Page 87 of A Secret In The Garden

“Okay, thanks, Mrs. Eliza.”

“It’s Miss—” But he’d hung up.

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.