The Poison Artist Read online

  Henry was about to say something else, but Caleb cut him off.

  “Just let me out here.”

  “I can take you back up to the medical center. You can give me—”

  “Let me out. Now.”

  Henry pulled over and Caleb got out.

  “Caleb—”

  He slammed the door and started walking in the opposite direction, back toward Judah. The Suburban was making the turn onto Sixteenth, but its driver changed his mind and swerved back into the lane to go west. Caleb watched it go, then kept walking.

  Twenty-One

  HE EXPECTED KENNON and Garcia to roll up in their truck. Expected they’d hustle him down to Bryant Street, sit him in a white-walled room with a one-way mirror on the back wall. And if that didn’t happen, then he thought Henry would circle around, make another stab at getting him in the car.

  But Kennon and Henry stayed away, and he walked alone.

  Still, he had no doubts about what had just happened. Considering the circumstances, he couldn’t really blame Henry. He wouldn’t have done the same thing if their roles had been switched, but then, there had always been an edge that separated them. They were as close as brothers, but Caleb was on the darker side of the cut. He wondered what kind of wire Henry had been wearing. Its transmission range must have been limited, or else Kennon and Garcia would have held back a little farther. Or maybe Henry had wanted them to stay close.

  Maybe he was scared.

  He crossed Judah Street and went south on Sixteenth, where he stole a plastic-wrapped copy of the San Francisco Chronicle from the front steps of a row house. He tucked the paper under his arm and took it to the Fifteenth Avenue Steps Park, the pedestrian pathway that ran at a forty-five-degree incline between Kirkham and Lawton Streets. He climbed most of the way up the steps, until he was out of sight in the heavy growth of trees near the top of the hill. When he sat down, he could see over the rooftops of the Inner Sunset, out toward Golden Gate Park. The steps were wet from the morning’s rain, from the ground-clinging fog that was still drifting out of the west. He pulled the Chronicle from its bag and sorted through it until he found the article about Marcie.

  Afterward, he followed Lawton Street toward Mount Sutro, dumping the paper in the first recycling bin he passed. There hadn’t been many solid facts in the story, but there was an anonymously sourced detail that bothered him. Someone had cleaned every surface in the house with acetone. The police wouldn’t be finding any fingerprints, wouldn’t have much hope of finding stray DNA, unless it was on Marcie’s body.

  The storage areas of his lab were full of acetone, but it wasn’t a hard chemical to come by. You could just go to a drugstore and buy nail polish remover. Hardware stores sold it by the gallon as paint thinner. But it was easy to draw a connection between the way the scene was cleaned and the way he’d have cleaned it, and he didn’t like it at all.

  He put his hands into the pockets of his coat and walked slowly with his head down. Even though he’d showered in the lab and changed into different clothes, he could still smell Emmeline on his skin, could taste her in the back of his throat. It was a bittersweet taste, like chewing on a clove, or biting through the rind of a clementine.

  He didn’t like the way he felt about that, either.

  Bridget’s Volvo was parked down the street from his house. He walked past it on his way up, backtracked to stop next to it and look inside. There were cardboard boxes in the back seat, and they were empty.

  She should have warned him.

  Maybe she even had. He hadn’t been taking her calls or reading her emails. He walked the last hundred feet to his house, and opened the door.

  “Bridget?”

  He heard her coming from the kitchen, heard the stumble of her bare feet against the floor, and knew she’d been drinking before he even saw her. She came across the entry hall and leaned against the wall, ten feet from him. She looked at him and tried to smile, but her eyes were trembling, and when she tried to say something, the cry that came from her mouth was like an open wound.

  She held on to the wall for support, used it to lower herself to the floor.

  “Caleb—I tried—I didn’t want to be alone—”

  “Bridget,” he said. He came to her and knelt on the stone floor in front of her. Her hands were wet with tears, and her skin was soft and pulsing with heat.

  “—alone on Christmas.”

  “I’m here,” he heard himself say.

  He felt like he was still standing at the threshold, one foot on the doormat outside. But he was all the way in, the door was shut and locked, and he was helping her up.

  “I didn’t know where you were!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I tried calling, to tell you I was coming—”

  “It’s all right, Bridget.”

  “It’s not all right! I hate it. I hate this, what we’ve done to ourselves. I can’t do it anymore, Caleb.”

  He helped her stand, started walking her into the living room. He was still holding his key ring, but tossed it side-handed into the kitchen as they passed. Then he had both his arms around her. She was wearing the same black dress she’d worn to the gallery opening when they’d met, but she’d cut her hair since the last time he’d seen her. Now it curled inward just above her shoulders.

  He thought of the vials of thujone in Emmeline’s dark bathroom, the electric spark that flashed through the second-floor windows of the mansion in Pacific Heights. He thought of the sliding bang he’d heard when Emmeline had gone upstairs, the droplet of blood she’d licked from her fingertip when she came back. He saw himself pan-roasting the scallops while Marcie Hensleigh was bound and naked one floor above him. Thrashing against the ropes, choking on the gag, her body riddled with current burns from the high-voltage electrodes.

  He put Bridget on the couch and fell onto his knees next to her. She leaned forward so that he could get his arms around her again. He laid his face on her chest and felt her hands go to the back of his head, pressing him against her. He held her tight and felt her fingers in his hair.

  “Caleb.”

  He raised his face, saw the shimmer of his own tears running between her breasts. Her hands were flat against each of his cheeks, and she leaned toward him, closing her eyes as she kissed him. She’d been drinking the Sauvignon Blanc he’d used two nights ago while he was making the fumet. It tasted better on her lips than it had from the glass.

  She pulled back. Her nose was pink from crying, but there was color on her cheeks now that had nothing to do with her tears.

  “Caleb, I’m so sorry for all this.”

  “It was me.”

  “I can live with it. With what you did. You don’t have to try to undo it,” she said. “I thought about it, and I talked with Paula. A long talk, things you and I never talked about. You didn’t even know I knew—”

  “Don’t. Please.”

  “Shhh, Caleb.”

  She put her lips to his ear and whispered.

  “I wasn’t wrong to be mad,” she said. “But I understand now—what you said, when we had the fight. That you did it because you wanted to be with me. Just me. That was true, I guess. But it wasn’t the only thing, was it?”

  “No.”

  He closed his eyes and held her. He knew they couldn’t stay in the house tonight. He had to get them out. Out of the house; out of the city. They could go south and find a hotel. A bed-and-breakfast in Monterey, or in Carmel-by-the-Sea. She’d agree to anything if he said it the right way. Tomorrow morning they could decide what to do. He would call Kennon and set a meeting on neutral ground.

  It was the only way.

  If Emmeline had gone after Marcie, she’d take Henry next. Or Bridget.

  Bridget stood, and pulled Caleb up from his knees. She put her hands on his shoulders and turned him so that the couch was behind him. She pushed him back and he sat down. She looked down at him, then lifted the hem of her dress and mounted him, her knees pressing into the cushion
s on either side of his waist. His hands ran along her calves, then up the backs of her thighs. He held on to her hips.

  She wasn’t wearing anything under the dress.

  “Please,” she said. “Caleb, please.”

  She lifted his chin and kissed him while she worked his belt buckle with one hand.

  “If you have anything tomorrow,” Caleb said, “cancel it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re leaving tonight. I’m taking you away.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “But after this,” Bridget said. “Okay? After this.”

  “Okay.”

  She settled down onto him, closing her eyes as she took him inside of her. He held her hips underneath her dress and guided her down, fully with her now. There was just Bridget, who was pushing aside the shoulder straps of her dress, sliding her arms free.

  Just Bridget.

  The girl from the gallery who’d painted his sheets with her blood, who’d loved him so completely that she’d nearly killed him last week when he’d told her what he’d done. When her arms were out of the straps, he took the bodice of her dress and tugged it down to her waist.

  “Stop crying, Caleb,” she said.

  But she was crying too.

  Near the end, she wrapped her arms around his head and held him close to her chest, sensing what lay ahead and quickening her pace to reach it.

  “Stay with me, Caleb,” she said. “Stay with me, stay in me.”

  It was too close to what Emmeline had said. For a moment, he couldn’t place himself. Couldn’t untangle the web. He leaned back against the couch as she rode him and looked past her side at the clock on the mantel. Its second hand ticked clockwise, carried them forward through time in the right direction.

  “Caleb, stay in me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Bridget.”

  “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter now, does it?” she said. “Stay in me. Hurry now. I want you to.”

  They were together on the couch, lying on their sides, with Bridget in front of him and his hand crossing her hip and holding her stomach. The fire was lit. Beyond the sliding glass door, the lights of the Inner Sunset blinked in and out of the glowing fog.

  “I was looking at that,” Bridget said. “That drawing you did. While I was waiting for you. It’s really good.”

  “What drawing?”

  “That one. On the coffee table.”

  He raised his head and looked, and was just able to suppress a spasm when he saw it. It was the last drawing he’d done of Emmeline. The way he’d seen her when he left her at the Haas-Lilienthal House two nights ago. She was lying on cushions, one elbow up on the coffee table. The hem of her dress had flipped back so that most of her right thigh was visible. Her eyes were closed and her lips were parted just enough to see her teeth, giving her face a look of serene resignation.

  “I thought I put that away.”

  “You did. I found it and brought it in here to look at. The light was better in here,” she said. “I’m sorry I moved it.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s really good. You’ve been looking at the painting, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “You know the one I’m talking about. The Sargent. It’s in the Legion of Honor now. It’s the only one he ever painted in San Francisco.”

  Caleb shook his head, but that cold feeling was coming back. As if all the windows in the house were open, the fog slipping inside.

  “I was just sketching.”

  Bridget got up on her elbow, propping her chin on her palm. As she looked at the sketch, Caleb had an impulse to get up and toss it in the fire.

  “You know the painting. It wasn’t a commission, like most of his stuff. It was, like, something he did for a friend. And then Samuel Lilienthal bought it.”

  “Who?” Caleb asked.

  He barely got the word out, but he was close enough to Bridget’s ear that she didn’t notice how low his whisper had become.

  “Samuel Lilienthal. That pretty gingerbread house, up in Pacific Heights? That was his. And that’s where the painting used to be. The family donated it to the Legion of Honor. I wrote a paper on it, when I was getting my master’s. The painting’s history.”

  Caleb felt it again, the abyss waiting underneath the paper-thin skin of his house. A move in the wrong direction, the slightest tear in the structure holding him up, and he would rip through it.

  He spoke slowly, cautiously.

  “I’ve seen this painting?”

  “I don’t know,” Bridget said. “You just drew it. Like, exactly. So I guess you’ve seen it. That time we went to Angel Island with Henry? I was trying to tell you about the paper I wrote. But Henry kept changing the subject. Like he was worried it’d bother Vicki—it’s a sad story.”

  Caleb untangled himself from her and stood, tucking his shirt into his pants as he rounded the coffee table. He took the sketch and put it on the mantel above the fire. He’d burn it later, when she wasn’t watching.

  “I guess I saw it,” he said. He didn’t sound very sure about it, though. “You’re positive it was in that house?”

  Bridget nodded.

  “I saw it there,” she said. “Before it went to the museum.”

  “Where was it?” Caleb asked. He was struggling to keep his voice level. “Where in the house, I mean.”

  “In the living room. Over the fireplace.”

  He glanced at his drawing. The fireplace was in the background, behind Emmeline. No one but Caleb would know it, but the door to the secret room was ajar by a millimeter or two. It needed him to lean against it, needed him to push it back into place. Just as Emmeline needed him to lie down with her, to wrap her in his arms.

  “Maybe it was a long time ago and it just kind of sat with you,” Bridget said. “That’s something I worry about, when I’m working.”

  “I don’t understand,” Caleb said.

  “When I’m painting, I ask myself, ‘Is it all mine? Or is it something I’ve been carrying for so long, I don’t even remember where I picked it up?’”

  “I must have seen it.”

  But he couldn’t look at her when he said it, and his heart was beating so hard it hurt. He didn’t like to look her in the face and lie. And there was going to be a lot of lying, if he was lucky.

  “So where are we going?”

  “Down south,” he said. He had to get control of this, had to get them out. “Big Sur somewhere.”

  He turned to her and saw the look she was giving him.

  “We don’t have a reservation.”

  “We’ll make one on the way,” he said. “But I walked up here from the lab, left my car there. And I think I left my wallet on my desk.”

  His wallet was sitting on the workbench, next to the ATM receipt he’d used to wrap the tissue from Emmeline’s bathroom. He stood behind the couch and looked down at Bridget. She was still naked from the waist up, and she rolled onto her back, her fingers laced behind her head as she looked up at him.

  “You brought clothes and stuff?” he asked her.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Okay. You go pack. I’ll run down the hill, get my wallet and the car. Then we’ll get out of here.”

  She got up on her knees and leaned over the back of the couch, holding out her hand to him. He knew how much she loved Carmel and the little spots south of it, loved to walk on the shoreline and stay at inns overlooking the sea. He’d settle for any trucker’s motel off the highway, as long as it was far from the city. But he’d promise her anything if it would get her moving without questions. He took her hand and she pulled him in, kissing his neck and then his lips.

  “Thank you, Caleb.”

  “It’s not much of a Christmas.”

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’ll be good for us. To be together.”

  He nodded and felt his pocket for his keys. They weren’t there. Then he remembered tossing them onto the kitchen cou
nter on his way to the couch. He let go of Bridget and walked down the entry hall to the kitchen. It got progressively darker as he went away from the fire’s light in the living room.

  Darker, and colder.

  The kitchen was like a meat locker, so frigid he expected to see his breath cloud the air in front of him. He found the keys on the counter without switching on the light, and was about to turn toward the entry hall when a shape on the dining room table stopped him like a cold hand.

  The bottle of Berthe de Joux was sitting there, exactly where it had been when he’d spoken with Henry yesterday morning.

  One of the dining room windows behind the table was open.

  He must have made a sound, some small sound of fear or pain, because Bridget called out from the living room.

  “Caleb, are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thought I heard you say something,” Bridget said.

  “Nothing. Just coughing.”

  He went around the counter, stepped to the bottle, and picked it up. The green glass was so cold, it stung the fresh scrapes on his palm. It was a quarter full. Half-moon scratch marks pocked the label where he’d picked at it with his thumbnail while sitting at the table. Drinking alone and drawing. But he’d taken it to the lab in his briefcase, had left his briefcase sitting in his office after his blindfolded ride with Emmeline.

  This bottle could not be in his house.

  He closed his eyes and held on to the edge of the table, trying to understand what was going on. The sketch he’d made was a copy of a painting that had hung for years at the site of Marcie’s murder. This bottle had appeared in his house, when it couldn’t be here. There was Emmeline, and everything that had happened since he’d first laid eyes on her.

  Christ, he thought, make it stop.

  Please.

  He smelled her before he saw her.

  He opened his eyes and looked into the shadows to his left. The fire in the living room was too far away. It was cold enough in here that frost was growing from the edges of the dining room windows, feathery crystalline fans. Before he could turn in the other direction, there was a sharp twinge in the side of his neck.