That very first night at Grandma’s Pantry, things ran so late, Nola popped into a nearby supermarket to pick up a cheap dinner. At the checkout was one of the young privates—some junior-level kid assigned to do coffee runs—who was doing the same. As the kid went to pay, the prices were clearly more than he’d calculated, so he started putting things back to lower his bill. What the kid didn’t realize was that Archie Mint was in that same line.
To put a finer point on it, Mint wasn’t one of those pushovers who took a recruiting command to avoid the field. He’d served in the Tenth Mountain Division up at Fort Drum—a hard outfit that always deployed. But on that night in the supermarket, Mint pulled out his wallet and paid the bill. The kid was embarrassed, saying thank you over and over. Mint wouldn’t have it. Told him it was just between them.
More important, when they got back to the office, Mint never said a word to anyone, never took credit. Nola wouldn’t have even known about it if she hadn’t been lurking in one of the aisles. In the military, so many commanders divided the world into Os and Es—Officers and Enlisted. Mint inspired loyalty because he knew there were things more important than those distinctions.
The mental picture disappeared as Nola’s car bucked to a stop at a black metal security gate. She entered a four-digit code into a keypad, and the gate unclenched with a loud ka—klunk. The road ahead was unpaved. She hit the gas, knowing where she was going.
Finally. Home.
For nearly a mile, the road twisted and turned, tornadoes of dust cartwheeling behind her. Then, at the very back of the park, Nola made a sharp right into an empty service lot. Straight ahead was a dirt footpath that wove into the woods. She checked it for footprints. Two sets, just as she knew there would be.
“Psst, psst . . .” Nola called out, leaving the car behind. No answer, no surprise. As she started up the path, a mass of trees and brush swallowed her, hiding her from view.
Back in the early 1900s, this park—over one thousand acres—had been a private estate that held multimillionaire Pierre du Pont’s summer home. Today, thirty-eight minutes from Mint’s house, with greenhouses a mile and a half long, it was known as Longwood Gardens, the largest private botanical garden in the world, attracting over a million tourists a year. Here, though, at the back of the park, on the outskirts of the eighty-six-acre meadow garden, it was abandoned.
“Psst, psst . . . Sarah . . . food!” Nola called again. Still no response.
Nola glanced around, noting the silence. She rechecked the path. Still two sets of footprints.
Up ahead, the path ended at a dilapidated white milk barn that had been abandoned decades ago and was now used for holding the park’s discarded tractors, ladders, and other random equipment. On her left was her real destination: the rusted silver Airstream trailer—a 1993 twenty-five-foot Excella—with a bent awning arm that made the entire blue canopy sag like a winking eye. As always, a single Tupperware bin sat on the cinder block steps: Nola’s in-box.
“Psst . . . psst . . . Sarah, you there?” Nola called again, eyeing the way the Tupperware sat askew on the top step, like someone had moved it. She rechecked the dirt. Two sets of footprints. Nothing out of place.
Nola grabbed the Tupperware but didn’t open it. Inside were three Polaroids—each one of a different plant, its name handwritten across the bottom. Ficus benjamina, aka the Dutch Treat. Davallia tyermanii, the bear’s-foot fern. And Sansevieria, a rare snake plant with pristine white striping in the leaves. They were this week’s assignments from Darryl, the head of Longwood’s botanical library. For six months now, Nola had been painting their collection in return for room and board—though the best benefit was the solitude of living out here, in what had become her private art studio.
“Sarah, if you’re hiding just to piss me off . . .” Nola warned, carefully pulling open the door to the trailer and—
On the floor, a dead toad was lying stomach up, its belly torn open.