense, because anything that hurts this much should be able to bleed out, should be able to be fixed and it can’t be, so eating Oreos until I’m bloated and cramping and vomiting just gives a way for the pain to make sense.

  It’s been a few months now since I teetered over that line I drew for myself and collapsed in front of the toilet—and Oreos definitely don’t taste good the second time—but I’m still . . . aware, I guess, that my control isn’t what it should be. Mum has always been significantly less concerned about the weight than about the eating-myself-sick part, but between the two of us—her iron will and my relief at her iron will—we’ve managed to stabilize things so I’m no longer swinging wildly between the worrisome extremes of bony and round.

  That my current weight makes me look more like Chavi than ever . . . well. On good days, it’s a shudder and carefully avoiding pictures, or mirrors larger than a compact. On bad days, it’s needles crawling under my skin and my fingers twitching for Oreos. Mum calls me a work in progress.

  I head inside the Kroger. I’m pretty sure I can’t feel the tip of my nose, so a hot drink wouldn’t be the worst thing. If I don’t eat until I get home, it’s harder to get myself in trouble.

  The barista is a tiny, sparrow-like lady who must be eighty if she’s a day, her lavender-tinted hair poufy in a Gibson Girl bun with bright purple bobby pins. Her back and shoulders are bent and her hands arthritic, but her eyes are sharp and her smile welcoming, and I wonder if she needs this job or if she’s just one of those people who gets a part-time job after retiring because the house or her husband gets too irritating over long periods of time.

  “What name, sweetheart?” she asks, Sharpie in hand as she reaches for the cup.

  “Jane.”

  Because watching people butcher Priya sucks.

  A few minutes later, I have my drink. There are tables and chairs packed together here in the corner of the grocery store, and there are speakers in the ceiling pumping out some corporate CD of smooth jazz, but it’s all but buried under the sounds of the rest of the store: squawky calls over the intercom, crashes of carts and cans and boxes, screaming children, the pop rock soundtrack—it’s chaotic and clashy and makes the whole café-in-a-grocery-store thing a bit weirder.

  So I head back outside, into the cold and the shred of a breeze that’s picked up, and wander off into the parking lot. I came from the back of the plaza, but the road fronting it will take me straight home, and it’s probably about time I headed back.

  Instead, I freeze at the sight of a strange little pavilion. It’s up on a grassy island, one of several splitting the parking lot into sections, the iron covered on three sides by what looks to be heavy white canvas. Space heaters, coils glowing cherry-red, hang from the struts, safely above the heads of a collection of mostly older men in similar ball caps, dark blue or black with yellow embroidery, all of them layered up against the cold that slams in from the rolled-up side of canvas. They’re seated at stone picnic tables, boards and pieces spread between them. It shouldn’t be anything, but it is, because it’s achingly familiar.

  Nothing looks quite the same as old men gathering for chess.

  Dad and I used to play chess.

  He was terrible at it and I pretended to be, something that bothered him a lot more than it did me, but we played every Saturday morning in the park near home, or in the adjacent empty church during the long Boston winters. He sometimes wanted to play during the week, too, but there was something about the Saturday tradition that appealed to me.

  Even after Dad, I keep looking for chess gatherings everywhere we move. I lose every game, at least half of them on purpose, but I still want to play. Everything else that was Dad is neatly packed away, but convincing others I suck at chess, that I get to keep alive.

  A car door squeaks as it opens nearby, pulling my attention away from the old men and their boards. A few feet away, a young woman, maybe midtwenties, sits in the driver’s side with a lapful of knitting, and she smiles at me. “You can go talk to them, you know,” she says. “They don’t bite. At least not with teeth.”

  I’m not very good at smiling anymore—it comes off a little frightening—but I try to muster an appropriately friendly expression. “I didn’t want to intrude. Do they let others play with them?”

  “Sometimes. They’re pretty particular about it, but it can’t hurt to ask. My grandfather’s up there.”

  That explains the knitting. Thank God—a parking lot Madame Defarge would be pretty creepy.

  “Go and ask,” she urges, her thumb absently petting the loops of red yarn around her pinky. “The worst they can do is say no.”

  “You encourage everyone who stops and stares?”

  “Just the ones who look lonely.” She closes the door before I have to come up with a response to that.

  After a few more moments of standing there like an idiot, an ache building in all the parts of me that aren’t frozen through, I walk up onto the grass and into the mostly warm pavilion. The players all stop their games to stare at me.

  Almost all the men are older, clearly veterans, based on the operation and unit designations on their hats. Chess parks are common places to find vets, so while I don’t know all the operations, I know enough to lump them into groups. Most of these guys served in Vietnam, a few in Korea, a couple in Desert Storm, and one very old man, bundled in scarves and blankets and seated nearest the space heaters, wears a hat with Operation Neptune embroidered on it, the thread
faded to a weary mustard.

  Holy shit.

  This man stormed Normandy Beach before my grandparents were even born.

  One of the Vietnam vets, a saggy, pouch-faced man with a bulbous, broken-veined nose that suggests chess may be the way he keeps himself from day-drinking, scowls at me. “We’re not looking for donations, girl.”

  “Wasn’t offering any. I was going to ask if you allow others to play with you.”

  “You play?” He doesn’t sound like he believes me.

  “Badly, but yes. I look for a place to play wherever we move.”

  “Huh. Thought that’s what you young people use the Internets for.”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  The oldest man clears his throat, and the others all turn to look at him. Every group has a hierarchy; groups of veterans are really no different, and actual rank aside, World War II trumps all. This man lived through hell and has carried its scars with him a lot longer than anyone else here. That kind of rank doesn’t retire or get discharged. “Come here, please.”

  I walk around the table and perch on the tiny sliver of bench sticking out beside him. He studies me—for what, I’m not sure—and the sickly sweet smell of his breath makes me wonder if he’s diabetic, if he’s actually okay sitting out here in this weather, space heaters and layers aside. His skin looks parchment thin, folded over itself in soft wrinkles, unevenly discolored with age and wear and thin blue veins spider-webbing his temples and under his eyes. Thick, pale scar tissue knots around one temple, digging back over and behind that ear. Shrapnel from Normandy? Or something else entirely?

  “You’ve got your own war, don’t you, girl?”

  I think about that, letting the question beneath the words take shape. It takes the shape of Chavi, all that rage and sorrow and hurt I’ve carried since her death. “Yes,” I say eventually. “I just don’t know who’s on the other side of it.” A war needs an enemy, but I’m not sure anyone can sabotage me as well as I do myself.

  “We’ve all wondered that a few times,” he agrees, his eyes flicking to the other men. All but one are watching us; the exception is studying his board with a faint frown and the dawning realization that his king’s about to be cornered. “What’s your name, then?”

  “Priya Sravasti. Yours?”

  “Harold Randolph.”

  “Gunny!” Most of the men cough into their hands. Only one refrains, and he doesn’t look like a veteran. He’s younger, softer, and there’s something in his eyes—or rather, something not in his eyes—that says he doesn’t belong the way the rest of them do.

  Gunny rolls his eyes. He slowly peels off a knit glove to reveal a second below, this one fingerless and a yellow as faded as the letters on his hat. His hand shakes slightly as he lifts it—a palsy, I think, more than cold—and he touches the tip of my nose with one finger. “Can you feel that?”

  I almost smile, but I don’t want to scare him, make myself less welcome. “No, sir.”

  “Then get on home for today, and come back whenever you want. We don’t play much on weekends. Too many folk.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I tell him. Impulsively, I drop a kiss on his cheek, soft whiskers tickling my lips. “I’ll be back.”

  The bulbous-nosed man snickers. “Look at that, Gunny’s got a new future ex-wife.”

  Most of the others nod at me, acknowledgment rather than friendliness, but that’s okay. I have to earn a place here, show them I’m not just bored or flighty. I stand up and walk along the back of the pavilion, soaking in the warmth before I head home, and glance at the man at the far end of the tables, the one who doesn’t seem to belong. He’s not wearing a ball cap, just a knit cap pushed back far enough to show light-colored hair that’s impossible to describe as blond or brown.

  He smiles blandly at me.

  “You look familiar,” I blurt.

  His smile doesn’t change. “I get that a lot.”

  No shit. He doesn’t look like anyone, so he must look like nearly everyone. There isn’t a single distinguishing feature on him, nothing to say yes, I’d absolutely recognize him out of context. He isn’t handsome, he isn’t ugly, he just . . . is. Even his eyes are a murky, indistinguishable color.

  And his smile doesn’t change the look of his face. It’s strange, that. Smiles change you, the tilt of your cheeks, the shape of your mouth, the crinkle around your eyes. But his face doesn’t look any different than it did before he smiled. It’s not that it looks fake exactly, it just doesn’t look . . . well, natural. But let’s be honest, chess parks are a haven for the socially awkward. Maybe I should just be impressed he’s making eye contact.

  I nod, still feeling somewhat unsettled, and head home. I’m not feeling the cold as much, which is less a sign of the day warming up than a hey-idiot-get-inside-before-you-get-frostbite warning.

  Once in the neighborhood, I stop at the large overhang sheltering the wall of mailboxes for our street. There’s even a trash can chained around one of the posts for all the junk mail. In my more sentimental moods, I miss our mailbox in Boston, with the brightly colored handprints across the cheerful yellow surface. Dad didn’t want to put his handprint—he thought it was undignified—so the three of us attacked him with paintbrushes and ended up with a beautiful multicolored moustache print on the front flap.

  I wonder if we still have that box. I haven’t seen it in a couple of moves. Then again, that’s the case for at least half of everything we own—unpacking and packing again hasn’t seemed worth the effort.

  I pull out a double handful of circulars and oversize postcards addressed to “Our Neighbor” and “The Residents of . . .” and flick them into the bin, along with the dental appointment reminder postcard forwarded from Birmingham. There’s a greeting-card envelope in a cheerful shade of green, a very spring kind of color, with Mercedes’s handwriting on the front. It’s not all that surprising; technically I start virtual school today, taking online classes with a tutor in France so I get used to thinking and working in another language, and Mercedes always has a card waiting for my first day of school, no matter how many there are in a year.

  What’s surprising are the other two envelopes, nearly identical in size. One is labeled all in caps, the writing effortlessly neat and legible, the kind that holds up well even as the paper and ink start to fade, the black print stark against the hot-pink card stock. The pale blue envelope has a mostly tidy scrawl, readable after a blink or two.

  Mercedes’s card is right on schedule, but Vic and Eddison usually space theirs out a bit differently.

  These are nothing like the card they’ll send in May, the one all three of them will sign. That one won’t have a note, not even a preprinted one. Just their signatures. Just a reminder that my sister’s murder hasn’t been forgotten. It takes some careful planning and an awareness of the postal service to make sure that one doesn’t arrive with my birthday cards.

  Because nothing says happy birthday like the reminder that the FBI still doesn’t know who murdered your sister and a string of other girls over the years.

  Inside the house, I strip off the outside layers to hang in the front closet, then head up the stairs to my room, peeling off the rest on the way. The cards get dropped onto my bed, the clothing onto the chair I dragged up from the neglected dining room to contain the chaos. After a hot shower that has my nose and fingertips painfully aware of returning sensation, I go back down to the kitchen and make packaged oatmeal, adding in cinnamon and honey and milk, and take it upstairs with me.

  It’s only once I’m settled on the bed in pajamas, the oatmeal working its magic to warm my insides, that I reach for the envelopes.

  Mercedes’s card is exactly what it should be, a cheerful back-to-school message in neon pen, half of it in Spanish because it cracks her up when I write back to her in French. I pull out Vic’s next, a black-and-white photo of three cats in massive sunglasses. The note inside is nonoccasional, a few lines about his oldest daughter’s college letters and the mise
rably rainy weather in northern Virginia. Eddison’s, with a picture carefully straddling the line between gross and funny, doesn’t have anything written in it at all.

  Why all three?

  But then I look at Mercedes’s card again, the front decked out in enough glitter to make a unicorn shit itself in glee, and realize some of the glitter doesn’t belong. The rest of it is superfine, pastel in tone. Here and there, though, are swirls of what look to be glitter glue, thick and a little gloppy and dried into little ridges of bright color. I slide a thumbnail under one of those swirls, gently prying it away. The paper tears on one curve, then releases. A moment later, I’ve got a rough circle of glue on one finger and an unobstructed view of part of the original card.

  She covered over the butterflies.

  Her name is Zoraida Bourret, and it’s Easter Sunday.

  You like Easter in the more traditional churches, when the girls and women still wear white dresses and lace, and hats with ribbons or flowers. There’s something about sitting near the back of the church and seeing the sea of Easter hats.

  And this year, you see Zoraida.

  You’ve seen her before, of course, helping her mother with a horde of younger siblings. You’ve listened to the gossip, and that subtle something other that isn’t gossip but isn’t quite news. Her father was a police officer killed in the line of duty, and even though Zoraida was a sure shot for college and great things, she’s dropped all her extracurriculars and probably her chance for higher education in order to help at home, and no one even had to ask it of her.

  What a good girl, the women say.

  What a sweet child.

  What a wonderful sister.

  She doesn’t look anything like Darla Jean, but there’s something there that reminds you. It’s been almost a year since Darla Jean betrayed you, and even still you love her, miss her, mourn her.

  But Zoraida really is a good girl. You’ve watched her enough to know that. She comes straight home from school, picking up her siblings on the way, and gets them all sorted with snacks and homework and activities, and almost always has dinner nearly done when their mother gets home from work. She helps with the baths and getting all the younger ones in bed, and only then does she sit down at the kitchen table and start on her own homework. It takes her late into the night, but then she’s up early again, making sure everyone gets breakfast and gets dressed and gets off to school.