When Heaven Weeps #2 (Paperback)

Chapter One

Atlanta, Georgia, 1964

Ivena stood in the small greenhouse attached to her home and frowned at the failing rosebush. The other bushes had not been affected-they flourished around her, glistening with a sprinkling of dewdrops. A bed of Darwin tulip hybrids blossomed bright red and yellow along her greenhouse's glass shell. Behind her, against the solid wall of her house, a flat of purple orchids filled the air with their sweet aroma. A dozen other species of roses grew in neat boxes, none of them infected.

But this bush had lost its leaves and shriveled in the space of five days, and that was a problem because this wasn't just another rosebush. This was Nadia's rosebush.

Ivena delicately pried through the dried thorny stems, searching for signs of disease or insects. She'd already tried a host of remedies, from pesticides to a variety of growth agents, all to no avail. It was a Serbian Red from the saxifrage family, snipped from the bush that she and Sister Flouta had planted by the cross.

When Ivena had left Bosnia for Atlanta, she'd insisted on a greenhouse; it was the one unbreakable link to her past. She made a fine little business selling the flowers to local floral shops in Atlanta, but the real purpose for the greenhouse was this one rosebush, wasn't it? Yes, she knew that as surely as she knew that blood flowed in her veins.

And now Nadia's rose was dying. Or dead.

Ivena put one hand on her hip and ran the other through her gray curls. She'd cared for a hundred species of roses over her sixty years and never, never had she seen such a thing. Each bud from Nadia's bush was priceless. If there was a graftable branch alive she would snip it off and nurse it back to health. But every branch seemed affected.

"Oh, dear Nadia, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?"

She couldn't answer herself for the simple reason that she had no clue what she would do. She had never considered the possibility that this, the crown of her flower garden, might one day die for no apparent reason at all. It was a travesty.

Ivena picked through the branches again, hoping that she was wrong. Dried dirt grayed her fingers. They weren't as young or as smooth as they once had been, but years of working delicately around thorns had kept them nimble. Graceful. She could walk her way through a rosebush blindfolded without so much as touching a thorn. But today she felt clumsy and old.

The stalk between her fingers suddenly snapped. Ivena blinked. It was as dry as tinder. How could it fail so fast? She tsked and shook her head. But then something caught her eye and she stopped.

Immediately beneath the branch that had broken, a very small shoot of green angled from the main stalk. That was odd. She lowered her head for a closer look.

The shoot grew out a mere centimeter, almost like a stalk of grass. She touched it gently, afraid to break it. And as she did she saw the tiny split in the bark along the base of that shoot.

She caught her breath. Strange! It looked like a small graft!

But she hadn't grafted anything into the plant, had she? No, of course not. She remembered every step of care she'd given this plant over the last five years and none of them included a graft.

It looked like someone had slit the base of the rosebush open and grafted in this green shoot. And it didn't look like a rose graft either. The stalk was a lighter green. So then maybe it wasn't a graft. Maybe it was a parasite of some kind.

Ivena let her breath out slowly and touched it again. It was already healed at the insertion point.

"Hmmm."

She straightened and walked to the round table where a white porcelain cup still steamed with tea. She lifted it to her lips. The rich aroma of spice warmed her nostrils and she paused, staring through the wisps of steam.

From this distance of ten feet Nadia's rosebush looked like the Moses' burning bush, but consumed by the flame and burned black. Dead branches reached up from the soil like claws from a grave. Dead.

Except for that one tiny shoot of green at its base.

It was very strange indeed.

Ivena lowered herself into the old wood-spindle chair beside the table, still looking over the teacup to the rosebush. She sat here every morning, humming and sipping her tea and whispering her words to the Father. But today the sight before her was turning things on their heads.

She lowered the cup without drinking. "Father, what are you doing here?" she said softly.

Not that he was necessarily doing anything. Rosebushes died, after all. Perhaps with less encouragement than other plants. But an air of consequence had settled on Ivena, and she couldn't ignore it.

Across the beds of flourishing flowers before her sat this one dead bush-an ugly black scar on a landscape of bright color. But then from the blackened stalk that impossible graft.

"What are you saying here, Father?"

She did not hear his answer, but that didn't mean he wasn't talking. He could be yelling for all she knew. Here on Earth it might come through as a distant whisper, easily mistaken for the sound of a gentle breeze. Actually the greenhouse was dead silent. She more felt something, and it could just as easily have been a draft that tickled her hair, or a finger of emotion from the past, as the voice of God.

Still the scene before her began to massage her heart with fingers of meaning. She just didn't know what that meaning was yet.

Ivena hummed and a blanket of peace settled over her. She whispered, "Lover of my soul, I worship you. I kiss your feet. Don't ever let me forget." Her words echoed softly through the quiet greenhouse, and she smiled. The Creator was a mischievous one, she often thought. At least playful and easily delighted. And he was up to something, wasn't he?

A splash of red at her elbow caught her eye. It was her copy of the book. The Dance of the Dead. Its surreal cover showed a man's face wide open with laughter, tears leaking down his cheek.

Still smiling, Ivena set down her teacup and lifted the book from the table. She ran a hand over the tattered cover. She'd read it a hundred times, of course. But it never lost its edge. Its pages oozed with love and laughter and the heart of the Creator.

She opened the book and brushed through a few dozen dog-eared pages. He had written a masterpiece, and in some ways it was as much God's words as his. She could begin in the middle or at the beginning or the end and it wouldn't hardly matter. The meaning would not be lost. She opened to the middle and read a few sentences.

It was odd how such a story could bring this warmth to her heart. But it did, it really did, and that was because her eyes had been opened a little as well. She'd seen a few things through God's eyes.

Ivena glanced up at the dying rosebush with its impossible graft. Something new was beginning today. But everything had really started with the story in her hands, hadn't it?

A small spark of delight ran through her bones. She smoothed her dress, crossed her legs and lowered her eyes to the page.

Yes, this was how it all started.

Twenty years ago in Bosnia. At the end of the war with the Nazis.

She read.

_

Father Micheal saw the soldiers when they entered the cemetery at the edge of the village. Their small shapes emerged out of the green meadow, like a row of scarecrows tattered by the war. He pulled up and a chill swept down his spine. For a moment the children's laughter about him waned.

Dear God, protect us. He prayed the words as he had prayed them a hundred times before, but he couldn't stop the tremble that took to his fingers.

They were a haggard lot. Then again, any soldier who'd managed to survive the brutal fighting that had ravaged Yugoslavia in its liberation from the Nazis would look no different. It was commonplace. But their presence here, in this secluded valley hidden from the war, was not commonplace.

The smell of hot baked bread wafted through his nostrils. A shrill giggle echoed through the courtyard; water gurgled from the natural spring to his left. Father Micheal stood stooped atop the stone-hewn steps that led to the tall church behind him, and looked past the courtyard in which the children and women laughed in celebration of Nadia's birthday, past the tall stone cross that marked the entrance to the graveyard, past the red rosebushes Claudis Flouta had so carefully planted about her home, to the lush hillside on the south.

To the four-no five-to the five soldiers approaching.

He glanced around the courtyard-they laughed and played, enjoying the cele-bration. None of the others had seen the soldiers yet. High above ravens called and Micheal looked up to see four of them circling. He'd dreamed of ravens twice in the last week and each time he'd awoken shaken. But surely this was nothing more than a coincidence.

Father, protect your children. A flutter of wings to his right caught his attention. He turned and watched a white dove settle for a landing on the vestibule's roof. It cocked its head and eyed him in small jerky movements.

"Father Micheal?" a child's voice said.

Micheal turned to face Nadia, who stood trying to hide a faint grin. She wore a pink dress reserved for special occasions. Her eyes sparked blue, like the sea, innocent above a wide nose and blotchy freckles. Her left leg was two inches shorter than her right compliments of polio-a bad case when she was only three. Perhaps their handicaps united them in ways the others could not understand. She with her short leg; he with his hunched back.

"Yes."

"Petrus says that since I'm twelve now all the boys will want to marry me. I told him that he's being a foolish little boy, but he insists on running around making a silly game of it. Could you please tell him to stop?"

Petrus ran up, sneering. If any of the town's forty-three children wa...