Bitter Truth by William Lashner Page A

spun around in circles, leading to still more barberry. She asked him about himself as they walked, listening without comment. Her cane was gnarled. The old gardener, holding her arm as he walked beside her, was silent beneath his wide straw hat. They wove slowly past bunches of phlox and violet sage, past peals of bellshaped digitalis, alongside spiny rows of purple globe thistle.
    “You some sort of gardener?” I asked Grimes.
    “Everyone needs a hobby, what of it?”
    “Just asking is all.”
    They walked in a seemingly directionless path in that maze until they found themselves in the center of a very formal space scribed by tall circular hedges, edged with astilbe and gay-feather and gaudy red hollyhock on tall, reedy spires. In the center of the space was an oval of rich, dark earth, out of which bloomed bunches of gorgeous violet irises above a sea of pale yellow jewelweed. At one end of the oval was a statue of a naked woman reaching up to the heavens, her delicate bare feet resting on a huge marble base, studded with pillars, encrusted with brass medallions, the word “SHAW” engraved deep into the stone. Across the oval garden from the statue was a marble bench, situated under a white wooden arch infested with giant orange trumpet flowers, their stamens red as tongues. The gardener deposited the old woman on the bench and she bade Grimes to sit beside her with two pats of the marble. As they sat together the gardener took out a pair of shears and began to trim the foliage behind them with shivery little clips of the blades.
    “This is our favorite place in all the world,” rasped Grandmother Shaw.
    “It is beautiful,” said Grimes.
    “We come here every day, no matter the weather. We feel all the power of the land in this place. We used to come here as children, too, but it has developed more meaning for us as we’ve grown older and more doddering. Mr. Shaw’s ashes are in an urn beneath the statue of Aphrodite. More treasures are buried in this earth, keepsakes, mementos of a better time. Everything of value we place here. We come every day and think of him and them and replenish ourselves with all the power in this dark, rich earth.”
    “Your husband must have been quite a man,” he said.
    “He was, yes,” she said. “In the last days of his life he had become intensely spiritual in a way open only to the scathed. You intend to marry our Jacqueline.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “We take our marriage vows very seriously in this family. When we promise to marry it is for forever.”
    “I love Jacqueline very much. Forever is too short a time to be with her.”
    “We are sure you felt that for your present wife too,” she said.
    She was referring, of course, to Grimes’s wife of seven years, mother of his two children, keeper of his house, rememberer of his family’s birthdays and anniversaries, planner of the family vacations, his wife, about whom he hadn’t yet gotten around to telling Jacqueline. They had been childhood sweethearts, he and his wife, had dated all through high school, her parents had put him through dental school by mortgaging their house. It had been the shock of her life when he moved out to live with Jacqueline Shaw.
    “That marriage was a mistake. I didn’t know what love was until I met your granddaughter.”
    “Yes, great wealth has that effect on people. Your private investigator did tell you the value of our family’s holdings, didn’t he?”
    “I love Jacqueline,” he said, rising from the bench with evident indignation. “And if you’re implying that my intentions are…”
    “Sit down, Mr. Grimes,” she said, staring up at him with that opaque blue eye. “We need no histrionics between us. We were very impressed with the hiring of your investigator. It shows an initiative all too rare in this family. Sit down and don’t presume to understand our intentions here.”
    He stared at her for a moment, but half her face smiled at him as she patted the bench