Night Film(152)

Within minutes, I found what I was looking for: Popcorn’s work shed.

The old blue wooden door was ajar, the same crooked sign nailed to the outside: PRIVATE KEEP OUT. I gently pushed it open.

Popcorn wasn’t home.

It was no bigger than a walk-in closet, filled with meticulously organized shelving, cubbyholes housing envelopes of seeds, plastic trays, terra-cotta pots, bags of mulch and fertilizer. Directly in front of me, facing the greenhouse’s glass walls—too dirty to see through—sat a desk and tall stool, where Popcorn could always be found smoking his cigars, reading his comic books, and listening to the Beatles. A small wire cage—some kind of trap for catching raccoons—stood atop the desk beside a faded comic called Mikey’s Friend and a half-smoked cigar in an ashtray.

I stepped inside to pick it up. It smelled recent.

Next to the desk on the wall was an old bulletin board, jumbled with poorly written directions for tending the soil and plants, a tattered postcard of colored shacks standing on stilts along the edge of a dark bay.

I tugged it loose and checked the reverse side. There was no address, only four scribbled words on the back.

Someday soon you’ll come.

I put it back, turning. Various gardening tools had been mounted along the walls using old spikes: hand sickles, Austrian scythes, pruning saws, axes of all different sizes. I moved over to inspect them—the same way Special Agent Fox had inspected them.

In Wait for Me Here, the eleven teenage bodies of the Leadville killings had been mutilated in ways mimicking accidents that occurred at an old paper mill—chemical burns, boiler explosions, industrial roller entrapment. But there was another constant: Each victim was a high-school student killed by a stab through the left ventricle of the heart using a pair of hedge shears, the pointed blades exactly nine and a half inches long.

Special Agent Fox sneaks in here in the dead of night to examine Popcorn’s gardening tools—every saw, snip, and clipper—trying to find a blade with that exact measurement. He comes up empty-handed. Because the hedge shears weren’t hidden in the work shed, as he’d suspected.

Now where in the hell were they?

My eyes were stinging, and I was drenched in sweat, getting steamed alive in here like a lobster. The heat was so overpowering I could hardly think, hardly remember that pivotal scene at the end, when Popcorn accidentally finds the shears buried somewhere in here, in one of his beloved flower beds.

I remembered they were encrusted in blood and the look on the poor man’s face when he came across them planting a new set of seeds, seeds with a bizarre name. His look was of such horror.

Real horror?

Was it my imagination or was it actually getting hotter in here?

I shrugged off my backpack, yanked off Brad Jackson’s herringbone coat and the sweater, leaving them on the wire trap. I wrenched a hoe off the wall and exited the shed, slipping around the koi pond.

Popcorn was the only person in the film to know the truth behind the murders. “Sometimes only the silent man can see the full picture.” Beckman had said it, or was it someone in the film?

I needed to get my hands on those shears.

I stepped into the flower bed, traipsing through plants growing so thickly I couldn’t see the ground.

I bent down, noticing a white handwritten sign stuck into the dirt.

EYE-PRICKLES, it read.

I stepped forward a few feet, spotting another.

DEATH CHERRIES.

There were countless similar signs arranged under the leaves.

BLUE ROCKET. TONGUE TACKS. SORCERER’S VIOLET. MAD SEEDS.

That one sounded familiar. Pushing up my sleeves, I raked the hoe through the dirt and immediately felt something hard in the loose soil. I bent down, seeing something shiny.

It was a brass compass, the glass face cracked.

It had belonged to Popcorn. The compass was a source of ridicule throughout the film. The whole town mocked the way he constantly pulled it out of his overalls, closely inspecting it as if to make sure he was still on course on his very important journey around the world, the joke being that the poor man had been born in Leadville and had never set foot outside the tiny town.

I pocketed the compass and shoved the hoe deeper into the dirt, the blade catching on something else.

I crouched down to inspect it. It was a half-decomposed cardboard box, sodden and limp, though I could make out the letters on the front.

Cracker Jack.

I threw it aside, ignoring the unease flooding through me, doggedly digging into the soil again. And I felt something else there, something bulky. I bent down to it.

Something was buried deep in the dirt.

Fighting a wave of nausea—it had to be the oppressive heat, the red lights making every plant and flower, even my own hands, look blood-soaked—I stabbed the hoe directly downward. It caught in some roots. Crouching, I brutally tore out some of the plants, leaves and limbs shuddering in my face as if in protest.

I could feel it with my hands, something hidden here, something hard.

Something human-sized. Popcorn?

It made no sense. At the end of the film, Popcorn was in the clear, safe. He was keeping the killer’s secret, and if anyone could keep a secret it was a mute man. Then what the hell was buried here? Why were his compass and box of Cracker Jack—the two items the gardener was famously never without—hidden here? Had the killer decided to finish him off? Had Cordova?

As my mind spun, suddenly I was aware of, somewhere far away, a dull thud. It sounded like a door banging closed. I scrambled to my feet.