Unrestricted Access: New and Classic Short Fiction Page 26

  Breathing hard, his heart thumping in his ears, Arthur could barely manage a nod and pushed back toward the exit.

  What was I thinking . . .

  As he reached the streets, the bright City by the Bay seemed suddenly a darker place, full of shadows. Even the morning light failed to dispel them. He fetched up against a light pole and stood there for a moment, trying to slow his breath, when a flash of white caught his eye.

  A paper flyer had been pasted onto the pole. The title drew his attention.

  But it was what was beneath those hand-scrawled words that sucked the air from his lungs and turned his blood to ice. It was a black-and-white photo of a handsome young man in his midtwenties, with dark hair and light eyes. Though the photo had no color, Arthur knew those eyes were a piercing green.

  They belonged to his brother. Christian.

  The flyer contained no further details except a phone number. With trembling fingers, Arthur wrote the number on the bottom of his notebook. He hurried down the crowded street, searching for an empty phone box. When he found one, he slotted his money into it and waited. The phone burred in his ear, once, twice, five times. But he couldn’t put it down.

  He let it ring, balanced between disbelief and hope.

  Finally, a man answered, his voice spiked with irritation. “What the hell, man? I was sleeping.”

  “I’m sorry,” Arthur apologized. “I saw your flyer on the street. About Christian Crane?”

  “Have you found him?” The man’s tone sharpened, annoyance replaced with hope. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said, fumbling for his words. “But I’m his brother. I had hoped—”

  “Damn,” the voice cut him off. “You’re the Brit? His foster brother. I’m Wayne . . . Wayne Grantham.”

  From the man’s tone, he clearly thought Arthur would recognize him, that Christian might have spoken to Arthur about him—but Arthur hadn’t shared a word with Christian for over two years, not after the way they had left matters in England, after their fight. It was why Arthur had come to San Francisco, to mend fences and start anew.

  Arthur pushed all that aside. “How long has Christian been gone?”

  “Eleven days.”

  That was one day before Jake was killed. It was a ridiculous time to peg it to, but the folk singer’s murder was fresh in his mind.

  “Have you called the police?” Arthur asked.

  A snort answered him. “Like they give a damn about a grown-up man gone missing in San Francisco. Happens all the time, they said. City of Love, and all that. Said he’d probably turn up.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  “No.” Wayne hesitated. “He wouldn’t have left without telling me. Not Christian. He wouldn’t leave me not knowing.”

  Arthur cleared his throat. “He left without telling me.”

  “But he had his reasons back then, didn’t he?” Guilt spiked through Arthur.

  “He did.”

  Wayne had nothing else to add, and Arthur reluctantly gave up without asking the most important question of all. There were some questions he still had difficulty asking, stifled by prejudice and made uncomfortable by his ingrained formal upbringing.

  Instead, he went back to the hotel and filed his story, burying the new detail of the orchid a few paragraphs in. For good measure, he also reported Christian missing to the police.

  As Wayne had said, they did not care.

  The next day, Arthur woke to the screaming headline of a second murder. He read the paper standing at his kitchen counter, a mug of coffee growing cold in his hand. As with Jackie Jake, the victim’s throat had been torn out. The body of the young man—a law clerk—had been found only a few blocks away from St. Patrick’s Cathedral—where Jackie Jake’s memorial service had been held. The article hinted that the murders were connected, but they didn’t elaborate.

  Two hours later, Arthur sat at a diner across from Officer Miller, calling in his favor, admitting that he was a reporter for the Times.

  “Can’t tell you much more than was in the Chronicle here,” Miller admitted, tapping the local newspaper. “But there was a flower—another orchid—found at this crime scene, too. According to a roommate, the victim found the orchid in his bedroom the morning he was killed, like the murderer left it as a calling card.”

  “Were there any witnesses? Did anyone see someone at the crime scene . . . or see whoever left that orchid?”

  “Nothing concrete. Someone said they saw a skinny, dark-haired man lurking around the church at the time of the murder, taking pictures, but it could be a tourist.”

  Arthur could glean nothing else from what the officer told him. The mysterious photographer did add a good detail for the report Arthur intended to file, but the fact was certainly not as juicy as the detail about the second orchid.

  That afternoon, Arthur composed and wired in the story. He dubbed the murderer “the Orchid Killer.” By the next day, the name was plastered across every newspaper in the city and across the nation, and his reputation as a journalist grew.

  His editor at the Times extended his assignment to cover the murders. He even convinced the paper to give him enough of a stipend to rent a dilapidated room in the Haight-Ashbury district—where both victims spent most of their time. Arthur used the little money left over to buy a radio and tuned it to the police band.

  Over the next days, he worked and ate with the radio on. Most of the chatter was dull, but four nights later, a frantic call came over the band. A dead body had been discovered, just blocks from Arthur’s rented room, a possible third victim of the Orchid Killer.

  He hailed a cab to get there quickly, but the police had already cordoned off the area to keep the press away.

  Standing at the yellow strip, Arthur lifted his Nikon camera. It was outfitted with a zoom lens. Christian had given it to Arthur as a present when he finished school, telling him that he could use the extra eye. Arthur still wasn’t very good with the camera—he preferred to tell stories with words rather than pictures—but without a photographer assigned to him, he would have to manage on his own.

  To get a better vantage point, he shifted away from the police cordon and climbed a few steps onto the porch of a neighboring Victorian home. He leaned against a brightly painted column to steady himself and examined the crime scene through the lens of the camera. It took some fine-tuning of the zoom to draw out a clear picture.

  The victim lay flat on his back on the sidewalk. A dark stain marred his throat and spread over the stone. One arm was outstretched toward the street as if beckoning for help that would never come. In that open palm lay a white object.

  Arthur zoomed in and tried to identify it, finally discerning the details of its frilled petals and subtle hues. It was an orchid, but not any orchid. Arthur’s stomach knotted with recognition.

  It was a Brassocattleya orchid.

  Such orchids were common enough, used as corsage flowers because of their powerful scent and their durable beauty. His mother had raised that particular breed because she adored the scent.

  Arthur remembered another detail. Christian had always loved them, too.

  His mind’s eye flashed to the poster, to the still life of Christian printed there, his brother’s smile frozen, his eyes so alive even in the photo.

  As he stared at the orchid in the dead man’s palm, the sweet smell seemed to drift across the street to him, although that couldn’t be true. He was too far away, but even the imagined scent was enough to dredge up a long-buried memory.

  Arthur sat on the stone bench in the corner of his mother’s greenhouse holding a pruning knife. The familiar scents of orchids and bark surrounded him, as the afternoon sunlight, trapped under all that glass, turned the winter outside into a steamy summer inside.

  He stared at the long tables filled with exotic plants. Some of the orchids he’d known for years, watching them flower over and over again throughout his lonely childhood.

  Since he was
a little boy he had come here to watch his mother work with the orchids, crooning to them, misting them gently, stroking their leaves, giving them the love that she did not give to him. They were special and rare and beautiful—and he was not.

  He’d had a secret dream that when he grew up he would do something so wonderful that she would look up from her pots and notice him.

  But now that would never happen.

  She had died two days ago, taking her own life in one of her fits of black melancholy. Today she had been planted in the earth like one of her beloved orchids.

  He ran his thumb across the sharp knife.

  He’d overheard the staff talking about the value of his mother’s orchid collection. She had spent a lifetime accumulating it—buying each plant from a funny little man dressed all in black with a bowler hat. He gathered them from botanical gardens around the world, from other collectors, and even from men who traveled into the distant rain forests and brought the specimens out in burlap sacks.

  Now all her precious orchids would die or be sold.

  A light winter rain began to patter on the glass roof and ran down the sides in streaks. Arthur laid the cold knife blade against the warm softness of his forearm.

  This is how she did it . . .

  Before he could act, the greenhouse door slammed open, and Arthur jumped.

  The knife clattered to the tile floor.

  Only one person dared to crash around the estate like that. Christian had come to the London house when both boys were fourteen. Christian’s parents had died in a car crash outside of San Francisco. Arthur’s father was second cousin to the boy’s father and took the teenager into their home. Though the two boys were related, it was only in blood—not in demeanor.

  “Arty?” he called brashly. “I know you’re in here.”

  Arthur stirred on the bench, and Christian spotted him, crossing over to join him. Christian’s brown hair was slicked flat from the rain, and his bright green eyes were puffy and rimmed in red. Unlike Arthur, Christian could let himself cry when he was hurt. It was an American trait. Something Arthur’s father and mother would never tolerate.

  Reaching the bench, Christian pulled the dark lens cap off his camera. He carried the thing everywhere. He took pictures all day and spent half the night in a makeshift darkroom developing them. Arthur’s mother said that he had real talent, and she would not have said that if it weren’t true.

  Christian planned to become a photojournalist. He wanted to travel to the world’s war zones, taking pictures—using his art to change the world. He’d even convinced Arthur that he could come along, too, as a journalist. They’d be a team. Arthur wasn’t sure that he had the talent for such a career, but he liked to be drawn into Christian’s whimsies. The other boy had a reserve of boundless optimism that Arthur often warmed himself against.

  But today even that wasn’t enough.

  Christian snapped a picture of the abandoned pruning knife on the tiles, then turned toward the rows of specimen tables. He headed to his favorite orchid: the Brassocattleya cross.

  First, he took a close-up shot of the blossom, then he pinched off a dead leaf and felt its edges to see if it was moist, just as their mother used to.

  “She’ll miss these flowers,” Christian commented. Certainly more than me, Arthur thought dourly. Christian plucked the flower, and Arthur gasped. Mother would never have allowed that.

  Christian dropped the flower on Arthur’s lap and picked up the pruning knife from the floor.

  Arthur watched the blade. He imagined how it would feel if it cut into his wrists, how the blood would well out and drop onto the floor. His mother would know. She’d used a long knife from the kitchens to slit her wrists in the bath. When Arthur found her, the water was such a deep red that it looked as if the whole tub had been filled with blood.

  Christian touched the inside of Arthur’s wrist. His fingers slid back and forth along the same spot where his mother had used the kitchen knife.

  “Do you think it hurt much?” Christian asked, not shying from the harder questions. His fingers still rested on Arthur’s wrist.

  Arthur shrugged, suddenly nervous—not at the subject matter but at the intimacy.

  Christian moved his fingers aside, replacing his touch with that of the cold edge of the pruning knife.

  Arthur stayed very still, hoping.

  Christian took a deep breath, then sliced into Arthur’s wrist—but not too deep. It didn’t hurt as much as he had anticipated. No more than a sting really.

  Blood welled out.

  Both boys stared at the shiny scarlet line on Arthur’s white skin.

  “She left me, too,” Christian said and put the flower into Arthur’s hand.

  Arthur clenched his fist, crushing the orchid, and more blood flowed out of his wound. “I know.”

  “My turn now.” Christian drew the bloody blade across his own wrist.

  “Why?” Arthur asked, surprised.

  Christian turned his arm over and dropped his wounded wrist on top of Arthur’s. Their warm commingled blood ran down their arms and dripped onto the clean-swept floor.

  With his other arm, Christian took several snapshots: of the crimson drops on the white stone tile, of the bloody flower crumpled on the bench. Last, Christian angled the camera up to take a picture of the two of them together, their arms linked.

  “I will never leave you,” Christian whispered to him. “We’re blood brothers, now and forever.”

  For the first time since Arthur had found his mother in the crimson water—her stained blond hair floating on the surface, her head tilted back to stare at the plaster ceiling—he broke down and wept.

  Arthur felt a hand shove him from behind, stumbling him back to the present.

  “Get off my porch!”

  He turned to discover a middle-aged woman standing there—about the same age his mother would have been if she’d lived. She scolded him and herded him off her home’s stoop, her flannel nightgown billowing in the night breeze.

  Arthur’s reporter instincts came back. “Did you see anything?”

  “None of your business what I saw.” She crossed her arms over her chest and sized him up. “But I can say that I don’t like how this Summer of Love has turned out.”

  Later, when Arthur filed his story, the headline read Summer of Death follows the Summer of Love.

  “I still haven’t heard any word from Christian,” Wayne said over the phone three days later. “Our friends in the city haven’t either.”

  Arthur frowned, cradling the phone to his ear as he sifted through piles of police reports and forensic exams from the latest murder, a third victim. The young man was named Louis May, recently arrived from Kansas City. Like Christian, the man had likely been drawn by the promise of California, a modern-day gold rush of free love and openness, only to die on the sidewalk, his throat torn open and a flower in his hand.

  Had the same happened to Christian? Was his body yet undiscovered?

  “But something strange happened this morning,” Wayne said, interrupting Arthur’s line of worry.

  “What?” He sat straighter and let the papers settle to the tabletop.

  “A Catholic priest came by, knocking at my door at an ungodly early hour.”

  “A priest? What did he want?”

  “He asked if I knew where Christian might be, where he hung out, especially at night. Strange, huh?”

  Strange barely fit that description. Despite his brother’s name, Christian had no religious affiliation. In fact, he only had disdain for those who piously bent their knees to an uncaring god, like Arthur’s parents had. So why would a priest be interested in his brother?

  As if hearing Arthur’s silent question, Wayne explained. “The priest said it was important that he find your brother and talk to him. Said Christian’s immortal soul hung in the balance. He told me to tell Christian that he could turn his back on what he’d become and accept Christ into his heart and find salvation. Those were
his exact words.”

  Arthur swallowed, hearing an echo of his own words to Christian on that last night, words that could not be easily taken back. He had called Christian names, demanded he change, telling him that the path Christian had chosen would only lead to a lonely death. Their argument had grown more and more heated until the brothers fled from each other.

  The next day, Christian was gone.

  “You should have seen that guy’s eyes,” Wayne continued. “Scared the hell out of me, I have to say. Never met a priest like that. What do you think he really wanted?”

  “I have no idea.”

  After that call, Arthur sat in his tiny rented room, studying pictures and news clippings taped to the walls. Like Christian, all the victims were men in their twenties. They were dark-haired and handsome.

  Arthur stared at a publicity photo of Jackie Jake. The folk singer’s black hair flopped over his eyes, reminding Arthur acutely of Christian. Jake even had the same bright green eyes.

  It was at that moment that Arthur realized he didn’t have a single picture of his brother. After their quarrel, in a fit of pique, Arthur had destroyed them all. In many ways, he was as volatile and temperamental as his mother—and in the end, just as judgmental.

  Arthur had been a fool back then. He knew it now. He wanted only to find Christian and apologize, but he worried that he might never get that chance. He could never make it right.

  Over the following three days, he buried himself in the case, sensing Christian was linked to the murders. But how? Was he a victim, or somehow involved? The latter seemed impossible. Still, he remembered the madman at the memorial service. Could Christian have been drugged, maybe brainwashed by some murderous cult, and turned into a monster?

  Needing answers, Arthur started his investigation with the orchids, but too many of the city’s flower shops sold them. He showed around the picture of Christian from Wayne’s flyer, but none of the shopkeepers remembered any particular customers buying those orchids around the times of the murders. It was no surprise. It was summer, and orchids were in demand for the dances of the upper class, those lofty creatures of wealth far removed from the men who lived on the streets or in squat houses or died holding one in their hands.