A Fierce and Subtle Poison (4 page)

“I guess we forgot to tell you. La Lopez got promoted,” Carlos eventually said. “She’s a detective now.”

Last summer, when she was just a beat cop, Mara Lopez—nicknamed La Lopez by the neighborhood kids—hauled me in for underage drinking and drunk and disorderly conduct. According to her, some viejo down on Calle Vecinto called in a tip claiming that a group of kids, included el chico rico (the rich kid: me) were down on the pier, acting all borracho, smashing beer bottles and scaring las turistas.

Most of that was true—though, to my credit, I think the bottle smashing was dramatic flair on the part of the old man—but that doesn’t make up for the fact that Rico and Ruben and everyone else on that pier who was stumbling drunk had been sent off with nothing more than a stern warning. I, however, had been hauled down to the San Juan jail by La Lopez herself, where I’d spent the rest of the night in cell with a man in a grease-stained mechanic’s uniform who snored like a broken furnace and smelled like rum and bird shit. The next morning, my dad, dressed to the nines as always, came down to pay a “fine” I assumed was generous enough to wipe the charge from my record.

“You need to get a handle on your boy,” then Officer Lopez had warned as we were leaving the station, “before he does something he can’t buy his way out of.”

“
You
need to get a handle on how to run your department,” my dad had shot back. “Maybe you should try focusing on bringing in real criminals rather than kids who aren’t guilty of anything aside from a momentary lapse in judgment.”

But I’d been guilty of more than that, my dad had told me in the car on the way home. I’d been guilty of being the one white kid in a group of otherwise nonwhite kids. According to him, Mara Lopez was just like all the others. Puerto Rico was full of women like her, he said—women with icepick stares who hated the whites and always blamed them for ruining their island and liked to mete out punishment like it was their divine right.

I remember wishing he’d just shut up. He was ranting, and I had a headache. The car was filled with the spice-musk scent of his Burberry cologne. He’d put on too much this morning, and I was choking on it. The car was also full of his sense of entitlement, which stunk worse than his cologne. At one point, I remember wondering which was worse: being stuck in a town car with my dad or having been stuck in a jail cell with a snoring, stinking mechanic.

What my dad didn’t get was that Mara Lopez hated me not because I was white but because I was spoiled. I sometimes hated myself for the same reason.

Five

THE SUMMER I
turned twelve, a daughter of one of the hotel maids taught me how to kiss. She was older than me, maybe fourteen, but she seemed much older by the way she dressed—in short jean shorts and cropped tank tops—and by the things she said. Nothing ever impressed her, and everything was lame.

For a reason I never figured out, she’d chosen to take me on as a project. Every day for a week she would sneak into my room during the hot hours of the afternoon and sit me down cross-legged on the floor at the foot of my bed. I’d listen carefully to her instructions. She’d point to the hollow between her collarbones and tell me to kiss her there first; she’d point to her bottom lip and tell me to kiss her there next. She’d take my hands and put them on each of her round, smooth shoulders, and she’d tell me to move my fingers up and down her throat. I did exactly as she said. She’d give me tips: slower, less pressure, more pressure, more movement. Sometimes she’d talk about all the other boys she’d let kiss and touch her and she’d compare what I was doing to what they’d done before.

“You’re not the best,” she once told me. “But you’re not the worst either.”

She was the first girl to make me hungry and desperate to the point that I would stare up at the ceiling and fantasize about her at night. More than anything I wanted her to think that I was an enthusiastic and capable learner, ready for anything. But mostly she just seemed bored.

One day she came to my room and didn’t want to start kissing right away. First, she asked if I’d heard the story of the young nun. I told her I hadn’t. She asked if I knew that before this hotel was a hotel, it was a convent. I told her everybody knew that. She asked if I knew that the very room we were sitting in, the room I’d stayed in every year for as long as I could remember had, hundreds of years ago, belonged to a nun who had died.

“The story es muy triste,” the girl said.

According to her, the nun was young, around fifteen, and the day before she’d entered the convent, she’d fallen in love with the local butcher’s son. Once a week, after saying her morning prayers and washing the floors of the convent with a potato sack, she would sneak out and give the butcher’s son letters she’d written in the margins of pages she’d torn from her Bible. At night, after all the nuns were asleep, the butcher’s son would jump the walls of the convent and slide his responses under her door.

“They were the best, most romantic love letters you could imagine,” the girl said dreamily. “They were about him wanting to lie in bed next to her and run the tips of his fingers across her lips and her neck and stomach and hips. She wrote to him saying that thoughts of them being together and touching each other kept her awake at night. She told him her body was on fire. She begged him to find a way for them to run away to Mayagüez or Ponce, to some place where nobody knew them and they could be together.”

“Have you seen the notes?” I remember asking.

I wanted the story to be over so I could put my hands and mouth on the girl’s salty skin.

“Of course I haven’t seen them.” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “How could I’ve seen them? This happened
way
before I was even born.”

According to the girl, the young nun kept the butcher’s son’s letters folded in the fabric of her habit, so she could pretend that the papers pressing against her bare skin were his hands, but one evening, as she walked across the courtyard on her way to vespers, several of the letters fell out and scattered across the ground. A few blew away in the wind; others landed in the fountain and turned to mush, but an older nun snatched one out of the air. She turned that letter in to the abbess, who was mortified. As punishment, the young nun was locked in her room—
this
very
room, the girl who taught me to kiss said—without any food and just a small cup of water. She was told to come out only when she’d purged herself of all desire and was convinced that she was pure of heart.

Two days passed, then five. As they walked by her door, none of the other nuns ever heard their sister calling out to them. They expected those calls; they expected that after many prayers and with knees bruised and sore, that the young nun’s heart would’ve been stripped of all affection for the butcher’s son.

After a week, the abbess, with all the other nuns stacked behind her, finally unlocked and opened the door. They found the young nun dead on her bed, her green-gray skin a stark contrast to the now black blood that had spilled from her wrists and dried into her sheets. Scattered around her were the letters from the butcher’s son that hadn’t blown away, along with loose pages from her Bible. The nuns gasped. Some dropped into dead faints when they realized what their sister had done with the pages of the holy book.

“That’s why they put you in this room, you know,” the girl told me, “to scare you into leaving. Everyone here hates you and your dad for coming in and acting all stuck up. They’re waiting for the young nun to come back and shake you from your sleep and tell you to leave her room.”

Then, finally, the girl let me kiss her.

If the girl was trying to scare me, it didn’t work. Every night for the rest of that summer, I stayed awake as long as I could and waited for the nun to come back to her room. I even left notes for her, first on my bedside table, then near the door where she’d know to expect them. In those notes, I told her I wanted to help her. I didn’t know how, but I would try.

But those late nights were a waste. The young, triste nun never came, unless it was to look over me as I slept.

By the following summer, the girl who had taught me to kiss was gone. The other maids told me her mother had saved up enough to move to New York.

Over time, the memories of my kissing lessons faded. They came back, however, when I’d found that first note—the one with Marisol’s crossed-out wish—slid under my door, and then again, after I came back from Condado Beach and found another.

Six

LIKE THE ONE
with Marisol’s crossed-out wish, this note had been written on stationery from the hotel. But unlike the one with Marisol’s crossed-out wish, it hadn’t been tossed over the wall last night. It had been tossed over the wall five years ago. By me.

I wish I could lift the curse over the house at the end of Calle Sol so the birds would fly over it again.

The paper was dirty and smudged in places, as if passed through many sets of hands, and the crease in the center was fragile, as if it had been unfolded, read, and refolded several times.

And, underneath my barely legible scrawl, in that perfect cursive:
So, what’s stopping you?

“Señor Knight, is there a problem?”

I spun around. Clara, an elderly woman who had been working at the hotel since as long as I could remember, was standing in front of me on the mezzanine, holding a tray from room service. She glanced at my door, which was wide open, and then to the paper in my hand. She smiled slyly.

“It’s not what you . . . ” I stammered.

“I have your dinner here, Señor Knight,” she said, wiping away her grin so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it.

I shook my head and put my hand to my now-throbbing left temple. “I’m not hungry. Please stop calling me Señor Knight. Just call me Lucas.”

“Sí, Señor Knight.” Clara nodded and headed over to the staircase. She took a single step down, stopped, and glanced in my direction. That same sly smile flickered and then disappeared. As she descended the stairs, the dishes on her tray rattled against each other.

Hushed voices came from the other side of the courtyard. There, a cluster of housekeepers, all in their humble gray shifts and clunky black shoes, stared at me the way grandmothers do when they know they have age and wisdom on their side, chin tipped up slightly, eyes narrowed.

I crammed the note into my back pocket along with the other and took off down the mezzanine. I leapt down the stairs two at a time, and, after weaving my way through the line of guests checking in at the front desk, burst onto the street.

From there, I sprinted in the direction of the scientist’s house.

Once, when I was a kid, I’d made the mistake of repeating to my dad some of the stories I’d heard from the señoras about the house at the end of Calle Sol. It had happened, of course, during breakfast. I remember him neatly folding up the newspaper he’d been reading. After taking a sip of coffee, he’d set his porcelain cup down slowly and leaned across the breakfast table. He’d told me not to believe old ladies. He’d said it was true that the man who lived in the house at the end of Calle Sol
was
a scientist who
did
work out in the forests near Rincón, but that did not mean he was a cruel man whose neglect drove his wife first to madness, then to witchcraft, then, finally, away for good. The windows of the house were shuttered, not to seal in some kind of curse, but because the man was rarely home.

“The women on this island are ignorant, Lucas,” my dad had said. “Because they are ignorant, they are fearful, and because they are fearful, they make up stories to explain things that don’t need explaining. Ignore them. Don’t let their nonsense make you fearful, too.”

After that, he’d reached for his newspaper, popped open the pages, and went back to reading.

His advice had missed its mark. The señoras’ stories didn’t make me fearful; I didn’t fear stories, or closed-up houses, or witches, or notes from ghosts, or even the possibility of being cursed. I’d spent my whole life on this island running toward those things, throwing rocks back at those who threw rocks at me, waiting up for phantoms. What I feared was a future where I ended up a version of my dad: oblivious and arrogant, disappointed in clearly beautiful things.

Most everyone in Old San Juan hated my dad because it was easy to hate my dad. He came in and built resorts on their beautiful beaches. He destroyed or warped everything the locals loved about their island in the name of “progress.” He talked down to them. When we walked through the public squares, I would watch people sneer at him behind his back. Old women would flick their fingers and mutter curses. 

I’d tried to be different, but despite my efforts to not become my dad, it was happening. If people hated him, they hated me, too—they hated the way I always had money but no job, how I was arrested for minor offenses but never charged, how I broke their daughters’ hearts and only sort of cared. And if they hated me, they would have no problem trying to scare me. What people never seemed to realize, though, was that I don’t scare easy. 

Toward the middle of Calle Sol, Señora Garcia came out of her courtyard in her bathrobe bare-handing a rigid, dead cat. It was most likely the latest victim of Señor Guzmán and his glass-laced chicken scraps. If the old woman wondered why I was running full tilt down her street in the middle of the day, she didn’t show it. After casting a disinterested glance in my direction, she dropped the cat into the trash can, wiped her hands on her robe, and walked back into her courtyard. I passed her gate just in time to hear the latch click into place.

I neared the end of the street and slowed. The scientist’s house looked like it always looked: derelict and unloved except for the leaves bursting over the courtyard wall.

When I got to the gate, I stopped to catch my breath and study a series of rusted-over iron latches affixed to the wood.

Inspired by Marisol’s boldness from last night, I glanced up and down the empty street and then pounded my fist against the gate five times.

Within seconds, I heard an interior door open, followed by the sound of slow footsteps across stone, followed by the squeals of metal locks and hinges protesting their use. Overhead, a seagull let out a shrill cry. I looked up to see it gliding in my direction. Just before passing over my head, the bird squawked as if a handful of feathers had been yanked from its skin. Its body twisted violently, and it flew off in the opposite direction.

All the birds knew better than to fly over a cursed house.

“You’re Michael Knight’s son, are you not?”

I turned my gaze down to the man in front of me and momentarily lost my voice.

I expected the scientist to be some decrepit thing, hunched over and clutching a cane with a hand frozen by arthritis. In my mind, the years of guilt, poison, and pain would’ve appeared in the lines of a sagging face and cataract-clouded eyes.

Instead, I saw a man roughly my dad’s age. He was standing up board-straight, dressed like a rich person from a Dickens novel, with brown herringbone pants, a matching vest, and a white button-up shirt. His only slightly graying hair was long on top and hung across his forehead in unkempt waves. A rose-gold watch chain dangled from his breast pocket.

I glanced over his shoulder and into the courtyard, not knowing who or what else I was expecting to find. My heart beat wildly, so much so that I pressed my hand to my chest.

“Am I correct, young man? You’re the junior Michael Knight?”

His voice had traces of an Irish or English accent. The señoras had said he wasn’t from the island, and I’d assumed that meant he was from the mainland. His eyes narrowed, belying impatience behind his good manners.

I cleared my throat. “I go by my middle name . . . Lucas.”

“How can I help you, Lucas Knight?” His gaze shifted to the street behind me. “Please step in from the rain.”

“It’s not rain—” A single drop landed on the bridge of my nose. The scientist stepped back and held the gate open.

I took my first uneasy step into a small, strange wilderness.

Tall trees with reedy, rough trunks and green leaves as wide as an open book mingled with squat bushes bearing tiny red berries and five-inch spines that looked as if they could easily spear a human hand. Strands of ivy crept around orange terra-cotta pots, through the gnarled root system of an ancient banyan tree, and up the interior courtyard walls. The ivy also covered the bricked-over ground, creating patches of dense carpet. Some of its vines formed tight corkscrews around stems and tree limbs. They were tiny, determined stranglers. As the rain picked up, the drops bounced off the plants, causing their leaves to start to pulse as if electrified.

The smell in the courtyard wasn’t earthy or loamy; instead it was heavy and hot and sharp like rubbing alcohol or the old bottle of grappa my dad kept in his liquor cabinet back home in Houston.

A narrow brick path connected the roughly ten-foot distance from the gate to the entrance of the house proper. Many of the houses in Old San Juan were built this way, with a courtyard surrounding a house, or, like with the St. Lucia, a convent surrounding a courtyard. At the end of the path and just next to the front door of the house was a knee-high pot containing a harmless-looking houseplant, like something I’d once bought from the grocery store to give to my aunt during a hospital stay. I stopped in front of it and leaned forward to examine the splotchy pattern of green and light yellow on its leaves.

“I wouldn’t get too close to that if I were you,” the scientist said as he passed me. “That’s dumb cane.” I turned to see him pull out his watch, flip it open, check the time, and then snap it shut. “It’s lovely to look at but a bit of an irritant.”

He held open the door to his house and gestured for me to enter, which I did. Even though it was lightly raining outside, the entryway I stood in was full of light. The ceiling two stories up was made entirely of glass. There was no reason for the house to ever throw open its windows with the sun shining in from above like that.

“You seem out of breath. I’ll fetch you something to drink.” The scientist closed the front door, sealing us in. I mumbled my thanks, and then searched the room for any sign of a small, taunting witch.

The decor of the house made it seem as if I’d stepped back in time and across the Atlantic. In a sitting room to my left, dark red curtains were drawn over the tightly shuttered windows. Two leather chairs sat on opposite sides of a brass-topped table. On that table was a chessboard, its black and white pieces frozen mid-battle. On the wall just above a carved mahogany chest hung two long swords in their scabbards, forming a flattened
X
. Rows upon rows of leather-bound books lined shelves that took up two of the three walls. A mahogany desk that matched the style of the chest was wedged in the corner, supporting precarious stacks of books and loose leaves of paper and old copies of
El Nuevo Día
.

The focal point of the room was a large and elaborate candelabra made from stiffly bent iron and reclaimed wood the width and shape of railroad ties. It must have been six feet in diameter and centuries old.

It was all very . . .
masculine.

“I typically don’t receive that many visitors, Mr. Knight,” I heard the scientist shout from the kitchen, “so you must excuse the mess. I was just having tea.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Aside from the cluttered desktop, everything was pristine.

“This is quite a house,” I called out after clearing my throat. “It looks a lot like the inside of the St. Lucia.”

“I’ve noticed that, yes! Your father and I have similar tastes.”

I glanced to my right and into a formal dining room. On the far side of a long banquet table, two glass doors opened onto a side yard. The wind brought in the scent of salt water from the ocean and that same bitter scent from the plants. Next to those glass doors, a staircase with an iron banister curled up to a second floor.

I hadn’t noticed the scientist return until he was standing in front of me, holding out a small tumbler of ice water. The fingers wrapped around that glass were long, lean, and built for precision. They looked like they’d done their fair share of studying, folding up, and categorizing small things; they were more than capable of producing a tight, perfect script.

The scientist entered his dining room, where he retrieved a porcelain cup and saucer from a china hutch, and then went over to the far end of the table to pour hot water from a white ceramic pot. Near the pot were a half-filled cup and saucer and a thick, hardback book that had been placed face down to mark its place. Next to that was small plate speckled with leftover crumbs. It was a place setting for one.

“Please excuse my interrupting you, sir,” I said, setting down my untouched glass of water so I could take the cup and saucer he was offering me. They were some of the most delicate pieces of porcelain I’d ever held, pure white rimmed with gold.

“That’s fine,” the scientist replied with a smirk. “How can I help you?”

I took a long drawn-out sip of harsh black tea to buy some time to think. Judging by the fact that he didn’t know I went by my middle name and that he was looking at me like I’d just crash-landed into his house from the moon, I doubted he had any idea why I was standing in his dining room politely sipping his brutal tea. Either that or he was skilled at being deceitful.

The scientist tapped his thumb on the rim of his cup and pursed his lips slightly, waiting for me to state the reason for my visit. I went on delaying by pretending to be interested in every small detail of the room. My eyes eventually landed on a frame on one of the walls of the study, which proudly displayed a diploma from Exeter College, Oxford.

There was a lot of calligraphy in what looked like Latin, but underneath all that, in plain, clearly written English: “Rupert Ford, Doctorate of Life Sciences.”

Bingo.

“Mr. Knight. Would you care to state your business, or are you just going to stand there all day?”

I looked to the scientist, cleared my throat again, and steeled my nerve. “I was wondering if you could give me some advice.”

“Advice?” His right eyebrow cocked up high. He had every reason to be skeptical. I was the very definition of flying by the seat of my pants.

“My dad told me that you were a scientist, Dr. Ford, that you study plants . . . ”

He took a sip of tea. “I’m a botanist, yes. As you saw just outside, I have a fondness for rare flora.”

“Hmm, yes.” I nodded, put on my best pondering-life’s-questions face, and continued. “Well, I’m also interested in studying plants, and I was wondering if you had any recommendations of places I could go for college.” I laughed lamely, and what I said next was a bad attempt to be humble and charming. “I see you went to Oxford, but I’m thinking that I might have to aim a little lower than that.”