The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(50)
“Not knowing is crippling. It will take a long time to get those girls out of the resin, even longer to make positive IDs. Too long. You have the chance to give these families peace. You have the chance to let them finally grieve and move on with their lives. You have the chance to give these girls back to their families.”
The little girl in the picture is wearing a pink glitter tiara and a Ninja Turtle costume—complete with eye mask and pink tutu—and holding a Wonder Woman pillowcase in one hand. A much younger Eddison holds her other hand, smiling down at her. He’s not in a costume, but the girl grinning back at him with two bottom teeth missing doesn’t seem to care.
Inara touches the child’s glass-covered smile. She touched Lyonette’s photo that way. “He took pictures of us,” she says eventually. “Front and back, once the tattoos were done. If he took them, he must have kept them. Not in his Garden suite—I looked once—but Lyonette thought he probably put them into some kind of book, to keep him company when he had to be away from the Garden.” She studies the photo another moment, then hands the frame back to him. “Lotte was nearly eight.”
“I’ll call CSU,” Eddison tells Victor, “have them check the house again.” He carefully tucks the frame under one arm and leaves the room.
The silence that follows is broken by Inara’s soft snort. “I still don’t like him.”
“You’re allowed,” Victor says with a laugh. “Did Desmond ever see this book?”
She shrugs. “If he did, he never mentioned it.”
“But at some point he discovered the true nature of the Garden.”
“At some point.”
The first time Desmond used his new codes was after midnight on a Thursday. Well, technically Friday. It was a week or so after his father finally programmed him into the security system, a week of visiting only with his father, of not asking questions even when his father had walked away. Three weeks now he’d known of the Garden, but not the real one.
I’d spent most of the day secluded in Simone’s room, helping her with cold cloths and glasses of water as she suffered through constant nausea and vomiting. It was the third day in a row and we’d thus far managed to keep it from Lorraine, but I wasn’t sure how long that could last. Between the nausea and some specific points of tenderness, I had the bad feeling Simone was pregnant.
It happened sometimes, because no contraception is completely foolproof, but it always meant another filled display case and a temporarily empty room. I don’t think Simone had realized her condition yet. She thought Avery had brought the flu back into the Garden. She was finally asleep, one hand pressed against her stomach, and Danelle had promised to stay with her until the morning.
The smell of sour, stale vomit clung to me, strong enough to make me semi-nauseated as well. I’d long since earned the privilege of turning my shower on whenever I wanted, but the idea of being stuck in another little room was almost physically painful. I stopped by the room just long enough to shove my dress and underwear down the laundry chute—far too narrow for a person to fit through, as Bliss had informed me—and went out into the Garden itself.
At night the Garden was a place of shadows and moonlight, where you could more clearly hear all the illusions that went into making it what it was. During the day there was conversation and movement, sometimes games or songs, and it masked the sound of the pipes feeding water and nutrients through the beds, of the fans that circulated the air. At night, the creature that was the Garden peeled back its synthetic skin to show the skeleton beneath.
I liked the Garden at night for the same reason I loved the original fairy tales. It was what it was, nothing more and nothing less. Unless the Gardener was visiting you, darkness in the Garden was the closest we got to truth.
I stepped through the echoing cave and into the falls, letting the water pour over me and wash away the sourness of sickness and coming death. It was just strong enough to beat at muscles sore and tired from three days of bending over someone, of perching on an uncomfortable stool and expecting every second for Lorraine or the Gardener to come investigate. I let the water pound that away, then used the mist-dampened rocks to haul myself up to the top of the cliff and the sun rock. I wrung most of the water from my hair and then lay back with closed eyes, sprawled inelegantly over the rock with its trace of sun warmth left over from the day. Breath by breath, I could feel my muscles slowly relax.
“Direct, but not very modest.”
I sat up so fast something seized in my back, and I spent the next several minutes swearing at people who couldn’t give proper warning. Desmond stood on the path five or ten yards away, hands shoved deep in his pockets, craning his neck back to stare at the glass tiles of the greenhouse roof.
“Good evening,” I said sourly, rearranging myself more comfortably on the rock. All of my clothing was either in my room or waiting to be laundered, so there wasn’t much point in shrieking and trying to find something to cover myself with. “Come to take in the view?”
“Rather more of a view than I expected.”
“I thought I was alone.”
“Alone?” he repeated, meeting my eyes and very carefully not looking any lower. “In an entire garden full of other girls?”
“Who are all either sleeping or occupying themselves in their rooms,” I retorted.