Influenced

by Eva Robinson

  And moreover, he realized he wasn’t too fussed if Irina was jealous.

  “You are urging me out of your house.” She pouted. “You don’t trust me here without you?”

  Losing patience, he gestured at his door. “It’s a cop thing. Nothing personal, of course.”

  She stormed down the stairs in front of him, chomping on her pancake.

  When she pulled open the door, Ciara frowned at her, eyebrows knitting together. “Oh, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”

  Michael’s smile faded. Ciara was quickly starting to impress him with her lack of tact. He hovered in the doorway, as if hoping the two of them might just disappear without him.

  “He didn’t mention me?” asked Irina.

  Ciara shook her head. “Not a word.”

  “Well, don’t let him make love to you, because he has trust issues. He is heartbreaker. And he prefers old people for some reason. He is a good lover, but if you sleep with him, he will leave you for old person at dive bars.”

  “She grew up on a yacht,” Michael blurted, though he had no idea why. This situation had surpassed his awkwardness tolerance by a long shot, breaking his brain, and he no longer knew his arse from his elbow. Then he added, “Irina, this is Ciara. Are you parked nearby, Ciara?”

  “Two blocks away. There was no parking—”

  “We’ll take my car,” he cut in. “We’re late.”

  Fifteen

  Michael took a sip of hot tea, burning his mouth. Then he narrowed his eyes, trying to line up the mirror on his car with the mirror on the car to his right.

  He could only hope Ciara wouldn’t notice how much of an effort it was for him to parallel park. It seemed to him Americans were handed licenses straight out of the womb, and learned to parallel park along with toilet training.

  And as for him? He’d only learned to drive right before he joined the police force at the age of twenty-six—a fact he’d never shared with any of his colleagues, because he intuited that they would think it unmanly.

  Ciara had turned on the radio to a news channel, then flipped to a hip-hop station. Then back to the news. And it was now nearly impossible for him to concentrate, but he didn’t want to let on.

  “I’d like to start by asking him more about his wife’s mental state. Maybe she really was psychotic,” said Ciara, “and had a breakdown in the past week. But here’s the thing: her husband was paying nearly obsessive attention to everything Rowan Harris did online. He liked every single one of her photos, going back years. Almost like he had a crush.”

  Please stop talking. Michael was slowly rolling the car back, trying to tune out her words so he could keep the two cars parallel. Now a turn of the wheel—

  “It’s just that if Arabella took poison intentionally, wouldn’t she have said something in the hospital that made it obvious? She had six hours before she slipped into the coma, and she had no idea what was wrong with her. She made no mention of ending her own life. She seemed as confused by the illness as everyone else.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” muttered Michael, but the utterance cost him his concentration again, and now the rear of his car was too close to the other. This was all wrong.

  “I was looking up poisoning in chemistry labs,” Ciara went on. “It’s more common than you’d think. Students who are jealous of each other, like you suggested. Romances that went wrong. Competitive academics, or just people with mental issues. But no one I’ve spoken to so far knows of anyone who had an academic rivalry with Arabella.”

  “Right.”

  “If it is thallium, like the doctor thought, a chemistry lab like the one where Adam works is just about the only place you could access it. Adam has it within his reach every day.”

  At last, Michael got his car into just the right position—the mirror lined up at sixty percent of the other car’s length—and started turning backward into the spot. From Michael’s perspective, it was deeply unfortunate that Ciara had chosen to have this flood of ideas right at this moment. When he could concentrate, he did a reasonably good job.

  He rolled the car into place, then put it in park, feeling quite pleased with himself. He blew out a breath. “If it came from Adam’s lab, there’ll be records of its use. We’d find a discrepancy.”

  “Right.” Ciara held his eye contact for an unnervingly long time. “You’re from London, aren’t you? I suppose they have a lot of public transportation. I can do the parking next time, if you want.”

  “I think I did a perfectly good job, frankly.”

  There it was again. That eye contact that lasted just a little too long, like she was reading his secrets. “I mean, we’re three feet from the curb.”

  “Irina isn’t my girlfriend,” he blurted. What was it about Ciara that made him want to tell her things? It was those pale green eyes that bored into him. They gave him the sense that she’d be able to read his secrets if she looked at him long enough, so he might as well come out with them.

  “I figured. With the ‘heartbreaker’ thing.”

  “She… well, we went on a few dates, and… she lies a lot, and I think she’s faking being Russian. So that was just a… a thing.”

  She shrugged. “We all have our things.”

  And now he was intrigued again.

  Ciara got out of the car first, and he sat in the driver’s seat for a moment longer. While Ciara stood in the sun outside, Michael quickly tapped the car door sixteen times. Then his chest tightened. Had he counted correctly, or had he missed one? Because fifteen was an absolute disaster.

  The habit was a ritualized superstition, and superstition was completely irrational. He had no idea why the number had to be sixteen. But even if it made no sense, he couldn’t stop himself. When you found a simple way to manage the epinephrine pumped out by your amygdala, you used it.

  Sixteen swirls of his spoon in his morning tea, sixteen taps of his toe before he entered a house.

  He started tapping the door again, counting out loud this time. When he’d got it right, he opened the door, perfectly composed. “Just clearing my head.”

  They started across the narrow street toward the house. It looked like an old American Colonial—yellow with green shutters, and an actual white picket fence around the lawn. A three-car garage stood at the back of the driveway.

  “Nice place. Guess he got some of his parents’ money.” As she leaned into him to whisper, he got the faintest scent of mint.

  And that was when it struck him—she made him deeply uneasy because he needed to feast on her life story in particular, because she was bloody strange. He wanted to know every weird detail about her—what her birthdays were like, what kind of person she was in high school. But he had a feeling that Ciara wouldn’t give up those secrets easily.

  They crossed through the gate and walked up the stone path to the wood door, painted a dark green.

  Michael knocked on the door. The sound of a barking dog punctured the silence, and a moment later, the door swung open.

  Arabella’s husband, Adam, stood in the doorway. He was bending down, holding on to the collar of a golden retriever who was desperate to bound out the doorway. “Sorry. Penny, sit. Sit, Penny.”

  With the thorny tattoos around his forearms, he didn’t look how Michael had imagined a chemistry professor would look. His hair was shorn down in a buzzcut, and he wore a tight black Henry Rollins T-shirt. The only things professor-ish about him were his thick-rimmed glasses.

  “Come on in, please.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Green.”

  He led them into the hall, then into a kitchen of rosy wood and granite countertops. Dirty dishes littered every surface, and it smelled faintly of rotten food. Either Adam had fallen apart in the past few days, or Arabella had been the one to do all the tidying.

  He sat down at the kitchen table, rubbing his eyes. He looked tired, but not particularly distressed. He didn’t give the impression that he’d been crying.

  “Do you want tea?” asked Adam
. “Sorry, I don’t know… how this usually happens.”

  “We’re fine, thank you.” Ciara pulled out a chair at the round table and sat across from him. “We just have a few questions for you.”

  “What did the autopsy find?” asked Adam.

  Adam, it appeared, was used to being in control of the dialogue.

  “Nothing conclusive,” said Michael.

  Adam ran a hand across his buzzed hair. “Yeah, she was… She wasn’t making a lot of sense. She seemed hysterical. She said her computer was stolen, and that she thought someone was after her. Or a group of people. Like a conspiracy.” He used air quotes on the last word.

  He did seem very eager to get this point across.

  “Can you remember her exact phrasing?” asked Michael. It was an unrealistic request, because memories of speech weren’t stored verbatim—it was the meaning that was stored, not the exact words. Still, he wanted to push Adam to be a little bit more specific.

  Adam stared at the kitchen table. “She said her computer was stolen, and she knew who took it. She said ‘they were after her.’” More air quotes. “And it was because she’d uncovered the truth, and she was going to expose it. She said they’d come for her next. It just sounded like…” He searched for a word, then shrugged. “Like tinfoil hat stuff.”

  “And yet it seems she was right,” said Ciara sharply. “Given that Arabella’s actually dead now. Someone was after her.”

  Sixteen

  Michael resisted the urge to jot down the word wanker in large letters across his notebook.

  “And she seemed hysterical?” Ciara asked, repeating Adam’s word.

  “Yes, so I told her to calm down, and I suggested this was all irrational.” Adam rubbed his eyes again. “But she hated it when I said she was irrational.”

  “Weird.” Ciara failed to hide the sarcasm in her tone.

  “So I said, ‘Let’s think this through logically. Rationally. Who do you think is after you, Bella?’ But she just said something like ‘How do I know you’re not part of it?’ Which is— I don’t even know where that came from. She wouldn’t tell me who, or what it was about. It seemed like a nervous breakdown, really. That she was maybe just paranoid for no reason. She said that she’d been observing things, and she’d drawn her own conclusions. But her conclusions were often…”

  “Yes?” asked Ciara.

  “Well, psychology is a soft science at the best of times, and she tended to get excited about correlations that weren’t really meaningful. She saw meaning where none existed.”

  Clearly, Adam was a first-rate bell-end.

  But it didn’t mean he’d murdered his wife. The world was full of bell-ends, in fact.

  Ciara leaned in, pinning Adam with her stare. “She looked very pretty in her photos with Rowan Harris.”

  A faint pinkness rose in Adam’s cheeks. “Did she?”

  “You didn’t see them?” asked Ciara.

  Adam shrugged. “I don’t use social media very much. It’s all about showing off, you know?”

  Ciara pulled out her phone and started flicking through it. “But you do. You like every single one of Rowan’s photos. Even this nude, posted after Arabella died. I suppose beauty is always a comfort in time of distress. And there’s a nice little poetry quote, about being terrible.”

  His jaw hung open, then he rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. I see why you’re asking about Rowan. Is this about the party?”

  “We have heard about the party, yes.” Michael had literally no idea what he was talking about.

  “Arabella misinterpreted things.” Adam was staring at the table again, now rubbing the surface with the edge of his thumb. “She blew things out of proportion sometimes.”

  Michael nodded. “She was irrational.”

  “Exactly,” said Adam. “That was the first and last time we went to a party at Stella’s house. Those were my colleagues, and she made a scene.”

  “It must have been embarrassing.” Ciara managed to convey sympathy. She hadn’t struck Michael as being much of a people person, but luckily she was able to mask her distaste for Adam well enough to play along.

  “It was embarrassing,” said Adam. “Maybe throwing a drink on your husband is cool when you’re twenty and at a punk show, but I’m in my mid-thirties.”

  “And it sounds like there was hardly any justification for it,” said Ciara.

  “Right. My hand brushed Rowan’s leg by accident. Rowan leaned into me. She got like that at parties. I mean, she likes a drink.”

  Interesting.

  His eyes had filled with tears, and he was still looking at the table. “It shouldn’t have been a big deal. But that was the thing with Arabella. It was always about drama. I mean, I loved her, obviously. But that night, when we came home, she smashed a glass on the countertop, and then she mashed her fist into it.”

  “Did she get stitches?” Michael asked.

  Adam looked confused for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, I took her to the ER at Mount Auburn.”

  “Were you fighting before she fell ill a few days ago?” asked Ciara.

  “No, but she was angry at me. She was always angry. The day before she died, it was because she thought I was patronizing her when I said I didn’t think there were people out to get her. There are thefts on campus all the time. And anyone can get into the William James building. There’s a stream of broke people signing up for psychological testing for fifteen dollars an hour. I don’t understand the point of their research, because I can’t imagine the results of any of those tests are representative of a normal population.”

  “Did you ever go in there to visit her?” asked Michael.

  Adam shook his head. “No, I had no reason to go there. On the rare occasions we met for lunch, we’d just meet in Harvard Square. But in any case, I didn’t think it was a conspiracy. She’d written a blog post on her computer, hadn’t yet published it, and then her computer was stolen. And she thought this meant that a nefarious league of… I don’t know, some kind of conspirators were after her. And that turned into a whole thing where she thought I was patronizing her.”

  Even after his wife was dead, he managed to be condescending.

  “So you suggested she was being ‘irrational’ again,” Ciara said, “and she became ‘hysterical.’”

  “She was furious with me.”

  “Can you tell us what kind of laptop she had?” asked Ciara.

  “A MacBook of some kind. I can look it up if you need it.” He rubbed at the table. “If the doctors say she was poisoned, then I think she probably took something herself to make a point. When she set her mind to something, she always succeeded. And in this case, she wanted me to feel terrible. And she did a fantastic job.”

  Ciara flipped her notebook closed, then frowned at him. “You didn’t come to see her in the hospital.”

  “I wasn’t here. I had a meeting in Connecticut. I didn’t return until later that night.”

  “And when did you leave for Connecticut?” asked Michael.

  “The night before.”

  In the car, Michael clicked his seatbelt into place.

  “Impressions?” asked Ciara.

  “I want to speak to Rowan. I’m wondering about an affair. Nice work, by the way, figuring out that connection. And I want to follow up on the records of poisonous substances in the lab where he works. If the toxicology report confirms that it’s thallium, and the dosage, we might be able to get a timeline of when it happened. We can find out if he has an alibi with his Connecticut trip.”

  “Good call.” She pulled on her seatbelt. “But the laptop is sticking in my mind. If she wasn’t psychotic—and you don’t think she was—maybe there is something to her claim that her computer was stolen to hide something. And she didn’t trust anyone enough to tell them what it was.”

  Slowly, Michael pulled out onto Oxford Street. “Adam was right about the fact that there are a million people going in and out of that building every day, many of them not
even students. But if you want to look for Adam among them, there are surveillance cameras—one on the ground-floor entrance, one in the elevator. He said he hasn’t been in the building. We can find out if he’s lying, or if he popped in to steal her laptop.”

  “Well, I can start there.” She turned the radio up.

  “You don’t like silence, do you?”

  “I hate it.”

  “So you’re not into meditating, I take it,” he said.

  “I would rather crush my fist into broken glass.” She smiled, but it quickly faded. “That was too much, wasn’t it?”

  “No, you’re fine.”

  Michael’s phone hummed in his pocket, and he pulled it out to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  “Detective Stewart? I have the toxicology report.”

  He caught Ciara’s eye, holding up a finger to let her know it was important, then he tuned in.

  His pulse started racing as he listened to the results. When he hung up, he held Ciara’s gaze. “The toxicology report confirmed the doctor’s suspicions: thallium it is. A particularly large dose, which was why it progressed so quickly. I think we should check the records in Adam’s lab right now.”

  Seventeen

  Hannah flicked through Rowan’s images again, completely absorbed with her temporary vacation from reality. Nora sat on the floor, entranced by stacking a set of plastic cups.

  The sense of calm was interrupted only by texts from her mom that popped up on her screen.

  When are you going to settle down, Hannah!? Yr not getting any younger!!!

  Have you been excercins . I’m start belly dancing.

  Can you fix my blinds? Stupid things don’t work.

  Much better to look at pictures of Rowan standing in London’s vivid Temple Church gardens, or on a picnic blanket with Marc.

  Rowan had kept her word. She’d tagged Hannah in a few stories, and already Hannah’s follower count was starting to rise. Not that it really mattered now.