“What’re you going to tell ’im?” a woman’s voice, elderly and difficult, was asking.
“The truth.”
Stuart recognized the waiter.
“You ridiculous old man, you don’t know the truth any more than I do. There is no ‘truth.’”
“There is. Look, at least I’ve been there. You haven’t.”
“You went there to shoot hares. Nothing cosmic about it.”
“I didn’t say there was.” Now the old man sounded petulant.
“You’ve bored enough people with your drunken tale. Now get out there before he steals the condiments,” said the cook. “I know the type. Sneaky.”
Constable Stuart stood up straight, miffed, then sneaked quickly back to his breakfast.
* * *
Clara scrolled through image after image of the garden on the website. In one, several huge DNA double helixes rose from the ground as though expelled. In another part of the garden, bold sculptures representing various scientific theories mixed with tall trees to form a forest. Man-made, nature-made. Almost indistinguishable.
And then there were the checkerboard patterns that swooped up and down and in and out, bursting through from another dimension.
The photographs on the website had been taken in daylight, in sunshine. But still there was something disturbing about them. This was no temporary sculpture garden. This one felt old, enduring.
It felt like Stonehenge or the haunting hilltop shards of Bryn Cader Faner in Wales. Their meaning obscured, but their power unmistakable.
Why? Clara asked herself. Why had someone created this garden? And why had Peter gone there?
* * *
“Never met the owner,” said the elderly man, whose name turned out, unexpectedly, to be Alphonse.
“Should I call you Al?” Constable Stuart asked.
“No.”
“Did he create the garden?” Stuart asked.
“With his late wife, aye. Nice people from what I hear. Did it just for themselves, but when word got out, they decided to open it to the public.”
Stuart nodded. He knew that much. And he also knew it was open for only one day a year.
“Not a day,” Alphonse corrected. “Five hours. Once a year. The first Sunday in May.”
“Is that when you saw it?” Stuart asked, knowing the answer.
“Not exactly. I went there in the evening.”
“Why?”
This was clearly not the line of questioning Alphonse had expected. Should he say he’d gone there to poach hares? Not for food, they had plenty of that. But for fun. As he’d done since he was a boy. Shooting squirrels and rabbits. Moles and voles.
Should he tell this policeman about the last time he’d gone shooting in the garden? It had been dusk. He’d seen movement and had raised his rifle.
He had the hare in the crosshairs. It was sitting on one of the strange sculptures, a bone-white stairway that cascaded down a hill, cut into the grass from a great height.
It was a magnificent hare. Huge. Old. Gray. As Alphonse watched through the sight of his rifle, the hare stood up slowly on its hind legs. Tall. Alert. Sensing something.
Alphonse stared at him down the barrel of his gun. And pulled the trigger.
But nothing happened. The gun had jammed.
Swearing, Alphonse had broken open the chamber, replaced the shell and snapped it shut, expecting the hare to be long gone.
But it remained where it was. Like a sculpture. Like a part of the garden. An old gray stone. Both alive and inanimate.
Alphonse raised his gun, knowing he had the power to decide which one the hare would be.
* * *
“The first Sunday in May?” Reine-Marie read out loud from the website. “But Peter had come back to Canada by then. He must’ve done the painting sometime in the early winter.”
“That means he must’ve trespassed,” said Clara. She tried to make it sound nonchalant. A simple statement of fact. But it was much more than that. For her.
The man she knew followed rules. He followed recipes, for God’s sake. He read instructions, paid his bills on time and had his teeth cleaned twice a year. He did as he was told and taught. It was not in his nature to trespass.
But Peter had changed. He was no longer the man she knew.
She’d sent him away, hoping he’d change. But now faced with more evidence that he had, she found herself suddenly afraid. That he’d not only changed, but changed course. Away from her.
To hide her upset, she went back to studying the website. At first she just stared, hoping no one would notice her distress, but after a few moments the images sunk in. They were like nothing she’d ever seen before.
The creators of the garden wanted to explore the laws of nature, the mysteries of the universe, and what happened when the two intersected.