Page 52 of A Secret In The Garden

Did Hester remain haunting these halls with tears in her eyes and a hand about her throat because the rumors were true and Jasper had killed her? With every shred of my being, I wanted to think that Jasper didn’t have the demeanor of a full-blown killer, and that there was no possible way that a fifteen-year-old version of him could have killed her, but unfortunately, I couldn’t say that. There was always a mysterious hardness to Jasper that left me feeling a little unsettled. After I got to know him better, I’d just assumed it was how the scars inside him had formed after his trauma. Cold and distant, unable and unwilling to connect with others no matter how much we laughed and talked—there always seemed to be a part of him that remained hidden and secret. Sometimes, he could be the most charming man I’d ever talked to, if not a little filthy, but in others, he was frigid and terrifying, like when he’d surprised us with shotgun in hand. Shotgun or not, his smile seeped into my bones and made me want to smile; I couldn’t help it. I found myself forming a connection with him instantly, sharing things about myself that I never shared with anyone.

Was the connection that we had real, or was he simply someone dangerous who was capable of manipulating me? I’d heard several serial killers described as being charming. I’d watched enough crime documentaries and listened to enough podcasts to know the really good killers pulled you into their sticky web, telling you it was a rope to save you, not to strangle you until it was too late.

I couldn’t shake my intense feelings for Jasper, but I also couldn’t rule out that there was a whole other side to him he didn’t let me see, and I wondered if Hester had seen that side before she died.

When Jasper walked in yesterday, I’d wanted to comfort him. I was thrilled he had returned, but something else lingered. It had been so easy over the phone; the wild, crackling tension between us had been moved to the background since we weren’t close. But as soon as he returned, so did the electricity and the danger.

Last night, when I entered my room, Hester had been in there. Every time she came to me, it grew more terrifying. It was a shock to see her, like we were in the presence of something we shouldn’t be. This time, the normally sad Hester had been in a panic. Her grayish opaque mouth was open as she tried to scream, but no matter how much she tried, nothing would come out. She needed to tell me something urgently, and I had no doubt in my mind it had something to do with her husband, but whether it was anger or sadness, I couldn’t tell. Only frustration floated from her, as she was incapable of communicating with me, the only one who could see her.

In a flurry of frustration, she had thrown the chair across the room. She’d gripped my shoulders painfully, desperately, with everything she had, trying to communicate with me when the energy within her body pushed out and slammed me against the wall. I’d never been so afraid in all my life. And then in ran Jasper.

At first, I’d worried that his presence would set her off more, but the scene that played out astonished me. As Jasper held and comforted me—or at least he’d tried—the ghost of his mother stood behind him, watching him before dropping to the floor in a sobbing pile of nearly invisible crimson and gray. It had been heartbreaking. Even though I had been terrified in that moment, it destroyed me to see her so dejected. A minute later, she began to fade, and her body disappeared completely.

The second Jasper left, I checked the locket.

It was completely empty. Nothing. Not even the velvet backing.

Not knowing exactly how the dynamic between Jasper and I would take shape over the next few days made me tense and uncomfortable. We had just gotten close, and now all I could think about was the very real chance that he had murdered his mother and that she was clearly trying to warn me.

It proved not to be such a factor, though, as Jasper and Sowerby spent the next several days mostly absent in an absolute flurry as they busied themselves with lawyers and the state attempting to stop Darius from taking back the manor.

Everything in the house felt tainted and uncomfortable. So much so that, had it not been for the very real prospect of me losing my job—and, of course, my desire to help Hester—I would have left. It didn’t feel safe for me to be in the middle of it all anymore.

I kept busy in the conservatory, thankful for the distraction of being able to throw myself into my work. All in all, I had found close to eleven almost-extinct plants in the conservatory. All of them were thriving now with my help. I had been putting off taking cuttings and propagations from them until they had more growth, but with everything happening, I knew I needed to do it today. If there was a chance Darius got an order in place and I couldn’t work in the conservatory anymore, I had to make sure I had these plants for Pinehurst. If that alone hadn’t been enough, with the days quickly passing, I found myself facing the very real thought that I would be going home soon and would be forced to face everything I had been using Blackwood Manor to hide from.

Even though it was easy in the moment not to see my mother, I knew that behind the scenes, she was creating a war zone for me to return to. My problems were far from over. I’d only pushed them away momentarily.

The invitations for the garden party had been sent, and a buzz about the community had already been set in motion. All two hundred people had RSVPed that they would be coming to see the conservatory and all of the work I had done to restore it. Not one single invite had turned down the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the infamous Blackwood Manor conservatory. So much was riding on my shoulders, and knowing the conservatory still wasn’t planted weighed on me like cement blocks resting on my tired shoulders.

I had to put in extra time in the gardens now to be sure that it would be finished, but also in fear that Darius Blackwood might soon be halting my momentum.

As if the chaos surrounding Darius’s return hadn’t been enough, when I entered the garden this morning, the spadix—the tall, fleshy, phallic column in the center of the corpse flower—had lengthened and was now protruding out of the large cabbage-leaf-looking outer covering of the spathe.

The corpse flower was preparing to bloom faster than I had hoped, faster than even Lithgow had thought, and defensive panic set in. Immediately, I sent photos to Professor Lithgow to lean on his expertise. It was nearly impossible to nail down how much time we had before it bloomed, and once it bloomed, the spathe would only remain open for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If my work in the conservatory was to be done to showcase it at the same time as the bloom, I had to work faster. Faster than I was capable of working.

Jasper had offered his gardeners, but as much as I needed the extra hands right now, it felt wrong to have someone else help me when I was so close to having the entire thing completed all by myself. It was stupid not to take the help, but I had already completed the majority of the hard labor I would have used the gardeners for as it was. It would most likely take me longer to explain what they needed to do and how carefully they had to do it.

I knew I could do it; I had to. But how was I going to do it and solve the murder of Hester Blackwood at the same time?

“Wow, I can’t believe how different it looks in here,” Jasper said.

I leaped out of my skin as I turned. He stood on the paver walkway near the house entrance, admiring the first section of the finished garden. Beautiful coleus bunched together in tufts of dark purple, with green ruffled edges whispering around the leaves, mixed in with the completely white monstera hybrids, while giant golden pothos spilled out onto the freshly tidied path. It was the simplest of beds, more of an edging to the walkway’s entrance, but I had been so excited to plant something that I couldn’t help myself, even though I still had far more to do to most of the other scapes before I would be ready to plant them. The next week would be spent working on the soil conditions of the other beds after solidifying from Hester’s notebook exactly where tropicals and subtropicals would be best planted to get optimal conditions in the multi-temperate space.

Combing through Hester’s gardening notebook had proved to be absolutely fascinating as far as the conservatory was concerned but failed to give me much more information about her, though I did find her absolute hatred of daisies and roses to be quite comical. I wish I knew the backstory because, in her obvious love of dark, mysterious, Gothic plants, it was unusual to hate roses, arguably the most stereotypical Gothic flower of them all. For some reason, though, it didn’t surprise me. After being in the remnants of her space for so long, I’d started to feel like I knew Hester personally, not just in a ghost form. It was obvious she did things her own way, not because they were the most popular or beautiful. I admired that more than I could put into words. She didn’t do it to please everyone else; she had done it for her. A trait I wished I had more of.

The environmental structures of the conservatory were fascinating. There were dedicated sections for cacti and succulents; desert plants like saguaro, prickly pear, and barrel cactus; a section for Mediterranean plants like lavender, oleander, and rosemary; a section for Alpine and mountain plants with Astor’s edelweiss and saxifrage, which were not to be outdone by the ornamentals. Hester had even procured a section of carnivorous plants at one time, and I made sure there was a space in the garden tucked away and protected by large fake boulders and plants, almost as if it were a room all in itself, where the pitcher plants, sundew, and Venus flytraps were kept happy until it was their turn to be planted. Beyond sorting through the forgotten decay of everything, I had to restore each of the conservatory’s perfect little environments. Typically, because the various plants required such different conditions, they would be housed in different rooms, but again, Hester had been an original genius and had managed to set up large, visually aesthetic blocks in the giant space that acted as walls, allowing for temperature and humidity customization for each subsection. It was brilliant, and something I hadn’t seen many botanical gardens try. My colleagues would be thrilled to see the workings of it all.

The Mediterranean plants enjoyed hot, dry temperatures, whereas the tropical plants thrived in warm, humid environments. Sowerby had been unstoppable in helping me with the heating and cooling systems of the conservatory, even if he complained the entire time. It was odd. After a few days of helping me in the garden while Jasper was out of town, Sowerby had grown increasingly irritated and crotchety, even shaking and tearing up, though not in front of me, of course. Things I could only watch from the corner of my eye for when I would turn and talk to him, his face would turn to annoyed, stiff stone as it always was, as if nothing happened. Seeing how much distress it was causing him to be with the old memories of Hester and the garden, I insisted he work only on the technical side of the conservatory instead of in the beds with the plants, which seemed to please him, though I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed at the lack of useful help. I imagine being in here brought back painful memories, and even though I was doing all that I could to bring hope back to the space, it still held her memories. Besides, it was just as easy for me to do it alone, as his pace was slow and significantly more careful than mine had become, with the corpse flower threatening to bloom.

“So you like the dark plants,” I said to Jasper, a smile lighting up my face. “So did your mom. I couldn’t believe some of the cool things she had planted here. It’s like a Gothic gardener’s dream. Almost everything she has in here is on the darker spectrum. It’s going to be beautiful once it’s all complete.” We obviously hadn’t been able to procure all of the exact plants that Hester originally had. When I gave Jasper the list of plants needed, I tried to find substitutes similar in color or impact but less expensive. Jasper hadn’t even wanted to fix up the garden, and though I was more than certain he had the money and connections to get the rarest specimens available, I didn’t want to push my luck. Besides, the eleven that had managed to live on in the conservatory were enough to showcase on their own. It did work out favorably, though, that several of the plants that Hester had loved were no longer considered rare and were quite easy to get.

As always, Jasper’s mood soured at the mention of his mother. That’s right, I was still supposed to pretend she wasn’t dead and haunting me, but that she was still alive, as all three men supposedly believed.

“Maybe she’ll come back and see it,” I said, watching his eyes for signs of deception as carefully as a hawk watches a field mouse.

“I hope she doesn’t. My father has caused enough trouble returning; I don’t need or want her here,” he said as he put his hands in his pockets and walked toward me with his relaxed, confident gait.

“James Bond,” I said, unable to help myself.