Maryann managed to get home long before the police and FBI left. Thankfully, her truck was parked off the drive, or she might have had more difficulty getting out due to the plethora of cars and vans with acronyms on the sides.
The first thing she did when she got home was grab two blankets and a pillow, then tromp through her gardens to the grassy grade that terminated at the treeline. The tall boxes that buzzed with life were soothing white noise to her frazzled nerves. She stood swaying in their midst for a long time, eyes closed, letting their tiny buffering wings as they occasionally zoomed close calm her.
Slowly, she constructed her pallet in the thick grass and curled up on it, guarded by the hives and their occupants. Sleep fell swift and deep like a drift of dark mist. Though she never sees the maroon eyes in her dreams, she feels their weight on her skin like the insects the hum in the air above.
Maryann's phone buzzed, startling her out of sleep. She slapped ineffectively at her pocket, thinking hazily that a bee had gotten stuck in there, before figuring out someone was calling her.
Extricating the device, she found that three hours had lapsed since she laid down among the hives. Dusk was falling steadily. The phone buzzed again, and scrubbing bleary eyes, Maryann answered groggily, "Hello?"
"Maryann." One word, a mere three syllables in that hypnotic accent, made the gardener wake up more thoroughly than if a cattle prod were applied to her instep.
"Hannibal," she acknowledged. She sat up cross-legged in her nest of blankets as her primitive nature encouraged readiness, wariness, even though he was far away.
The psychiatrist's chuckle sounded lubricated with something, probably expensive wine. "I had hoped to hear that word from your lips again," he confided. "It is a shame that it took two deaths and a beating to loose it, though."
Maryann fought a blush and lost. His words brought both a warm delight and a spine-stiffening concern to her: delight in the obvious flirt, and concern in that he flung the values of lives so carelessly, even in jest. "I'm surprised I have cell reception down here," she blurted, not knowing what else to say.
"And where might 'down here' be?" he queried.
"The southernmost hill of my property, where the woods meet my meadow."
"Is that buzzing I hear your brain, or bees?" he teased.
Who was this man? He spoke with so much ease, like nothing had transpired. Like he hadn't killed someone. Like the momentary drop of his mask hadn't revealed his relish in the act, or his prying into her capacity to handle it. Because that was what she saw in those maroon depths, right? Revelry in death?
"My apiaries are down here," she replied, fighting to stay neutral (at least until she sorted her thoughts).
"You sound drowsy. Have you been sleeping?"
She had to grin at his perceptiveness. "I took a nap in the middle of the hives, yes. I needed my babies." Her hand tightened on the phone. "How are you? I heard the medics say you refused treatment."
The shrug was practically audible. "I have some bruises and a stiff leg. Nothing that needed attention. My suit, on the other hand, is proving stubborn at holding onto bloodstains."
"Peroxide works," Maryann replied blithely. "An ex-MD ought know that." Immediately, she wished to take back the words. She'd just insinuated he had lied to her, when really, she shouldn't care. But if he was as serious about getting close to her as his casually inflicted flirts and lingering touches suggested, it seemed a pretty big thing to hide.
It was a test, but a dirty one that left her exposed.
Instead of the stony, insulted silence she expected, she heard a sigh. "It is not something I am terribly proud of, Maryann."
She sighed in turn. "I'm sorry, that was rude of me." Rude, like her x-rated daydream earlier. She swallowed. "Why would you hide such an illustrious and accomplished career?" she asked gently, beseechingly.
"Today wasn't my first time killing someone," Hannibal replied, calm as a breezeless pond.
There was such an echoing, stunning lack of sentiment, such a damnably opaque double-meaning overshadowing the statement, that Maryann found herself wondering what she'd wrought in this. The feral animal she saw in his eyes hours before suggested an innuendo to the statement she did not want to explore.
She shivered reflexively in the wake of the thought.
"Someone died on my surgical table," Hannibal continued, sparing her prolonged silence. "It changed me. I took up a new profession."
"I'm sorry," Maryann found herself murmuring. "That had to be hard to handle."
"I prefer this surgery of the mind," Hannibal replied with more honesty than Maryann felt she deserved. "Although it is not as satisfying as removing the infection, tumorous growth, or ballistic invasion with a scalpel, psychiatric practice has its merits."
"Like people invading your home to kill you," she muttered.
Although there was a beat of silence, the faint, dark smile it conjured in her brain made her unconsciously cover her scarred foot. "That was a decidedly rare occurrence."
Something occurred to Maryann that made her heart squeeze in guilt. For the third time, she said, "I'm sorry."
"Whatever for?" Hannibal asked, bemused.
A thickening of her voice denoted the growing lump in her throat. "I watched him walk into your house. I was in the yard, and I watched him walk in. I thought it was weird, but I didn't say anything, didn't do anything." A sob wracked her. "Now that man, Franklin, is dead. And you nearly died, too."
Unbeknownst to her, Hannibal's smile grew wicked. He kept it from his voice, though, and wrapped his tones in those of a trustworthy therapist. "If you had approached Tobias Budge, he would have maimed or killed you, or both," he soothed. "Although it was admittedly to my detriment, I would not have had your warning come at that cost."
"But you still got hurt," she sniffled, eyes shut tightly with remorse. "And you were forced to kill somebody."
Now, Hannibal was presented a conundrum. He was never 'forced' to kill someone. He chose, connived, strove, and desired to kill for various reasons: to protect his identity as the Chesapeake Ripper and his personal killing identity within other masks, to sate his hunger(s), and simply because he found some people incredibly, irrationally, unforgivably rude. Rudeness was probably the biggest tipping point, if he were honest. It held the largest sway over his choices in random victims.
But he'd shown her what was in his eyes, standing in that innocuous doorframe. So now, he could counteract it like a coward, or bare a sliver of himself.
The latter was more appealing: he wondered how she might react to subtle revelation.
"I am never forced to kill," Hannibal said, clear as moonless night and glittering with soft, sinister innuendo. He allowed the words to hang, to brew in her head like acrid tea. When he heard a faint, shuddering inhale that had no hint of tears in it, he had his answer: there was a texture of fear, yes, but not a overt note. Hannibal wished he might be face to face with the gardener, that he might plumb her body language even as he prodded her mind. He continued, "Force implies I had no choice in the matter, which is incorrect. I chose my life over Budge's. It is as simple as that."
A hint of her humor colored the darkness of the subject. "If you make a comment about survival of the fittest, I will drop you into a bear exhibit at the zoo to test the idea." There came a steeling breath, then Maryann's firmest but most polite voice, "Are you going to tell me why you were playing the harpsichord when I found you?"
Hannibal had to smile. He had wondered when she would get around to asking. "Do you play any instruments, Maryann?"
A pause. "Went through a rebellious phase as a bass player," she admitted. "Why?"
"Then you understand the way music grounds the soul," the psychiatrist continued. "In answer to your previous question, I played because I required that grounding. My mind still had not processed the trauma. Traumas." It was not completely untrue. He'd just freed his beast without preamble, and the creature was loathe to go back into its cage after such revelry, such decadence, such wildly primitive defense. Hannibal had pressed the ivory keys and wound the music around him like a sari, corralling the beast and bringing it back under control.
Before he had finished, Maryann had called his name from the door, prompting him to turn his barely restrained capacity for violence on her.
Hannibal was utterly, wholly unprepared for what the gardener said next. "So are you going to tell me what I saw?"
He waited with baited breath for her to elaborate, to step into his web, to commit herself to the act. Did she reckon what the words would mean? What power they would put over her?
"The harpsichord didn't ground you completely, Hannibal," she prompted. Such suicidally inquisitive words punctuated by an appeasement. How intelligent, if puerile.
He wasn't expecting this conversation to happen so soon. He had anticipated so much more manipulation, so many more puppeteer's strings binding Maryann in place, stretched upon his rack. But he rose to meet the fortuitous happenstance with bared teeth and dark delight. "What do you think you saw?"
He could hear her swallow over the line, over the faint whir of her apiaries' inhabitants. Did she think herself safer in their midst? Did she view them as her guardians, the keepers of dreamless sleep?
"I'm not sure what I saw," Maryann admitted finally.
Inwardly, Hannibal both praised her wisdom at keeping her tongue and railed for the denial of strivings' fruition. "I have a proposition for you, Maryann."
The attempt to throw her off guard succeeded. "What might that be?"
"Come to dinner at my house," he said, sounding for all the world secure, competent. She was finally dancing to his tune, and with so little prompting!
"I've disclosed my problems with that," she replied courteously.
"Need I be bodily jeopardized for you to cross my threshold?" he teased, accent wrapping around the words like butter around risotto rice.
The gardener gave a chuckle, but it was marred by her spinning wheels. "I'd rather today not repeat itself," she said, heartfelt and honest. But she still did not answer his proposal.
"Maryann," coaxed the cannibal, the way the snake whispered in Eve's ear. "I can help you control your fear, and win over it, but only so far as you are willing."
Maryann plucked at the strings binding the bedding quilt together. She had to be insane, stark-raving mad. What he'd shown her in his maroon eyes only hours - hours! - ago should startle her more. Any sensible woman would endeavor to break contract with a client like Hannibal, after what happened. After what he hinted, as soft as the eider in the quilt beneath her, a piece of her intuition (that piece that was still quadrapedal, crawling out of primordial mud) was screaming at her to run, to hide.
Her current being would not abide by the notion. You ought know better, jeered the quadruped. The selfsame thing happened with the dream-haunter.
I know, Maryann replied brusquely to it. I am not a fool. I know what that looks like, I SAW it up close and personal!
It was just beyond clarity in Maryann's mind. What was it that differed the monster who scarred her, and the monster she glimpsed in the doorframe of the good psychiatrist's house?
She would have to get closer, dig deeper, to find out.
Hannibal was offering her aid for her issues, the kind of aid that might finally break her of them. That was reason enough. And hadn't she promised herself, the next time she was offered, she would go into a home that was not her own?
"I'll do it," Maryann said in a rush, before she could change her mind. "I'll dine with you, Hannibal."
A sound rattled down the line, piped straight into her ear. It might have been a throaty laugh that forgot to undulate. Positively, absolutely... a purr. It sounded primeval, but diluted with modern constraints of manners; archaic, but hidden behind the veil of some persona. "Wonderful," Hannibal said.
"Name a time, I'm free any evening," Maryann threw down the challenge like a glove between knights.
"Three nights from now," came the reply, and the tone of it twisted low and sensuous in Maryann's bipartisan gut. "I look forward it."
"As do I," she murmured, slightly knocked by the reaction her body had to pleasing him. The quadruped was rather base-natured.
"Do get some rest. There is a pun about bedbugs somewhere in the sentiment, but it might strike too close to home."
"Funny man," she drawled without ire. "You too, Hannibal. Lord knows, you earned it today."
They hung up simultaneously, and Hannibal picked up his fork again. The arugula salad sat on a pristine white plate, alongside tiny frisée, thinly sliced green apple, and garnished with rustically whole baby Hakuri turnips and French radishes, straight from the garden. The vinaigrette was made from blood orange juice, flaxseed oil, and snipped chives.
The perfect accompaniment to the Brunello di Montalcino in his glass, and the crumbles of human brain resting among the leaves.