A Fierce and Subtle Poison (11 page)

Dr. Ford cut me off as he leaned in closer and gripped my shoulder with his strong, lean fingers. I glanced at his wrist and thought I saw a rash there on his skin, just underneath his rolled-up sleeve.

“As dangerous as you know Isabel to be, she is not intentionally so.” His breath was heavy with the smoky scent of scotch. “She truly hates the fact she has the capacity to bring suffering to others. I, on the other hand, could not care less. And because of that, I will cause you even greater pain than you have already recently suffered if you do
anything
that could lead to my daughter and me becoming separated.”

Dr. Ford could’ve threatened me all day, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Thinking about what might happen to Isabel if people found out she existed, however, was enough to make me quake with fear.

What had Ruben said when I’d gone over to his house after Marisol had died: that nobody wanted me around, that my being there made everything worse?

Is that what I did to every situation I found myself in—made it worse?

“I’m not going to tell anyone about her,” I said.

“I saw you speaking to the detective.” Dr. Ford’s fingers dug into my shoulder. “Just now.”

“That had nothing to do with Isabel. That woman hates me. You heard my dad. If she could pin every crime that happens in San Juan on me, she would.”

“Maybe for good reason,” he shot back. “You certainly have a history of stirring up trouble and not considering the consequences of your actions.”

“I’m not a criminal.”

“Not yet.” Dr. Ford searched my eyes for a moment. His expression was like the detective’s: knife-wielding, crafty, hunting for ways to make means justify an end. He finally released my shoulder and gestured to the far end of the plaza. “I believe your friends are waiting for you.”

I said nothing, but stared for a moment at Dr. Ford’s bloodshot eyes and the lines that spidered from their corners. There was nothing I could say. An apology would’ve rung hollow with him—a promise would’ve done the same. Like the detective, he hated me and would always hate me for breaking into his world.

Someone—a stranger, an obliviously happy festival-goer—bumped into my shoulder, and broke my standoff with Dr. Ford. He stayed put as I turned and began to snake my way through the crowd to where Carlos and Rico were waiting with an idling taxi. They were yelling at me to get a move on. Behind me, in the plaza, the band ended another song, and another cheer rose up.

“Who was that?” Carlos asked, climbing into the cab.

“No one. A friend of my dad’s.”

Carlos let it drop; for him, it was a good enough explanation.

On the way to the beach, as Carlos and Rico sang along to the cab’s radio at the top of their lungs, I was preoccupied by thoughts about Dr. Ford’s arms, blotched and inflamed, with tiny white blisters dusting his skin like rock salt. I’d seen those blisters on my own skin after I’d fallen into Isabel’s courtyard. They’d come along with a burning fever and delirium, slurred speech and bloodshot eyes. When I’d gone back to the hotel and looked at myself in the mirror, I’d looked . . .
deranged
. Tonight, Dr. Ford had looked the same.

Isabel could do that to a person—mar them inside and out, tip and tilt them from their core. She could, of course, also do much worse.

Fifteen

I’D MISSED THE
ocean—I hadn’t realized how much. I stripped off my shirt and my jeans, tossed them in the sand, and sprinted toward the surf in my boxers. The water, I noticed as I plunged into it, seemed off: strangely cold, with a slightly fungal scent and a less salty taste on the tongue. The recent storms must have brought new water in from far away.

Rico and Carlos were shouting nearby. When I looked over, I could barely make out their heads bobbing up and down and their arms flailing as they tried to dunk each other. I stayed where I was, floating on my back and letting the cold water soothe the memory of my once-burning skin. The seaweed that the storms had uprooted grazed against my legs and my back. I imagined they were the fingers of dead men.

Eventually the three of us raced through the water, parallel to the coastline. It was a dirty fight, and one that I would have won had Rico not whacked me in the face with his fist. I saw stars, swallowed a mouthful of black salt water, and thought for moment that my nose had been broken.

Almost thirty minutes later, we were laughing, bone-tired, as we pulled ourselves out of the ocean and back onto the beach where we swatted at stray mosquitoes and stumbled around to find our clothes. Carlos tripped over a beach chair and fell face down in the sand. When he tried to get up, he tripped and fell again. The more he told us to shut up, the harder we laughed.

When I finally got back to my room at the hotel, it was nearly dawn. I cracked open Dr. Ford’s book in bed, but it almost immediately slipped from my hands and landed on my chest as I fell asleep.

In the morning, I woke feeling a pinch on my face. I slapped my cheek, but the mosquito was quick. He flew over to the nightstand, where he landed on the dumb cane leaf. He took a few light steps, exploring with his slender proboscis. Then he froze. His legs actually seemed to crack in half before he tipped over dead.

Outside my door, I heard the sounds of mild chaos, mostly the hustle of feet, commands given in harsh whispers, and the squeals of carts being pushed swiftly across the mezzanine.

Another mosquito landed on my arm. This one was slower, already fat. I was able to smash it against my skin, where it left a bloody streak.

On my nightstand, my phone rang. It was my dad, telling me that breakfast in the courtyard was cancelled. He asked me to join him in his room, where he had already rung for room service.

“The mosquitoes are back,” he said before he hung up.

Every few years, from the islands to the east, millions of mosquitoes make a giant journey for their tiny bodies. Like ships, they follow the winds and the tides. Once they reach San Juan, they bounce from one thing with blood to another, attacking stray dogs as they run yelping for shelter under cars and zooming down gutters and sewers for lizards and rats. They cause the cats to howl and seek shelter up trees. They squeeze their way through the nets and screens designed to keep them out, burrow down into the folds of blankets, and find warm skin.

A few years ago, hundreds of Puerto Ricans died of the dengue plague. The mosquitoes infected people with poison that caused their faces to swell to the point where their eyes were visible only as slits. People bled from their mouths and noses; their very own blood turned to venom.

Back then, everyone stayed indoors and went crazy. The authorities came on the news and told us the solution was to get rid of standing water. I’d laughed. It’s like they didn’t even know the composition of their own island.

I had a different solution. I rubbed my arms, legs, and neck with cedar and eucalyptus oil—a trick I’d gained from the wise señoras—before throwing on jeans and a plaid button-up over my white T-shirt. I was almost to the door when I stopped and spun around. With my hands wrapped in toilet paper, I tore up the dumb cane leaf and flushed it down the toilet so that the housekeepers wouldn’t accidentally touch it if and when they came into my room that day.

Out on the mezzanine, the brief chaos had settled. It was quiet. There were only the faintest human sounds behind sealed doors. I squinted into the bright morning sunlight, and everywhere were tiny black bodies hovering, leaping over and across one another, diving like kamikazes.

My dad’s door was seven down from mine and around a corner. He must have heard my shoes hitting the tile as I ran in his direction, because he opened the door just as I reached it.

“It’s bad,” he said, simultaneously fastening the latch behind us and slapping a mosquito off his wrist. “They’re saying it might be worse than last time.”

I collapsed into a chair and poured myself coffee from a French press. On the other side of the room, facing me, the television was muted but tuned to the local morning news show.

My dad took a seat across from me and raked a hand through his hair. “I hate being stuck here.”

He raised his coffee cup to his lips, and I couldn’t help but notice how different he looked. Unlike himself. His hair was dirty and separated into clumps from yesterday morning’s application of pomade. He may have been wearing the same pants and shirt from the suit I saw him in last night in the library.

I dipped my head to hide a sly grin as the question formed on my lips:
Rough night?

Instead, I asked, “So, how did your dinner go?”

“Oh, fine.” My dad sighed as he rubbed his right temple in the attempt to massage away a hangover. I’d been there.

He picked up a piece of toast and started spreading mango butter on it. A mosquito landed near his left collarbone. It crept around some and then stopped. My dad failed to notice. I leaned over and slapped it away.

“I saw Dr. Ford in the plaza last night,” I said. “At the Festival de San Juan.”

My dad took a bite of his toast and then chewed it with a look of consternation.

“Huh. He told me after dinner that he was heading home. Perhaps he got detoured. Did you get a chance to speak to him?”

I didn’t answer. As I brought my coffee cup to my lips, my eyes landed on the muted television. In the corner of the screen, next to the newscaster’s head, were school pictures of Marisol and Celia. Mari appeared slightly younger but was smiling broadly in the same way I’d seen her smile the night she attempted to leap into the house at the end of Calle Sol. She’d been beautiful before the ocean I loved so much took her beauty away and covered her with . . .
sores
, as Mara Lopez had said: small, ripped, and white, the type you’d get from rubbing against poison ivy or . . .

Oh God.

I attempted another sip of coffee, but my hand was shaking so badly, the coffee sloshed over the rim. With barely functioning fingers, I set the cup down heavily. Porcelain dishware clattered across the tabletop.

My dad launched out of his chair, and in an uncharacteristically considerate gesture, placed his palm across my forehead.

“Lucas, what’s the matter? You’re not sick again, are you? Did you check this morning for bites?”

“Yes.” I shook my head frantically. “I mean, no. I’m fine.”

He backed away to examine my eyes. “Were you drinking last night?”

“No! I . . . Not really, I . . . ” I stuttered, searching for an excuse. “I just remembered I told Ruben’s mom that I’d go over and keep the family company today. I’m kind of dreading it, that’s all.”

My dad put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I looked to his face and saw that his expression had softened.

“It’s a rough time, I know, but it’s good of you to go over there. Just try to be indoors as much as possible today, all right?”

He did know what it was like to have someone disappear on him. The anxiety. The loneliness. I always forgot that.

Mara Lopez was about to start another press conference. I stood, grabbed the remote from my dad’s nightstand, and unmuted the television.

“ . . .
mentioned previously, the girls’ condition was fairly consistent with that of drowning victims, but we still have to run toxicology tests. The initial results have come back inconclusive, and a second round of testing is currently underway. On behalf of the San Juan Police Department, I’d like to apologize to the families of Sara Fikes and Marisol Reyes and assure them that we are working expediently to bring them closure. When we have conclusive results from the coroner’s office, we’ll be able to share with the families what exactly caused their daughters’ deaths, drowning or otherwise.”

Lopez paused to take a question from a man off camera.

“Missing persons is responsible for the case of Celia Reyes,” she responded, leaning into the microphone, “so they would be the ones best able to answer that question. Right now we do not believe that the Reyes sisters’ cases are linked, but that this is more likely a very, very tragic coincidence.”

“Lucas,” I heard my dad say from behind me, “maybe you shouldn’t watch this if it’s too upsetting for you.”

“All I can say definitively, as of this very moment—and I want to emphasize how early we are in these investigations—is that, upon further inspection, it now appears as if both of the young women were afflicted with some kind of rash that’s inconsistent with what we typically see of drowning victims and more consistent with an allergic reaction. Their legs and arms were covered in red rashes and small white blisters. We’re hoping to nail down what might have caused that condition with the next round of testing, but this is going to conclude our remarks for right now.”

I heard my dad again ask if I was feeling alright and urge me to have a sit and drink some water. I shrugged him off and charged out the door, across the mezzanine thick with mosquitoes, past my room, down the stairs, through the courtyard, through the lobby, and out the front door.

Then I ran.

Calle Sol was deserted but alive. The normally clear blue sky was speckled with swaying black dots. Those black dots gave off a persistent, angry hum.

Dr. Ford had warned me in no uncertain terms not to come back to his house, but that wasn’t a warning I was going to heed. I knew of only two things that could cause reactions like the ones Detective Lopez had just described: Isabel’s plants and Isabel.

Sixteen

WHEN THE HOUSE
at the end of Calle Sol came into view, so did the small-framed figure of a girl sliding through its wooden gate. A hood-covered head snapped in my direction for a split-second before the figure disappeared into the courtyard. I broke into a sprint and then skidded to a stop in time to hear the gate’s system of latches snap into place.

“Isabel!” I yelled. “Let me in!”

The metal continued to click. Mosquitoes hummed around my head. Underneath that mix of sounds, I could hear Isabel’s labored breaths, wheeze-like, on the other side of the door.

“You don’t understand!” Her voice was shrill, on the edge of desperation. “Please, Lucas. Just leave us alone!”

It was the wrong thing for her to demand. I backed away from the gate and crossed the street. With the help of a running start, I catapulted myself up and over the courtyard wall, and landed solidly on my feet, my right arm barely brushing against the leaves of the nearest tangle of plants.

Isabel was running to the door of the main house. I lunged toward her and grabbed her by the sleeve of her sweatshirt. I spun her around to face me, and instantly wished I hadn’t.

The last few days had robbed Isabel of all color. Her chapped, ash-gray lips were set in a grimace. Pencil-thick streaks of white ripped through her dark hair. The flesh around her cheeks and jaws stuck more closely to the bone. Her eyes, still raven-black, were huge, slick, and shimmering. Those eyes were once one of Isabel’s impenetrable defenses—hard like bricks. Not anymore. Not now. Now they were fathomless—twin pools of guilt and resignation.

“Isabel,” I croaked, “what did you do?”

“I . . . I didn’t . . . ” She lowered her head so that most of her face was obscured by her hood. “I’m sorry.”

Until then, I’d never believed someone’s heart could actually sink, but that’s what mine did. It loosened a little, grew sore and heavy, and then dropped.

“My daughter claims you have some sense, Mr. Knight, though I’ve yet to see you exercise it.”

Dr. Ford stood in his doorway. He, like my dad, had not fully come together after the night before. He was dressed again in a brown suit, though his jacket was off, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. Locks of graying hair fell across his forehead and formed tight curls.

My fingers went slack, and Isabel tore herself away from me.

“That’s better,” Dr. Ford said, stepping back from the threshold and gesturing to his entryway.

I glanced over at Isabel. Her body was tense and trembling; she was a girl set to boil.

“Your daughter is wrong,” I said, once again entering the house at the end of Calle Sol. I had no sense. It occurred to me I might end up dead and washed up on the beach, but I didn’t care. I followed Dr. Ford as he veered left into the dining room; Isabel trailed a few steps behind, her hands buried in the depths of the front pocket of her sweatshirt.

Dr. Ford took a seat and drummed the pads of his fingers against the top of the dining room table. The sound it made was like rain on a rooftop.

“I’m assuming you’re here because you saw something on the news this morning that confused you,” he said. “From what your father tells me, you’re an impetuous and also quite impressionable young man who makes poor choices and fails to listen to reason.” He glanced over at his daughter and then back to me. “Just because a couple of girls have an allergic reaction doesn’t mean . . . ”

Isabel cut off her father by slamming her fist down on the table. Both Dr. Ford and I watched the small object she’d been holding in her hand skitter and spin across the wood. Within seconds, it stopped, and that’s when I recognized the head of a wolf, rough hewn from pewter.

“Enough,” Isabel growled. “Where is the girl?”

“You know I don’t know,” Dr. Ford scoffed.

“I said
enough
!” Isabel’s voice rose into a near-feral screech. “Where is Celia? Is she dead like the others?”

Dr. Ford’s gaze was directed at the table, not to the pewter charm that lay inches from his face, but to the swirling wood grain he was tracing with his pointer finger.

“It was you?” I whispered. “What did you do to them?”

Dr. Ford didn’t look up. Instead, he made a sound, an exhale, like a huff, as if this entire conversation wasn’t worth his time.

It was then that everything snapped together: Isabel was sick and getting sicker. She’d told me her dad was trying to help her. Mara Lopez was right. Marisol and Sara didn’t drown. And even though Isabel could’ve killed them, she didn’t. The girls were dumped in the ocean after having been taken and poisoned and studied by someone whose life revolved around toxic plants and their effects on the human body.

“You experimented on them?”

I started toward the doctor, and he jumped to his feet. But before I could reach him, Isabel launched herself across the top of the table and landed between us. One of her hands flew up, stopping inches away from her father’s face. His eyes went wide, and he halted, tipping back slightly on his heels. The fingertips of Isabel’s other hand were pressed against my chest. Only a thin cotton layer separated her poison skin from mine.

My vision swirled. I slammed my eyes shut, and when I opened them a second later I saw that Isabel had taken her hand away from me.

“Where is the girl?” Isabel demanded for the third time.

Dr. Ford ignored his daughter and shouted over her to me, “I told you to stay away! It’s not my fault you fail to listen. The American girl happened before you started coming around, but those other two from San Juan . . . ”

“Sara!” I interrupted. “Marisol. Celia. They have names!”

“I don’t care about their names.” Spit flew from Dr. Ford’s lips. “Isabel is
dying.
She’s worth more than every one of those girls out there. I’m trying to do what’s best for my daughter. Tell me that I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong!”

“No.” Dr. Ford extended his right arm out by his side and flipped his palm to face up. The quick movement caused his gold cufflink to glint. “Listen to me. On one side, you have Isabel.” He then extended his left hand and flipped that palm. “On the other, you have all the other girls on this decaying little island, all the Marisols and Saras and Celias and on and on.” The doctor paused, his mad, dark eyes shining. “Isabel is a marvel. There’s no one else like her in the entire world. Her life deserves preserving.”

“My
life
,” Isabel sneered. She inched closer to her father, causing him to take a shaky step back and stumble over a chair. He checked his balance by clinging to the side of the table. Isabel continued to approach him, with her hand outstretched and her fingers spread wide. “This is not a life.”

Isabel was as frightening as I’d ever seen her, lean and hungry-looking. She lifted her face so the tip of her nose nearly brushed her father’s chin. He turned his head slightly to the side, took in a single breath, and held it. Beads of sweat trickled down from his hairline and jaw.

“Please, Isabel,” Dr. Ford begged. “I can find a way . . . I’m close. This is what you wanted.”

Isabel shook her head. “Not anymore.”

“I just need more time! The little one. Celia. She shows promise. There’s something special about her. Her immunity . . . ”

“No!” Isabel yelled. “No more time. No more girls.”

“Your mother . . . ”

“Don’t talk about my mother!” Isabel reached down and grabbed her father’s wrist. He hissed as if having been stung. “Is Celia dead or not?”

Dr. Ford swallowed, then twitched, the way a person does when he’s in pain and doesn’t want anyone to know. Sweat glistened on his neck, his forehead, and above his lip. After several seconds, his eyelids began to flutter. His expression went slack, and the rest of his body followed. First, his eyes rolled back into his head. His limbs drooped; his neck lost its ability to hold his head upright. His legs failed, and he began to tip forward. Isabel loosened her grip and stepped back, allowing her father’s body to fall hard to the floor. His head bounced against the tile and made a sick popping sound. I flinched, but Isabel seemed not to care. She skirted around the far end of the dining room table and threw open the double doors to the courtyard, leaving me alone with the still body of her father. One of his hands was resting, palm up, on the top of my shoe.

“He’s dead,” I whispered.

“He’s not dead,” Isabel called out from the courtyard, where she’d begun to furiously rip the leaves off various plants and toss them into piles. “I had my fingers on his pulse the whole time.”

I kicked away the doctor’s hand and ran outside. Isabel was now tearing handfuls of leaves from the low limbs of a tree. A mosquito landed on my hand, another on my arm. I hit both them at the same time, leaving the scraps of their mangled bodies on my skin.

“This is what
you
wanted?” I demanded. “Is that what your dad said? You wanted Sara, Marisol, and Celia all dead?”

Isabel spun around and took a step in my direction. Bunches of leaves were gripped tight in her fists. The look on her face was the same as the one she’d just given her dad, bold and wild, and while I was scared of her, I knew she was scared of me, too.

“I wanted to not be sick,” she said. “I wanted to get better and be normal. I was desperate. My dad said he’d found a way to help me.” Her chest heaved, causing her voice to crack into a wheeze. “There’s a chance that Celia might not—”

“Why Marisol?” I interrupted. “Why her?”

“Because . . . ” Isabel tightened her fists, crushing the leaves within them to pulp. “Because I told him to.”

Sorry, Lucas. This one I just can’t grant.

I hated her. I’d never hated anyone as much as I hated Isabel in that moment.

“You knew what had happened to Marisol, and you didn’t say anything.”

“I was going to!” The wildness in her eyes still shone, but the boldness had faded. In its place was a mess of guilt and confusion. “That’s why I sent the note about the disappeared girl, I . . . ”

It was getting harder to breathe. My lungs. The air. It was what Isabel was telling me; it was Isabel; it was all the poison leaves torn from their poison stems.

I tipped my head back, looked to the still blue sky, got dizzy, slammed my eyelids shut.

“This is your fault!” I cried out.

“I know it’s my fault!” Isabel sobbed. “Lucas, I’m sorry. I was scared of dying, and I was angry at being cursed, and I knew it was wrong . . . I didn’t think he’d take Celia. She’s so young. I was really hoping that she’d just wandered off, and that someone would find her.”

I opened my eyes, slowly, and took small sips of air. “How many are there?”

Isabel shook her head, but didn’t respond.

“Was Sara the first?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t know how many.” Isabel dropped the pulverized leaves from her fists and wiped fresh tears from her cheeks with the back of one of her green-stained hands. “He kept a lot of the details from me.”

“I could say the same about you. Keeping details from me.”

“I didn’t know you.” She paused to transfer a mix of tears and pulp from her hands onto her jeans. “I still don’t. Not really. You need to get away from me. You’re getting sick again.”

“What are you doing with all that?” I asked, ignoring her statement and gesturing to the leaves she’d started to collect in piles.

“I’m leaving.”

“Leaving to do what?”

Isabel reached out and yanked a foot-long waxy leaf from the limb the nearest plant. “To find Celia.”

“No way.” I shook my head. “If anyone’s going after her, it’s going to be me. If you know where she is, you have to tell me.”

“Like you said, Lucas. This all happened because of me, and I’m the one who’s going to fix it.”

“You do not
fix
things, Isabel. You
destroy
them.”

Isabel flinched. For a moment, she looked just like her father did earlier, teetering on the brink of collapse. But she quickly found her balance, regained what little composure she had left, and came close, too close. Her chin lifted so her nose was nearly grazing my lips.

Isabel and I knew each other more than she was willing to give us credit for, and this was her power play. Like the other night, the night of the storm, when, for just the shortest of moments, Isabel was so close I could feel her breath on my skin. Fear and desire, in equal measure, pulsed in the space between us. Isabel liked to pretend to be fearless, but she wasn’t. She knew that I knew she wasn’t.

“How do you plan on stopping me, Lucas?” she taunted, whisking the long leaf across my cheek. “Huh?”

“I’m not going to stop you,” I said, snatching the leaf from her hand and flinging it away. “I’m coming with you. You may know where Celia is, or you may not. There’s only one way for me to find out.”

“You are
not
coming with me, Lucas.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing.” I pointed past the top of her courtyard wall. “You won’t last thirty minutes out there.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but I cut her off. “But more than that, I don’t trust you.”

Isabel turned, sizing up the piles of leaves scattered around the courtyard before casting a long, melancholy glance at the inert form of her father on the floor of the dining room.

“This better not be you trying to play the hero, Lucas.”

I grinned. “Better me than you, Isabel.”

“You think I have no idea what
I’m
doing?
You
have no idea what
you’re
doing,” she scoffed. “You may not last thirty minutes with me.”

“It’s a chance I’m willing to take. For Celia. For Marisol.”

“Fine.” Isabel cleared her throat. “For Celia.” She gestured to the strewn leaves. “I need something to put all this in. I need a place nearby where we can go hide out for a couple of hours so I can work on something. I want to be long gone before my dad comes to. It can’t be your convent. He’ll go there first.”

Isabel dashed through the courtyard door and over to the twisting staircase. Once there, she put her foot on the bottom step and turned toward me.

“I need you upstairs.”

Isabel lived in a room of glass. If anyone were to have seen it from outside, they would’ve thought they were looking at a perfectly perched rooftop solarium. Rows of thick plants obscured the windows that lined the room on all four sides. I could just make out their tall shadows and hear the squeaks of their stems being dragged across the glass by the wind.