Free Bloodstone by Nate Kenyon Page B

not move away. Her hand brushed against the lace curtain, holding it back, and he thought, she thinks the sun’s on the glass and I can’t see . She stood there for a full minute, and Jeb thought it was funny that she would think he couldn’t see when the sun was shining on the front of the house and not the back, and in fact half the garden was in shadow.
    He worked for the next several hours in silence as the sun crept over the rooftop and reddened his back, and then took his lunch in the shade of the oak tree just beyond the garden. All this time he didn’t see Mrs. Friedman again, and by late afternoon he had forgotten the whole thing, thinking once again about what he was doing and why the hell he was doing it. Mrs. Friedman wanted a landscaped flower garden with a pebbled stream in the middle, something you saw on one of those home improvement shows. A goddamn waste of time. A manicured “small pebbled stream” belonged in L.A., Beverly Hills maybe, but not Maine. Some hot shit director or movie star with a twenty-acre estate would hire a landscaper who got paid two hundred bucks an hour to do it. Then the landscaper would hire a couple of kids to do the work and make a killing. Jeb had seen it all on Lifestyles . Maybe that was something he could do; move to Hollywood and work on famous people’s gardens, sit back in the shade and drink whiskey from tall, cool glasses.
    They wouldn’t let you in those big Hollywood gates, Jeb. They wouldn’t even let you wash their dicks for them .
    True. But it would be nice to live in Hollywood and look at all the pretty girls in bikinis. He sighed, and rubbed at the small of his back where a sharp pain nagged at him. The voices had been getting louder lately, and they never had anything good to say. They’d been running around and around his head, driving him crazy, ever since the night he’d gone up to Thomaston to get the suitcase. The suitcase that was still sitting up in his closet, hidden under the pile of old t-shirts and odd socks and sweat pants.
    He split a bag of cow manure down the side and mixed it with peat moss, the peat lifting dust-like in the sunshine andmaking him sneeze. The manure was old and dry and smelled like blood. A little of that mixture in with the fresh soil and he would have a good base. He was looking forward to the long trip down to Bath, where he would stop in at the greenery to buy the plants Mrs. Friedman wanted. He loved these trips because they always took an hour or more, and most of the time was spent on the road in his car with the windows down and the radio on. A real sense of freedom, flying down an open road in the sunshine while other people were locked up inside some stuffy office that smelled like old paint. If he hurried he could be ready to do the trip tomorrow or Monday at the very latest, and the plants could go in the ground in another week or two if the weather held.
    A few minutes later he looked up to see Mrs. Friedman standing in the open doorway at the rear of the big house, hands on her hips, loose button-down shirt flapping in the slight breeze. Some of her hair had come loose from the elastic, and strands floated around her face. She pushed them back and called out to him.
    “Could you come in here for a second? I’ve got something I need help with and I’d like to get to it today.”
    He slipped his shirt on and followed her inside.
    “The chandelier in the dining room has burned out and I need to get the ladder from the basement,” Mrs. Friedman said, as they walked through the narrow rear hall. She smelled of shampoo and something else he couldn’t place. He saw her hair was still slightly damp at the center. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I can’t carry it alone and we’re having a dinner next Saturday for friends, and I’m just a mess running around trying to remember everything. I’d like to get this done while I’m thinking of it.”
    He nodded, following her through the kitchen, down into the