The Poison Artist Read online

“Good,” she said.

  There was another silence between them, and again, she was the one to break it. He hated that he could make her do that, make her come across to him. When she spoke, her voice wasn’t much more than a tearful, warm whisper.

  “Bye, Caleb. I love you.”

  She hung up right away, as if she didn’t want to know how he’d respond.

  Nine

  WITH HALF AN hour left to kill, he parked on Taylor Street, at the bottom of four tiers of steps spilling away from Grace Cathedral’s main entrance. He got out and locked the car, then walked halfway up the wet steps and stood looking at the darkened rose window. He started on a slow walk around the cathedral, watching the shadows of its buttresses and the faint gleam of the polished bronze friezes on the Ghiberti doors leading to the baptistery. This was Bridget’s family’s church: she’d come here since she was a little girl. When her parents emigrated from France, they chose it because it reminded them of Notre Dame—never mind that it wasn’t Roman Catholic. It was the building that mattered. Now the columbarium in the bell tower held their ashes. Caleb turned the corner and went into the deeper shadows beneath the naked branches of sycamore trees as he climbed the hill past the Cathedral School.

  For Bridget, this building was like an island in time. It brought the past and the future together. She could stand in its nave before the altar and remember herself in her first communion dress, knowing—both then and now—that in the future she would stand here again to receive a different rite. As if all three strands of time were woven into a braid by their common connection to this spot of ground. She’d brought Caleb, and taken him through the main sanctuary on an empty Saturday night, explaining this to him.

  Yet he’d done what he did, without telling her about it for months.

  And now, in twenty minutes, he was still going to do what he’d come here to do. He put his head down and turned the next corner, walking slowly east on Sacramento Street. When he finished his circuit, he checked his car and looked once more at the rose window. Then he turned his back to it and walked down California Street. Toward Spondulix. Toward Emmeline.

  A few nights ago, he’d walked past this alley without even noticing it. He’d been too drunk to see much except his feet on the pavement. But even now, mostly sober and having studied a map, he almost walked past it. It was that narrow. He stood at the mouth of the alley with his back to Powell Street and looked ahead.

  A hundred feet down, a parked car took up the width of the lane between the buildings. There was less than a centimeter’s space between its passenger side and the brick wall of the adjacent building. On the driver’s side there was just enough room, maybe, for someone to open the door and squeeze out. It was hard to tell its color in the shadows, but he thought it was the same ghost-gray antique coupe he’d seen drift past Grace Cathedral in the rain and fog on Sunday night. It was parked facing outward. He was looking at its chrome-plated headlamps and the silver statuette on its hood. It was too dark to be sure, but he thought the trunk was open.

  Spondulix, if it existed at all, must be somewhere down the alley, past the coupe. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t quite three, and she had been insistent: he could be late, but not early.

  He put his hands in his pockets and walked down Powell Street. He took a left on Pine and then circled the block, lingering in the spots of light across from the Ritz-Carlton’s marble-columned façade to check his phone and then turn it off.

  When he completed the circle and came back to the alley’s entrance, it was five minutes past three. He stood at the dark mouth of the alley. The gray coupe was gone. The way up the alley was clear.

  “Hello, Caleb.”

  He turned, and there she was. Ten feet up Powell Street in the shadowed doorway to a shuttered delicatessen. He had walked past her without seeing her, because he’d been focused on the alley.

  “Emmeline.”

  She was wearing an off-the-shoulder black dress. It was sleeveless, but she wore black silk gloves that went past her elbows. Her hair was as dark as volcanic glass, and fell loosely about her shoulders and curled inward beneath her chin and across her breastbone to frame her face. The light of the streetlamps glowed in the fine drops of rain caught in her hair.

  “Shall I show you the way?”

  “Please.”

  She came to his side, switching her black clutch bag from her right hand to her left so she could take ahold of his arm. There was nothing shy in that touch. The side of her body pressed up against his, and because of that, and the way she walked as she led him into the alley, he could map out the violin curve from her shoulder to her hip.

  “Here we are,” she said.

  They were standing beneath a small canvas awning above a painted wooden door. Brass lettering mounted in the door might have spelled out SPONDULIX. It was too dark to tell for sure. There were gas lamps on either side of the door, but they were unlit. The only light came from the streetlamps on Powell, and they were a long way off.

  “Is it open?” Caleb said.

  “For us.”

  She put her gloved palm on the door and pushed it gently. It swung open and Caleb was looking down a staircase. Whatever Spondulix was, it was underground. From the bottom of the stairs came the flickering light of candles.

  “Go ahead,” she whispered. “I’ll close the door.”

  She let go of Caleb’s arm and he felt her fingertips at the small of his back. He went four steps down the stairs and heard her move behind him. She closed the door so that it was entirely dark on the stairway except for the candlelight down below. He heard her throw a deadbolt lock, a jingle of keys. Then the lovely nightshade scent of her perfume was with him, and she’d come down the few steps that separated them. Her hands came around his shoulders and rested lightly on his clavicles.

  “Go on,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  The stairs were too narrow for them to walk side by side, but she stayed close to him till they reached the bottom. Then the hallway widened some and she was next to him again, taking his arm and leading him through an arched doorway and into the bar.

  The single room of the bar was like a jewelry box: exquisitely crafted, plush with red and black velvet. Sparkling. It was also completely empty. The ebony wood floor was freshly mopped and still had wet streaks from its scrubbing. There was a baby grand piano on a small raised stage in one corner. A pair of votive candles flickered at one end of the bar. Half a dozen more of them rested on the table of the largest corner booth, their combined light glittering in the crystal pendalogues of the unlit chandeliers. She led him toward the candlelit table. A half-full bottle of Berthe de Joux was there, together with a carafe of ice water and a pair of reservoir glasses already topped with slotted spoons. A little silver platter held a small stack of sugar cubes.

  “Will you make the drinks?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You remember how?”

  “I do. You could say I studied it. While I was looking for you.”

  She smiled and let go of his arm. Then she slid into the booth, looked up at him, and tapped the velvet seat beside her.

  “You must be freezing,” he said. “Can I give you my coat?”

  “Could you?”

  She leaned toward the table and let him put the coat around her shoulders. She didn’t put her arms through the sleeves but reached up from inside it and pulled the lapels together so that she wore it like a cloak.

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said. He looked around the empty bar. “Is this place yours?”

  “No.”

  “You’re the manager?”

  “No, I don’t work here,” she said. “But it’s okay, Caleb. I promise you.”

  “All right.”

  She tapped the seat next to her again, and this time he sat. She moved over, closing the gap he’d left between them. Then she rested her cheek against his shoulder.

  “Pour the drinks.”

  He
reached for the bottle and uncorked it. He poured just over an ounce into each glass, pushed the cork back into the bottle, and set it down. He put sugar cubes atop the spoons and then took the carafe and poured the ice water the way she’d taught him at House of Shields. High and slow.

  “I’m glad you found me,” she said, without lifting her head from his shoulder. “I’d like for us to be friends. I don’t have any others. Do you believe that?”

  He paused in pouring the second drink and looked down at her.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  “Well, it’s true,” she said. “Finish pouring that one. We’ll have a toast.”

  When the second sugar cube had melted through the spoon and into the absinthe, he stirred both drinks and set the spoons aside on a saucer. Emmeline sat up and moved back on the velvet bench so she could hold her drink and face him. He moved to touch the rim of his glass against hers, but she pulled hers back.

  “This is the toast,” she said. “It’s a promise. Two promises. If I’m your friend, I’ll never lie to you. And I’ll never hurt you. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about you? You’ll promise me those two things?”

  “Yes.”

  “You promise me?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then.”

  She reached toward him with her glass and they clinked the heavy crystal rims together. Then she put her glass to her lips, closed her eyes, and sipped the absinthe. He did the same. It was a mix of such opposing sensations that it felt like a balancing act. Bitter wormwood and rue leaning into the sweetness of the sugar and anise, the chill of the ice water pulling against the alcohol’s heat. She put the glass on the table and sat with her eyes closed for a moment. Then she looked at him.

  “Just because I promised not to lie to you doesn’t mean I’ll answer anything you ask. But if I answer, it’ll be the truth. You understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good.” She picked up her drink and finished it. “Finish yours, and then let’s have another. Don’t you want another?”

  “Yes.”

  He picked up his glass, swirling the absinthe and breathing in its vapors.

  “Did you spend a long time on it? Making the drawing?”

  He nodded, and sipped his drink. Her eyes were following the fingers of his right hand. The scabs were almost complete now. When he put his glass on the table, she took his hand and used her gloved fingers to coax his fingers flat on the black tablecloth. She brushed her fingertips in circles along the edges of the wounds. She’d done something similar to his forehead in House of Shields, getting his blood on her bare finger within a minute or two of meeting him.

  “You didn’t have these before.”

  “No.”

  “You have to be careful, Caleb.”

  “I will be.”

  She slid one of her hands under his, then placed the other atop his, so that she was pressing both sides of his fingers with the cool silk of her gloves.

  “Why don’t you ask me a question? I know you want to. You have a lot of them.”

  He had so many questions, he didn’t know which to start with. He couldn’t even begin to understand the effect she had on him. It was like one of Henry’s cases—a tangle of interacting compounds and forces so complex that he would need a week in his lab to sort it all out. He finished his absinthe and refilled both of their glasses. He put the slotted spoons into place, topped them with sugar cubes, and began to drip the ice water into Emmeline’s glass.

  “It isn’t a test, Caleb. You can just ask me a question.”

  “All right.”

  “Pour it slowly,” she said. She moved one of her hands to his right knee. “That’s right.”

  “You said you didn’t have any friends. Why is that?”

  She took her hand off his knee, then tucked both her arms away inside his coat where he couldn’t see them. She drew the coat tightly around herself again.

  “It wasn’t always that way. I used to have one. A friend, I mean. A man. We traveled together, place to place. He raised me, but he wasn’t my father. When I got old enough, we—”

  She stopped, and looked at him. When she blinked, he saw the powdered malachite eye shadow she wore.

  “But I don’t have to tell you everything, do I?”

  “No,” he said. “Not unless you want to.”

  Caleb finished pouring the water into her absinthe and moved the carafe so he could pour into his glass. He could already feel the first drink moving into him, meeting his blood and coming alive there. The second glass would be even better, would wrap his skin the way her perfume and the touch of her cheek on his shoulder enveloped him. Carried him.

  When she didn’t say anything else, he asked another question.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went away one night. That was normal enough. When he’d leave, I had to wait for him. That was the rule, from when I was little: I had to stay wherever we were sleeping. The motel, an apartment. In the old days, before we had much money, sometimes I had to sleep in the car, parked out in the woods. The last time he left, he didn’t come back. I waited a week. And then I did what we always did.”

  “Which was?”

  “I moved on.”

  When he finished making the absinthes, she reached her arm out of the coat and took her glass by its stem. She brought its rim up against his, one soft click of crystal to crystal, and then she drank the whole thing, in one swallow.

  “How long ago was this?” Caleb asked.

  “A month ago. Maybe two,” she said. She looked at Caleb. “I think he’s dead.”

  Caleb looked through his drink at one of the candle flames. The absinthe darkened the fire and tinged it green. He picked up the glass and drank it all at once, just as she had.

  “You think this is bad,” she said. “This worries you.”

  He looked at her face, her wide green eyes captured in the candlelight and shadows of this empty, shut-down bar. He’d promised not to lie to her. So he nodded.

  “Yes. It’s— I don’t know what to think. About any of this, I guess.”

  “You can leave if you want. I won’t hold it against you.”

  “No. I don’t want to leave.”

  “Good,” she said. She leaned her cheek on his shoulder again. Her left hand was curled on her lap and her right hand rested on his leg, just behind his knee. “There’s one thing I have to do before we leave here. I want to give you something, so we’re even. You gave me the picture. But I can’t draw like you. So make us a third Berthe de Joux. I probably need a third, to do this right.”

  He took the bottle and pulled its stopper out, liking the wet, hollow plonk of the cork coming free.

  “Pour this one like we’re at home,” she said. Her cheek was still on his shoulder. “Like we’re not in a bar, but we’re at home, a home we can always stay in, and we’re about to go to bed. This is the last drink.”

  He poured it that way, slowly filling the reservoir of her glass and letting the meniscus of absinthe rise past the bulb of the reservoir until each glass held a full two ounces. He put the sugar cubes on the spoons, his hands steady and his vision lucid with the pulse of the spirit he’d already drunk. Emmeline sat up from him and took her drink when he was finished. He had many more questions, but now wasn’t the time. She was so beautiful that when this night ended and he went back to his house alone, he would want to lie on the couch with his eyes closed, remembering the way she was right now. He didn’t want to interrupt this with questions. She brought the glass to her lips and drank, then met his eyes and smiled at him with half her mouth.

  “Stand up, Caleb,” she said. “So I can get out.”

  He slid out of the booth and stood at the end of the table above the light and smoky heat of the candles. Emmeline put her glass on the table and then brought her right hand to her mouth. She bit down on the fingertip of her glove, holding the silk in her teeth
as she slipped her hand out of it. She put the glove on the table and then did the same with her left hand. She looked up at him and saw he was watching.

  “I can’t play with my gloves on,” she said. She stood, leaving her gloves on the table. She took her drink, then looked at Caleb. “Bring a candle. I’ll need a little light.”

  He took one of the votive candles inside its thin shell of warm glass. Emmeline held his arm, leading him across the ebony floor toward the small stage. She let go of his arm and stepped up to the raised platform, pulling the piano bench back and sitting down before the keyboard in a single movement of silk and shadow. She set her drink on the narrow sheet music shelf above the keyboard.

  “Come stand over here with the light,” she said. “Over to the side so there’s no shadow on the keyboard.”

  She hit the first couple of notes as he stepped past the bench. She was so light on the keys that he could hear the wooden hammers coming down on the wires and the felt-padded dampers as they moved in to still the vibrations. He could hear the creak of the right pedal as she touched it with her foot. The first few notes were like a scattering of rain on a window overlooking the sea. Warm and intimate.

  He recognized it right away when she began to sing.

  Her voice was just a whisper, and that made it work. He’d never heard a woman sing this. Tom Waits, who wrote it and sang it, had a voice like smoking flint. The song was so beautiful because you’d never think his voice could say anything so tender. Emmeline’s voice was as smooth and polished as the stem of the glass in front of her. But when she sang in a whisper and the breath caught in her throat because she was trying so hard to be quiet, and some parts of the words were simply lost to silence, it had almost the same effect.

  It was an end-of-the-day song. An end-of-it-all song.

  Emmeline paused before the penultimate verse, her foot on the sustain pedal so that the last notes she’d struck carried into the break while she picked up her glass and drank it off until nothing was left but a slurry of sugar. She set the glass down and finished the song, running out of breath as she whispered the last words, her fingers slipping a little, missing the cadence of the final notes. She moved her foot off the pedal and Caleb heard the dampers fall all the way across the board. With that felt-hushed thump, the room went silent. The flame in his hand whipped and sent up a thin runner of smoke as he breathed.