Chapter 9 - The Garden of Mercy
Spring arrived late in New England that year.
By the middle of May, the frost had finally crawled out of the ground along the river, leaving the black soil soft, wet, and smelling of iron and rotting oak leaves.
The cottage by the reservoir was small—four rooms, a screened porch that needed painting, and an old stone well in the front yard that had been dry since the nineteen-forties.
Daniel Walker knelt in the flowerbeds along the south wall of the house.
He was wearing an old denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms and a pair of canvas trousers with soil ground into the knees. He held a small, triangular trowel in his right hand, digging small, six-inch pockets into the compost to plant three flats of purple salvia and white phlox.
The Crown Victoria was gone.
It had been sold three months ago to a municipal auction in Hartford for eight hundred dollars. In its place in the gravel driveway sat an old blue Ford pickup with three hundred thousand miles on the odometer and a wooden rack in the bed for hauling lumber.
The screen door creaked.
The sound was familiar, comforting—the loose spring snapping against the pine casing with a double *clack*.
Lily came down the wooden steps carrying two tall glasses of iced tea with lemon slices floating among the ice cubes.
She was wearing an oversized cream sweater and blue jeans. Her hair had grown out, falling in soft chestnut curls around her shoulders, completely covering the pale, two-inch surgical lines beneath her ears.
If someone looked closely—very closely—they might notice that when she smiled, the left corner of her mouth rose a fraction of a second slower than the right. But nobody looked that closely. When people looked at Lily Walker now, they saw only an honors student who had just been accepted into the master’s program in Renaissance conservation at the university in Boston.
She walked across the grass, her bare feet leaving dark green prints in the dew, and sat down on the overturned wooden bushel basket beside him.
"You’re planting them too close," she said, handing him a glass.
Daniel took the glass, the cold condensation soothing his dry, soil-stained fingers. "Salvia needs to be tight. If you leave space between them, the crabgrass comes in from the gravel path."
Lily took a sip of her tea, looking out over the reservoir where the morning mist was rising off the dark, still water like white steam.
"Marcus was here yesterday," she said quietly.
Daniel stopped digging. The trowel stayed buried in the dark earth. "I know."
"He was sitting in that old Buick by the mailboxes," she continued. Her voice was peaceful, entirely without the shadow that had hung over it during the winter. "He didn't get out. He just rolled down the window and handed me an envelope. He told me to give it to you."
Daniel didn't look up from the dirt. "What was in it?"
"A receipt," Lily said. "From a title company in Providence. It said the old pier—Pier Forty—was purchased by the city housing authority for one dollar. They’re building a public park. A playground, three ballfields, and a community greenhouse."
Daniel set the trowel down.
He took a long drink of the tea. The lemon was sharp, cold, and clean.
"Your mother always wanted a greenhouse," Daniel said softly. "She used to try to grow tomatoes in three-pound coffee cans on the fire escape in Portland. The salt air killed them every August."
Lily reached down and picked up one of the salvia plants. She loosened the root ball with her thumbs, the black soil crumbling through her fingers, and set the green shoot into the hole Daniel had dug.
"Did you love that life, Daddy?"
Daniel looked at her.
He looked at the small hands, so like her mother’s, patting the earth down around the tender roots. He thought of the warehouses along the canal. He thought of the red ledgers, the sound of the King Air’s turbines in the wet hangar, and the three boys crying on the concrete while their dynasties turned to ash around them.
"I didn't love it," Daniel said. "I was just good at it. Some men know how to build stone walls, Lily. Some men know how to fix diesel engines. I knew how to make bad men afraid of what was behind the door."
"And now?"
Daniel reached out and took a handful of fresh soil from the bushel, spreading it gently around the base of the plant she had set.
"Now I’m sixty years old," Daniel said. "I have two acres of grass that need mowing every Saturday. I have an import warehouse that sells three shipping containers of Portuguese cork every month to people who make wine bottles. And I have a daughter who’s moving to Boston in September."
Lily smiled.
It was a full, real smile—the smile that Ethan Cole’s heavy boot had tried to erase from the earth with three hundred pounds of pressure per square inch.
"Boston isn't that far," she said, leaning her head against his shoulder. Her hair smelled of apple shampoo and morning air. "It’s only an hour on the train. You can come up on Sundays. We’ll go to the museum. You can look at the frescoes and tell me they look like old plaster."
May you like
"They *do* look like old plaster," Daniel said, his arm wrapping around her shoulders, holding her against his ribs as the morning sun broke fully through the pine trees, turning the mist on the water into gold.
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