The Stone Flower Garden

  An outrageous plan began to form in Eli’s mind. “Godawmighty, goddamit, you can’t go to her that way,” he said at the idea, and put his head in his hands.

  But he knew that he had to find out what might be between him and her, to meet her on neutral ground before he had to tell her about Bell’s addled plan to dig up the land behind Marble Hall, but most of all he knew he owed it to her to be where she needed him, where death stalked the helpless. He knew he had to try.

  After twenty-five years, he and Darl would meet again.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’d lost. No more chances. No more appeals. Frog Marvin was going to die. And it was my fault.

  Wednesday morning, dawn. A hot September day seeped onto the horizon of central Florida, far from the fantasies of Disney World or the friendly beaches of the Atlantic and the Gulf. A few hours earlier the governor had refused to intervene in Frog’s case. I stared bleakly at the cusp of the pink and maroon sunrise as I stood in a fenced yard outside the prison. The light was very dim; the smell of mown grass, pine thickets, and swampy culverts clung to the heavy air; the frogs had just stopped singing.

  Frog. I winced. I hadn’t slept more than five hours in the past two days, and when I did I dreamed about Eli and Jasper and Clara and even Preacher Al, all as raw as a new quarry pit. Eli was always thirteen years old to me, calling out Pa, no! as his father fell from the gunshot. My silence, my fear, my loyalty to my own kin—had condemned him. Now I’d failed Frog Marvin, too.

  “Time to go back inside,” I said to the young man and woman who chain-smoked a pack of filter tips. They were law-student interns for the Phoenix Group. Their moral support had been limited to following me around and—when they thought I couldn’t overhear—whispering to each other that I was about to crack. They might be right. My feet were leaden. My body felt like a cold wire inside a rumpled blue jacket and matching skirt. I stopped at the door held open by a guard, and spent a moment wiping bits of grass and dew off my black pumps. Anything to distract my own thoughts.

  “I’m ready,” I lied. I followed the guards into a secluded cell. Frog lumbered gallantly to his feet. An elderly prison minister stood beside him, looking shriveled. Frog was huge, with a round, florid face and bulging green eyes, thus the nickname. At first sight he looked like a monster. “Miss Darl,” he said urgently, his voice a thick, backwoods drawl. “I was fearin’ you might feel too bad to come see me one more time.”

  “Frog, I’ve never broken a promise to be here for you, have I?”

  He looked at me tenderly. “No, Miss Darl.”

  “I was just upset when I had to tell you what the governor said. I needed some time to myself, time to think about anything else I could do. But there isn’t anything else, Frog. I’m so sorry. I wish I could start over. I’d do everything different. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes.”

  “Oh, no, Miss Darl, don’t blame yourself. Everybody says you’re the best lady lawyer they’ve ever seen.” He twisted his big hands together and shifted from one foot to the other. “I did something bad and I guess I . . . I guess I oughta just go on and die.”

  “Frog, you only did what your brother made you do. I don’t want you to die for that.”

  “I . . . I have to, though. They say so.”

  I nodded. My eyes burned, my throat was a knot. Frog looked at me and his lower lip quivered. “Don’t be sad,” he whispered.

  “I’m sad because I let you down.”

  “Miss Darl, don’t you say that. I was scared of you at first when you come to be my lawyer. You got mean eyes. But then you smiled at me and I saw you were sweet. And you been sweet to me ever since. You couldn’t let me down. You built me up.”

  The minister cleared his throat. He produced a small prayer card from the Bible he carried. He held it out to Frog. “Mr. Marvin, let’s read this out loud together.”

  Frog fumbled the card in his thick fingers, and his face turned red. My stomach twisted. Frog couldn’t read. I took the card. “I’ll read it for you, Frog.”

  “Does it say what heaven’s like?”

  The minister drew back his head and inhaled as if filling his lungs with rhetoric. “Heaven is beyond our comprehension, Mr. Marvin. It’s brimming with the light of goodness and . . .”

  “You’ll have a nice girlfriend and a home with a place to play basketball,” I interjected, drawing on favorite themes Frog had discussed with me. “Hambone will be waiting for you as soon as you die, and your grandfather Bo, too. Both of them. As soon as you fall asleep, they’ll come to you.” A pet mutt named Hambone and a kindly grandfather were Frog’s only gentle memories. His whole life had been handicapped by mental retardation, poverty and terrifying abuse.

  Frog stared at me with urgent hope. “They’ll be right there when I die?”

  “Yes. All you have to do is fall asleep, and they’ll come to meet you.”

  “How do you know?”

  I hesitated. “Because dead people visit me in my dreams.” Nightmares, but I didn’t say that.

  “And you really know when they’re there?”

  “They’re always there,” I confirmed. “Just waiting for me to shut my eyes.”

  Frog exhaled raggedly. “I can do that, then.”

  “Time to go, Ms. Union,” an official said at the door.

  “Miss Darl,” Frog whispered. “I’m scared.”

  My body clenched. I wanted to do something, anything, break down the walls, rush this grown child outside and away to a world less cruel. “Let me hug you,” I whispered. He engulfed me in his arms. When I finally stepped back he looked at the minister frantically. “Give her the present!”

  The minister sighed and pulled a small, bulky item from the pocket of his jacket. “Mr. Marvin asked me to purchase this for you.”

  I gently pulled white tissue paper apart. Inside was a white plastic heart with tiny flowers painted on it. “My heart is yours forever,” Frog said.

  I nearly lost my mind. Frog was Jasper Wade, he was me, he was Eli, he was every vulnerable memory I’d sunk deep inside me all those years. Once again I would watch someone die. “I’ll keep it safe, Frog.” I kissed him on the cheek. “I love you.” It was probably the first time in his adult life that anyone, woman or man, had told him that. He began to cry. “Now, I can go to heaven,” he said.

  A few minutes later, dazed, I walked into the small room where Frog would be killed. A young male reporter from a Florida TV station said queasily, “I don’t know how you can do this.”

  I said nothing. I didn’t know, myself.

  A woman from one of the cable news services leaned toward me as we sat down in rows of chairs. “I heard the Phoenix Group is paying for Frog Marvin’s cremation. I heard a rumor you’re having his ashes sent to your hometown in North Carolina. True?”

  I ignored the question, and she called me a cold bitch under her breath. Every nerve in my body thrummed. When the officials led Frog into the other side of the room and strapped him to a gurney with his massive arms anchored to armrests, he began to tremble and looked my way. “Miss Darl, I’m going to close my eyes now, and I’m gonna keep’em shut until Hambone and my grandpa come to get me.” He paused. His mouth quivered. “I’m not scared, because you’re here waitin’ with me until they come, Miss Darl.”

  I nodded, unable to speak. The antiseptic stink of the room, the hum of the air conditioner, the buzz of an overhead light fixture roared inside me. I saw Clara and Jasper, air bubbles in the koi pond, blood on the ground before the Stone Cottage. I saw Eli lurching to his dying father’s side, and I saw the hollow stare in his eyes when Chief Lowden dragged me away. Now I saw Frog Marvin stretched out on a gurney as if crucified, and I saw the technician start the IV drip that would make him sleep without waking, all because I had somehow not done or said the right thing, once again. I began to scream
silently. Clenching the tiny plastic white heart, I held it against my cheek, where Frog could see that I wouldn’t let go.

  Frog smiled and shut his eyes.

  He never opened them again.

  Chaos. Dozens of protesters rallied behind picket lines outside the prison entrance, waving their placards and chanting for the television cameras. About half were for killing Frog. About half were against. The scalding white light of video cameras recorded the crowd for various networks and local television stations. A line of police officers kept everyone behind barricades. A hot semitropical sunrise slanted across the placards. I only noticed the hateful ones.

  KILL THE COP KILLER.

  JUMP INTO HELL, FROG.

  ONE LESS PIECE OF CRAP IN THE WORLD.

  The police officers sweated and looked uncomfortable. “Darl, I cannot let you do this,” William Leyland said, as I started walking toward the throng and the cameras. Phoenix’s security coordinator sounded fierce, which was hard for William to do with his musical Caribbean accent. He laid a burly, mocha-colored hand on my arm. “Come, now, Darl. You cannot do this. It’s irresponsible. I have cars waiting and the others are already in them. We have to go. Speaking to these protesters will do no good.”

  “It will do me good.” I pushed his hand away and strode forward. The cameramen turned their lights on me about the same moment the crowd realized I was Frog’s lawyer. The anti-death-penalty group applauded. The rest surged forward with glittering eyes.

  “I hope you got to see your murderin’ retard die, bitch,” a woman yelled. One of the anti-death-penalty protestors shoved her, and the police broke them up. William rushed after me and tried to block more contact. “This could cause a riot,” he said under his breath. “Please stop.”

  “I can’t.” I stepped to the edge of the barricade. I still clenched Frog’s plastic heart in one hand. With my other hand I pulled a folded slip of paper from the side pocket of my wrinkled jacket. “I want to read you all something. It’s from a social worker’s report about Frog Marvin and his brother. It was written in 1979, when Frog was about twelve and Tom was fifteen.” I cleared my throat then read loudly, and slowly, “Frog shows severe fear and is covered in bruises. Often goes to neighbors’ house in hysterics, begging them to hide him from ‘monsters.’ Boys’ alcoholic uncle is only adult in the home. Neighbors report beatings of both boys and beatings of Frog by Tom. Tom broke Frog’s jaw and arm last year. Tom has killed or tortured animals in front of Frog. Doctor’s exam shows signs of sexual abuse in Frog.” I stopped. “Frog Marvin grew up in a chamber of horrors. Nobody cared enough then to stop it, and nobody cares enough now. We’re the monsters in Frog Marvin’s world.”

  I saw a few chagrinned and queasy looks around me, but many belligerent ones. A small, fleshy man bulled his way to the front of the crowd. “Lady, it’s whiny liberals like you that let scumbags like him run free. I don’t care how the stupid bastard grew up. I don’t care if he was too scared of his brother to get away. I don’t care if he only had half the sense of a goddamned rock, all right? He killed two cops and he deserved to die.” He snatched the paper and the toy heart from my hands and held both high. “What kind of shit is this? Liberal excuses,” he yelled.

  “Shut up, you ignorant redneck asshole,” someone from the anti-death-penalty group called out. That crowd began shoving forward. There were shouts and screams. People began grappling with each other. The camera crews turned their white-hot lights and lenses on the brawl. I leaned over the barricade, snagged the front of the man’s shirt, and reached up for Frog’s gift and the paperwork. The man tore the paper into pieces then dropped the plastic heart on the ground and stomped it beneath his shoe. “Take that to court,” he said with a smirk.

  An unknown fist flashed by me and slammed into his mouth. The fist didn’t belong to William, who was urgently trying to push me aside. The punched man staggered back and was engulfed by the shouting, shoving crowd. By then the melee had begun to push the barricade over, guards and police were invading the pack and prying people apart, and I was almost knocked down. “Get her out of here,” William yelled to the person who had punched my tormentor. A strong arm curved around my waist. My feet left the ground.

  I struggled and gasped as the unseen rescuer pulled me out of the crowd. When he set me down I turned to shove him away. “Let me go, goddammit. I have to get my heart out of there—” My voice halted. I stared up into large, burnt-brown eyes and an angular face topped with dark hair. Something, deep inside me, said Look at him and remember. Remember what? I shook my head.

  “I’ll take care of it,” the stranger said in a deep Southern accent that went into my bones. “Your heart. I’ll take care of it.”

  William ran up to us. “Go. Go with this fellow. Please.”

  “Go where?”

  “Irene has made plans for you. Please go. This man is an old friend of mine. I’d trust him with my life and you can, too. You can count on him. His name is Solo. No worries, now. Please, go.”

  “William, I can’t—”

  “I’m takin’ her,” the stranger named Solo said abruptly. A rental sedan sat on the opposite side of the two-lane prison entrance. Solo pulled me to the passenger side and jerked open the door.

  I clutched the door frame and held on, staring at the fighting, yelling mob I’d provoked, heartsick. Solo put a hand on my shoulder, and the contact made me swivel to look up at him with desperate shame. I had only added to the circus atmosphere around Frog’s death. “What have I done?” I asked in a choked voice.

  There was a fiercely proud expression in his eyes. “You made ’em look at themselves too hard, and what they saw was ugly. Now get in the car. When it’s all over but the shoutin’, it’s time to back up and breathe.”

  “I haven’t taken a deep breath in years.”

  “Then let’s go get some air.”

  He gently pushed me into the car. I nearly suffocated on my own shame, and put my face in my hands.

  Solo had a small plane waiting near the prison. Judging by its weathered paint job and scuffed interior, it was used to hard action. My luggage was already stacked in the passenger seats when he opened the hatch. I climbed in next to him in the cockpit, then stared blindly out as the world slipped by below us. Within an hour the vast Gulf of Mexico began to glimmer to our west.

  St. George Island curls like a sandy eyebrow along Apalachicola Bay, on the waters of the Gulf, looking toward the Caribbean and Mexico. People call that part of Florida the Forgotten Coast. Since it’s in the curve below the state’s panhandle, less kindly souls call it the armpit. Far from the interstates, it sports only quaint old fishing towns, oyster bars, and wide, uncrowded beaches fronting dunes and vacation houses perched on concrete pilings.

  Irene Branshaw, the retired federal court judge who headed the Phoenix Group, had decreed that I go to a house she owned there. I was being gently kidnapped, and this new security consultant of William’s—Solo—had been assigned the unenviable job. I didn’t want to know more about him, not even his full name. I wanted to exist in a vacuum where my responsibilities began and ended with myself.

  Fat thunderheads piled up on the horizon. Wind gusts buffeted the plane. Solo maneuvered the controls calmly, but his expression was intense. The day grew from dawn into a burning sun, behind us. I was running from the heat of Hell, and taking this stranger with me.

  Neither of us spoke. I sat with my hands unfurled and laying palm up on the coffee-stained skirt of my suit, my head back on the seat rest, my mind blank. He said something under his breath as he watched the control panel.

  I lifted my head. “Is something wrong?”

  “No. I was just calculating my fuel weight in relation to airspeed.”

  “Are we running out of gas?”

  “No. It’s just a hobby of mine. Counting, calculating.” He hesitated. “Brea
the,” he ordered gently.

  I nodded, put my head back again, and shut my eyes. I could count on him, William had said. So maybe he was good with numbers.

  Good with numbers. Somehow, reassuring.

  I slept despite myself.

  Frog died again, in my dreams.

  Solo and I landed at a tiny airstrip among pine forest on the island’s western end. Irene kept an old Jeep there. Solo piled my luggage in the back along with a battered leather tote of his own. I stared at his tote and tried to form an opinion, which was difficult. I hadn’t eaten much in two days, and the heat plus an empty stomach made me see firefly stars. “Thank you, but I intend to go on alone from this point,” I said, leaning against the Jeep, sweating in my business suit.

  He studied me carefully, turning a dog-eared ace of hearts in his fingers as he did. “The odds are against your plan.” As if proving his prediction right, my knees buckled and I clutched the Jeep’s side. Solo picked me up and set me in the Jeep’s passenger seat. “Relax,” he ordered. “I won’t get in your way.”

  I sat there in dizzy, nauseated silence as he drove the main road that ran the length of the island. We passed through a sandy community of restaurants and tourist shops then entered more pine forest. He turned in at a lane that disappeared through the pines. When the lane left the woods we drove among sandy hummocks covered in sea oats. The vast expanse of the Gulf waters spread before us. He stopped the Jeep in a yard behind a multilevel, pearl-gray house with a tiled roof the color of coral. The house sat on a dozen pilings, at least fifteen feet above the parking area underneath. Beyond the house, low dunes and blue sky filled with dramatic white clouds framed the ocean.