Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [86]
“Flowers belong in the ground,” he had said. What did he mean by that? It had raised goose bumps on the back of her neck when he’d said it. “I like flowers. Flowers don’t do bad things. They’re just quiet.”
“Flowers don’t do bad things. But people do, right, Benny?” she whispered. Then she slapped the book shut, standing up suddenly, and ran down the stairs.
“Jeffrey,” she said, as she came out the front door … and walked over to Benny’s flower garden. She touched the earth with the toe of her boot and wondered if her thoughts could be right. “Flowers belong in the ground.” But people don’t, right Benny? Jeffrey had come to stand beside her.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I think we need to dig up this flower garden.”
Lydia wanted to be the one to tell Greg. He needed to hear this news from someone who knew what it was like to lose the only person that mattered. But she didn’t have to take it on alone. When Jeffrey had offered to come with her to Greg’s garage, her first instinct had been to tell him no.
“I can handle it,” she said.
“No doubt,” he answered, “but I want us to be a team, Lydia. Let’s deal with the hard stuff together from now on.”
He’d looked a little surprised when she agreed. “Can I drive?” he asked, smiling.
“You’re pushing your luck,” she answered, but walked to the passenger side of the car.
“Wow, this is just like The Taming of the Shrew.”
She smacked him hard as they got in the car.
She had watched them load what was left of Shawna’s body into the ambulance. The killer hadn’t even used a body bag for her, just put her in the ground underneath the red larkspurs in Benny’s beautiful, perfectly tended garden. It made Lydia so angry to think that some people never even had a chance at happiness in this world. All those New Age psychobabblers talking about how you make your own happiness and create positive energy in your life didn’t know shit about Shawna Fox. One of the faceless shrinks Lydia had gone to see had accused her of wallowing in her grief for her mother, had told her she was destroying her life with negative thinking. “Maybe you’re right,” Lydia had answered. “When someone cuts your heart out of your chest and expects you to walk around the rest of your life without it, you let me know how it feels. You tell me when you find a way to stop ‘wallowing.’ ” The irony of that statement was hitting her only now as she and Jeffrey drove to Greg Matthews’s garage, to tell him they’d found Shawna’s body.
“Oh my god,” Lydia said.
“What?”
“I was just thinking, when you lose someone you love, if feels like someone has taken your heart.”
“Okay …” he answered, not sure where she was going.
“Remember how we were talking about what that meant? To lose your heart or to have your heart taken?”
“Yeah. So you’re saying maybe the killer lost someone close to him?”
“Right. And maybe that’s why he wants vengeance.”
“Against whom, though?”
She remembered something Juno had said to her on the first day they spoke. He’d said, “There are many people who believe that I have the power to heal. But there are many that disbelieve it—vehemently. These types of people have perpetrated acts of violence against me and this church in the past, may God forgive them.”
“What if Juno tried to heal whoever it was … but couldn’t?”
When Juno awoke that morning, he knew something was wrong. He lay still in his bed and listened to the air. There was a stillness like the pause before speech, as if the church had taken in a long breath and was holding it. He had been loath to move, feeling that once his feet touched the floor, nothing would ever be the same again.
As he went about his morning routine, feelings crept up on him, rose within him like a tide. Emotions he had rarely known seared through him—fear, and an unspeakable sadness. He tried to ignore them and go about the business of the morning. The door to his uncle’s room was closed, and Juno almost knocked but he hated to disturb the priest, thinking