“I promise to be gentle.” He helped me on the bike and showed me where to put my feet. I wrapped my arms around his waist and he peeled out of the parking garage, tires screaming when we turned onto the street.
Riding a motorcycle was a thrill of adrenaline-fueled excitement coupled with a layer of fear and anxiety. All my senses were heightened. I noticed the rapid change of smells as we left the city center and drove along the lake. I heard the roar of the engine and felt the motorcycle vibrate between my thighs. I watched the world hurtle past while the noise in my head faded away, leaving me feeling exhilarated and free.
After thirty minutes, we turned into Bridgeport and drove down a dimly lit street of boarded-up houses. Jack parked in front of a small run-down bungalow, and we pulled off our helmets, clipping them to a hook under the seat. It was clear no one had lived in the house for a very long time. The wooden staircase leading to the front door had rotted away and the picture window was covered in boards and graffiti. Garbage littered the small front garden, and a tall cedar had fallen into a broken trellis fence.
“Who lives here?”
“I did for a few years,” he said. “It was my grandmother’s house.”
He grabbed the saddlebags from the back of the bike and led me through the broken gate to an overgrown garden lush with plants and flowers, and fragrant with a mix of rich earth and floral perfume. A crumbling flagstone patio, partially hidden by ground cover, gradually transitioned to a grassy lawn. Tall trees and bushes along the worn wooden fence hid us from the outside world.
“This is amazing,” I said, trying to capture every detail through the soft glow of the streetlights. “It’s like a hidden oasis.”
“My grandmother planted probably seventy or eighty species of plants.” Jack put down his bags. “She taught me how to nurture them and help them grow. I believed her when she said there was magic in the garden. I’d come out here when I had a problem, and after a few hours with my hands in the dirt, I’d find the answer. I was more myself here than anywhere else.”
Jack walked me through the garden, naming plants and flowers with dizzying speed: blue spruce, hydrangea, and boxwood gave winter interest to the garden. Quaking aspen and Boston ivy grew along the fence. Pink Spike and Crimson Queen Japanese maple added colorful purple foliage along with First Love speedwell and panicled hydrangea. “These plants are fighters,” he said. “Even without any nurturing, they’ve managed to flourish. They do what it takes to survive. My grandmother would have been proud that her garden has endured.”
“Where is she now?” I asked when he knelt beside one of the flower beds.
“Gone.” His voice tightened and he carefully dug up a bunch of pink flowers. “A developer bought all the houses on this street. They’re going to be torn down and replaced with condos. I asked my cousin to set up a small greenhouse for me at his nursery so I could save her plants. One day, I’ll re-create her garden.”
I worked with him for the next half hour, digging up the plants and putting them in plastic bags with damp paper towels around the roots. I’d never been a plant person. My parents didn’t have time for a garden, and even if they did, it would have been destroyed by my brothers, who loved to play ball and wrestle on the back lawn.
“It must have been hard for her to leave this,” I said into the silence.
“She didn’t have a choice.” Jack’s hand tightened around the trowel. “She was a librarian at the local high school, struggling to make ends meet, especially after I came to live with her. She was worried she’d lose the house, so she borrowed money from a man she thought was a legitimate lender. He took a lien on the house and then charged her an exorbitant rate of interest. She couldn’t keep up with the payments, and one day two of his guys showed up and told us to get out.”
My heart squeezed in my chest. Chloe had almost faced a similar situation before she found her white hat hacking side hustle. “How old were you?”
“Thirteen,” he said. “Old enough to think I could do something. Too young to understand the danger.” He dropped the trowel and bent his head. “I tried to kick them out. My grandmother intervened and one of the men pushed her down the front steps. She hit her head on a paving stone and never woke up. His voice caught, broke. “If I hadn’t picked a fight . . .”
I felt an ache in my throat and wrapped my arms around his bent shoulders. “It’s not your fault. You were just a kid.”
Jack shook me off and returned to his digging. “I found out later the man who loaned her the money was a shady real estate developer,” he continued. “He’d started the loan business for the sole purpose of doing what he did to my grandmother so he could acquire the huge blocks of land he needed for his developments at a low cost. She wasn’t the only person on the block who lost her home, but she was the only one who died.”
My heart went out to the boy he’d been and the burden of guilt he’d been carrying all these years. “Did you tell the police?”
“A neighbor called them when she saw my grandmother lying on the ground. The two men told the paramedics it was an accident and she’d fallen down the stairs. No one believed me when I said she’d been pushed. I’m pretty sure the developer paid someone off to make it all go away. He had a lot of power and was owed a lot of favors.” He ran his hand through his hair, leaving a little streak of dirt on his forehead. “The last time I visited her grave was fifteen years ago. I made her a promise then that I would avenge her, and I still intend to make that happen.”
“What happened to you after she died?” I asked. “Where were your parents?”
“I lost them when I was eight years old, which is why I was staying with her. I had no other family, so it was foster care for me, and when that didn’t work out, I wound up on the street.”
“She’s why you know Oliver Twist,” I said, putting the pieces together.
“I went to the library every day after school to wait until she finished work. She thought it was better if I was surrounded in books than sitting at home alone in front of the TV.”
“She sounds like a wonderful person,” I said. “She must have loved you very much.”
Jack picked up his bags and looked around the garden. “I won’t have time to save them all. I’ve taken pictures to re-create her design, but it won’t be the same.”
“How about this one?” I pointed to a graceful, feathery vine with small, delicate, star-shaped red blooms.
“That’s a cypress vine,” he said. “Ipomoea quamoclit. It’s an escapee and not native to her garden. People think it’s an annual, but with a little help from nature, its self-seeding ability means it can pop up in new places year after year and thrive far away from its original home.”
Something niggled at the back of my mind. If the vine could escape and start over again somewhere new, why couldn’t a person? If Jack’s grandmother’s plants were strong enough to survive neglect, why couldn’t I? Maybe there was a way to save both Bella and Chloe. Maybe the heist wasn’t over after all.