Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“If there was such a thing as karma, most of the world’s leaders would have leprosy.”

“It isn’t funny,” she said. “Do you think I’m a bad girl?”

I couldn’t think of the right words to use. “No, I don’t think that.”

“I’m afraid,” she said. “For all of us. Roy says we’re wayfaring strangers, like the Canterbury Pilgrims trying to wend their way past the Black Death. He says death is the only reality in our lives.”

“Roy is a nihilist.”

“Say it again.”

“Say what?”

“That I’m not a bad girl.”

“Good luck to you. I think you’re a formidable woman with qualities that you don’t give yourself credit for. Don’t let Hershel get hurt any more than he already has.”

The line went dead.

I DROVE TO HERSHEL and Linda Gail’s box of a house a few blocks off River Oaks Boulevard without calling first or knowing what to expect. It was hard for me to think of Hershel as a possible adversary, perhaps a dangerous one. But in light of how human frailty and jealousy affect us all, I knew if he had received the bogus photograph, anything was possible. As I drove down the boulevard past some of the grandest mansions in the Western world and turned onto Hershel’s street and pulled into the deep shade of his driveway, I smelled an odor that was like wet leaves burning in a barrel, and water that had go

ne sour in a pond, and moist dirt oozing with white slugs spaded up in ground that never saw sunlight.

Hershel was bare-chested and pushing a shovel deep into the soil with one booted foot, his back knotted and red and sweaty and powdered with dirt. His shirt and leather jacket hung on the back of a wood chair. He had torn the flowers out of the beds and stripped the climbing roses and the trumpet vine from the trellises and smashed the trellises into sticks. He dropped the shovel on the grass and began ripping divots out of the St. Augustine grass with a mattock, destroying the root systems, driving the mattock deeper into sandy soil and rock and a metal sprinkler line. Hershel was waging war on the environment that Linda Gail had been willing to trade her marriage for.

“What are you planting, farmer?” I said.

He looked up at me like a primitive creature hard at work in front of his cave. There was a crooked grin on his face, a liquidity in his eyes that I normally would associate with yellow jaundice. The knees of his canvas trousers were green with grass stains. “I’m putting in a vegetable garden.”

“It’s December.”

“I know. I kind of got carried away and tore up Linda Gail’s roses. She flat loves those roses. I’m sorry I did that.”

“It’s mighty cold to be digging a vegetable garden.”

“I’m late this year. That’s why I’d better get on it.”

Behind him was an aboveground swimming pool constructed of a pipe frame and sheets of blue plastic, a garden hose hung over the rim.

“Want to take a dip?”

“What’s that smell?”

“Linda Gail says the neighbor’s cat drowned in it. I don’t believe it, though. Cats don’t fall into pools. A coon or a porcupine might do that, but a cat is too smart.”

“Can we talk?”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“I’m going to explain some things that have happened. Put down the mattock and let’s go inside.”

“I like it out here just fine.”

His chest and shoulders and upper arms were hairless and smooth, his nipples as small as dimes. The temperature must have been fifty degrees, but sweat was leaking out of his hair and running down the sides of his face.

“Did somebody send you a photograph?” I said.

“They sure did.”