Lucy was making a pot of coffee when she heard the doorbell ring. With a sweeping rush of worry, she tightly wrapped her robe around her and minimized all of the documents on the screen of her computer. She eyed her German Shepard, Kurtz, before quietly padding toward the door. She undid her three locks and cracked open the door, looking through the small crack allowed by her silver chain lock.
It was her elderly neighbor, Claire.
"Hello Miss Catherine!" The woman greeted. "I have fresh tomatoes from my garden, and I was wondering if you wanted any?" She grinned effervescently.
"Um," Lucy answered quietly. "Alright. Hold on."
Lucy shut the door and grabbed a red cloth from the kitchen before unlatching the lock and opening the door again. She held out the cloth and Claire place them in the center of the stretched fabric.
"Thank you. They're beautiful," Lucy commented quietly.
"My garden is blooming wonderfully this summer. You should come see it some time—we could have some coffee? Or tea?"
Lucy smiled halfheartedly. Her garden was blooming wonderfully; Lucy looked at it for hours every day. She grew nearly everything—from chrysanthemums to thyme to irises. If only Claire knew how badly she wanted to spend her day wandering her garden.
"Perhaps sometime," Lucy answered.
Claire nodded slowly, distraught by her neighbor's superficial frostiness and unsociability. "You could come see it now, you know? I've just finished planting some new bulbs."
"I don't know…" Lucy mumbled, but subconsciously creaked the door wider open—oh, how she longed to be entangled within the vines of that garden. It almost reminded her of the garden her mother and she used to tend to now and then; when the two would look out the kitchen window and see the flower heads looking downward and the leaves wilting brown, they would set out and re-water—to no avail, of course.
"Now Ms. Gore, I know you're a bit of an introvert, but I see you peeping out that window and looking at the flowers. Wouldn't you like to see them up close?"
Lucy paused, then hesitantly answered: "I suppose I would."
"Splendid! This afternoon my daughter is bringing her little girl over for tea. Why don't you join us?"
"I don't want to intrude—"
"Hush, dear! It would be a delight to have you."
"Well, what time should I be there?"
"Half past three is when my daughter arrives. Why don't you come over then too?"
Lucy bit the inside of her lip and thought, for she saw no harm in seeing the flowers. In this moment, however, she failed to take note of her prejudice toward flowers. "I'll be there," Lucy grinned. Claire felt enlivened by the small-toothed, lily-white smile Lucy flashed her; she wished the girl smiled more.
"Excellent. Until then, Ms. Gore."
"Until then. And thank you for the tomatoes," Lucy said.
"My pleasure."
Lucy shut the door and let out a long breath. Before Claire could return home, Lucy ran to the window of her living room and looked out to the window. She slid the glass upward and breathed in the fresh air; she could smell the gardenia from her room.
Basking in the scent, she was startled when her home phone rang. She made her way for the computer and picked up the phone that sat next to it. Reading the caller information, she recognized the number as that belonging to Doctor Spencer Reid. She took the phone with her as she walked toward her unfinished pot of coffee. She nervously took the call as she put down the tomatoes on the kitchen counter.
"Hello?"
"Hi Lucy," Spencer immediately responded. Lucy was momentarily animated by the vitality of his voice.
"Hi Spencer," she smiled to herself. "What are you up to?" She wasn't sure why she bothered asking. There relationship only dealt with the health of Diana Reid.
"I'm actually in the library right now, and I was wondering if I could ask you an academic question."
"You always can. Why do you need my help?"
Spencer paused, perhaps startled by her use of the word 'always.' "Well, I don't know if my mother has told you but I work for the BAU—Behavioral Analysis Unit—of the FBI. And we often deal with criminals who try to disorient us with ambiguous messages, and one had caught my eye."
Shockingly, Diana had never told Lucy this. She was comforted by the thought of someone working for governmental protection services, as she owed her life to them.
"Well, what is it?" She smiled to herself.
"The unsub—or unknown subject—leaves Achillea millefolium between the breasts of all of his victims, the plant being—"
"Yarrow," she finished.
"Right," he paused. "I was wondering if you knew anything about the cultural or artistic significance of yarrow? Does it typically symbolize something in art, or is it ever used to convey a message?"
"Art is symbolic, so any plant depicted by in art is intentional and indicative of the maker's message," she stated. However, her mind took her down another path. "Except, you might have better luck going down another route… Have you ever heard of the language of flowers?"
"Can you specify?" Spencer asked hesitantly.
"During the Victorian era, both men and women would send messages by way of flowers. And these bouquets were typically sent devoid of note. You see, it was common knowledge in the mid to late eighteenth century what each flower meant. It was even so precise that senders could send phrases to a lover, for instant, through a single flower. Yarrow was seen as a cure for a broken heart. I imagine you all looked as the flower's placement between the breasts as sexual, but the unsub was probably placing the flower beside the heart to indicate his—or most likely her—own broken heart."
A long pause crossed the line, and Lucy began to wonder if she had been too presumptuous.
"Of course. A Romantic. We're looking for a Romantic—a female Romantic," Spencer blurted. Lucy heard pages flipping and hand running across the spines of books.
"Did that help?"
"More than you think," Spencer said. He quite his movements momentarily, seemingly more focused on the conversation. "Thank you."
"My pleasure."
"Um… I wanted to apologize for suspecting foul play—or at least indicating I suspected foul play. I never should have called you."
"Oh—"
"No, um—I'm really glad I called you, actually. I'm really, really glad. It's—you're very bright and I treasure that. You help my mother, and you help me. Or, um, you just helped me. Thank you—thanks for that. I'll call you again soon, probably. Is that okay? I'm sorry, I'm bad on the phone. I, um—"
"It's okay, Spencer. I'm not very technologically savvy myself. I like talking to you."
"I like talking to you too."
A silence crossed the line once again.
"Thanks again, Lucy."
"Call me again, Spencer."
She hung up.
What are you thinking?! Lucy asked herself with anger. She figured she hadn't had such legitimate human communication for so long she needed his calls. Call me again, Spencer, she repeated in her head.
"Idiot," she said to herself as she screwed her lips into a frown.
Lucy made her coffee and poured a generous cup of it before moving toward the enormous bookshelf in her living room. She closed the curtains she had opened just after catching a glance of Claire digging around in the dirt. She pulled out all of Diana's letters from the fourth bookshelf and set them at her desk, secretly hoping to scour them for mentions of Spencer. Just before sitting down, Lucy remembered she'd forgotten to check the mail.
With Kurtz hot on her heels, Lucy walked to the door and undid the latches and locks. She quickly opened the door, giving her arm just enough space to slip toward to mailbox and pull out whatever it held. She then slammed the door behind her and locked up, holding the letters to her chest in a pose that resembled that of prayer.
Lucy flipped through the contents of her mailbox and dealing with them as she did: magazines she never remembered subscribing to being thrown immediately in the trash, bills to be paid left in a messy stack on the circular table by the front door, and letters from Diana into her pocket. But then between her electricity bill and a coupon for the nearest Staples, Lucy caught something that made her heart thump in her chest as fast as the wings of a bird in flight. A photograph that was folded in half.
Lucy unfolded the photograph and nearly gagged. The image of a pallid woman graced its front; the woman with a knife in her gut and blood dripping down her white dress. She was young—probably in her mid-twenties—and blessed with the face of American beauty: blonde hair, blue eyes, and bronzed skin that had been bleached by exsanguination. Her eyes kept to the image as her right hand blindly reached for the matches she kept in the drawer of the circular table. She struck the tip of the wooden match along the igniter and immediately brought the small torch to the edge of the photograph. She shut her eyes tightly as the flame devoured half the picture. When only a quarter remained, she ran toward the fireplace and cast the remains in the dead embers.
Horrified by the recurring event, Lucy fell onto the couch opposite the fireplace and brought her knees to her chest.
They're moving faster, she thought to herself. It's only a matter of time.
—
Lucy arrived promptly on time; she rung the golden doorbell to the home of the Byfords, and an unfamiliar figure instantly swung open the door. Lucy expected to meet eyes at her level, but instead she had to sink her gaze several feet downward to meet the recipient to her arrival.
"Are you the neighbor?" A little girl asked. Her mouth was agape with the indiscreet curiosity of a young child. Lucy would have stumbled over the unfamiliarity of a new character, but she was too quickly enamored by the girl's frilly white frock to feel off-put.
"Unless there are others arriving, I suppose so," Lucy grinned widely. "Are you Mrs. Byford's granddaughter?"
The girl nodded her head; her auburn ringlets jumped with each shake of head.
"Elizabeth, is that how we greet guests?" A familiar voice sounded from the deeper interior of the house. Claire Byford appeared, welcoming her inward with a friendly tilt of head.
Within moments, Lucy was sat at a small, round table of smooth wood; she admired the intricate woven pattern forming the circle and the dramatic shadows it cast against Claire's brick patio. Lucy had never felt so eased as she did amongst the flowers and leaves; the world was again a friendly, bright-colored place, and nothing horrible hid in the dark silhouette cast by hedges and thick bundles of flowers.
Elizabeth was an energetic girl who was small enough to see the gardens as a jungle; she dove between rows Black-eyed Susans and hid beneath the cover of crawling roses upon the trestle. Her mother was Claire's daughter, a small woman named Bridget. Unlike Claire and Elizabeth, Bridget was a quiet woman whose comments were of the enlightened kind; when she added to a conversation, what she added was unquestionably worthwhile and fruitful of new questions.
Lucy knew Spencer was of this ilk, but she had always wondered how he would behave face-to-face. Exposure could either crack or boil people like an egg; Lucy was the cracking kind—she was absolutely tragic at small talk.
"Anyone special in your life right now, Lucy?" Claire asked with her standard grandmotherly curiosity.
As she had been thinking keenly on Spencer, Lucy shrugged and could not help but let a smile shine through her pink lips. "I don't know…"
"Oh, please! I could spot that look from a mile away. So what's the fellow's name?"
By this time, even Elizabeth was tugging as the hem of Lucy's dress. It seemed she could not deprive the Byford ladies of at least a hint.
"He's not anyone special," Lucy shook her head slowly, watching as a waved tuft of fawn blonde hair slipped from her barrette and into her eyes. "Just someone I've met through my work, sort of."
"Do you think it will go anywhere?" Bridget asked in her soft voice.
"I doubt it," Lucy shrugged it off. As the blush faded from the apples of her cheeks, she refocused on the sunlight passing through a nearby dogwood. Elizabeth—easily bored—ran to the sunset wave of tulips that painted the side of the house.
"I'd quite like to know if it does," Claire smiled amiably.
—
Lucy spent the remainder of her day installing another lock on her front door, recalibrating her alarm system, checking the house for broken window locks, and making sure all the food she was delivered the night previously was sealed. Lucy nearly screeched when the door rung with the dog-walker returned an exhausted Kurtz, and truly screeched when the phone rang. It rang four times before she had the will to look at the caller, and another two times before she picked up.
"Hello?"
"Hi Lucy."
"Second time hearing from you today. Is there a reason to why you call so frequently?" Lucy asked warily, her fear outweighing her interest in their conversations. Behind her fear bubbled a warm delight that had risen from the feminine conversation in the gardens, but it was shielded by worry.
"Oh, I—" he stuttered, caught off-guard by her precaution. "You said to call again… So I did."
"You're right—I'm sorry. I'm a paranoid person."
"Did something happen that would trigger such paranoia?" Spencer asked; she felt like she was being profiled.
"No," she curtly retorted. "Do you need more help with a case?"
"I don't," Spencer responded with hesitance. "I just wanted to talk to you."
"Oh. Well, I suppose that's alright."
"I'm sorry if I'm bothering you, you just seem like an insightful person. You remind me of my mother, and I don't get to talk to her anymore like I used to," he admitted with a degree of sheepishness.
"I remind you of your sixty two year-old mother?"
"Well, you're older and wiser than me… So, I suppose."
"I'm only twenty-nine!" Lucy exclaimed with a wide grin on her face. "And I'm certainly not wiser than you. I only have one PhD."
"Oh—well, Doctor, I thought you were older. I apologize. As it seems, I'm actually the senior here."
"That you are," she laughed. Another pregnant pause sat on the line.
"But, anyway, I don't talk to many people… And I like talking to you," Spencer admitted. She twirled the phone line around her pointer finger.
"Well, I don't really talk to anyone aside from your mother. And I like talking to you. I meant it when I said call me again. You can call me whenever you'd like."
"I will then," he responded before a relatively lengthy pause. "You don't talk to anyone? I thought that was only me," Spencer laughed.
"Oh come on, you must talk to your coworkers."
"Well sure, if you consider that just 'talking.' But I'm essentially on my own in terms of organic human communication."
"I promise you're better off than I am. The only person I talked to today was my neighbor when she offered my fresh tomatoes from her garden. And my dog."
"You have a dog? I wish I had a dog. They don't like me very much."
"Yes, a big one named Kurtz," she said. "I wouldn't ask you this if I didn't know you were well-read, but have you read any Joseph Conrad?"
"Ah, Heart of Darkness. An interesting selection for a dog—the man eaten by the world around him; swallowed by the darkness."
"We live in a flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling. But darkness was here yesterday… I see no evil in Kurtz, only a man obsessed with an illusory light in the dark…" she spoke. "But aren't we all?"
"Most believe Kurtz is an embodiment of the modern man. Some consider him a pillar of amorality in a setting in which the maintenance of morality and self-discipline is required, but few see the reflection of themselves in his character."
"Which is as Conrad intended!" Lucy added, astounded by his wealth of literary knowledge. "I enjoy your commentary, Spencer."
"That means a lot. I enjoy yours also, Lucy."
—
Seven months later.
Lucy sat looking at her home phone, waiting for her nightly call. It began to ring and Lucy flung to retrieve it.
"Spence?"
"Why do you sound so tense, Lucy?"
"Tense? Why would you think that? I'm not tense."
"I've come to know the timbre of your voice very well. I can discern how you feel through your voice. Not to mention—you answered my question with a question."
"Why are you so clever?"
"Actually, voice recognition comes a lot more easily than most people think. Seeing the first human conversations were rooted in guttural sounds with varying pitches, our modern conversational skills are just as dependent on fluctuations in pitch and tone as much as they were—"
"It was a rhetorical question, Doctor Actually."
"But why so tense?"
"I'm rereading Bram Stoker right now. He always makes me go on edge," she lied.
"Vampires scare you?" Spencer laughed.
"A bit," Lucy shrugged.
"Well, I won't let any get to you."
Lucy laughed at the irony of his comment. "Via telephone?"
"Well, maybe it doesn't always have to be via telephone," he suggested quietly, as he had before.
"I told you… I'm scared of meeting new people," she argued shyly.
"Am I new to you?"
"Well, no—but I'd be a wreck, Spencer."
"So would I, trust me—but Lucy, I want to see you. I didn't see Maeve until moments before her death. If I never saw you, I think I'd die," he admitted. Lucy knew once Maeve was brought into conversation, the part of Spencer he normally kept locked away was opening again.
Lucy sighed. "I want to see you too, Spencer."
"When could I see you?"
"I don't know, Spencer…" she paused, rubbing the bridge of her nose.
"What about on Friday?"
"It's Wednesday."
"I know. What about on Friday?"
"I mean…" she began as she began to pick at the reddened skin around her nails.
"And you said if we ever met, it would be at the Morgan Library on Madison Avenue."
"I did."
"So, will I see you there?"
"Spence, you live in D.C.!"
"I don't care. I won't have any trouble getting there—will you?"
"I—I guess not. It's about a two hour drive from my house."
"Okay, so I'll meet you there on Friday."
"What time?"
"What works for you?"
Lucy laughed a breathless laugh of shock; she was too stunned to process the wave of nervousness that would inevitably rain down on her within a matter of minutes.
"Noon, I suppose…?"
"Noon it is."
"Should I wear a flower, or something?" Lucy offered before realizing the words that left her mouth. "Oh Christ—that was horrible. My god."
Spencer laughed across the line; she could feel him shaking his head in amusement on the other end. "No. I'll know who you are."
"How? You've never seen me…" she felt her eyebrows knit together before she rolled her eyes in embarrassment and realization. "What am I talking about—you work for the FBI! I'm sure you've seen what I look like. Not that you're interested—just that… In case—"
"I haven't ever seen you. And I am interested in what you look like, Lucy—I think I already know what you look like."
Lucy blushed and smiled widely. "How's that?"
"I can just tell some things. Can you tell me if I'm right?"
"I won't, but you can tell me what you think."
"Well, I think you have light hair, light skin, and light eyes, because you speak most enviously of dark-featured women. Especially those with olive skin, which means you probably have very fair skin and don't tan well—you might even have freckles. You're thin; you walk around on the phone and crash into things—which I do too, by the way—but I can never hear your footsteps. And you're short too—you say Kurtz takes you down sometimes by standing and putting his paws on your shoulders," he stated as though he had run it before through his head a thousand times. "I'm certainly no Sherlock Holmes, but I think I'm somewhere near accuracy. I am sure you're beautiful, though."
A few quiet and clumsy girl-laughs rumbled from Lucy's throat and into her mouth. He was almost entirely right—he just missed one bit.
"I'll see you at noon on Friday at the Morgan Library," Lucy whispered then hung up the phone. She was no coquette, but she believed she'd just played with Spencer a bit.