two of them clanged heads as they fished out delicate, papier-mâché sculptures of the following items: a blue flower, another apple, and, oh yes, Readers, a yellow jacket. The second apple had torn and its insides were now exposed. Once Harper cleared the dirt from it, the honeycomb pattern of the paper used to fill it and give it shape was evident: the gray chambers of a wasp nest.
Harper and Kae laid the objects in a row along the lip of the planter. They seemed brighter there, richer, in a line against the zinc edge.
Kae unwadded the soil bag and scrutinized its label. “Maybe they’re for some kind of promotion?”
“What would they be promoting?”
“They’re all garden stuff,” Kae said, flipping the bag over and scanning the back. “Flowers and bees—it’s about their brand.”
“I don’t know. They look too handmade for that. And old.”
“I mean, they’re really beautiful,” Kae said. “I just don’t know what they’re for.” They looked closer, glancing their fingertips over the top of the yellow jacket. Harper had the same impulse. There was something about the pieces that made you want to touch, to covet them.
“Do you think maybe you’re supposed to plant them?” Kae asked. “You know that thing where they embed seeds in paper and you can water it to grow flowers or whatever. They do it with grass and it looks like insulation.” Kae picked up one of the apples, the one that wasn’t torn. “I bet that’s what this is.” They held it up into the streaming light and inspected it for seeds.
It was an apple: a tiny papier-mâché sculpture painted, rather realistically, to look like a Black Oxford apple.
“Maybe,” Harper said. It wasn’t completely unreasonable, what Kae was saying. It was no more unreasonable than finding the things in the first place. But it was obvious too that all of these objects represented Brookhants and its curse.
She pulled out her phone, ignoring its screen of notifications and going right to her camera app. She then took several pics of the sculptures from different angles. Kae was right, they really were beautiful, especially there in a row in the brilliant light of The Orangerie.
Somebody talented seemed to have taken their time making them.
Harper was captioning her post* when Bo and Audrey walked in. They were talking in that kind of feigned hush that isn’t actually all that quiet but straining to appear like it’s a whisper—the voice people use for both gossip and genuine alarm.
Audrey wore a striped Oxford shirtdress, a double-wrapped skinny belt at her waist, and pink canvas shoes dotted with gold pineapples. She should have been the picture of effortless summer, but as she pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead, Harper saw how unhappy she was. She said to Bo, “His mouth looked really bad.”
“It didn’t look great,” he said. “Good thing he had it on him.” He looked at Harper. “Sorry about the wait, we got sidetracked on the way over here—Brookhants strikes again.” He wore denim cutoffs and another of his horror movie T-shirts, this one for The Uninvited.
“What happened?” Harper asked.
“The crew in the garden hit a ground nest,” he said.
“Of wasps,” Audrey added.
“Yellow jackets,” Bo said, raising an eyebrow at her.
“One of the landscapers, like, literally hit it with his shovel,” Audrey said, her eyes wide, “and a bunch flew up at him and stung him in the face and neck. And he’s allergic.”
“Oh shit,” Kae said, stepping into their cluster. “Do you know if it was Marco?”
“That’s exactly who it was,” Bo said, as if noticing for the first time that Kae was there.
“Is he OK?”
“I think so,” Bo said. “Or he will be.”
Audrey jumped in: “Only because he had his EpiPen on him and he injected it right after. Like immediately.”
“He was just telling me about how he’s allergic,” Kae said, turning to Harper. “I mean, just this morning he was telling me, at breakfast.”
“His face is pretty fucked,” Bo said. “They’re taking him to the ER now to get checked out.”
“His lip,” Audrey said, shaking her head. “His top lip looks like it’s a water balloon.”
“That’s so scary,” Harper said.
“It’s for sure losing us time,” Bo said. “They were already supposed to have the garden finished and now they can’t work in there until they get the nest cleared out.” He looked at his phone. “Brookhants keeps on giving,” he said, scrolling. “Whose idea was it to shoot here?”
“I should probably go over that way and see if they need me,” Kae