The Devil_s Garden

FOURTEEN

Abby spent the early part of the afternoon at the block sale, haggling good-naturedly with other women from the neighborhood, bargaining over glassware, picture frames, jigsaw puzzles, flatware.

She had always thought that garage sale items were nothing more than worthless junk being sold and resold to the same people over and over again. Granted, sometimes there were pearls to be found in the suburban oyster, but rarely.

Earlier in the day she had brought over three large boxes from the house, a good deal of it things she had picked up at garage sales and flea markets over the years, proving her point. One of the boxes was full of paperbacks; yellowed mass-market copies of books she had been shelving and reshelving since college. Colleen McCollough, Harold Robbins, Stephen King. She found it terribly difficult to part with books, but she made herself a promise this time.

At just after one, while talking to Mindy Stillman, who seemed to have an immeasurable trove of anecdotes about her ex-husband’s infidelities, Abby waved over Charlotte and Emily. She needed to get them fed and ready to drop off at the babysitter’s house.

She did not see or hear the black SUV turn the corner, drive up her long driveway, and park behind the garage.

In the distance, the smoke of burning thatch writes the village’s epitaph in the sky. He feels alive, connected to history by the blood beneath his boots, still electrified from the insanity of battle. He checks himself for wounds. He is unscathed. Around him is a meadow sown with the fallen.

He enters the farmhouse. He knows every stone, every timber, every sill. It has lived in his dreams for a long time.

The old woman glances up from her task. She has met Koschei before, knows the centuries of madness in his eyes. Her house is warm, heated by the burning fields, the fires that have brought Grozny to its knees. The kitchen smells of fresh bread and human flesh. The senses are ashamed of their hungers.

“You,” she says softly, the tears rimming her ancient eyes. She draws the knife to her own throat. “You.”

While Abby flipped through the new issue of Architectural Digest, the girls played in the backyard. In about an hour Abby needed to drop them off at the babysitters, before heading to the clinic. She had a twelve-hour shift coming up and, as much as she had intended to catch up on her sleep, she was tired already. On the days when she worked, and Michael was in court, there was usually a three- or four-hour window where they needed someone to watch the girls.

Regardless, she needed to give the girls a bath before they left. It was getting to be more and more of an ordeal these days, ever since Charlotte and Emily discovered the world of skincare products. She also needed to make them a snack.

As she took out the peanut butter and jelly she heard the back door open and close.

“Let’s get ready for your bath, girls,” Abby said.

She made the sandwiches by rote, her mind on her upcoming shift. She cut the crust off Emily’s sandwich. Charlotte liked the crust. Grape jam for Emily; strawberry for Charlotte. She bagged the half-sandwiches, listened to the house.

Had the girls come in? If so, they were a little too quiet. It could only mean one of two things. They were tired, or they were scheming.

“Come on, girls.”

“You are even more beautiful than I imagined.”

Abby dropped the jar of strawberry preserve at the sound of the man’s voice. A strange man’s voice. She spun around. In front of her, just a few feet away, stood a tall, broad-shouldered man. He wore a long black leather coat. His face was rugged, chiseled, and bore a ragged scar on his left cheek. He did not brandish a weapon of any sort. Instead, in his right hand, was a red rose.

The reality dawned. There was a stranger in the hallway.

A stranger. In her house.

The girls.

Abby opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. It was as if her ability to make a noise was somehow stillborn within her. She darted around the man, toppling a chair in the process. Somewhere behind her another glass shattered on the floor. The man did not move in any way to stop her.

“Girls?” she yelled.

She ran into the living room. They were not there. The sense of panic soon swelled to an overwhelming feeling of terror.

“Girls?”

She looked in the bathroom, the downstairs bedroom. She ran to the back door, opened the sliding glass door leading to the patio, her heart racing to burst. In the backyard she saw another man sitting on the picnic table. A younger man, strong looking. Charlotte and Emily stood at the back of the property. They were holding each other, their eyes wide with fear. A few seconds later the man in the house stepped up behind Abby. He did not touch her, did not raise his voice. His voice was almost reassuring. He had an accent.

“That young man is with me. Trust me, no harm will come to you or your family if you do as I say.”

Trust me. It sounded unreal, like dialogue in a movie. But Abby knew it was real. Everything she had dreaded the night before was now in front of her. Somehow, the fact that it was broad daylight did not make it any easier.

“It is important that you do exactly as I say.”

Abby turned to face him. He had stepped back, into the hallway leading to the kitchen. The anger began to bloom inside her.

“Get out of my house!”

The man did not move.

The gun, Abby thought. Her eyes flicked to the stairs. She would never make it past him. She glanced at the kitchen counter. The scissors sat there, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight, daring her to reach for them. They looked a hundred miles away.

“You must try to remain calm,” he said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Abby screamed.

The man seemed to wince at her profanity. Then his features softened. “My name is Aleksander Savisaar.” He closed the sliding glass door, slid the bolt. He turned back to Abby. “Before we go any further, I would like you to do something for me.”

The man spoke with a quiet authority that chilled Abby to the bottom of her soul. She did not respond.

“First, I would like you to calm down. As I said, nothing bad is going to happen to you, your husband, or your lovely home. Can you calm down for me?”

Abby tried to stop shaking. She stood staring at the man. Crazily, she thought of the time her brother Wallace fell off a jungle gym at the school playground, breaking his arm, twisting it at an unnatural angle behind his neck. Abby had been only five years old at the time, and had known that something bad had happened, but she had been immobilized by the sight of his arm doing something it could never do. He looked likea broken doll.

She felt that way now. Frozen by the idea of what was happening. In a second, it occurred to her that this man, this man who did not belong in her house, her life, her world, had asked her a question.

“What?” she asked, returning to the moment.

“Can you remain calm for me?”

Calm. Yes. She remembered helping Wallace – big, goofy, ungainly Wallace – back to the house, where her mother had called an ambulance. She had taken charge. She would take charge now.

“Yes.”

The man smiled. “Good. Next I want you to go into the backyard, and tell the girls not to be afraid. Tell them that Kolya and I – Kolya is the young man – are friends of the family, and that the girls have nothing to fear from either of us. Will you do this?”

Abby just nodded.

Aleks looked out the window, nodding to the man in the backyard, then returned his attention to her. “You have nothing to fear either, Abigail.”

The sound of her name was a sudden twist of the knife. “How do you know my name?”

“I know many things,” he said. He held forth the rose. Abby noticed a single drop of dew on one of the petals, the way one of the thorns had broken off.

Funny that, she thought. The things you notice.

“And there is no need to worry.” When Abby didn’t take the flower from him, he put it down on the dining-room table, then slipped back into the shadows of the hallway. When he turned away from her his coat fell open. On his hip was a large knife in a leather sheath.

This was everything Abby had ever feared, and it was all happening. Right this minute.

“If you do everything I say,” the man who called himself Aleksander Savisaar added, “Anna and Marya will be just fine.”