The Poison Artist Read online

  “That looks lovely,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  He put down her plate and then sat. She stood behind him a moment, her hand on the side of his neck, under the collar of his shirt. He thought maybe she’d say something, but she didn’t. She brushed her right hand along the curve of his ear, and then with a rustle of silk and a swirl of perfume, she pulled out her own chair and sat.

  Seventeen

  IT COULD HAVE ended so many different ways.

  But as he walked to his car, jangling his keys in his coat pocket and thinking about it, he was sure it could not have ended more beautifully. After the risotto, they’d sat on the floor in front of the fireplace in the main living room, using cushions from the sofa and leaning against the heavy coffee table. Emmeline had poured the last of the prosecco and they’d eaten the chilled raspberries with shavings of dark chocolate, Emmeline pressing up against him for warmth. She’d put her hand on his chest, where two of her fingers slipped beneath the placket of his shirt between the mother-of-pearl buttons to rest against his undershirt, next to his heart. They finished the dessert, then the wine, and when the last of it was gone, she’d leaned up to him again and kissed him.

  Her lips had been cool and sweet.

  Emmeline moved her body against his, and when he grew hard, she put one hand against his lower back and pressed him to her. She broke off the kiss and spoke with the corner of her mouth against his ear.

  “It’d be easy, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here, in front of the fire.”

  “I know.”

  “You could take me,” she said. “Any way you wanted.”

  He drew his hand down her back, bringing her closer. That midnight scent of her skin, the smell of moonlight and shadows, wrapped him and carried him.

  “But not yet. We can’t yet,” she said. “You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  He was dizzy now. There was the wine, but the real intoxicant was Emmeline. She was inside of him, running through his veins and crossing the barrier to his brain. The slippery silk of her dress, and her bare skin underneath it.

  She brought her lips to his and put her hands on the back of his head. When that ended, that long and deep kiss, she held her forehead against his. Her fingers still ran through his hair. Her eyes were closed.

  They stayed that way long enough, pressed together on the cushions, that their breathing fell into the same rhythm. In and out, together. She pulled back first, and he lay on his side with his head propped on his hand. They were close to the fire, and the cushions facing it were warm.

  “You’re not looking at me anymore,” she said. Her eyes were still closed.

  “I was looking at the fireplace.”

  “Do you see it?”

  “Do I—?” But he stopped midstream, when his eyes focused. “Wait.”

  He stared at the heavy jamb supporting the left side of the mantle.

  “It swings out, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded, her eyes still closed.

  “A lot of old houses had things like that,” she said. “And when enough people die, then the house has a secret.”

  He wasn’t sure what had given it away. But he’d spent his life learning to find what other people couldn’t see. That was, perhaps, his defining trait. He looked at the fireplace again. The dimensions were off somehow. The wall was thicker than it needed to be and the jamb looked light for its size. The house was too beautiful, too well designed, for these anomalies to have been mistakes of proportion or failures of aesthetics.

  And where there was a reason, there was a way in.

  “Is it okay?” he said. “I mean—”

  She put her finger on his lips again.

  “It’s all right, Caleb,” she whispered. “You can look.”

  But he was reluctant to leave her. His fingertips were at the base of her throat, and he could feel her shoulder and back pressed against his chest.

  “Take a look,” she said. She shifted, and then she was pushing him up. “You’ll figure it out.”

  “And you?”

  “Not me,” she said. “I don’t like going in places like that. I like it by the fire.”

  He stood, letting his fingers trace a line from her shoulder to her hip. Then he stepped over her and knelt at the jamb, taking one side of it with each of his hands. With his fingertips, he explored the corner between the wall and the edge of the fireplace, but didn’t find anything.

  It wouldn’t be like that, though.

  If it was as simple as a hidden latch, a maid would have found it while polishing the hearth; a child would have tripped it in the midst of a game. It wouldn’t be a secret anymore. He leaned against the jamb and used his palms to press it down, into the floor. From somewhere inside, he heard a click, and when he stood up and pulled, the jamb swung out on internal hinges.

  It revealed a doorway no more than a foot wide and five feet high. The passage stretched into darkness.

  “See?” Emmeline said. “But you know how to find things.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You found me.”

  She’d opened her eyes now, and was looking at him. She lay on the cushions with her finger circling the rim of her empty prosecco glass. There was color in her cheeks from the fire’s heat, and he knew that if he came to her and lay next to her, he could put even more color there. But he could smell the mildew and dust in the dead air he’d just exposed, could feel the cold leaking from the secret room, and he knew he had to go there.

  She wanted him to—he knew that, also. There were a thousand places she might have brought him tonight, but she had chosen this place. This house of echoes.

  “You’ll want a candle,” Emmeline said.

  There were half a dozen of them on the coffee table next to her. He took one, shielding its flame with his hand, and stood in front of the passage. He looked at Emmeline once more, and then ducked into the tunnel.

  It was only four feet deep and then it opened into a room no larger and no less austere than a monk’s cell. The floor and walls were made of stone, and overhead were the bare redwood beams holding up the mansion’s second story. He held the candle above his eyes and turned slowly.

  There was a cot in one corner, its blankets tossed in a pile by the last person who’d slept in it. But that must have been long ago, because the blankets and the cot were each covered in drifts of spider silk and dots of dark mold. On the floor was a dust-covered water glass, and next to that was a silver spoon coated with a black crust. There were sheets of drawing paper scattered under the cot and on its thin mattress. He crouched to look at one, but it was too filthy with mildew and the leavings of insects to see what had been drawn on it. Whatever had once existed in the charcoal was forever gone. He didn’t look at the others.

  Caleb stood and turned all the way around to make sure he had missed nothing, and then he went out the way he had come.

  Emmeline was where he’d left her.

  After he shut the secret door, he put the candle back on the coffee table and then knelt next to her. She rolled to him, opening her eyes again. She took his hand and brought it to her lips, and when she kissed his knuckles, just underneath the line of cuts, he could feel the gentle touch of her teeth.

  “Hello,” she finally said. “How was it?”

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something to do with Prohibition?” he asked. “Like a hiding place?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know. It’s a secret.”

  “But you knew about it.”

  “I found it,” she said. “The same way you found it. So that makes it our room—our secret room. It’ll be ours until we’re both gone, and then it’ll just be a blank space again. A darkness.”

  She let go of his hand and put her palm against the back of his neck, pulling him to her.

  “You’re going to tell me to go,” Caleb sa
id.

  “It’s time.”

  There were too many questions to ask. Why this house, with its dead room and its strange echoes? And why him, of all the men in the city, when her knowledge of him was limited to his first name and his telephone number? When he’d started a question like this before, she’d shushed him with a finger to his lips, and then a kiss. It was better not to know, she’d said. So he asked nothing at all.

  “You go home,” she said. “I’ll clean up.”

  “And you’ll call me?”

  “It won’t be long,” she said. “And then you’ll see me. And, Caleb?”

  “Emmeline.”

  “I’m yours. So don’t forget.”

  He nodded, his forehead against hers. He stood and straightened his pants and his suit jacket, then looked down at her. She was still on the cushions, reclined in front of the fire, one elbow on the coffee table. The hem of her dress had slipped up to her thigh, well above her knee. She pushed it down and looked up at him.

  “Soon,” she said.

  He nodded again.

  Then he turned, and showed himself out.

  Now he was crossing the street, his hands in his coat pockets, his key ring bouncing in his cupped fingers. Twice, she’d frozen every physical process in his body with just two syllables: I’m yours. He’d never met anyone who could do that, who could stop time with a word. She could probably run it backwards if she wanted to.

  He stepped up to the sidewalk on the far side of the street, then turned and looked back at the Haas-Lilienthal House. The memory from earlier in the night rose up and wavered before him, the image of his mother, running down this sidewalk with a policeman in tow. They turned to vapor and blew away on the wind before he could decide if he’d seen a true memory or just the ripples of a dream.

  Caleb steadied himself against a streetlamp and stared at the house.

  The first level was still dark, but he saw a light moving behind the curtains on the second floor. The firelight of the hurricane lantern went past the three curved windows of the corner tower, paused a moment in the center, and then withdrew.

  She was going deeper into the house. All the upstairs windows went dark as she carried the light away. But Caleb didn’t turn. Not yet. He didn’t know what he might be waiting for, but he knew there would be something. A sign, a hint.

  He waited, leaning into the streetlamp’s damp metal pole.

  From behind the curtains there was a blue spark, like the flashbulb of an old camera. No sound at all. Just a burst of light.

  Then it was dark again, and silent. The fog rolled past, clipping the northern edge of the city as it pressed from the Pacific to the bay. At the corner of Franklin and Jackson, one of the streetlamps flickered and went out. His car was parked up there, in the new shadows under the dark eye of the lamppost. He turned back to the house, watched the curtain-bound windows on the second floor for another minute, and then gripped his keys inside his fist and went on.

  The doorbell rang at ten thirty in the morning. Caleb rolled off the couch, took the bathrobe off the armrest, and threw it on. Because he’d broken and then boarded up the window next to the door, he couldn’t see who was out there. Kennon, he imagined. Or maybe Bridget. Someone from the lab.

  He opened the door.

  “Henry—what the hell are you doing?”

  His oldest friend looked at him. His shoes were wet and muddy, and Caleb guessed he must have parked somewhere else and then walked up to the house on one of the footpaths through the eucalyptus groves.

  “Better come inside before someone sees you on my porch.”

  “Lemme take these off first.”

  Henry bent and untied his shoes, slipped them off, and then stepped into the house when Caleb stood aside for him. Caleb shut the door and followed Henry down the hall to the kitchen.

  “Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Caleb got the bag of ground coffee from the freezer and took the French press from the dish drain next to the sink.

  “What happened to the machine?”

  “Bridget.”

  “Sorry.”

  Caleb shrugged.

  “The least of my problems. Anybody follow you up here?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Vicki know what’s going on?”

  “Some. But, Caleb—”

  Caleb cut him off.

  “Shouldn’t you be with her and the kids? It’s Christmas Eve, right?”

  Caleb lit the burner under the teakettle, then turned his back to Henry while he poured coffee into the French press.

  “She asked me to come,” Henry said.

  “What?”

  Caleb turned around. Henry was sitting on one of the stools opposite the kitchen counter, the same place Kennon had been sitting.

  “To be honest, I didn’t want to,” Henry said.

  “I’ll bet.”

  “But some things matter more than work. More than careers. Like sticking by your friends when they need you.”

  “Vicki told you that.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Nice.”

  Henry half smiled, then looked down at the counter. There was the hushed sound of the gas burner and the teakettle ticking as it heated.

  “What’s wrong, Caleb? I mean, what’s really wrong? It’s not just Bridget, is it?”

  “Oh, come on, Henry.”

  “I’m serious, Caleb. Is it work? Something else?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Caleb sat on a stool opposite Henry and put his elbows on the stone countertop.

  “Look at yourself,” Henry said. “At this place.”

  Henry nodded at the quarter-full bottle of Berthe de Joux on the end of the dining table, at the mostly empty bottle of Jim Beam near the sink. Caleb had spent some time sketching last night when he’d gotten home, drawing Emmeline as he’d last seen her, reclined on the cushions in front of the fire. Her sad eyes telling him to go home, but the shape of her body begging him to stay. He remembered the way it had smelled in the secret room, the heavy scent of dust and dead memories. And the way it felt when Emmeline had pressed against him, her skin cool and alive, her pulse as quick as a fawn’s as they lay together in front of the fire, a few feet from the hidden door she’d hoped he would find. He understood now that meeting her must have been more than chance, more than a brush in the dark at House of Shields.

  “It’s not messy,” Caleb said, and that was true.

  “No. But how much’ve you been drinking?”

  “Of that? Not much. Last night I just had one. I was working on something.”

  “For the lab?”

  “Something else.”

  “All right.”

  “The lab’s fine. I’ve got till the end of January to get the data sets to the NIH. It’s all on track.”

  “They still giving you trouble?” Henry asked. “End of September, you were really worried.”

  “It’s fine. I got it under control.”

  “In September, I thought maybe the real issue was the auction.”

  “Christie’s can sell what it wants.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “But you keep track.”

  Caleb shrugged, then nodded.

  “It was the first time one of his pieces went for over a million,” he said. “So I followed it. But so what? It’s just art collectors trading them back and forth. They go higher every time. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “Except they’d never sell for so much if your father had just been a normal man,” Henry said. “Or if he’d just stayed a normal man. I don’t know—I mean, I don’t know how it was. I only saw it from the outside. And from the outside it looked fine, until it wasn’t.”

  “And then every time one sells at an auction like that, there’s a story in the Times,” Caleb said. “And it all comes up again, and I have to talk about it with you. Or try to talk around it. We have to say how disgusting people are, to want to pay to own a piece of that.
So let’s just say it and get past it. People are evil. They’re twisted. Can we move on?”

  “I’m not saying we have to talk about it.”

  “Fine.”

  When the kettle started to steam, Caleb got up and poured the water into the French press. When it was done brewing, Henry accepted the mug that Caleb slid across the counter. Caleb sat again, took a sip, and waited for Henry.

  “The patients in your data sets, those are mostly what?”

  “End-stage cancer,” Caleb said. “Postoperative patients. The more stitches, the better. People coming into the emergency room with traumas.”

  “How do you sign them up?”

  “It’s not easy.”

  “Something like, ‘Hey there, instead of a morphine drip, how about two hundred bucks and a chance to tell me how much it hurts?’”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What about the batrachotoxin study? You still doing that?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “We’re building a 3-D model. It’ll help other labs study it in computer simulations.”

  “So they don’t have to worry about contaminating the building,” Henry said. “Drop a vial, kill the whole staff.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You want to come over for dinner tonight? Vicki wanted me to ask. It’s why I came.”

  “No,” Caleb said. “I mean—no, but thanks. I ought to stick around here.”

  “What for?”

  “I just ought to be here,” Caleb said. He was looking at the countertop and not at Henry. “In case she comes.”

  “All right.”

  Henry glanced around again, then focused on the dining table.

  “What is that, anyway?”

  “What is what?”

  Henry pushed up his glasses and squinted as he read the label on the bottle.

  “Berthe de Joux.”

  “French absinthe.”

  Henry turned and put both elbows back on the counter. He brought the mug to his lips, sipped the coffee, then set it down.

  “Little experiment with thujone, trying to get inside the mind of our killer?” Henry said.

  He said it lightly, like a joke, but Caleb’s insides tightened and his eyes narrowed.