Chapter 1

1: September 16 to October 11, 2009

Larkin’s at Short Pump, Far West End, Richmond

September 16, Wednesday night

Henry Allan Thorn

Henry really loved the night and his graveyard shifts at Larkin’s. He loved the shadows and the dark corners that even the lights high in the ceiling somehow failed to illuminate. He loved the unexpected caves made by lumber or boxes or concrete that just happened to be stacked in a certain way, even if the next day, like sand castles, the caves were gone. He loved the green shadows of the Garden Center that darkened and grew and turned black and grey as night fell. He loved the Garden Center’s green, earthy smells: the stalks, the fronds, the leaves, the tiny pots, the ferns in hanging baskets.

Tonight he had found a shaded corner in the back, where he was deadheading flowers and watering flats of petunias, dahlias, pansies, calendula and sweet alyssum. Snapdragons, chrysanthemums, asters. The autumn roses were next. Henry inhaled, drinking in all the scents, the green, the earth, the shadows. He had never told anyone that shadows had colors and scents and that green shadows had the richest, the deepest, smell. The Garden Center was his favorite place; he wanted to work there full time. Instead he was a floater. Sort of.

Henry had never told anyone a good many things. He had learned early on that he was different from everyone around him in some deep basic way. People didn’t like differences. Sometimes they would hurt you if they thought you were different. No one would ever know he had another secret besides smelling shadow-scents: he knew how to disappear.

Somehow he knew how to pull the shadows around him like a soft, soft cloak, the colors of his skin, his clothes, his black hair, became ghosts of themselves, faint enough for whatever was around him to show through. Sometimes even the sounds he made in the shadows were muted to barely audible whispers. He had learned long ago how to pretend to be invisible in a crowd. He tried not to use the shadows at work, but a lot of the time Carlene seemed to forget that he was in the Garden Center, and that was fine with him.

Even if he didn’t love working with plants so much, Henry knew he had to be in the Garden Center right now. Something was coming. That was another of Henry’s deep and dark and long-kept secrets: he sensed when things were coming, events, weighted moments coming charged with meaning. He rarely knew what the moments would be, and some he might have avoided if he had known, like the time the dog at his last group foster home attacked him. He just knew that they were coming and where. One was coming to the Garden Center.

Henry shook his head to clear his thoughts. It did him no good to waste time trying to focus on these impending moments. He went back to deadheading and spraying the plants. Plants, Henry had found, were often a lot nicer than people. Sometimes thorns and leaves might tear or prick his skin, but they never bit him or snapped at him, like cats and dogs did, or even some people. Plants never looked past him or through him or talked around him, the way some of the guys at work did, even at lunch, when they would go over to Jason’s Deli or Chipotle or out front to Dominic’s Garden Grill. He was used to it; it had been happening to him all his life, including in all the foster homes he had been in and out of until he was eighteen. It still hurt.

Henry was scanning the next flat of pansies: a little dry, a few deadheads—when he jerked up, the watering can spilling on the concrete floor. He felt the weight of the impending moment pressing on him. He listened hard, his head cocked toward the doorway, some forty or fifty feet away, with only two rows of plants of one kind or another and a flat cart loaded with bags of potting soil and mulch between him and whatever was coming.

“Three weeks of training and orientation, I told you that, right—this is the Garden Center, obviously…Back this way is the storage room, where we keep the special order bins, appliances on clearance…” Carlene, the senior day manager, was giving a new guy a tour. Her voice trailed off as she disappeared back into the main store. The new guy, red hair falling over his face, stood in the doorway and stared at Henry. Henry could feel his gaze as if it were directly on his skin. He could feel his body responding and he knewthe redhead was feeling the same things he was.