The Poison Artist Page 16

  He slowed to a crawl as he drove past the address, looking out the left window to see the house to which she’d led him. It was a huge Victorian, a sprawl of painted gables and pointed cupolas, three or four stories tall. It was in the middle of the block, but it had a side yard and a garden. All of the windows were dark and the curtains were drawn shut. He circled the block and found a parking spot one street over.

  Walking back, with two grocery bags in each hand, he saw a light moving behind the curtains in the house. He climbed the two sets of steps to the porch and glanced at the bronze plaque set on the wall. There was just enough light from the streetlamps to read it:

  SAN FRANCISCO ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE

  HAAS-LILIENTHAL HOUSE

  1886

  The house, and the name on the plaque, tugged at a memory, but he couldn’t place it. Something about Henry, something that came at him back-loaded with a mix of emotions as counterbalanced and self-cantilevered as a glass of absinthe: a shimmer of arousal coupled to terror of the dark. Shame lay underneath both, indelible, like ink pushed under the skin. He knew that twenty-five years ago, in a place like this, his mother had set out on a frantic run, dragging a policeman by his shirt cuff and screaming Caleb’s name. She’d dropped the metal cane she was supposed to use, so that she’d run with a jagged limp. Most of the bandages had come off by then, but the stitches were still there, meandering her cheeks and forehead until the gashes and skin grafts healed.

  He hadn’t seen that happen. The image of his mother wasn’t a memory but was something he’d pieced together from what she’d told him. She was gone now, though. There was no way to ask her if this was the place, or if this was just another false echo in a city that was, for Caleb, full of them.

  It could be the two glasses of wine, and the way the street slept under its blanket of fog so that everything was soft at the edges, the familiar and the unknown swirled together and set adrift. He reached for the door knocker, but before he could grip it, the front door opened. Emmeline held a brass hurricane lantern, its wick trimmed low.

  “You found me,” she said. “Will you come in?”

  She held the door open for him and he stepped into the old mansion. She closed the door behind him and turned the heavy deadbolt. She was wearing a dress that was a shade of crimson so dark, it was almost black. It was sleeveless, and her bare arms were pale white in the shadows of the entry hall. She was barefoot, and when she walked up to him, she made no sound at all. She stopped when her toes were touching his. The lantern was between them, close enough to his stomach that he could feel its heat. She reached up and traced the back of her index finger under the line of his jaw.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said. Her perfume, as delicate as a single strand of spider silk, wrapped around him. “Follow me?”

  “All right.”

  She led him through the dark house, the lantern throwing a circle of light around them as they moved through the high-ceilinged rooms. The kitchen was in the back right corner of the house. She’d set candles on the marble pastry table and on the countertops next to the stove. The stove itself was vast and complicated, a gas and electric wonder at least a hundred years old. It had six cast-iron burners and three different enamel-coated oven compartments. There was a wire filament bulb in the range hood, the only electric light that he’d seen burning in the house. It cast a warm amber cone down to the stovetop, drawing it into focus.

  “You’ll be able to cook here?” Emmeline asked. She was standing beside him, two of her fingers resting on his arm just above his elbow.

  Caleb looked around.

  She’d taken out pots and pans, had washed them in the sink so that they now lay drying on dishtowels on the stone counters. Beautiful old copper pots, an assortment of handmade carbon steel knives that glowed at the edges where they’d been recently sharpened on a whetstone. There was a heavy chopping block made of the interlocking end pieces of old hardwood, and there was a cast-iron grill pan that gleamed with seasoning. He could broil the oysters on that, and heat the rock salt in the matching iron skillet.

  “I’ll be just fine in here,” he said.

  Emmeline went to the marble pastry table and set down the hurricane lantern. She used the wheel on the side to bring up the wick. The flame licked and grew, bringing more light to the room. She turned to him, leaning against the table with her hands against its edges.

  “Tell me the menu,” she said. “So I can pick the wine.”

  “I hope you like seafood,” he said.

  “I like everything.”

  “We’ll start with grilled oysters,” Caleb said. “Snow Creek oysters, the little ones.”

  She nodded.

  “Something sparkling,” she said. “I have a Treviso prosecco. We’ll have prosecco with that.”

  “And then pan-seared scallops, with wild mushrooms,” Caleb said. “Truffle risotto, after.”

  “I brought a good pinot grigio. That will go with the scallops. Burgundy for the risotto.”

  “Dessert’s nothing fancy,” Caleb said. “Just chilled raspberries. A little bit of dark chocolate.”

  She smiled.

  “We’ll finish the prosecco with that.”

  “Should I get started?”

  “Please,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  There was an old-fashioned icebox against the far wall. Caleb opened it, not sure what he’d find. The inside was split into upper and lower compartments, and a block of ice sat in the upper compartment. In the bottom, there were bottles of white wine, and the prosecco.

  “You brought the ice?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right to put a few things in here?”

  “Of course,” Emmeline said. “I’ll be back. I need to find wineglasses. And wash them. They’ll be dusty, I expect.”

  She took the lantern from the table and walked out. It was so quiet in the house, and she was so gracefully silent in her bare feet, that he could hear the silken rustle as her legs brushed against the inside of her dress. He watched her go, then put some of the groceries into the icebox. When that was done, he went to the stove and figured out how to light the oven.

  The house was a time capsule, a ghost of a San Francisco wiped out by the 1906 earthquake. It was a museum now, maintained well enough to look at, but most of the things in the kitchen hadn’t been used in a long while. He twisted a knob on the stove and leaned down to the burner, smelling the gas coming out. That was good, but there were no pilot lights. He ripped a piece of paper from one of his grocery bags, set it aflame with a candle on the counter, and then used it to light two of the oven compartments. He shook out the paper and put it in the sink. When he turned, Emmeline was behind him, holding six long-stemmed glasses. A clean set for each wine pairing.

  “You have that look,” Emmeline said.

  “What look?”

  “When I told you about the man I used to be with, when I told you he disappeared,” she said. She put the glasses down on the counter next to the sink. “I told you he was dead—probably dead. I said all that, and you were worried. Like you look now. It’s because we’re here, isn’t it? In this house.”

  He nodded. But he owed her more than that. There was a lot more than the house on his mind, and he’d promised her the truth. He remembered the smell in Henry’s morgue, the waxen-death smell of adipocere when Henry drew the sheet back on the corpse. The way Kennon stood in the lab, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, watching Caleb with his deep-set eyes.

  And Bridget.

  Even here, in the candlelit kitchen with Emmeline, there was Bridget.

  “I—”

  She came up close to him, put one palm on his sternum and the soft pad of her right index finger against his lips.

  “Shhh, Caleb,” she said.

  She looked up at him, not blinking. Holding him with her eyes. Then, as if satisfied he wouldn’t start to speak when she removed her finger from his mouth, she took him into an embrace. Her cheek pressed agains
t the front of his left shoulder.

  “It’s better this way,” she said. “We’re safe here now. I promise you. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “This isn’t where I live. It’s not my house. You know that. But we’re safe here. It’s all right to be here.”

  “But how—”

  “Don’t ask how,” she said, holding him tighter. “It’s not always good to know how. Not yet.”

  Now she held him so close that he could feel the beat of her heart. He slid his palms up her bare arms and then let his hands fall down her shoulders to the small of her back, holding her against him.

  “I’ll take you to the place I live. I want to,” she whispered. “I want to take you there now. But I’m not ready for that. Not quite yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you want to bring me to your house. You want to have me there, to know everything about me. But I think you’re not ready for that either, are you?”

  He nodded, then realized she couldn’t see him.

  “I guess not.”

  “So that’s why it’s good this way. It’s safe. For both of us.”

  She pulled back from him, without taking her hands from his waist, and raised her face to his. The kiss that followed was as easy as turning a key in a familiar lock, opening the door, and coming home. Her lips were cool. And sweet, like the glass of Berthe de Joux she must have drunk before letting him inside the house. Her hands ran up his back, inside his jacket, smoothing his shirt against his skin. When it ended, she let go of him, and then she turned and stood with her back to him, her hands on the kitchen counter.

  “Shall I pour you a glass of the prosecco while you make the oysters?”

  He looked at the back of her neck, at the shape of her body beneath the crimson flow of the dress. He had never wanted anyone so badly in his life. The skin on his back was still reacting to her touch, the memory of it lingering as clearly as it would if she’d dipped her hands in red ink. As though she’d marked him, scribed her ownership down his back. If he’d had no shirt on, if they’d shared their kiss while standing naked against each other at the foot of his bed, he was sure she’d have ended that touch with her fingernails. Curling her fingers and raking the nails down the length of his back.

  Ten parallel lines, shoulders to waist.

  “Caleb?” she asked. She didn’t turn. “Wine?”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll be busy for a bit.”

  “May I watch?”

  “I want you to.”

  The gas fireplace in the dining room was burning with a blue-orange flame behind its brass grate, and Emmeline had carried more candles into the room, placing them in a scatter down the long walnut table. He brought in the plates, holding them with dishtowels because of their heat. The oysters lay on a bed of smoking-hot rock salt, three to a plate, each half-shell topped with a spoonful of the butter-rich fumet, then chervil and a teaspoon of golden caviar.

  Emmeline had already poured the prosecco.

  She was sitting on the right side of the table and had set a place for him at the end. He put her plate down, then his own. He pulled out his chair and sat. Emmeline took her fluted glass and held it up. He touched the rim of the glass against hers, and they each sipped. The prosecco was as crisp as a green apple, as clean as spring grass.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “It’s—”

  “No, Caleb. Don’t make it small. Hear what I have to say. No one has ever done something like this for me.”

  Emmeline put her glass down carefully. She used her fork and lifted one of the oysters from its shell, slipped it into her mouth, and closed her eyes. He watched her, saw her pleasure as the flavors melted together. She swallowed. She put her fork on the edge of her plate and opened her eyes.

  “Caleb.”

  “Really, it’s—”

  “You don’t know what it was like. What my life’s been,” Emmeline said. He saw how close she was to crying, how the tears were about to run down the white curve of her cheeks.

  Caleb put down his fork, reached for her hand. She took his fingers in hers and pressed them.

  “He owned me. Like you own a dog. You think I’d have stayed in the car, out in the woods—he was gone for days—you think I’d have stayed there if he hadn’t put a lock on the collar? A steel chain? I might have loved him, but did I get a choice? I was a child. When I had to make that choice—when I had to make myself love him—I was a little girl.”

  “Emmeline—”

  “—oh god, Caleb, I’m sorry.”

  “No.”

  “Caleb, I’m so sorry.”

  He turned to her, finally catching her left hand. He took it in both of his. Her fingers were as cool as the fog blowing through the streets. With her free hand, she wiped her eyes.

  “I shouldn’t have said all that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not.”

  “We promised each other,” Caleb said. He ran the tips of his fingers down hers. “Never to hurt. Never to lie. And we’re okay.”

  He squeezed her hand gently until she met his eyes.

  “All right,” she said.

  “He took you, didn’t he?”

  She nodded.

  “He did.”

  “But he’s dead now.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “God, I hope so.”

  She slid her hand out from between his and took her wineglass.

  They touched the rims together and then she drank off her prosecco. A thin foam of bubbles lay at the bottom of her glass, lit by the candlelight.

  “I’m sorry. The oysters—they’re so good. And I’ve never had anything like them.”

  “Then let’s eat them,” Caleb said. “They’re best when they’re hot like this.”

  Afterward, he put the plates in the sink and began preparing the risotto. Emmeline opened the pinot and then she leaned in the doorway and watched him. She held the bottle by its neck, down at her hip. He could feel her eyes on him, watching his hands work. The way she leaned in when he picked up a twelve-inch knife and tested its edge against the pad of his thumb before slicing the wild mushrooms on the hardwood chopping block.

  He turned to look at her once. Her eyes were dark, and wet tracks on her cheeks glittered in the candlelight. He started toward her but she stopped him by holding out one hand, palm out.

  “Cook, Caleb.”

  “Right.”

  “You have me now,” she said. She was leaning her head against the doorjamb.

  “Do I?” he asked. He wasn’t sure of anything.

  She nodded.

  “You have me. I’m yours. So cook. Because I’ll still be here, after.”

  There was a thump from somewhere upstairs. He looked at the ceiling, then at her. It might have been the house settling. It was an old house, built of redwood. There’d be creaks and groans on a night like this. The wind and fog were streaming past the house, pressing it into its foundations. But what he’d heard sounded like someone moving.

  “Stay here,” Emmeline said.

  “You want me to—”

  “Stay. Cook.”

  She smiled at him, but it didn’t change her eyes. Didn’t lift the sadness from them. She backed out of the room. He heard her put the wine bottle on the dining table, then a moment later heard the wooden stairs as she climbed them to the second floor. He put the mushrooms and the minced garlic into a hot iron skillet. The thin layer of olive oil flared up, sizzling. He pictured her again as a little girl, left alone in a car in the woods. He’d imagined this before, had seen it in his mind since their night together in Spondulix. Something about it had caught him, and now she’d given him enough to understand why.

  Now he had new details.

  He saw the dog’s training collar—a choke collar, its spikes pointed inward—circling her neck. A chain curved away, its end locked to an eyebolt fixed through the car’s floor. The dark-haired little girl clawed at the closed wi
ndows, leaving bloody streaks. Autumn leaves were scattered on the car’s hood, on its roof. More than a day’s worth. Wet leaves were stuck to the windshield, to the side windows. The darker ones were the same color as the clawed lines on the inside surface of the glass.

  From above, he heard a slide and a bang. It brought him out of the wet woods. He looked at the ceiling and heard a quiet cry. Something stifled. A sob cut off with a surprised palm across the mouth.

  Then Emmeline was coming down the stairs. He turned when she came back to her spot in the doorway.

  “Everything okay?”

  “A window. I left a window open upstairs. While I was waiting for you.”

  He nodded.

  “It smells good,” she said.

  “It should be okay.”

  Emmeline looked at the tip of her finger, then touched it to her lips.

  “You’re all right?”

  “I caught my nail. It’s nothing.”

  There’d been a drop of blood on her fingertip, but it was gone now. She’d sucked it away, one quick kiss to the wound.

  “I can get you some ice,” Caleb said.

  She shook her head.

  “Cook,” she said. “I’ll have a glass of wine. That’s all I need. It’s just a little cut.”

  She disappeared into the dining room and came back a moment later holding a glass of the pinot.

  “This’ll be ready in about half a minute.”

  “Should I get plates?”

  “I have them. On the pastry table.”

  With a wooden spatula, he turned the scallops one last time, to check them. They’d seared to a nice golden brown, and when he leaned closer to smell them, he could tell they’d pulled in the flavors of the chanterelle and morel mushrooms. He lifted the skillet off the burner and arranged the plates, which he’d already garnished with chopped thyme and truffle oil. When he carried them into the dining room, Emmeline pulled out his chair. She’d poured his wine.