Another report stated that the dispatcher received a call around 9:30 a.m. and that her body was found only a few yards in front of her vehicle, a Nissan, and the car itself was free of any damage yet void of her belongings, though some of them had been strewn about the accident scene. The car sat off by the side of the road on a bed of gravel, neatly parked and unlocked. It wasn’t quite a robbery, but it wasn’t just an accident either. It was up to the police to figure this out and so far they had been clueless. Not one news report mentioned the lack of blood, but there was always that one fact the police didn’t release and it was an open investigation after all.
He had cut out a picture of her from the paper that he carried with him. Her face had become familiar by then, the gentle swoop of the bridge of the nose, the defined jaw, her teeth supporting the lips just right. That woman. It was still hard for him to call her by her name, preferred to refer to her as that woman. Crumpling the paper into a ball, stuffing it into the coat pocket, he knew he had to throw it away. Suddenly it felt unnerving to hold on to the picture. What if something happened to him and they found it, then what? Would someone put two and two together?
On foot he followed the road to the next bend. There was nothing but another bend around the corner, nothing to see there. He imagined how, in the dark, the woman might have parked and gotten out of her vehicle for one reason or another, Penelope had approached, unable to stop, unable to avoid her, the turn exposing her as an inattentive or inexperienced driver. Knowing Penelope, that was the likely conclusion to be drawn, but still, he was a scientist and not understanding the world wasn’t an option for him, uncertainty equal to torture.
He thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye but it was just a broken branch dangling off a tree. He took in the area. Another hour and the world would lose color and turn into shades of gray, but for now the orange flashes in the distance dashed about, dowsing the immediate perimeter in a tawny glow. Edward turned and walked in the other direction, past his car, past the park sign, and again there was a bend. He followed the curve, scanning the ground, though the road had been searched extensively, so he assumed, and Edward wasn’t really looking for anything specific but it never hurt to keep his eyes open.
Headlights in the distance illuminating the bend in the road. It was an SUV—he couldn’t make out the color, black or dark blue maybe—and it slowed down, then stopped. With a hum, the driver’s window descended. A man in his fifties leaned out.
“You got car trouble?” he asked.
“What?” Edward stood still, slightly slumped over.
“Something wrong with your car? You need a hand? A ride?”
His mind tumbled. Was this a random person or a detective? Had he been lying in wait past the shoulder, in a gravel verge underneath a tree, invisible from the road? Was he here to catch the criminal returning to the scene of the crime? Edward didn’t know if that was just a plot device on detective shows or if criminals really had an inclination to relive their handiwork.
“Your lights are flashing.”
This place, this bend in the road. All those trees, the brush, even the painted line in the middle of the road and the cracks in the asphalt of the parking lot were silent witnesses. He wanted to spill it all, just get it over with, but not one word came out of his mouth. He was frozen.
“Are you all right?” A pause, then the man nodded. He pinched his lips. “Just thought I’d ask.”
“Everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”
The window ascended and the car sped up and disappeared.
Edward buried his hands in his pockets, the crinkled sphere of paper unnerving as he enclosed it with his fist. He could’ve sworn he had just felt the temperature drop another ten degrees. Nothing was fine. Not a goddamn thing. The man probably was a detective—and what if he put two and two together? Penelope’s death, the autopsy he had attended, maybe he got wind of that somehow, that would be the end of it all.
Edward got in his car and got back on the highway, where he lowered the window just enough to fit the woman’s crumpled picture through the gap. The wind grabbed it and in the rearview mirror he watched as it bounced a few times before he lost sight of it. Twenty minutes later he drove down a long winding road leading to Shadow Garden. The Monterrey oaks turned sparse and at the end of the road appeared a building within a circle of jade-colored grass, almost like a moat defending its tenants against some unknown enemy.
* * *
• • •
The deep-red terra-cotta brick building was the crowning center of the expansive lawn, surrounded by a cast-iron fence common around public parks, the building’s border from the rest of the world was ten feet tall with intricate details of Victorian design. Even in the impending darkness he was aware of the comical appearance of it all as he considered the care it took to keep the place somewhere between formal English grounds and touches of whimsical cottage gardens. North Texas wasn’t arid by a long shot, but it was far from conducive to elaborate and needy greenery. He imagined a crew of men in orange vests with mowers and hedgers and trimmers descending upon the place, sprinklers dispersing thousands of gallons of water within seconds, three times a day, which was proof that the illusion of Shadow Garden was about man’s conquest over the elements, over nature.
Shadow Garden. Fuck. That’s exactly where Donna belonged.
He slowed the car to a crawl as he approached the entrance, stopping in front of the cast-iron gate surrounded by crape myrtles. He loved crape myrtles because they’d been a favorite of his mother’s, that’s how he remembered her, on a bench, underneath sprawling domed canopies.
He thought about her as he spent the next ten minutes sitting in the car going back and forth with an invisible voice. The gate guard demanded his name, appointment time, and the name of the person he had an appointment with. He went along with it, didn’t complain, and was mostly amused. During that time he called the number he had programmed into this phone, let it ring twice, and then hung up.
The guard’s voice informed him through the speaker to proceed to the arched main entrance for car service drop-off and pickup. He parked next to a man in a chauffeur’s uniform leaning against a black Buick, on his left a lime-green car with maid service decals.
From the central courtyard, a path led to the individual buildings and it was that walkway Edward took, past a fountain with a copper spigot. There was a certain stillness about the place, a memorial park for the rich where they hide from the rest of the world. He had an almost prophetic feeling then, saw the terra-cotta buildings not far removed from inevitable decay, withering blossoms drifting toward the dark earth, turning to sludge and slime.
Edward stood on the walkway and breathed in the dense air. It was like muddy water, thick and crisp at the same time. The lampposts gave off the faintest of lights, flickering about. They were so dim that they didn’t produce any shadows but rather an overall layer of illumination, as if everything was important in this moment, everything deserved equal brilliance.